Saturday, May 13, 2017

"Blameless" Tone-Deaf Law Professors Ted Seto and Steve Diamond Whistle Past Grave Yards

What with the recent closures of Indiana Tech and Whittier, to say nothing of mergers and attempts by law schools to raise funds in order to keep operating, what do LawProfs have to say?  By chance, are they implicated in any way?  Let's get right to it:

Not clear that blaming senior faculty is constructive. Like Jack, I work hard. I’m currently on sabbatical, but for the preceding five years, I averaged 20 units of teaching per year, twice what our junior faculty members are asked to teach, while maintaining some of the best teaching evaluations at a school with excellent average evaluations. During that same period, I wrote a first and second edition of a casebook, with accompanying 500-page teacher’s manual, and published numerous articles. I also designed and implemented several new revenue-generating programs for the school, the net revenues of which pay for my salary many times over. When our school went on a faculty-slimming program with buy-out offers, no one offered me a buy-out. I wonder why. (I wouldn’t have accepted in any event; I love what I do.) Sorry to seem self-promoting, but we more experienced faculty members sometimes need to defend ourselves.
Posted by: Theodore Seto | Apr 25, 2017 12:06:16 AM


Well!  Let's count the Baby Boomer bromides: (1) I "work hard" notwithstanding sabbaticals, (2) everybody loves me, (3) I'm important because I'm published, (4) I pay for my cost by helping keep the gristmill going, and (5) I'm better that everyone else and those other (younger) lawprof louses should be fired instead.  Nothing about law school lax acceptance practices, outrageous tuition costs, the dissemination of false and misleading information, that too many law schools are pumping out too many graduates, or the non-recovery of the legal market.  Clearly, no one else works as hard as Seto and he deserves his position, so go looking elsewhere for your pound of flesh from the scam.  

Are things better for the class of 2016 as opposed to earlier?  There appears to be some minor improvement according to recent ABA numbers, but hardly what one would call a huge swing to the so-called "golden days" of legal education.  UPDATE:  For example, the percentage of students from, say, Loyola(LA), who obtained full-time, bar-passage required jobs went down 0.2% from a whopping 47% to 46.8% from 2015 to 2016.

http://witnesseth.typepad.com/blog/2012/12/bloated-is-better-for-law-school-rankings.html



MacK dismissed Seto's arguments in late 2013, and it appears that his predictions were more on point:

Seto's assessment - and for that matter Dan Filler's approving posting of it is remarkable in inherently admitting something that Dan and Seto had until now been desperately denying - that there was a substantial fall in the number of law school matriculations in progress - and that there is an oversupply of JDs.

At the same time, Seto makes a mess of things. The key hole in his analysis is the assumption that until recently supply (JDs awarded per year) was in fact in equilibrium with demand for new law graduates. As has now been relentlessly detailed by numerous careful studies (as well as the missing lawyer phenomenon) that has not been an accurate assessment since perhaps the 1990s. Only a small proportion of the demand-supply mismatch can be attributed to the recession. (The non-equilibrium in the JD supply is a function of the market distortion of a student loan system devoid of underwriting standards.)

Where Seto may be accurate is in his prediction that on current numbers matriculations will be of the order of 39,900 - though it could easily be lower (the impact of law schools' desperate efforts to get applications in the current cycle (waiving application fees, chasing marginally interested applicants) will likely be a lower yield of matriculants from the number of applications, especially if the recovery continues to strengthen through the summer. What does this mean for law schools? Well one good prediction is that in any given metro area with multiple law schools, the bottom ranked law school will be in trouble as students shuffle up to the higher ranked school(s), or the lower ranked school needs to offer very heavy discounts to attract students. It may also lead to competition for transfers in senior class ranks (as schools like Phoenix law are discovering) and further efforts to prevent the losses of 2Ls and 3Ls and tuition dollars. Remember a fall of 8,000 law students means the equivalent of around 20-40 law schools' first year classes (assuming 200-400 per entering class.) The assumption of the pollyanna's is that the fall in matriculations will be evenly distributed across all law schools - but it seems more reasonable to think that those with the perceived worst value offering will take the biggest hit.

The next couple of years are going to be a wild ride for law schools - and September will be very interesting.

23 comments:

  1. This is a little off topic or maybe it isn't. A Hofstra student, not me, posted a critical post about Barbara Barron of Hofstra Law Commode on Rate my Professors.She complained and RMP took it done.I thought the purpose of RMP was to distribute criticism of professors so that students would know to avoid them. If professors can have critical posts removed just because they are critical what purpose does RMP serve?

    I have seen this before. A professor gets a critical comment on RMP and the Prof has it taken down. You got to wonder how Seto and Diamond are protecting their reputations.

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  2. Whether or not Seto is the god among men that he considers himself to be, the law-school scam is still a scam.

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    1. That's the real issue here. Seto could work as hard as he claims to be working, or even twice as hard, and his superlative courses would still be a dangerous trap for debt-funded students.

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  3. http://thirdtierreality.blogspot.com/2013/06/profiles-in-academic-putridness_11.html

    I barbecued Seto nearly four years ago. He was a pig then, and he is still a swine.

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  4. "I work hard. I’m currently on sabbatical, but for the preceding five years, I averaged 20 units of teaching per year, twice what our junior faculty members are asked to teach, while maintaining some of the best teaching evaluations at a school with excellent average evaluations. During that same period, I wrote a first and second edition of a casebook, with accompanying 500-page teacher’s manual, and published numerous articles. I also designed and implemented several new revenue-generating programs for the school, the net revenues of which pay for my salary many times over."

    Five years is over 10,000 hours of billed labor for most BigLaw associates. Given the choice, every last one of them would take 20 units of teaching and writing a book and a few articles on the side. For generating that 2.5M - 5M in revenue for the firm, the associate will probably be paid somewhere in the 1M-1.2M range as a salary figure for five years, total, so it pays their salaries many times over, too.

    In other parts of the legal spectrum, graduates may put in that 10-12k hours of billed labor over five years, be paid only $300-350k, and generate the firm revenues of 1.5M or more.

    There's no tenure or sabbaticals, either. Treadmill keeps going, and you can be chucked off at any time.

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    1. In addition, 10,000 hours of billed time is probably 15,000 of actual time worked.

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  5. —— I also designed and implemented several new revenue-generating programs for the school, the net revenues of which pay for my salary many times over.

    Note how disingenuous Seto is. He claims credit for every penny of the net revenues of some programs that he supposedly "designed and implemented". As if nobody else were involved.

    Example: Scamster makes the facile proposal of an LLM or a "certificate" or a summer course in some exotic locale, then claims full credit for the "program", as if he alone were responsible for it.

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    1. It seems that the cockroach takes no responsibility for the commode's weak-ass ranking, pathetic bar passage rates, and the fact that MANY of his graduates end up returning to their old line of work.

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    2. Seto makes himself sound like a mafia hood who's a "good earner" for his capo. Truth is, like loan sharking and extortion, those LLM programs are a racket.

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  6. Any nerds with more time and ambition than I, could go school-by-school and see who's tightening their admissions requirements. I've noticed this casually. Some schools (Illinois, Drake, Idaho) are starting to tighten up LSAT scores, while others (Creighton, Drexel I think, Mercer) are still going the other way.

    This could be the "Great Sorting" that was predicted years ago, between the sorta-respectable schools and the absolute trash schools.

    Data nerds? What do you think?

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    1. Tighten their requirements though they may, they won't be able to sustain the scam. There simply aren't enough decent law students to fill the ranks even of an Illinois, never mind an Idaho or a Creighton. All of Tier 6, all of Tier 5, and at least half of Tier 4 should close down.

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    2. The Great Sorting has already taken place, and it's a matter of signalling. Once overall quality gets low enough, the Fourth Tier JD becomes worse than useless, an albatross around some poor bastard's neck.

      That's why Illinois isn't whatever tier it is in Old Guy's extravagant fantasies. An Illinois JD still signals quality to enough Chicago and statewide employers that it retains some financial value. I would totally agree that Illinois needs to cut ts class size, however, which is one thing Old Guy's comment implies.

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  7. Thanks for the referral, "Duped". Given his conspiracy rantings, Diamond is one crazy cat, but Seto is almost as delusional if he thinks 20 units of canned lectures a year = hard work. Of course, as others have pointed out, it doesn't matter how hard he supposedly works, if the product serves no benefit to the customer, who cares? Even if Seto "covered his costs", that coverage comes at the expense of the students who are ripped off.

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  8. The U of South Carolina just blew $80M on a new building for its Tier 5 law skule:

    http://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article150836627.html

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  9. Did you guy see this? Trump and Betsy, let's turn kindergarten into a profit center, Devos, want to officially repeal and end Public Sector Loan Forgiveness.

    Also, graduate student loan borrowers are excluded from all of Trump's plans to make IBR sunset debt at 15 years instead of 20, etc.

    He also wants to end the interest rate subsidy on all federal student loans.

    LOL! I guess the fucker figured out that the *current, sitting* US Federal Government does indeed profit massively from federal student loans by US-debt-financing them then taking 'repayments', spending them, and leaving the whole bill due to the same people who can't get vote, and whose marketplace they FUBAR'ed on purpose.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/05/17/trump-and-devos-plan-to-reshape-higher-education-finance-heres-what-it-might-mean-for-you/?utm_term=.1931e6a38c08

    When, oh when, are Millennials going to figure out that they are targeted for lifelong poverty through financial manipulation of a 100% corrupt and broke government? When they wake up in Venenzuela?

    What happened to the 250 BILLION DOLLARS in federal student loan "repayments" that the DOE has turned over to Congress since 2010????? It didn't reduce that 1.3 now 1.4 trillion dollar balance owing to the very same victims of fraud, price-fixing, and economic genocide.

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  10. Off topic, but Old Guy, did you see this? How will this affect law schools?

    The ‘Borrower Defense’ Rule Takes Effect in July. Brace for It.
    By Anthony J. Guida Jr.

    "The rule — which applies to all of higher education, not just for-profit colleges — provides new processes and establishes a federal standard that allows the department to forgive federal student loans based on: 1) a "substantial misrepresentation"; 2) a breach of contract (i.e., in enrollment agreements, catalogs, etc.); or 3) a contested judgment against the college. It also expands the scope of "substantial misrepresentation" to include omissions of fact, making it much easier for students and even graduates to claim that they were misled by their college and should therefore have some or all of their loans forgiven. The rule also permits the department to charge back to the college the student loans it has forgiven."

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    1. I'm not delighted with a change that only saddles the public—again—with the cost of a foolish decision to attend a Cooley for $300k. If there's a substantial misrepresentation, take the money out of the law school's ass, not out of the public coffers. If the law school can't pay, why should the public?

      Besides, as I have long said, I no longer have the slightest sympathy for anyone, anyone at all, who enrolls in any school in Tier 4, Tier 5, or Tier 6. (That's all but 13 schools.) Nobody should borrow money to attend one of those. And even Tier 3 is very risky.

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  11. This would be a good time to cover Trump's proposed changes to student loans, including doing away with PSLF, combining all student loans into one program and having that program of IBR require payment of up to 12.5% of the borrow's income for up to 30 years, at which point the loan would be forgiven, apparently without relief for the income tax effect of loan forgiveness.

    This proposal would be a victory for the law school scam movement if enacted. It would keep many people from making an uneconomic decision to attend law school, because most lawyers who borrowed six figures would be paying off law school debt when they were sending their kids to college and trying to save for retirement.

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    1. Eventually the current model is going to collapse, regardless of whatever the current President or next one does. The debt simply cannot be repaid by a sizable percentage of the borrowers. It's going to collapse sooner than later. Student loan debt is going to go away because our generation will gain political power and change it because we were damaged by a dysfunctional system. Within a decade the total debt held is going to be close to $3 Trillion dollars. Stupid filthy rich baby boomers don't understand how bad things are on the ground in real America. I can't wait to see a couple dozen law school close and watch the scam Deans and professors whine.

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  12. 11:47 You got it wrong. The sunset of debt after 15 years is for undergrad debt. For graduate school debt it will be forgiven after 30 years under the Trump proposal. It does preserve IBR for those who started their educations before July 2018.

    See https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/budget.pdf

    Big victory for the law school scam movement if this passes. Sort of a nail in the coffin for law schools, including the T14 or T6 or T3, as people will be betting they will earn enough to pay off the massive cost of law school.

    One can expect more law school closings if this passes, as the toilets do not disclose income levels of graduates. Who wants to gamble that way with high law school debt that will be burdening them for the rest of their lives?

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  13. If you have ever taught in law school, you know that you need a room to accommodate a class and adjuncts you pay $4,000 a class because they are paid by other jobs. You need to pay some administrators to design the courses, maintain accreditation, post year end grades and keep student records. Bare bones, would it really cost $90,000 a year per law student? Couldn't law schools outsource almost everything but teaching?

    There has got to be a cheaper way.

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    1. But you're forgetting such essentials as princely salaries for effete aristocratic profe$$ors, tenure for same, feather-light workloads, sabbaticals, junkets to expensive and exotic destinations, numerous deans and assistant deans and associate deans and so on, fancy new buildings, and of course heaps of scholarshit. With all that, it's a wonder that law school doesn't cost ten times as much.

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  14. Diamond is terrified because there is another failing Jesuit law school just up the road in San Francisco. Obvious solution is for the two law schools to "merge" (i.e. close one of the law schools) and cut all the faculty at one of the two schools.

    Granted, Diamond would seamlessly move into a partnership at Wilson Sonsini, but he's concerned about what might happen to his colleagues if Santa Clara Law were shut down.

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