It’s not that people are so stupid that they will believe anything wrapped up in the pretty pink bow of diversity and inclusion, or any other flavor of social justice rhetoric. Okay, it is. Toss in a bunch of idiotic jargon and you’ll buy anything because your pretense of critical thinking is total nonsense. That’s not just me saying so. Elie Mystal says so too.
This month, Bethune-Cookman, a historically black university in Daytona Beach, Fla., announced an “affiliation” deal with Arizona Summit Law School, a for-profit institution in Phoenix. A joint scholarship program will send Bethune-Cookman students and students from other historically black colleges to the law school. Other programs, including intensive LSAT prep classes, have been announced as part of the deal.
More black lawyers! Yay! Isn’t that what everybody keeps saying we need, we should have? Hell, this has been the foremost initiative of that merry band of social justice warriors, the ABA, along with counting labia in the courtroom.
So aren’t we thrilled? Not so much.
Bethune-Cookman doesn’t have a law school, so it makes sense that it would want to partner with an accredited institution. But there’s a problem: Arizona Summit, formerly known as the Phoenix School of Law, may be accredited, but only 25 percent of its graduates passed the Arizona bar exam on their first try last year.
That’s an embarrassing result for any school.
Embarrassing is an understatement. But the fact that it’s a disgrace for a school isn’t the end of the problem. There is a strong belief that the dearth of black lawyers can be remedied by creating “opportunities” for students who, unlike Elie, can’t get into Harvard Law School to still join the guild. If so, then shouldn’t an accredited law school, any accredited law school, that offers greater opportunity be a good thing?
But encouraging African-American students to attend Arizona Summit will not help them achieve their goals. It will hobble them. Going to a law school that doesn’t prepare most of its students to pass the bar is not an “opportunity,” unless “opportunity” means being saddled with debt that you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to pay back.
Damn you, reality, sucking all the feelz out of the lies we tell ourselves. This is a painful, if not brutal truth: if a law school can’t manage to produce more than 25% of its students who can pass the bar exam, it’s a scam. It’s awful. It’s a disgrace. First, because they’ve just spent three years of their life being taught how to be lawyers, with all that entails, including more than just tuition, but the opportunity cost of sitting in a classroom all that time rather than earning a living.
But second, because the bar isn’t all that hard. No, it’s not easy, but anyone awake for every third class, who then takes a bar review course (because listening to your prawf drone on about his theories of the universe that no court has, or ever will, give a flying shit about, doesn’t actually teach you anything useful and is just an exercise in academic vanity) should have a pretty good shot of passing. Law isn’t rocket science.
And why is it that black students are the focus of this scam?
For-profit schools like Arizona Summit prey on students with high aspirations but little knowledge about how the postgraduate system really works. Many black students aren’t just the first people in their families to go to graduate school — they are the only people they know in the game. Information passed down from family, friends or mentors is hard to get when you don’t have people in your life who have been there. Too many aspiring black students are trying to piece together education plans based on career fairs and Google searches.
While we often talk about “vulnerable populations” as an excuse, the fact remains that somebody has to tell you something or you don’t know. If your parents can’t give you the insight and guidance you need, then what of teachers? What of professors? You’ve made it through four years of high school, four years of college, and nobody explained to you that there are law schools out there designed to suck those student loans right out of you and leave you with a cool law degree and no place to go with it?
The best thing any historically black college could do to “disrupt” exclusionary legacies in legal education would be to arm its students with the very information from which they have been excluded, information that would help them get into good schools — or at least keep them out of predatory ones. Anything less is a hustle.
There are real things to be done to help students learn what they need to know to avoid being the patsy in a law school scam. If only the deeply passionate professors would spend their time telling students things that matter instead of beating up white girls behind the gym for wearing hoop earrings. This wouldn’t take long, providing the actual guidance necessary to save aspiring students from making a horrendous mistake. They could do it and still find the time to beat on their colleague at Middlebury.
And then, there’s the issue of what black law students plan to do with their shiny new bar cards after they pass the bar. But that’s a scam for another day. In the meantime, remember that selling diversity as if the empty rhetoric is reality can be just as bad, if not worse, than the bad old days for the very people it’s supposed to help. Talk is cheap. Law school is not.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I don’t think that’s a message the average professor of critical-post-ethnic-meta-validation studies is going to want to bring up. It might lead to scrutiny of more than just shady law schools.
There is certainly a downside to teaching students to really think critically.
I remember when the only diversity that mattered in law school was the kind in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To get diversity jurisdiction.
I can’t tell you how many yuks that one got.
None?
No chickens are alive today who remember a pre-Twombley/Iqbol heightened pleading standard.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To break diversity jurisdiction.
So 25% pass the bar. If 20% of those get decent jobs, that’s still better odds than trying for that starter position in the NFL.
But, Mencken be damned! We already know most of the answers to this problem, starting with stripping the asinine legal protections that allow student lenders to get a risk-free 6% from the riskiest of students.
20%? On a risk/reward basis, NFL wins by a landslide.
This seems particularly cruel. If you want to hook up the scam pipeline for these students, why not hook it up from Bethune-Cookman to Florida Costal School of law? Same scam for-profit owners but much closer to Bethune-Cookman and much better (although still poor) bar passage rate of 59.3%. Hooking them up to Arizona Summit is just shoving their faces in the dirt after kicking them in the nuts.
Nuts. So sexist.
Actually, probably not. I came from a relatively good background and even many folks at my level gave poor or nonexistent advice. I cringe to think what advice people are getting at HBCU feeder schools. Especially folks who are relying on the advice which is proactively given to them, rather than the advice which is available if only they knew how and where to look. As a single example: these days, serious students with knowledgeable parents are planning college admissions before high school, to line up the right prerequisites and AP courses—but a typical high school won’t proactively discuss it until junior year, at which point it’s too late. If your parents didn’t know… well, too bad.
Not to mention that you need GOOD advice, and a lot of advice is really bad. Worse yet, an inexperienced person can’t recognize bad advice until it’s too late. Even a bad T5 law school dean is way more educated than their applicants and can be very convincing. So the real skill is knowing who to ask, and where to look, and what information to trust. That is really hard to get without plenty of folks on your side.
Finally, speaking of bad advice: there is a huge “affirmation culture” in many diversity programs. Nobody wants to be the person who seems harsh or who is accused of disbelief in someone’s potential. It’s a pretty harsh pill to tell someone they’re not smart or good enough to do what they want, even if it’s true. It’s much easier socially to tell someone they’re great and that they have the “ability to succeed.” Then you can pass them on to the next level up–sure, they may fail once they get there, but it won’t be traceable to you.
I don’t suffer from that “affirmation culture.” You comment is too damn long.
“This is a painful, if not brutal truth: if a law school can’t manage to produce more than 25% of its students who can pass the bar exam, it’s a scam. It’s awful. It’s a disgrace.”
That number (25%) gets worse if you put it in context.
1. The school will lose a certain number of matriculants through attrition.
Some — those who presumably are more likely to pass the bar — will transfer to better schools. (Incidentally, these students account for the lion’s share of direct aid/scholarships.) A larger number, however, will leave for academic reasons (those, presumably, who are even less likely to pass the bar than their former classmates).
2. Not every graduate will sit for the bar. Most often, it’s (a) the lowest performers — those with no prospects of a job requiring actual lawyering — that choose not to pony up for the review course and bar fees, and/or (b) those who were admitted despite pre-existing disciplinary issues that almost certainly would prevent admission. Nor is it uncommon for schools like AS to often “advise” their students either to not sit, or at least not sit for the more difficult exams (Illinois, New York, California, etc.) despite offering better employment prospects if they pass.
Thus, assuming a 25% pass rate, the reality is only between 15-20% of all matriculants (most of whom will pay close to sticker price) will ever pass the bar.
Of course, Infilaw’s Charlotte School of Law was getting high marks for “diversity” right up to the time the feds cut off the loan funds. We can’t very well give flimflam artists a “pass” from their equal opportunity exploitation obligations.