Massachusetts School of Law: Can You Love and Hate A Thing Simultaneously?

Michael Coyne is the Associate Dean at the regionally-accredited Massachusetts School of Law, although given the tone of his recent piece in the Worcester Telegram, he might be promoted to Minister of Propaganda.

It's hard to disagree with sentiments such as this:

• Tuition costs at law schools accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) have doubled in the last nine years....
• Nowhere is the need for reform of higher education more obvious than in legal education....
• The ABA continues its monopolistic control over access to legal education, imposing its costly outdated model of 19th century legal education on all ABA law schools, where annual tuitions have now reached $50,000, with $60,000 annual tuitions likely just three years away.

I love that there is, somewhere, someone operating a law school that is pissing off the ABA. I love that they do not use the LSAT and rely instead on personal interviews. I love that they try to keep tuition down (40% of other schools) while spitting out functional lawyers.

What I don't like are ridiculous statements like this:

Mortgages, bonds, and long-term loan forgiveness programs are now needed to pay for the cost of a law degree at an ABA law school.

With ever-escalating tuitions and access to loans dwindling, our country’s middle class finds itself hard-pressed to see the promise of opportunity that a law degree provides as nothing more than a mirage on an ever-elusive horizon.

Access is not really the issue. Virtually anyone has access to federally-backed loans to go to school. The problem is that the return on the investment is not high enough to justify the cost. In my experience, very few people have problems with "access to loans;" if anything, the problem is that loans are too freely given without concern for the loan being paid back. There's no need to rephrase this issue as one of class or access. It's bad enough that they lie about the return on investment to rake in more money.

And then there's this strain of junk:

The MSL model is a highly successful, practice-based, lower-cost method of legal education patterned after the medical school approach to higher education.

...

MSL is now nationally recognized for its effectiveness at training law students and its success in winning various regional and national advocacy awards. Legal journals are reporting on the growing number of ABA law school graduates vocal about having been forced to sacrifice their lives on the altar of high ABA law school tuitions.

Highly successful? Nationally recognized? Really? And why do complaining students show that your school makes any more sense than the rest of them? Again, the problem isn't restricted to tuition, it's a debt- and rate-of-return problem. MSL could cost $10 for a degree, but if the degree is only worth $5, it's just as much a scam as any other school, just on a smaller scale.

And then there's this whopper:

Americans have a God-given right to higher education. It is the promised path to a better future that every generation of Americans has passed on to those that followed. Let freedom and innovation ring. We will then be able to provide the “justice for all” that the inscription above our Supreme Court promises.

Um...yeah. The inscription is "Equal Justice For All," higher education is not a "promised path" to anything, and if we were really to "let freedom and innovation ring," the last remnants of professionalism in the attorney field would perish.

There's a bunch of phony rhetoric about how the LSAT discriminates against minorities and how law schools are too white, but to me the real problem in the article is that he misses the point.

That outdated model of 19th century education is not "costly" to run. On the contrary, it's quite cheap: pack 80 students in a room and get someone to talk about negligence or equitable servitude. The high costs seem to come from elsewhere, specifically the human resource department. Many law schools are still profit centers, and the fact that for-profit enterprises can compete with public schools and non-profit universities should give you a hint that the cost really isn't that prohibitive.

The problem isn't, either, that we've closed access. It's that demand for a legal education has risen dramatically on manipulated statistics, a distorted public perception, and federally-backed loans that are remarkably easy to get.

Remember the housing crisis? One of the factors of rapidly escalating home prices was the fact that we had this idea that there was a strong preference (bordering on a right) for everyone to own a home. Lender standards were relaxed so more minorities and other poor people would have more access to home ownership. Within a decade, people were defaulting like crazy - and it wasn't just those who purchased expensive, overpriced homes, but also those poor people who suddenly had access to 75k-100k homes. Message: you should not be "promising" or give a "right" to what are basically high-cost economic goods.

I swear this all just happened less than 5 years ago, but people like Michael Coyne seem to have missed the message. If the MSL's idea of fixing the law school problem is to admit all comers on lower tuition than the other guys with no regard as to the chances of paying it back, they're just as bad as everyone else. How do they think poor minorities come up with the 15k a year needed to pay tuition? Last time I checked, not many poor people have 45k in the bank and very, very few could pay that and their living expenses without incurring more debt. And when they graduate with 45k (or more) in unsecured, non-dischargable debt, how are they going to pay it back? Their school will not have a good reputation and they will have little chance at getting a mid- or large-firm job.

To my eyes, there are two things that need to fundamentally change with law schools; there are many minor changes, but many can be seen as tangents of these two:

1. The curriculum needs to be changed to adequately prepare and develop modern working lawyers; this is an issue with the ABA's standards.
2. The law schools must reduce the number of graduates and/or the cost of a legal education to accurately meet the demand for legal services; this is an issue with ABA accreditation, federal bankruptcy law, federal higher education lending standards, and plain old false advertising.

MSL seems to have figured out the first. But Mr. Coyne seems out to lunch regarding the second, and MSL's solution would only serve to saturate the legal marketplace ever more. There may be fewer students with 300k in debt under the current MSL model. But if lawyer work is only valued at 25k a year, is 75k in total law school debt even worth it? With completely-opened access to legal education, the market only becomes more saturated, and the earning power of every law degree - especially MSL'S pieces of paper - drops dramatically.

Grasp that, Michael Coyne, and you'll see why I can't embrace your school, even though I salute it's general attitude towards the ABA.