The Eerie Mathematics of Indiana Tech's Closure

Indiana Tech Law School graduated twenty students last year.  It has "lost" twenty million dollars from the University.  Accident?  Not in this clusterfuck of a world.

Because of the Million Dollar Premium(c), each graduate of Indiana Tech will reap an earnings premium of one million dollars.

Thus, the University, in its magnanimity and beneficence, has gifted the State of Indiana the benefits of a labor pool with an increased education, almost dollar for dollar.  Never before have we seen such a direct, unmistakable example of an investment by educational institutions translating into direct economic benefit by graduates.

Twenty million invested.  Twenty million benefit to society.  That's math.

But that's not all.  The graduates are not the only people who have benefited from Indiana Tech.  There are also current students who, while they have yet to graduate, have learned much from the professors who sacrificed lucrative practice salaries to teach the next generation.  They at least get partial premiums, valued conservatively at $666,666.66 and $333,333.33.  More math.

Those extra benefits come with no additional "loss."  More math.  Fort Wayne feelings of constitutional justice dropping precipitously.  Also math.  Graph math.  Graph make linear version of frowny face.

When people say that Indiana Tech's imminent closure cost lots of money, I call bullshit.  They're not quitting because they're behind.  They're quitting right about the moment they've made a net positive economic benefit to the world, regardless of what the balance sheet says.  They close solely because of calumny leading to low "enrollment," cost-benefit "analysis," and bar passage "statistics."

What's truly scary this Halloween is how callously people not only disregard the isolated economic benefits law schools bestow, but completely ignore the role law schools play in social life, like increasing diversity in the lily-white profession law schools created.  Why are you so damned racist?  I can hear you, cracker, claiming my interjection of racism is a suddenly shameless and disgusting red herring attempt to gloss over the "real numbers," but I would really prefer not to be told how to think by the legal field equivalent of a Klansmen, thank you very much, DW Griffith. We were only a few hundred law schools away from radically changing the Hoosier state from a Mike Pence-electing overalls grease stain to an enlightened center of global culture and legal thought.  *This close* you selfish assholes.

And if you think this blog posting reads like a Baghdad Bob rant while there's a line of M1 Abrams  tanks in the background and the fat lady is singing with a megaphone in his goddamned ear, you should know that right now I am so high on mescaline that I've gone Syd Barrett on the world.  I found the glassine baggie in this board room, Fort Wayne, Indiana, a few years back.  Next stop, gonna build me law schools in Myrtle Beach, Mobile, Reading, Shreveport, Anchorage, Peoria, Kalamazoo, Duluth, by gum, I'll put them all on the legal education map with unique and innovative models never heretofore seen.