Bait and switch law school
July 18, 2011
Self storage, first month free!
Giving away storage free for a month may seem like a bad business practice. Why would you ever give away the only thing you sell when you’re a for-profit business? How many gas stations or grocery stores do you see doing this?
It’s actually a very clever technique, and it works well anytime a customer makes a long term commitment to a vendor. It’s the same reason law schools give away so many merit-based scholarships to incoming students. 
They get you in the door, using their services, and then poof! You have to start paying huge cash – or change your lifestyle. Whether it’s a lifestyle change that involves spending a weekend or two emptying out a storage unit, or dropping out of law school – which I did recently – it’s not something anyone would really prefer to do.
I was given a merit based scholarship when I got into the Seattle University School of Law, for not quite half of my tuition (a fact which typically escapes the attention of giddy newly admitted students, confused by the long, tenebrous process of law school admissions). But to keep the scholarship, I’d have to be near the top 10% of my class. Grades are obscenely competitive in law school, and in my opinion, anyone who hasn’t failed out has performed admirably. It’s a mathematical certainty that 90% of the class will finish below the top 10%, and when nearly 100% of your student body has scholarships like mine (which I think is a reasonable estimate, at least for Seattle) the school comes out ahead like a casino.
The dean of a similar law school recently said that “with hard work and good luck, students will be able to retain their scholarships.”
The carrot of competitive drive - Oh, if you work hard and really apply yourself, you can do it. With a little luck and hard work, you’ll keep your scholarship. Just work work work, and maybe the dice will come up in your favor. Are you up to the challenge? 
Of course you are.
This is just the tip of the ice berg when it comes to rich law schools scamming the growing social class of impoverished students. To me, it exemplifies the overarching shift of wealth we’re seeing today in American society. The next group of articles on this site will set up a moral backbone for the broader logic-based argument that this shift is unhealthy for society, and detracts from the collectively available reservoir of free will in our world.
I had a 3/4th’s scholarship to a TTT. I had to be in the top half of the class to keep it, which would be easy I thought.
The scumbag law administrators put all of the scholarship students into one section where half of us were guaranteed to lose our money. After seeing this scam in action for one semester, I also ran like fucking hell away from that dump.
ps. the redhead in the first picture isn’t bad looking, but she needs to do something with her hair.
Good for you! They did the same thing at my school, with the “smart” and “dumb” sections, at least based on what our professors told us. Shouldn’t the scholarships go to the worse students anyway, because they’ll have a harder time finding employment?! At all law schools, you’ll have two classes of people – 1.) the smartest and best students, top 10%, who make a huge profit, and 2.) the rest, who are scammed, left in debt, underemployed, and trying to fake their own deaths to get out of debt.
After not long, I start wanting to assign culpability. Of course, the scumbags in the administration who organized the money-stealing system are at fault, but because the ABA and government both have the power to intervene – but simply choose not to – aren’t they equally culpable?
Had you been told when you were awarded the scholarship that only 10 percent of the people who received the scholarship would renew it, would you have viewed the scholarship offer differently?
I ask this not to be a smartass but to get an honest response. I work in the admissions office at a law school, and we require our scholarship recipients to stay roughly in the top 10-15% of the class to keep their scholarships. We tell our scholarship recipients that the required renewal GPA is typically the top 10-15%, but we don’t go so far as to say that 85-90% of scholarship recipients won’t have scholarships in the second year.
So do you think that telling students the renewal rate up front would make a difference? Or do you think that all scholarships should just be “good standing” renewal with a smaller “face value?”
Would you agree that offering a scholarship to a majority of incoming students, and then revoking it from a majority of students after they enroll, is misleading? I read through the paperwork, and after starting, still had no clue that the plug on my scholarship would be pulled. I learned it from word of mouth during the semester. I’m sure it was put in some fine print way in the back of whatever I signed, which may qualify as legal, but falls far short of qualifying for a good-faith relationship. Would you agree that law schools see students as ATM-style punching bags, the way a 16 year old girl sees her rich dad? I’m sure the administration justifies the fees based on high anticipated salaries, but this is total fiction. The bubble in the legal industry is going to go “POP” pretty soon, I’m sure your office is doing everything it can to inflate and profit from it before it all falls down.
I understand that law school is a business (many are classified as “nonprofit” business, which is laughable, and a mockery of the term) but when you scam students from day one, how are you building a community? How are you going to ask those students, who had their scholarships revoked for being in the middle of the curve, for donations in the future? Don’t you think it might be a better business model to treat students fairly and then ask for donations than to scam them and then get no donations?
Sorry if I’m a little bitter, but I just got done paying 5 figures to a random ass law school for the luxury of learning that law school is a scam for a minimum of 75% of students, and I consider it to be one part of a very large trend in our society which is shifting wealth away from the middle class and giving it to the top few percent. What are your thoughts? What’s it like to work in a law office and be powerless to stop the machinery around you? Is the “anger” in “angry law admissions guy” directed at me or at the f—ed up system?
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