|
Common Questions About Cooley Law School
Posted 2005/11/15 17:51:37
Author Steven Shelton
|
A few months back, I graduated from Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan. Cooley is the largest law school in the country, in no small part due to its open admissions policy and flexible scheduling options. (It's one of only two or three law schools in the country where you can attend full-time while working more than 20 hours a week. This is something that requires special permission from the American Bar Association, and Cooley was the first to get it.) Because of its size and its somewhat unusual approach to legal education (giving virtually everyone a chance to prove his/her ability to practice law, as opposed to being an elitist institution), Cooley is the frequent subject of discussion among law students and potential law students.
---UnderThisSeparatorIsLatterHalf---
As an alum (and an alum with a fairly noticeable internet presence), I receive (on average) two or three emails a week from people who want to know what Cooley's like. I don't mind answering these questions; in fact, I rather enjoy it. I wish there had been someone that I could have accessed easily when I was preparing to start law school. But to save people some time in waiting for an email response from me, I've decided to dedicate today's blog entry to some of the more frequent questions I get about Cooley.
Okay, with no further ado, the most common questions and answers about Cooley:
1. Will Cooley accept my application?
The answer is usually "yes", assuming you are a college grad without a terribly sordid past and you can get a reasonable score on the LSAT. Cooley doesn't have an interview process or anything like that; it's all strictly by the numbers. If your "Admission Index" is high enough, you're admitted. It's that simple. The formula for the admission index is as follows: Undergraduate_GPA x 15 + Highest LSAT score = Admission Index If the total is at least 185 and your LSAT score was at least 145, you're in.
2. I scored a 143 on the LSAT. Will Cooley accept my application?
No, because the minimum LSAT score is 145. But you can always take the LSAT again; Cooley takes your highest LSAT score in the last five years and ignores all the rest. If your LSAT score is below a 150, though, I'd reconsider the law school option in general. It's not like I put a lot of faith in LSAT scores; I think it's pretty well-known that my opinion of LSAT scores is that to find where they come from requires a flashlight and a proctologist. (Thanks to Scott Adams for that line, by the way.) But the LSAT is a mutiple-choice test, and quite a few (although not the majority) of tests at Cooley are multiple-choice. Plus, if you plan to take the Bar Exam, your future is going to rest upon your ability to take the Multistate Bar Exam, a multiple choice test. (This is why Cooley's administration requires that a certain number of classes include multiple choice testing in their exams.) If you consistently score lousy on the LSAT, you're probably not going to do well in law school and you're going to have a real hard time passing the Bar.
3. Can Cooley grads find jobs?
Absolutely they can. According to the school, about 77% of the graduates have employment in the "legal" industry within a year of graduation. This is not a great number in comparison to other schools; in fact, it's near the bottom. The top school in the country in terms of immediate employment, for instance, is Texas Tech with a 98.5% rate of employment a year after graduation. So there are schools with higher rates of immediate employment than Cooley, but if your goal is to "find a job as a lawyer" then you're still likely to do so within your first year as a grad from Cooley. (Note that this number is actually quite a bit misleading; if someone starts up a solo practice—which is actually the goal of many people who attend law school—this person does not count as someone who has "legal employment" for these statistics.) The average starting salary for a Cooley grad is $46,000. This is largely because Cooley grads tend to end up in private practice other than business ("corporate") law; if you look at schools with much higher acerage starting salaries for grads, they tend to have a much higher rate of first-time employment as corporate lawyers.
My advice on this subject is this: if you want to get rich, Cooley's probably not the school for you. If you want to practice law because you love the law and you enjoy helping people, Cooley is a great school.
4. Don't Cooley's U.S. News & World Report rankings mean the school sucks?
Uh, no. Listen, U.S. News is not a publication that really has any credibility in terms of ranking law schools. I don't even know how they got into the business of doing so. Now, if Consumer Reports, which exists to create these kinds of ranking systems, were to have a list, I would put some credibility into it. But U.S. News? Why not just ask me to rank the world's top rugby players? I've got just as much expertise in this area as U.S. News does in law schools. Nobody in the practice of law cares about these rankings; the ABA and every other legal organization has disavowed them and said they are meaningless.
Of course, Cooley scores low in the U.S. News rankings because the factors—some of which are just ridiculous—are weighted toward east-coast Ivy League schools. In fact, most of the people they survey are Ivy League grads, so who do you think they're going to rank higher? So, to get around this (because a lot of prospective law students and even some undergrad advisors who should know better do take these rankings seriously) Cooley created its own system. Let me tell you: this system is as silly as the one created by U.S. News and is just as meaningless. It's an extremely self-serving system that is designed to boost Cooley's prestige. It fails, and does so miserably. Ignore it. Ignore U.S. News. Base your decision on what's important (quality of the education, what you want to do after graduation, the cost of tuition, the availability of scholarships, the location of the school, whether you want to work full-time, and so on) and not on some silly ranking that has nothing to do with your personal situation.
5. What's Cooley's first-time Bar passage rate?
I'll be honest: it's abysmal. It used to be very high—sometimes higher than the "elite" University of Michigan law school—but in recent years it's fallen dramatically to somewhere around 50%. That's an embarrassment. There's no way around it. A large part of the reason is probably the school's open admissions policy. Part of it is also probably the fact that the ABA made the school lower its attrition rate, meaning the school is forced to graduate some people it probably shouldn't. Part of it is that some people just don't take it seriously; Cooley stresses that you're forced to take a lot of required courses that you don't want to take (and that other schools wouldn't make you take) to prepare you for the Bar, and for some people that's apparently a signal that they don't need to study for the Bar. If that's the message these people are getting, they are dead wrong. (I graduated in the top ten in my class with a 3.66 GPA, collected seven book awards along the way, and received a ton of other honors . . . and I still struggled through my Bar prep course.) I don't think that this is really a reflection so much of the educational quality of the school, however, as it is a reflection of some of the attitudes of a certain group of students who probably never should have been admitted to law school. But, Cooley gave them a chance, and if they want to blow it, that's their problem. If you graduate from Cooley and you take a Bar prep course (like Bar Bri, PMBR, Micromash, or another reputable course) you will most likely do well; something like 90% of Cooley students who take a Bar prep course pass the Bar on the first attempt. (I don't have the exact number, but the school is more than happy to tell you if you want to call and ask them.)
6. Isn't Cooley expensive?
Yeah. It is. Very much so. But, then again, this is law school, and law school is never cheap. Tuition at Cooley is $825 per credit hour (as of this writing). This is about right for a private law school. Harvard's tuition is $35,100 for two terms, so roughly $1,170 per credit hour. Yale Law is $38,800 for nine months (about $1,300 a credit hour). For something closer to Cooley in terms of location and "prestige", there's MSU-Law (formerly "Detroit College of Law"), where tuition is $893 per credit hour. For public law schools, you can look at Wayne State University's law school (in Detroit); tuition there is $552 per credit hour for Michigan residents and $1,054 per credit hour for out-of-staters.
Fortunately, Cooley is very generous with scholarships; I got a 75% scholarship because of my LSAT score. (I missed the full-ride by one point, and when I took it again to see if I could get that one extra point I actually went down one. Frustratingly, the school dropped the threshold for a full-ride about three points a term or two after I started, so if I would have waited six to nine months, I could have gone for free.) Right now, you can get a 100% scholarship with an LSAT score of 163, a 74% scholarship with an LSAT score of 158, and a 50% schoarship with an LSAT score of 153. If your LSAT score was lower but you had a high GPA, your "admissions index" score can also get you the same scholarships if it's high enough.
7. Can I work full-time while I go to law school full time?
The general rule is no; the American Bar Association has this silly rule that you can't work more than 20 hours a week if you are a full-time law student (which usually means carrying 12 or 15 hours per term). Cooley has a special dispensation that allows the school to have a full-time student/full-time worker program. The only catch is that you can only take 12 credit hours (instead of 15). Since Cooley does three terms per year, though, you can still graduate at the same time (or earlier) than students at most other law schools who take 15 hours per term.
8. Don't half of Cooley's students flunk out?
Sadly, no. And I mean it when I say "sadly." My understanding is that Cooley used to have one of the highest attrition rates in the country—somewhere around 50%—but that's no longer the case. The ABA cracked down on Cooley for having such a high attrition rate, so the school has bent over backwards to keep people in law school who probably shouldn't be.
For instance, there's the "void grade" program, which allows students who get a "D" in a class to actually be better off than students who get a "B" or a "C". If you get a "D" in a class, you are allowed to re-take it (and spend a certain minimum number of hours at the Academic Resource Center learning how to study), and if you get a higher grade the "D" is erased. The grading standards have eased up some, too, although they are still quite tough.
In my opinion, this attempt to lower the attrition rate is misguided and harmful. Cooley used to have a reputation as a school that was easy to get into, but hard to graduate from. Law firms knew that anyone who graduated from Cooley had worked hard and had a firm grasp of the law. Cooley had one of the highest first-time Bar passage rates in the state. Of course, those were the days when the attrition rate was much higher. (Coincidence? I think not.) Now, because of the pressure from the ABA, people who would have flunked out previously are being allowed to graduate. As a result, the school's Bar passage rate has fallen and with it, the school's reputation. It's a real shame, because the legal education at Cooley really is first-rate . . . if you apply yourself.
Look, the whole point of a school with an open admissions policy is to create more a of a level playing field: the person who went to Harvard for undergrad has the exact same chances as someone who went to Pigsuck U. Admissions and grades are all about ability, not pedigree. In addition to the traditional law students, you also get students who have lots of ability but who might not be admitted to a more traditional school because it's assumed they "can't make it." Given that approach, you would expect a high attrition rate: some of those who conventional wisdom says can't hack law school really can't. If they can't hack it, they should not have their hands held and they should be kicked out. I am very suspicious of a school that has an open admissions policy and a low attrition rate.
9. Since there's an open admissions policy, doesn't the level of education suffer? Instead of being in class with people who scored 165 and up on their LSATs, you're in class with people who scored in the 145-150 range. Doesn't that lower the level of discussion?
No. First, look above to see my opinion of LSAT scores as a predictor of anything other than your ability to take the LSAT. Second, most of the classes at Cooley are larger than they are at the more "elite" schools. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you approach it. The conventional wisdom is that smaller classes mean more personal attention, but in law school that's not necessarily true. On the other hand, I knew a guy who went to Yale who always said, "Every time I'm in class, I'm sharing the room with 10 people who got over 165 on their LSATs." Well, you know what? The same thing was true at Cooley. Because the class might have 30 people instead of 10 or 12, there was more diversity. Sure, there were people who scored in the 140s and 150s on their LSATs. But there were also ten or more people who scored 165, 170, or higher. And, quite frankly, I was always competing with the four or five best students in the class, not the bottom four or five. So my classroom experience wasn't that much different than it would have been at a school with smaller classes but tougher admissions standards.
10. Isn't Cooley just out to get your money and flunk you out?
That's a ridiculous statement that you hear a lot from people who couldn't cut it in law school. They heard from someone that Cooley was an easy school, or assumed it was from the open admissions policy, or went to a college where grade inflation was the rule (*cough* Harvard *cough*) and they were suddenly faced with reality. If the school was so interested in money, it wouldn't pump so much into scholarships.
11. What about the story I've heard about the Cooley valedictorian who couldn't find a job?
I honestly don't know if that story's true or not. I will say this: the same story went around at my undergrad and I have a friend at MSU who says he heard the same story about his school, so take that for what it's worth.
The fact of the matter is this: most of the people who get upset because they can't find a job after they graduate—or that the job they find doesn't pay a high enough salary—are people who assumed that being a law grad somehow entitles a person to an instant six-figure salary upon graduation. These people have an amazingly unrealistic worldview. It's not the school's job to find you employment; it's yours. There are a lot of things that go into whether or not you'll find a job quickly after you graduate, and very few of them have to do with your GPA (assuming it's respectable). Your previous background, your connections to a geographic area, your contacts with attorneys, the kind of law you want to practice, and a host of other things will all play into it. For instance, someone like me (a radio/publishing background, no contacts in the geographic area where I live, and no interest in corporate or tax law) will have a much harder time finding work than someone who has a medical background, is good friends with a dozen attorneys in town, and who wants to work doing insurance defense or as in-house counsel. This is true even if my GPA is much higher than my colleague's. That's just the way it works. I'll probably take a small pay cut at my first law gig. I'm okay with that. But people who aren't—who think that any law school that doesn't guarantee all of its graduates an instant fortune is a "crap school"—are going to be disappointed no matter what law school they attend.
And there, my friends, is my two cents' worth of advice about Cooley. My advice to potential law students is always going to be this: look at where you are now, why you want to go to law school, where it is that you want to work, the area of law you want to practice, and your existing lifestyle and financial commitments. Base your decision on these factors, because they teach the same law at Cooley and MSU and University of Michigan and Stanford and Harvard and Yale and Pitt. How well you do will depend on your abilities and how much you apply yourself. [SCHOOL X] is a great school for some, but it's a lousy school or others. Find the one that's right for you, and don't let anyone else make that determination for you.
|
|