Another Law School Bites the Dust!

So happy to run into this bit of news.  Wilkes University, in Northeaster Pennsylvania (i.e. Not Philly, nor Pittsburgh) will not be opening a law school as planned, due to economic woes.  Can I hear a "Hip, Hip, Hurray"?  Best news ever.  They had hired the former Widener Dean to start this project and hoped that they could compete with Drexel, Duquesne and Widener--all shit law schools.  Anyone who lives or has lived in Pennsylvania knows that that state suffers from a saturation of attorneys.  Drexel and Widener pump out attorneys at a rate that cannot be absorbed by the local economy. Outside of Philly and Pittsburgh, there's not much else going on in that state and they cannot handle the 325 lawyers that Wilkes was planning on shoving into the legal world, annually.  I went to a law school that only had 160 annually and that was too much for that region. I'm not sure why law schools are dead set on these mega classes... oh yah, money.  But I'm happy that they won't be moving forward with this stupid, selfish and short sighted plan.

"I feel, personally, really a real sense of loss," Prescott said. "But I also recognize that the decision was well-reasoned by the president, by the trustees. And I think at this stage of the university's history, and under the current economic climate, I think this is exactly the right thing to do. Even though we had high hopes for the school, it's just not the right time to do it."

I don't feel a sense of loss at all.  I couldn't be happier for the students that will not fall victim to Wilkes' scam.  It's amazing that there is absolutely no analysis of the needs of the community. It's a math equation.  ROI=(cost of building school and hiring top notch faculty) - [(# of students) * tuition]* X years.  Is it that simple?  At some point, alumnae stopped making enough of a contribution to matter to schools.  If alumnae gifts were a large enough portion of schools' endowments, schools would care about their fate.  But a more likely culprit than the sharp decline in alumnae gifts is the greed of academia.  They just want more and more and they have lost sight of customer satisfaction.  I see their demise in the next few decades.  The World Wide Web had made so much of life cheaper and more convenient, but education has become costly and burdensome.  I know that the college experience is great, but I would love if brick and mortar education becomes a thing of the past.  It's the wave of the future.