Summary: Harrison Barnes wrote an expose on how Thomas Cooley Law School, the largest in the nation, operates as a degree mill, getting rich from peddling false dreams to law school students.
Veteran legal recruiter Harrison Barnes minces no words when exposing Thomas Cooley Law School in a devastating article. Having seen how this fourth tier law school operates and loads its students with false hopes, he rails against their policy and reveals why they’ve dropped upwards to 70 percent of their faculty recently. Amazed that the school would admit almost everybody , charge over $40,000 a year, and ensure almost certainly that the students would pick up debt and not jobs, he excoriates the entire Cooley enterprise.
As the largest law school in the nation, with 2,500 students, and its come-who-may policy of accepting 80 percent of applicants, it isn’t a wonder that less than 1 percent of graduates land a job at any large law firm. His problem isn’t with this though, but that “While some people prey on senior citizens, the poor, or the rich, Cooley preys on law students.”
By giving false hope to middle class and lower class aspirants who want to lead a life better than their poor parents, the law school seems to be a solution to having a better life, to escape the atmosphere of despair surrounding the failed automotive market in West Michigan.
The problem is exacerbated by the loose and easy loan process by which these students can so readily be saddled up with a whopping $200,000 debt, simply because they are going to law school. Barnes points out that no other demographic could secure such a loan so readily.
The problem here is in Cooley’s conversion to a bureaucracy more concerned with securing higher paychecks, with less and less publishing expected from its staff. They hoped to make as much money as reputable law schools and banked on the government’s willingness to grant the loans to hoist the bloated edifice, while meanwhile, as Barnes claims, “Thomas Cooley stood out like a piece of fool’s gold beckoning people with promises of riches and prestige that were unlikely to ever come.”
The school refused the legal services of LawCrossing, even if free to students, since, as they bluntly explained, they want to keep students dependent on Cooley staff and not on securing the students actual jobs.
Barnes then goes on to detail a story where he met up with the financial aid director, and was exposed to the entire sordid process by which the institute keeps the gravy train rolling, exploiting students with false hopes, and becoming very rich in the process themselves. Check out the article for the full deal!