Oh, goody, more lawyers:
Convinced that Indiana needs more lawyers, Indiana Tech plans to open the state's first new law school in more than a century.
"We haven't had a new law school open in Indiana since 1894," Arthur Snyder, president of the private Fort Wayne-based college, said Monday. "It's about time we did."
[. . .]
The law school would open in the fall semester of 2013. A nationwide search for a founding law school dean is under way, Snyder said.
The state now has four law schools, which enroll avout 3,000 students a year. Snyder says that "is not enough to meet the demand for legal services in Indiana" and that our state ranks 44th in the nation in the number of working lawyers, with a ratio of one lawyer per 447 residents (the nationwide avearage is one per 263).
But the more lawyers we have, the more we need. Each lawyer has to find work to do, and what better way than to find nuances, exceptions and loopholes not found in the law before by anyone else? And a lot of the lawyers end up in legislative bodies so they can create still more laws to house still more nuances, exceptions and loopholes. Enough, already!
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Shakespeare was right.
Whatever else one may think of the new law school, did you see the projected tuition? It was over $26,000 (a year, I assume).
When my wife was considering law schools, we settled on West Virginia University, which offers a highly regarded law degree for roughly one-tenth of that!
It's not like going to this place is going to let you put "Harvard" on your resume. I wonder if it's just going to be a diploma mill for students who have lots of money but a lousy LSAT score.
Instead of building law schools, they should be building medical schools. Or nursing schools. Or engineering schools.
There tend to be lots of small fast-growing businesses popping up around engineering schools, so they're especially nice. But increasing the supply of doctors and nurses, and thus lowering their wages, would be a good idea.
"Where one lawyer starves, two lawyers prosper."
Indiana Tech seems destined to spend itself out of existence. first they spent a boatload of cash rehabilitating a 100 year old building when a new larger building (with enough room for the law school) could have been built for the price. Now they are talking about putting up an ugly wind-power rotor in the middle of Fort Wayne which will never pay for itself.
So we will have the law school -- but who would want a law degree from a technical institute? Worse, they will next rehab a building next to the courthouse for classrooms and students will bike from apartments in the West Central neighborhood to attend classes downtown (huh?). That is what the Indiana Tech president said.
Meanwhile, there are 17 buildings sitting empty at the Taylor University campus and Ambassador Family Enterprises would be happy to deal.
Tim Zank: "Indiana Tech seems destined to spend itself out of existence."
Or not.
In 1991, I was interested in taking a course in RPG/400. RPG/400 was the programming language for the IBM AS/400 minicomputer.
The AS/400 was the successor to the S/38 minicomputer. The S/38 was expensive and hard to use, and many companies had tried to stay with the cheaper and easier S/36, but their computers simply weren't big enough and fast enough to handle their increasing computing needs. The AS/400 was faster, fairly affordable, and was a lot easier to use than the S/36, so companies adopted the AS/400 left and right.
In 1991, the JG/NS was running "help wanted" ads that asked for 5 years experience with RPG/400, a language that had only existed for 3 years. Given that IBM had already announced "end of life" for S/36 systems software would occur in 1993, it made sense to learn the new software, not the obsolete stuff.
At the time, four-year colleges taught mainframe programming, and a little PC programming. The only colleges that were teaching minicomputer courses were technical colleges, but when I called IVTC to inquire, they said they not only didn't have an AS/400 so that they could teach RPG/400, their capital budgets for the next five years showed to plans to replace their existing S/36 computers.
Overspending obviously wastes a little money - but underspending wastes ALL of it. I decided that IVTC was grossly mismanaged two decades ago - but to be fair, I've since learned that they're no worse than other two-year colleges; they all stink.
Glasses Harl, get some new glasses. I'm not Gadfly.
Roger, wilco.