I've previously mocked Thomas Cooley's absurd marketing techniques, but I didn't realize the true depths of the demonic awfulness in their hokey solicitations until today.
Sometimes, those who comment and write on these issues luck into finding a graph, a picture, or a table that speaks for itself. This is one of those times.
From Guidestar.org, the following represents the amount of money this set of relatively-comparable schools (private, non-profit, unaffiliated, ABA-accredited) spent on advertising and promotion in 2009 (Form 990, Part IX, Line 12):
Thomas Cooley: 2,167,925
New England: 669,677
Ave Maria: 323,259
William Mitchell: 263,907
Vermont.: 158,475
John Marshall (Chi.): 124,000
New York L.S.: 122,470
South Texas: 89,567
(note: Thomas Jefferson and Brooklyn's numbers were unfortunately not available).
$2 million. If you went to Thomas Cooley that year, you, individually, paid almost $600 so that the school could con someone else into going there. You could have enjoyed a shopping spree, eaten fifteen to twenty top Lansing dining experiences, bought a night with an std-free escort, etc.
Instead, you paid for advertisements so the worst law school in America - North America, in fact - can try to convince people that Cooley is a worthwhile use of six figures and three years.
In 2009, Ave Maria packed up its entire school and moved to a completely different region of the country. It spent a mere 15% of what Cooley did.
Granted, much of Cooley's number might come from its absurd stadium naming-rights deal, but that didn't take place until early 2010 and it still begs the question why a quality professional school would ever need to buy naming rights to a minor league baseball stadium. And they do have the highest enrollment in the country, which may justify some additional promotional costs.
But $2 million? When John Marshall barely spends six figures?
Think of all the superior ways that money could have been used. Cooley could have made a donation to the Lansing public school system, bought an elementary school or something. It could have founded programs for troubled youth, disease research centers, good ol' legal aid foundations: the sky's the limit for the truly munificent.
Nope. A baseball stadium name. And $2.1 million spent on advertising.
And it's not like they're getting a quality product for the money, either. This is some pretty watered-down stuff. God-awful would be one description for their advertising. Hysterical would be another.
Take, for example, Cooley's laughable NFL comparison:
Yes, you read that correctly: Cooley is trying to convince doe-eyed 149ers that because NFL quarterbacks come from places like Miami-Ohio, using prestige in the law school business is as silly as a Matt Millen draft.
I actually like the analogy, but not for the reason Cooley wishes. It's a beautiful illustration of cherry-picking with anecdotal evidence, a really common logical flaw in law school advertising (if not the world at large).
Here's the reality for football players: a high school quarterback who wants to get to the NFL has the best chance to get there if he goes to USC, Texas, Florida, etc. Likewise, A college graduate who wants to work at Cravath has the best chance to get there if he goes to Harvard or Yale.
Ultimately, the concern isn't with the few Cooley graduates who make BigLaw or the few NFL players who hail from Miami-Ohio. It's about the odds of a a random person at Cooley, or at Miami-Ohio or similar football school, to make that end destination. The population isn't the end population (BigLaw or NFL), but the starting one (all people at Cooley or a lousy football school).
To illustrate the analogy, let's say Cooley is the 200th best law school in the country (this is generous, as it excludes some non-ABA accredited schools that may be finer institutions). Last year, Jeff Sagarin's rankings listed Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, and the Citadel as the 199-201st best college football teams in the country.
So how many Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, and the Citadel graduates are in the NFL right now? 1 for Fordham, 3 for Bethune-Cookman, and 1 for the Citadel.
Those teams have roughly the same number of overall players and alumni as schools like Texas (41 active pros), LSU (40), and Miami (40). See a difference in the odds? A random player at the "more prestigious" colleges was 24 times more likely to make the NFL.
This is why top high school talent continues to go to Texas, LSU, Miami, etc. and not Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, or the Citadel. The same principle is why budding lawyers would never, ever dream of going to Cooley when Columbia is an option.
Kids, the analogy works, from the school's own fire-breathing mouth: if you go to Cooley, your odds of making the big leagues are the about as good as a random football player from Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, or the Citadel making the NFL.
The differences? Most of those schools offer scholarships to their football players. At Cooley, you have the privilege of paying $200k for a glorified lottery ticket from a school that's basically conceding that everyone thinks it's a piece of crap. And there are opportunities for the low-level college football players to show off their skills. No such thing exists in law.
You could theoretically be the second coming of Louis Brandeis, but if you go to Cooley, your odds of getting anywhere prestigious in the law are worse than the 65th percentile graduate at Cornell, even if you ace everything and edit enthralling editions of the law review single-handedly. Yes, this is a dumb system, but it's wrong for Cooley to portray it as otherwise and act like its stellar graduates may actually have a good chance.
Of course, anyone with moderate logical ability figures all this out rather quickly, which speaks to the utterly poor quality of the propaganda at issue. Only the least-sophisticated consumer could fall for this shit, meaning Cooley's LSAT median probably isn't going to rise any time soon.
As an aside, their own advertising shows a distinct lack of college football knowledge. Note in the following how Stanford is a more prestigious football program than Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, BYU, West Virginia, Clemson, Boston College, and Michigan State (heck, national title game aside, I don't even Oregon is top 20 yet).
One has to wonder if Cooley used the same formula as their proprietary law school rankings to rank college football programs.
In any event, that $2 million is clearly paying for the best Madison Avenue can offer. It makes one wonder why, instead of naming stadiums and putting out ridiculous Soviet-level propaganda, the administrators don't just hire their own graduates at 20k and have them do it. Surely, a group of Cooley grads could come up with something better than a horrendous NFL analogy that doesn't work in the school's favor for anyone with three brain cells.
Cooley is clearly in a league by itself. As bad as LaVerne or Thomas Jefferson or Florida Coastal may be, they've got nothing on the multi-campus money-sucker of Cooley. It is the 5th tier, the 6th, the 7th; no matter how many tiers of legal education hell one wishes to construct (or deduct...), Cooley is at the bottom of the barrel, the slumpbuster of law schools, the scenic vacation in northern New Jersey, the menu item no one but a drunk would order. As far as I can tell, it's worse than the for-profits, worse than the state-accredited schools, worse than the LLMs in International Donkey Saddle Arbitration.
$2 million isn't going to get it any respect, but rather make sure its place at the bottom of the toilet is firmly cemented. Is there any scenario where such a figure can even possibly be justified? In a world where LSAC and resources like US News are more than happy to advertise for free?
The cherry on top is that when I logged on right before posting this, there was a google ad for Cooley at the top of my page. I find this hilarious and fitting, and it only slightly diminishes when I think about the long-term consequences of having student loan with a low return-on-investment paying off this small part of a $2 million pool.
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