NC State Cuts Pre-Law Advising; Silly Responses Abound

So N.C. State has decided to cut its pre-law advising service, which - to me - is perfectly understandable given that (1) there's no real need for a separate pre-law advising department aside from normal advisers and (2) almost every state in the union has to slash public expenditures. I genuinely feel sorry for the long-term adviser who will lose her job, but I have to say some of the responses in the article are downright absurd.

The first one isn't that bad:

"When I found out [pre-law services] were getting cut, I was pretty shocked about it. They have done so much for me," [senior Erin] Walker said. . . ."I didn't know what I needed to do to get ready to go to law school. I was completely lost," Walker said.

Did pre-law services take your LSAT for you? Did they get you a high GPA? No? Then, despite appearances to the contrary, they really haven't done that much for you. But it's understandable that one would think that. After all, law school is a long, glorified disabusing process. You start a doe-eyed undergraduate with one slate of perceptions and when you're through the meat grinder you realize a variety of truths, including that there are very few things that actually matter when it comes to getting into law school. Furthermore, if you're "completely lost" in dealing with schools' websites and LSAC, which are straightforward about a simple process, you're going to be even more lost when you try to figure out what the governing law is on some issues.

And then we have this:

Melanie Nutt, director of admissions and financial aid at the Wake Forest University School of Law, said she wants her name added to the letter to the Provost. She reinforced the impact of losing Tetro and pre-law services on N.C. State.

"Losing Mary [Tetro] would be a real blow to the students and to the law schools as well," Nutt said. "[Tetro] has just been a phenomenal resource."

No kidding. You're losing an inside sales person at the state's 2nd-biggest public school. Already, one should note a theme in the article: no one is actually articulating what pre-law services actually did that was so indispensable for N.C. State students. Instead, they merely dish out platitudes like "it was so valuable" and "losing this sucks." Seriously, are N.C. State students so utterly dumb they can't figure this stuff out? Do none of N.C. State's other advisers have an hour to read up on law school?

I did not have pre-law services in undergrad, so I honestly have no idea what they do for you and - again - I see no pressing need to have one. But apparently others do - even if they can't articulate why:

"Cutting something in a big college, like engineering, would be more efficient, because they have so many resources," [senior Harrison] Do said. "If you cut this small, little thing that helps so many students, that to me isn't being very efficient."

Efficient? Efficiency is about resource maximization and waste reduction. I don't care how many programs there are in the engineering college, they're probably all a better use of resources than a pre-law department. Again, I'm sorry a dedicated educator is losing her job, but a pre-law advising service is basically $350k down the sinkhole. Every second a student spends in there would be better spent figuring out LSAT tricks, studying for higher undergraduate grades, or chatting it up with bored professors to get better letters of recommendation.

One of the biggest problems in education - legal and otherwise - is that when someone says "we really need [x]," too few people stand up and say "bullshit." Guaranteed government-driven revenues have never encouraged thrift, and so now we have bloated university structures with all sorts of useless centers and services that are economic deadweights but - oh no! - we can't cut them because we actually hired nice people to fill those positions.

Well, if schools had any interest in teaching their students about the real world, they'd be far more aggressive in shedding excess baggage when budget cuts proved necessary, and they'd be far more hostile to people who try to tell them otherwise. No one in the private sector ever had his job saved because he was a good person or even good at his job in isolation. The fact that we treat public/non-profit university employees differently when many states are flat broke is absurd.