New York Law School Dean Richard Matasar for the last decade has argued that low-ranked schools like his cannot produce the jobs needed to pay off the cost of legal education. He has led a major and impressive effort to boost bar exam pass rates for students in the bottom quarter of the class. But that might get you a job as house counsel or for a small firm. Yet under Matasar NYLS has pursued glory - include a new building. The Times here makes him a centerpeice of their story. - GWC (click on image to enlarge
) Law School Economics - Job Market Weakens, Tuition Rises - NYTimes.com: "Take a look at the strange case of New York Law School and its dean, Richard A. Matasar. For more than a decade, Mr. Matasar has been one of the legal academy’s most dogged and scolding critics, and he has repeatedly urged professors and fellow deans to rethink the basics of the law school business model and put the interests of students first.
“What I’ve said to people in giving talks like this in the past is, we should be ashamed of ourselves,” Mr. Matasar said at a 2009 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. He ended with a challenge: If a law school can’t help its students achieve their goals, “we should shut the damn place down.”
Given his scathing critiques, you might expect that during Mr. Matasar’s 11 years as dean, he has reshaped New York Law School to conform with his reformist agenda. But he hasn’t. Instead, the school seems to be benefitting from many of legal education’s assorted perversities."
To his credit, NYLS began a program of heavy intervention for students at risk of failing the bar, and the NYLS bar passage soared for the bottom 1/3 of their class, or do I have that wrong?
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