Concord Law School officially RA

You may remember some time ago Concord Law School announcing their intention to merge with Kaplan University to obtain Kaplan's RA status, pending approval of the accreditor.

Articles appeared today in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. and on InsideHigherEd restating this news, so I checked the NCA web site to see what might have changed. Kaplan is now approved by the NCA to offer the JD and Executive JD.

Also of note, as stated in the InsideHigherEd article, the Penn State Dickinson law school has received ABA approval for policies that would technically allow students to take all but their first year of law study by DL.

 

Please provide the links.

 

After a quick tour of the Penn State Dickinson law school and Penn State World Campus websites I was not able to find the information regarding first year DL studies.

Is there a specific site you could point us to the read up one this? I wonder what this would mean for taking the Bar in states other than CA.

 

I am on a mobile device that does not allow me to copy and paste. But, if you go to InsideHigherEd.com and click the second article on the front page it will show you the information on Penn State's exception.

 

Legal Education at a Distance article at Insider Higher Ed

 

This is a move in the right direction. Even those in the legal community who are opposed to distance law education will have to realize that change is inevitable, albeit slow. People who tell themselves and others that the ABA will never change its rules are living in the past.

I wrote a thread about this very topic at the beginning of this year:

http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?t=26447

Pepe

 

RA is obviously a plus for Concord, but it does not move it any closer to ABA accreditation. ABA accreditation is completely independent of RA. ABA can and does accredit law schools that are not RA, as in the case of Hastings Law School in California, or Brooklyn Law School in New York.

The Penn State law school experiment is interesting, but it's not DL in the sense that most people here are familiar with. In this case, there are two B&M campuses, but they are linked with special classrooms so that students at Campus A can "virtually" attend and participate in classes at Campus B. So the professor that lectures to you and answers your questions might be 90 miles away, rather than 20 feet away.

But even so, you still have to show up at a B&M campus at a scheduled time and sit in a B&M classroom in order to attend your class -- just like you would at an ordinary B&M law school. So is this really DL ?

 

What I find very interesting is that the "Executive JD" apparently now enjoys RA status. This seems strange: two professional degrees with the same title, JD, but different requirements. One qualifies for bar admission in CA, and one does not.

I would have hoped that the accreditor would have required a different degree title for the "Executive JD."

 

There's a good chance that this will happen anyway, due to potential policy changes in the near future by the State Bar of California:

 

Glad to hear that Concord JD is RA now. It's good for the students. But somehow I cannot find this info in Concord's website yet. Right now, Concord JD's tuition is $8900 per year, already double its initial price tag back in 1998. After Concord obtained RA, I guess the tuition will go further higher. It's bad for students. Since Concord won't be a ABA school any time soon, the RA really won't help students much except give more credit to Concord's degree. Cheers anyway.

 

Perhaps RA will also help Concord grads gain admission to the LLM programs of foreign law schools.

 

If you search "LLM Bar" in this site, you can find a lot of discussion on this topic.

 

http://info.concordlawschool.edu/

This concord site is fully updated with the RA information. http://info.concordlawschool.edu/

 

In my opinion, all this has nothing to do with the ABA.

The Penn State situation is not distance learning at all. Its sole purpose is to allow expert and specialized faculty to teach in two places simultaneously via very elaborate (and expensive) synchronous video hookup. I’ve seen this type of system demonstrated at Microsoft’s Seattle HQ a year ago. It’s very impressive. The screen takes up an entire wall and when a student gets up to ask a question, the cameras (there are about a dozen of them set up in the room) zoom in on the student by way of software control. So I think the correct characterization of this is the use of technology to create an extension of a classroom. It may even be that class size would be limited by the number of students in both classrooms.

As for Concorde’s RA. My view on this that it is a move by a regional accrediting agency to make sure that a school that has proven its success by having a large number of students enrolled, comes under their umbrella (and is wrested away from DETC). There will be no benefit to any student past, present or future. The ABA will never allow DL law schools for the simple reason that they want to control the number of licensed attorneys. (Modern day guild?)

 

And why does accreditation by NCA "wrest it away from" DETC? Take a look at AMU, for example.

 

True, but also take a look at KU itself. Of course, they have the option of keeping both, but the point is that they don't need to.

 

Are there actually any states that will allow you to take the bar without attending an ABA approved law school?

 

Massachusetts has two residential non-ABA law schools that allow graduates to take the bar exam in MA;

http://www.msl.edu

http://www.snesl.edu

 

The fact that the legal profession is inundated with numerous graduates from myriad levels of ABA approved schools, resulting in a very competitive job market and in terms of acquiring clients in private practice, makes the acquisition of anything but an ABA degree a very expensive and risky professional move. I can understand if an individual who lives in a state such as California does not have the time to attend an ABA law program or who had a long term wish to complete a law degree, attends a distance learning JD program. However, the limitations associated with such a degree as well as the lack of general acceptability by the legal profession, including colleagues, should result in one carefully planning their legal education.