January 2017

I titled this blog after I graduated law school and was subsequently unable to reconcile a so-called profession's obsession with prestige with its patent scumminess. Scummy practitioners who are miserable human beings. A scummy academy that has driven the best and brightest students away, even as it encourages mediocre ones to matriculate and throw away their life. A scummy accreditor that needs no further comment. A scummy judiciary that blames the victims, aka "sophisticated consumers."

A while ago I reached a point where I not only lost interest in blogging, but even reading other scamblogs I've followed for years.

Anyhow, I popped into TTR recently and saw that Charlotte School of Law is holding a food drive. For its own students. The tl;dr version is the Dept of Education finally put the screws to a law school and cut off Federal loans, something it should have begun in the Joan King era.

Reportedly, the DoE offered to extend loans for the spring semester if the school agreed to shut down, but scumminess won the day. Nando and his commenters have already said all that needs to be, so I'll quit here.

Please give generously. CSL Students' Living Expenses

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm

Not seasonally adjusted	January	2016	1,111,000
	November	2016	1,124,700
	December	2016	1,130,400
	January	2017	1,117,400	6,400
Seasonally adjusted	January	2016	1,119,400
	November	2016	1,122,500
	December	2016	1,125,800
	January	2017	1,124,900	5,500
Change from Dec-16 to Jan-17				-900

Feds move to fire an incompetent watchdog

From Finally, the feds move to fire an incompetent watchdog over for-profit colleges

Much of the world turns on paper credentials. But the fact that these often aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on has been spotlighted by the accreditation scandal in the for-profit college business. Scores of campuses have been given a seal of approval by accreditation agencies despite coming under state or federal investigation for fraud.

The federal government is preparing to bring down the hammer on one of these toothless watchdogs. …

The ACICS case underscores the drawbacks of governmental outsourcing of its regulatory authority to outside agencies, especially self-regulatory bodies. These bodies often are dependent for revenue on the very institutions they oversee, which tends to file down their sharp teeth when confronted with the need to bite down hard on a fee-paying target. The phenomenon typically leads to abuses going unaddressed[.]

Giggity. Here's hoping they take a gander at the ABA.