MBA USNEWS Flawed Numbers, Kansas Applications Down Big, and Duke Finds New Way to Grab Tuition Money

1. Grad School U.S. News Fraud:

From BusinessWeek:

The Gainesville Sun last night reported that the University of Florida Warrington College of Business supplied the magazine with inaccurate job-placement data, resulting in a higher ranking.

An anonymous complaint made through the university’s ethics hotline in August alleged that 37 percent of UF’s 2009 MBA graduating class had jobs at graduation, while 53 percent had jobs three months later. The figures supplied to USNWR indicated 53 percent placement at graduation and 79 percent three months later. UF was ranked 39th in 2009, falling two spots from the year before; in 2010 it fell to 47th.

An investigation found no evidence of willfulness, but you can't help but wonder at the similarities. Does any school ever drop as a result of submitting false numbers? Gee, I wonder why that never happens. In any event, the article gives us another look into the askew, dullard mind of Bob Morse, the laziest journalist/statistician on planet Earth:

[Morse] said he thought data accuracy was not a widespread problem, but it's one that should be addressed by organizations such as the American Bar Association and the MBA-CSC in their capacity as standard-setting bodies, not by the media outlets that conduct rankings.

"It's not my problem" is just about the shittiest possible answer a bona fide journalist or statistician can come up with. People who are actually interested in finding the truth - rather than serving as a press agent for the official organizations that supply them - actually get off their asses and find the truth, ensure accurate data, stop official manipulation where it's suspected, etc. I think at this point any illusion of U.S. News being anything more than a puppet with no journalistic or mathematical intentions is shattered by Morse's own admissions.

2. Kansas Applications Down

From the K.C. Star:

The University of Kansas Law School says its applications declined 23 percent for this year compared with last year.
...
About 850 students applied to the law school this year, down from about 1,100 last year.

They're still far from being underwater (they only admit about 350-400 each year), but this is a state flagship university. If you want to ultimately practice is Kansas or the Kansas City metro area, you can't find a better school to attend. I wonder how the quality of their applicant pool is, and I wonder what this kind of drop signifies for places like Washburn and UMKC that are 2nd-choices for KU applicants. I imagine we start seeing sub-150 LSATs more prevalently and schools have to reach further than they normally would.

3. Duke Innovates in Ways to Leach

From the Nat'l Law Journal:

The school announced this week that it will launch a master of laws program in judicial studies geared specifically to judges....

The LL.M. program will open during the summer of 2012 to 10 to 15 sitting judges. They will take intensive four- to six-week sessions over the course of two summers. The curriculum will include classes and seminars in which both judges and scholars look at the history of the judiciary and judicial decision-making. Participants will examine topics including judicial independence, bias, the selection process and use of specialized courts.

Tuition for this four- to six-week program? $17k. For roughly 1/6 of the normal school year, with a guaranteed small class size and what surely will be the lightest teaching, lowest resource demand in academic history, the school is charging over 40% of its full-year tuition price.

Ca-ching! I'm sure Duke justifies this by some inflated beliefs that the judiciary could use the advanced training, but let's be real: most courts are overworked and, frankly, the judges have better things to do than take classes at Duke for $17k and a worthless L.L.M. If a judge in my district went to this thing and was subject to election, I'd vote against him/her on principle.

But hey, you have to hand it to Duke. If kids are going to start turning down law school to find better uses of their money and time, the law schools are naturally going to move to pushing education for existing practitioners, more than they have already.

Applications Increase at Colorado

Yes, the headline is correct. While applications elsewhere are falling - to the tune of 11% per year - applications at Colorado-Boulder are up a whopping 12.7%. Of course, the numbers are coming from the school itself, and as we all know from the 'Nova example, people lie. But still, why are people going to Colorado, especially if its neighbor to the east saw a precipitous decline?

“Our faculty continues to focus on a quality educational experience that combines theory and practice,” Dean David Getches says in the release. “When you combine that type of education with our student teacher ratio and our relatively low costs, there is a great value in our education. We believe that is what prospective students are seeing when they choose to apply here.”

Gee, that sounds like almost every other public school in the country.

Incidentally, this more or less shoots down my "part-time/evening" program theory from Saturday, as CU has only a full-time day program.

I really don't get it. The COA is still 43k which is more than Kansas, Wyoming, etc. It's not like the Denver legal market is booming, and it's not like CU grads have any kind of edge in national hiring.

I suppose some school had to keep the application numbers high. Maybe Colorado offered more fee waivers or something, but again, I just don't see the genuine interest.

Kansas Sees Huge Drop in Applicants: But Is the Quality Improving?

From the Lawrence Journal-World:

KU [law school] extended its deadline by one month, to April 15. Even with that extension, [interim dean] Mazza said the school expects a drop from 15 to 20 percent from last year’s group of about 1,100 applicants.
...
Mazza said he didn’t anticipate significant negative consequences for the school because of the lower number of people interested in applying to KU.

“What we are finding is that the quality of our applications is steady to slightly improving,” he said.

Right. So you decided to extend the deadline because _____ ? If there's no negative consequences, why are you so desperate for more applicants?

KU is a state flagship school that essentially has a monopoly over high-level legal studies in Kansas (no one with an honest choice would go to Washburn or cross the river and go to UMKC). It's fairly cheap, too. If it's seeing a steep drop, that's a major indicator that people are figuring out that not even the main state flagships are worth going to.

But this "quality" argument thrown out by Interim Dean Mazza seems to be the latest and greatest in law school administrator rationalization. For it to be true that a 20% decline would prompt an increase in the quality of the pool, the type of people who applied last year but didn't apply this year would have to be disproportionately lower-qualified (lower LSATs, lower GPAs). That would suggest that there's some sort of significant correlation between desire to practice law and undergraduate academic performance. Somehow, I doubt that. And it seems to me higher-qualified applicants are more likely to pass on schools Kansas and go for T15s like Texas or Michigan, given how crucial prestige is.

Absent concrete evidence, I just don't buy that the quality has anything to do with the seriousness of the applicant. And I'd like to remind the dean that a 20% drop in his applicant pool means they have to broaden their admissions criteria slightly, which will almost certainly lead to a drop in the matriculation pool. That conclusion is almost inescapable unless the 150 LSATs were all apathetic and the 175 LSATs are all gung-ho. If anything, though, it's backwards.

But overall, this is very good evidence that the law school bubble has burst and students are no longer buying into this ridiculous system. Of course, that doesn't mean they can identify what changed:

An article in the New York Times in January seemed to start the conversation, [student Tonda Hill] said. (Mazza said the person profiled in the article didn’t do enough research into law school before beginning his journey.) Other students have blogged about their difficulties in finding jobs.

That article wasn't about a "person profiled." Furthermore, as I've previously pointed out, it's a false conclusion to assume the New York Times article is what caused this. At the time that article came out, almost everyone in the 2011 applicant pool had already taken the LSAT, secured fee waivers and letters of recommendation, and had likely set their mind on applying to law school. Those "other students" [graduates, for the most part] have been blogging for two years in some cases, and they should be given credit for many of those who never started on the "journey" in the first place, not to mention that those blogs are a but-for cause of the New York Times article.

Few Jobs at KU, but Legal Industry "Doing Just Fine"

From the Lawrence World-Journal:

After entering law school with designs on graduating to a job with a six-figure salary, Geri Hartley found the job market a bit more daunting....

She had designs on graduating with her J.D. and M.B.A. combination and becoming a general counsel for a large corporation. Instead, she was unemployed for awhile, and briefly took a position at H&R Block that didn’t require her to have passed the bar exam....

Many of her classmates are having a difficult time. Almost none has stayed on their original plans when they went to law school. One is working behind the cosmetics’ counter at Macy’s, she said. Another creates websites for a living.

A J.D. AND an M.B.A. and she wound up in a non-bar position.

And it's not like the University of Kansas is some 4th-tier obscure private school. It's the flagship public in a state of 2.5 million with two cities over 300k. There's only one other law school in the state and it's a semi-obscure, lowly-ranked private. UMKC, just across the river, lacks the prestige of KU.

In other words, if KU grads are doing this poorly, where a J.D./M.B.A. has to take a job in Paola after being unemployed for awhile and working at HR Block, how are Washburn grads doing?

Here's the kicker. Many people claim that once the legal industry "turns around" and the recession ends, hiring with fire right back up. Uh huh.

Bill Modrcin is a 1978 KU law graduate now working as an attorney in Overland Park. He’s worked for several large Kansas City-area firms, and he’s seen the drop-off in recent years.

On the whole, the industry is doing just fine, he said. Established lawyers in large firms are doing well. But entry-level positions are extremely hard to come by, he said.

If the "industry is doing just fine," why Earth would it go back to paying overpaying entry-level workers? Will the entire history of business management suddenly do a U-turn contrary to all empirical evidence?