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.

Touro Trying to Reduce Class Size

Remember how Albany has decided to reduce its enrollment? It looks like Touro has joined in (maybe I just missed the news on it). From the Wall Street Journal:

[Albany and Touro] plan to admit 10 fewer students.

Still, the cuts represent an unprecedented acknowledgment among law deans that the product they’re churning out isn’t as highly valued now as it was, say, 5 years ago.

“It is the ethical and moral thing to do,” Touro Dean Lawrence Raful told the NLJ. “I don’t think the [job] placement situation is going to turn around for a number of years and I think we are concerned about the ethics of turning out quite so many students in debt when we know that not everyone can get a job to pay off that debt.”

According to the NLJ, if the Touro board agrees to Raful’s proposal, enrollment in this fall’s first-year class will dip to 270 from the 280 in 2010. Raful is proposing further 10-student reductions in the falls of 2012 and 2013.

Are they a few years late? Absolutely. But good for them for taking this stance rather that certain other states' deans*. It's not like anyone could reasonably expect the schools to just cut off 50% of their graduates at once.

They aren't completely waving the flag of justice and "the ethical and moral thing to do," but you have to applaud steps in the right direction. Good for Dean Raful for scaling Touro's wreckage back despite his self-interest. I wonder if we can expect the other New York lower-ranked schools (Hofstra, New York Law School, Syracuse, St. Johns, Pace, Brooklyn, Buffalo) to do likewise and help ease the saturation in the Empire State.

*My prime example here is Minnesota's four law deans, notably Thomas Mengler. Their sharp wit and brilliant approach to oversupplying the market can be seen here. Among the highlights are Mengler's assertions that lawyers are no different than coffee shops and that the market should be able to handle all St. Thomas grads because St. Thomas is a unique educational experience unrivaled by any other.