On the train this morning, I sat down next to a fellow studying a law school crim law text. Turns out he is studying for his JD online at Concord Law School. It is not accredited by the ABA and he can only sit for the bar in California. He will have to practice in California for four years before Virginia will allow him to sit for the bar. He can’t go to a brick-and-mortar day or evening program, he says, because he works full time, has a one-year-old, and the area law schools are too expensive anyway. I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t help but think my erstwhile evning division law school classmates who had borne equal or greater burdens. He says he is studying for his JD mostly for “informational purposes” as a criminal investigator.
I dunno, it seems to me he’s getting the worst of both worlds. For four years he has to spend all his free time studying; he will get a degree that few will recognize let alone respect; he will have to relocate his family across the width of a continent for a minimum of five years to reap significant benefit from his four years of toil and sacrifice; he will experience none of the camaraderie, none of the informal give-and-take, and the only merest fraction of the intellectual stimulation that makes law school tolerable for working adults with families.
On the plus side, he will have spent less, but not all that much less. Concord Law School (a part of Kaplan and accredited only by the Distance Education and Training Council, as far as I could tell) charges $9250 per year for a four year program, and George Mason University School of Law (a state school in the Commonwealth of Virginia) charges about $13k per year to in-state evening division students. He is only saving 13% in tuition payments. It is like buying a $16.5k Vespa for your cross country trip instead of a $20k Harley because it is less expensive and takes up less space in the garage. I wish the fellow well, but from where I sit the situation is best expressed as "Penny wise and pound foolish."
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He can’t go to a brick-and-mortar day or evening program, he says, because he works full time, has a one-year-old, and the area law schools are too expensive anyway.Oh, please. I just want to club such people.
You want to club such people? Is that because you're so precious - or parentally-supported - that you need not work full-time?
How dare someone attempt to live an adult lifestyle and also work exceptionally hard to improve themselves via the best means available to them!
Janet, the online law student doesn't deserve anyone's contempt. The solitary course he has set for himself is daunting, especially without the help of the formal and informal study groups that coalesce in a brick and mortar law school. Besides, he will reap contempt by the truckload from attorneys who will look down their noses at him as a correspondence-school wanker. In fact, unless he is admitted to the California bar, his reputation among the prosecutors and defense attorneys he deals with will be worse than if he had never gone to law school at all.
Not to defend Janet’s desire to club the fellow like a baby seal, but I did go through four years of law school in the night division with people who had infants and toddlers, working or ill spouses, and demanding full time jobs, not to mention a mountain of student loans. They and their spouses would roll their eyes at anyone who said they could not go to school because of a small child and high tuition. These folks did not have parental support or independent wealth. What they did have was focus and clarity of purpose.
As for working to improve himself, Anonymous, that was the point. The online law student is not improving himself in proportion to his investment of time and money—not unless he moves to California, passes the bar exam, and is hired as an attorney on the left coast, that is. Otherwise, for nearly $40k, he is buying a degree that will not advance his career, that will not make it possible for him to change careers, and that he cannot even list on his resumé since it is not from an ABA accredited law school. If his intent really is informational, he can, for a lot less money, get course outlines, old exams with sample answers, and even actual law school lectures, all online. He would get most of the informational benefits of an online law school education for pennies on the dollar.
No, actually, Anonotroll, I WAS the support person for someone who worked full-time and went to a brick and mortar evening program -- and we had three kids. My point is, if you want it badly enough, you can do it.
Whining about it is childish.
I took one on-line course back in college. It was awful.
I find it difficult to learn without the interaction of a classroom and even harder to maintain motivation and momentum. I cannot imagine four years of such programs.
Having been through a four-year evening program, I have much sympathy for those who try to move forward in their careers while balancing family and school obligations. Were I an interviewer for this guy, I think I would more favorably consider his application for that experience alone.
This law school education system and the bar exam feels so much like hazing. The ones who entered the bar just don't feel like to give any newcomer a break.
In contrast, New York lets people who has a foreign law degree and a US LLM to sit for the bar. That seems to be a much better deal. A LLM only takes 2 years.
Only two years for an LLM? Yes, but that is on top of however many years of a foreign legal education.
As for hazing: 1) law school inoculates each new generation with the intellectual common law culture necessary for coherent legal system, and 2) the bar assures a certain minimum competence in black letter law.
I admit,5toesloth, that law schools are less than perfect in their mission, and that the bar exam acts just as much as means of limiting competition as of establishing competence. There is an element of hazing, of "if I suffered through it, then so should you!" institutional traditionalism.
Reflecting on the experience, I admit that I learned a lot about "law" in law school. That should be a given, but it didn't seem like that was what was happening during the experience.
There were some myths that were dispelled by my experience. In particular, the old saying that "during the first year of law school they scare you to death, during the second, they work you to death, and during the third, they bore you to death" does not seem to match the evening program.
In many ways, the most interesting courses were during the third and fourth years and I certainly found the fourt to be hardest.
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