Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Fake News Awards 2018

Our President sees fit to publish a list of award-winning fake news stories.  Those in the law school skepticism business seem to love centralized accrediting authorities, so surely they agree with the executive up top in spirit.

It's a herculean effort and the President is to be commended.  As much as the LSTC would like to issue similar awards for fake news in legal education, we lack the time, energy, and fortitude to wade through the massive heaping pile o' bullshit that's been published in the last year telling people how bad legal education is, usually because they're false flaggin' it, selfishly wanting the perceived value of law school stock to drop so they can profit from the shortage of good lawyers.  They're selfish assholes and law schools are the good guys.  Don't forget that.

So we'll give an award out for the fakest article published in the last forty-eight hours.  Let's go with this one.  That was easy.
After enjoying an enrollment surge in the first decade of the new century, many law schools have more recently struggled mightily amid a dearth of jobs for young lawyers, dwindling student interest, worries schools were encouraging students to take on high debts they would struggle to repay, and intense criticism that many schools had been admitting students who never had the academic chops necessary to become practicing lawyers.
F is for Fake like Orson Wells wrote it.
Experts predict the contraction will come not among the largest, most prestigious institutions, but among small, private law schools that are already struggling to enroll enough students who can pass the bar.
Experts?  Fake like your step-mom's bazongas.
Some schools find themselves facing the unsavory choice of admitting more students who might not be able to pass the bar or not admitting enough tuition-paying students to keep the doors open.
Fake like the Faberge egg your Grandpappy lost in a poker game in Altoona, 1956.
Pass rates started slipping several years ago, though -- right around the time when students admitted in years with sharply fewer LSAT takers would have been graduating and passing the bar.
Fake like the first moon landing, fake.

This article is a whopping 4000 words and can't even be bothered - once - to give credit where credit is due and thank American law schools for providing the world's most affordable and efficient means of training young lawyers.  Worse, it can't even be honest and admit that even painted in the worst light possible, law school is still a winning option for the 99% of us not born with F-you money.

I've been railing against legal education's malicious detractors approaching five years now.  Trump's calls fake news are nothing new to me.  These reality-benders have been plaguing education for ages, and it's high time we had leadership in the White House and Department of Education who knew how to ignore "evidence" and let the state-boosted crony-market do its nasty thing.

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