How about retuning to Clerking on the Job, then Taking the Bar Exam

Clarence Darrow never went to Law School! 

Much of the time there is a great disconnect from what is taught in school and the practical education gained on the job. m/r

Thomas Jefferson's Folly by Mark Pulliam, City Journal 1 October 2014

California’s worst-performing law school illustrates the moral hazard of federal student loans.

Investors can make bad decisions, and businesses sometimes fail due to unforeseeable market conditions. But Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s impending default on $133 million in tax-exempt bonds was predictable, perhaps even inevitable. The American Bar Association accredited the private law school in San Diego in 1996, but U.S. News & World Reportnever rated it; the magazine cuts off its ranking at 145 of the 203 ABA-accredited schools. Undaunted, Thomas Jefferson moved into a lavish new building in January 2011, just a few years after the Great Recession devastated demand for legal services and created a glut of law school graduates seeking employment. Law schools generally, and bottom-tier schools such as Thomas Jefferson in particular, have been in free fall ever since. From 2007 to 2013, Thomas Jefferson raised its acceptance rate from 45 percent to 81 percent—essentially open admissions—but enrollment still declined.

Steadily declining job prospects have cut into law school applications, resulting in lower enrollments and depressed tuition revenue. Many expenses associated with running a law school—such as faculty payroll, rent, and debt service on the physical plant— are fixed. Even sharp tuition increases cannot make up the revenue loss from slashed enrollments. Public law schools can subsist on legislative largesse, but private law schools—especially stand-alone schools without an endowment cushion to ease restricted cash flow—face financial crisis.

It doesn’t help when the school is the target of a class action lawsuit by graduates claiming they were defrauded into attending based on misleading job-placement statistics. Thomas Jefferson faced those charges in May 2011, just months after moving into its fancy eight-story digs in San Diego’s trendy downtown East Village. A 2008 Thomas Jefferson graduate who borrowed more than $150,000 to attend alleged that the school had misrepresented its post-graduation employment. The school said that its employment rates were between 80 and 90 percent, when in fact those statistics included part-time and non-legal jobs. The actual placement rate for Thomas Jefferson graduates in full-time legal positions within nine months of graduation is closer to 25 percent. Combine toxic publicity with high tuition, the highest average student-loan debt in the nation, poor academic ratings, an abysmal job market, and the lowest bar-exam pass rate among California’s 21 accredited law schools, and it’s no wonder that applications plummeted and enrollment plunged.

Notwithstanding some faculty and staff layoffs (even as the new dean gets paid more than $500,000 a year) …

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