Michael Simkovic defends bait and switch law school “scholarships”

Michael “Step Right Up and Buy Your Million Dollar Law Degree” Simkovic is apparently planning to dedicate his career to defending every single law school practice, including something I would have thought even the most hardcore law school denialists would blanch at backing: bait and switch conditional “scholarships.”

Here’s how this sweet little racket works: A law school offers a prospective student a big discount on sticker tuition (inaccurately characterized as a “scholarship,” when in fact it’s a discount cross-subsidized by students who are paying full boat, rather a real scholarship, i.e., income from an endowment which subsidizes what would otherwise be the student’s tuition obligation). There’s a catch though: the discount is conditioned on maintaining a certain grade point average.

Now on its face this doesn’t seem like a big deal, given that lots of undergraduate scholarships have similar conditions. But in fact the two situations aren’t at all comparable. Almost all law schools have strict forced grading curves, which means that at many schools it’s going to be mathematically impossible for a significant number of students with these conditional “scholarships” to retain them.

Until a couple of years ago law schools weren’t even required to disclose how many students lost their “scholarships.” Perhaps having learned from the debacle that ensued when he argued recently that law schools shouldn’t be required to distinguish whether their “employed” graduates are employed at Cravath or Starbucks, Simkovic doesn’t actively oppose the new disclosure requirements, although he doubts they’ll be of any real use.

Given the effects of optimism and confirmation bias, he may be right about that.

Another factor that may be in play here is that various law schools are rumored to “section stack.” Section stacking involves putting a disproportionate number — perhaps even all — of the students who have conditional scholarships in the same 1L section, thus ensuring that the forced curve causes the largest possible number to lose their scholarships.

Note that no decent law school gives out conditional scholarships, other than the pro forma condition of not flunking out. On the other hand:

Unsurprisingly, almost 37% of Seton Hall 1Ls with conditional scholarships lost them last year, which places them in the top quartile of law schools in terms of having the most conditional scholarships lost. It seems apropos, as it is so par for the course. Untenured law prof at law school finds massive law school premium after said law school publicly stated it may have to lay off its untenured faculty (and where 8 of 285 grads scored BigLaw last year); writes more papers of a similar vintage after receiving six figure grants from financially interested parties (LSAC, AccessGroup). Moreover, the proffered rational of “attracting and retaining the best students, rewarding motivation and ability seems like a reasonable policy” has failed. Despite lopping more than 50% of its entering class size since 2010 in a vain attempt to keep their stats up, Seton Hall’s LSAT splits have still dropped from a 155/159/161 to a 152/156/159.

Based on extrapolation, Simkovic’s next contribution to the debate over whether it’s a good thing for law schools to hide data, bait and switch their students, etc., will be to defend schools for publishing fake LSAT and GPA figures for their matrics. After all, doing so makes students more likely to cash in on their million dollar law degree premium. Those more learned in matters of theology can determine whether such an approach could fit into the doctrine of mental reservation.