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The University of Florida’s law school requires students to maintain a 3.2 G.P.A. to keep their scholarships; at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan, it’s a 2.95. The Chicago-Kent College of Law has a number of grant offerings, one of which sounds like the refueling options for a rental car: students can get a $9,000 annual scholarship guaranteed for all three years, no matter what their G.P.A., or $15,000 a year on the condition that they earn a 3.25 or above. If they get between a 3.0 and 3.25, they keep half the scholarship. Below a 3.0, it’s gone.
Some elite schools don’t give any merit scholarships, and some give them conditioned only on maintaining good academic standing — which translates to “don’t flunk out.” But merit stipulations — or stips, as they are known by students — are used by 80 percent of law schools for which information is publicly available, Professor Organ found.
And it’s not just institutions in the bottom half of the U.S. News rankings. If your school is ranked 35th, perhaps you’re gunning for No. 30 and you can see No. 40 creeping up in the rear-view mirror.
Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with incentives that ask students to earn strong grades in exchange for a break on tuition. But given that students are often shocked when their scholarships disappear, there are some basic questions about good faith and full disclosure here — an irony, given that those topics are covered in law school.
Catering to the U.S. News rankings also has “strange and unintended consequences,” says Thomas F. Guernsey, dean of the Albany Law School.
To him, the strangest is that the bulk of law schools skimp on aid to students who can least afford tuition. The number of need-based scholarships has actually shrunk in the last five years, according to A.B.A. figures, to 18,000 from 20,000 five years ago.
Another consequence of merit mania: a lot of heartache and anxiety. After fall semester exams, it dawns on thousands of 1L’s, as first-year law students are known, that their financial future is about to change dramatically for the worse.
As realities set in, many are irate. Others, like Ms. Leumer, who graduated from Golden Gate in 2009, feel snookered.
GOLDEN GATE LAW was founded in 1901, and sits today in a modern building of concrete and brick in the city’s Financial District, not far from Fisherman’s Wharf. Six years ago, the school attracted some unflattering attention when the A.B.A., which accredits law schools, put it on two-year probation. One reason was that the percentage of graduates who passed the bar on their first attempt, at just over 30 percent, was too low.
Ms. Ramey, who became dean in 2009, said the probation did nothing to affect the number or size of scholarship offers. But in 2006, Ms. Leumer quickly realized that she was surrounded by dozens of students just as motivated to get a 3.0 as she was. Concern turned into worry when, in her first semester, her grades included a B-minus in torts and a B-minus in contracts.
Translated numerically, she had a 2.786.
By then, Ms. Leumer had a serious case of scholarship remorse. Her goal had been to get a law diploma without taking out huge loans, but as the first year ended, she was looking at a $60,000 bill for the next two years of tuition.
A friend and classmate, Rachael Welden-Smith, wound up with a 2.9 in the first year, and, with that number, a deep sense of regret. The previous year, she’d been accepted and sent a deposit to a higher-ranked law school, but she chose Golden Gate when it offered to cover half her tuition with a merit grant.
What both women realized too late is that it’s often mathematically impossible for everyone to keep their grants. This year at Golden Gate, for instance, 57 percent of first-year students — more than 150 in a class of 268 — have merit scholarships. But in recent years, only the top third of students at Golden Gate wound up with a 3.0 or better, according to Ms. Ramey, the dean. If past patterns hold, dozens of first-year Golden Gate scholarships are about to vanish.
Ms. Ramey says it is statistically possible for 70 percent of first-year students to maintain a 3.0. She also maintains that Golden Gate 1L’s are well informed about the odds they face in keeping scholarships.
Actually, it takes a bit of forensic accounting to figure out how hard it is to keep a 3.0 at Golden Gate. Knowing the G.P.A. that a school expects of its merit winners says little unless you also know where it sets its curve — essentially, its median grade. A 3.0 at a school where the median is 2.6 is a lot harder to achieve than at a school where it’s 2.8.
It also helps to know how many others in a given class have the same offer — information that Golden Gate, like many schools, puts on its Web site but not in its congratulations letters.
Students who don’t seek out this data tend to regard merit scholarship offers as a school saying “We love you.” It’s more like an invitation to a foot race, and before you get to the starting line you’d better know how fast to run and how many others are running.
“I went online and found a standard deviation calculator,” said one Golden Gate 1L, explaining what he did to size up the difficulty of achieving a 3.0. Then he taught himself how to use that calculator. He entered data from the school’s student handbook, which includes a table with details like the maximum and minimum percentage of A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s that a professor can award in a given class.
Many schools, it seems, expect students to find the ladder. The Wayne State University Law School in Detroit tells merit scholarship winners in congratulations letters that they will need a 3.25 G.P.A. to keep their grants, worth nearly $25,000 a year. That means students need to wind up in the top third of their class. But that information isn’t in the letter.
Then again, disclosing exactly how hard it is to get a 3.25 could diminish Wayne State’s appeal to students the school wants most, which could have real repercussions. So many schools are packed so tightly together in the U.S. News rankings that even minuscule gains and losses have an impact.
How many of Baylor’s 1L’s are on merit scholarships? Ninety percent, according to David Swenson, a professor who helped design Baylor’s grant program. Given the G.P.A. requirements, he added, 8 out of 10 of those students can expect to keep the money next year.
“It was an accident,” said Professor Swenson, when asked why the school offered more scholarships this year than it is likely to renew. A greater number of 1L’s than expected enrolled at Baylor last fall, he explained, making it the largest class in the school’s history.
IN the world of law school deans, U.S. News plays roughly the same role as the final standings in Major League Baseball — rise and you’re golden, sink and you’re fretting. The dark comedy in all of this is that many deans consider the rankings to be absurd. They know that schools’ reputations don’t change much in a given year, and that the U.S. News algorithm can amplify tiny vibrations into quakes.
But as much as academics bemoan the algorithm, it has an audience that can’t be ignored, comprising students, lawyers, judges, university presidents and parents.
Faith in the meaning of the rankings all but forces a school to offer merit scholarships. Every fall, admissions offices and applicants begin an immense, multilayered haggle that resembles nothing so much as a bustling souk. Aspiring 1L’s shop for the best combination of money and prestige, and schools dangle acceptance letters and dollars.
As common as G.P.A. requirements are, they often barely register in applicants’ deliberations. The very human tendency to overestimate one’s talents is part of the problem. Like the children of Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, all incoming 1L’s seem to believe that they are above average.
Consider what happens at Chicago-Kent, the school that offers students less scholarship money ($9,000) if they want it guaranteed, and more ($15,000) if they can clear the 3.25 G.P.A. hurdle. Ninety percent opt for the larger and riskier sum, according to school officials. A “significant” number later lose their scholarships, says the school’s dean, Harold J. Krent.
Credit Chicago-Kent with forcing students to consider a trade-off, at least for a moment. Other schools phrase their scholarship offers in lump-sum terms that seem to encourage wishful thinking.
Officials at George Washington said they would not discuss their scholarship program.
Combine the optimism of students and the enticing language of law schools, then toss in the curve, and an inevitable result is legions of irate and disappointed 1L’s.
POPULAR student mythology has it that the A.B.A. requires law schools to grade them on a curve. Not so. But by loading up 1L’s with curved classes, Golden Gate and other schools all but ensure that the first year of law school is far more difficult than the two that follow. Which is another way of saying that for many merit grant winners, law school becomes easier, but only after it is too late.
Ms. Leumer’s experience is typical. She took few classes that were graded on a curve in Years 2 and 3, and her grades kept improving. Her cumulative G.P.A. for all three years was 3.14.
Her parents chipped in to help with tuition but used money the couple badly needed; her father, a Teamster who drove a tractor at a horse track, had been laid off.
Several current Golden Gate students who arrived on merit scholarships say they expect to owe more than $100,000 if — the more pessimistic say “when” — they lose the grants. Tuition is now more than $38,000 a year. Because money is also needed for rent, food and books, the bills climb from there.
These students will scramble for loans as law schools suffer through what looks increasingly like a public relations debacle.
A lot of livid graduates and some slightly mortified professors have lately been contending that law schools are misleading prospective students about the marketability of a doctor of jurisprudence.
But the A.B.A. seems unaware of the issues raised by merit grants. Its annual survey of law schools is granular enough to ask for the number of hours the library is open, but it doesn’t ask how many students lose their scholarships each year.
The schools already know that number. Why not publish it?
Then Mr. Morse thought about it.
In a forthcoming paper, Professor Organ proposes a simple system of greater disclosure that, among other figures, would detail the number and percentage of students on scholarships in all three years. Reducing lost-scholarship sticker shock, he suggests, could serve schools’ long-term interests. Alumni who feel that they were on the losing end of a raw deal are less likely to send donations. Ms. Leumer, for instance, hears from Golden Gate now and then, asking her for money.
“Many times, I’ve drafted my response in my head,” she says.
Suffice it to say, the response does not include a donation. But in one crucial way, Ms. Leumer contributed to Golden Gate the day she passed the California bar on her first try. Thanks in part to all those merit grants, the school’s bar passage rate has been rising in recent years and is now roughly double the level when it was on probation.
Ms. Leumer today is volunteering at an environmental nonprofit organization as she looks for a paying job in a gruesome recession in the legal market. She has some warm memories of her years at Golden Gate, but ultimately, she says, the place did not work for her. But by spending $60,000 on tuition, and by helping to bolster a key statistic, she worked for Golden Gate.
Esther Rose Braasch, 87, of Cheboygan and East Jordan, died Friday, Jan. 14, 2005, at Grandvue Medical Care Facility in East Jordan.
Funeral service will be held at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 22, at the Penzien Funeral Homes, Inc., in East Jordan. Chaplain Ronald G. Klooster will officiate with interment in Sunset Hill Cemetery, East Jordan.
Esther was born on June 5, 1917, in Verona, Wis., the daughter of Henry and Rose (Andrey) Geiger.
She married William C. Braasch in September of 1945. They lived in Mount Clemens where they built their own home. In 1954, they moved to East Jordan.
William preceded her in death in 1969. She then worked at Glen's Market and the East Jordan Canning Factory. In 1970, she moved to Cheboygan. She worked for Proctor & Gamble, Sea Shell City, Cheboygan County Building, Community Memorial Hospital and Traverse Bay Woolen Company of Mackinaw City.
Esther loved snow and water skiing, ice fishing, square dancing and sewing. She also enjoyed knitting, shoveling snow, making things out of wood like swans and totem poles, and flower gardening.
She is survived by two daughters, Winifred (Lanny) Shepard of Cheboygan and Patricia Rose (Les) Slack of Wyoming; four grandchildren, Angela (Dale) Rogers of Lowell, William (Christine) Shepard of Sterling Heights, Robert Shepard of Cheboygan and Travis LaRue of Wyoming; three great-grandsons, Gabriel Scott Shepard and Jacob Hauser, both of Sterling Heights, and Charlie Rogers of Lowell; and one brother, Richard (Beth) Geiger, of Verona, Wis.
She was preceded in death by her parents; one sister, Pearl Pritzborn; and two brothers, Marvin Geiger and Donald Geiger.
The family will receive friends 6-9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 21, at the Penzien Funeral Homes, Inc., in East Jordan.
Memorials may be given to Grandvue Medical Care Facility.
Consolidated Metco’s TruTurn fully machined brake drum won the 2004 Technical Achievement Award from the Truck Writers of North America.
TWNA director Tom Berg of Newport Publications presented the award to Al Anderson, field sales manager for Consolidated Metco, during ceremonies Feb. 17 at the winter meeting of the Technology and Maintenance Council.
The TruTurn drum’s fully machined finishing process, both inside and out, creates better dimensional consistency and a uniform wall thickness, which translates into improved performance characteristics for the end user, according to the manufacturer.
The TruTurn process gives the drum strength because there’s no need for weld-on weights or balance cuts that can weaken a standard drum, according to the manufacturer. The result is a drum with less potential for cracking, lower per-stop temperatures, a more uniform distribution of temperature and braking forces; all of which deliver a longer life-cycle. The drum’s uniform wall thickness also contributes to more consistent thermal expansion and, therefore, minimizes brake vibration for better braking performance.
Benghazi is a political lightning rod for Republicans.
Republican Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon is slamming the testimony of a key Benghazi witness before the committee of Republican Oversight Chair Darrell Issa.
It’s a rare rebuke of Issa from a member of his own party and exposes a rift, even if small, over conservatives’ prosecution of Benghazi, the alleged cover-up of which they believe is a winning issue for them in the 2014 elections.
McKeon (R-Calif.) called Brig. Gen. Robert Lovell an unreliable witness and criticized Lovell’s assertion that the State Department was not quick to deploy troops to respond to the 2012 terrorist attack in Libya. Lovell testified Thursday before Issa’s (R-Calif.) oversight panel.
“BG Lovell did not serve in a capacity that gave him reliable insight into operational options available to commanders during the attack, nor did he offer specific courses of action not taken,” McKeon said.
Benghazi is a political lightning rod for Republicans, who hope that bringing attention to it will energize their base before the 2014 midterms.
But Democrats and even some Republicans have tired of the ongoing Benghazi focus by Issa and conservative critics of President Barack Obama.
“We had been working closely with the Armed Services Committee to interview military officials, so it’s inexplicable that Chairman Issa cut Chairman McKeon out of the loop with this witness. With his press release today, it looks like Chairman McKeon has had enough of Chairman Issa’s political antics and his approach of lobbing unsubstantiated allegations without any facts to back them up,” said a Democratic Oversight staffer.
Sitting before the Oversight panel, Lovell predicted that if the State Department had swiftly reacted to news that Islamic gunmen has seized the consulate at Benghazi, it is possible the Navy Seals killed in the attack could have been saved.
The Oversight Committee defended Lovell’s testimony.
“General Lovell’s important testimony underscores why Americans, and specifically Benghazi victims’ families, have been unsatisfied with closed door and incomplete evaluations of the military response. The Oversight Committee intends to continue its investigation into interagency communication failures that contributed to the attack’s tragic outcome” said an Oversight Committee spokesman in a statement.
At the time of the Benghazi attack, Lovell was a deputy director of Defense for intelligence at Africa Command, but said on Thursday he was not in the chain of command that had responsibility for the quickly-unfolding events in Libya.
Republicans in Congress slammed the White House on Thursday over newly released emails showing Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes helped craft talking points to discuss the “goals” for when then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice would appear on the Sunday shows.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called on Congress to appoint a special committee to investigate what happened in Benghazi and the role the White House played in drafting Rice’s remarks. Speaker John Boehner called on Secretary of State John Kerry to testify before Congress about the previously undisclosed emails.
NEW YORK, June 9, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In response to the escalating concerns of in-house and law firm counsel to cybersecurity threats and the desire of C-suites for legal counsel to have a thorough understanding of data protection strategies, ALM is offering the Mid-Year Cybersecurity and Data Protection Legal Summit on June 16 at the Harvard Club of New York, NY. The Summit is designed to provide counsel with a primer on breach response, ethics requirements for information security, cross-border data flows, class actions, cyberinsurance and government enforcement.
Counsel from Heartland Payment Systems, Macy's, Oracle, American Express, leading cybersecurity practice groups and a full range of government agencies will be on hand to provide guidance and answer questions in an intimate setting. The day will close with a moderated discussion between counsel from the Department of Commerce, Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Office of the New York State Attorney General.
The day will start with a 75-minute interactive "You've Been Hacked!" tabletop exercise where counsel will be challenged to respond to the gradual unraveling of a fact pattern. The audience will gain insight into data breach triage decision-making in the context of the incomplete information that accompanies real life incidents.
This event has limited seating to ensure high quality closed-room discussion and networking. Attendees are eligible for up to nine CLE credits including an ethics credit.
Visit http://at.law.com/cybersecurityJune2015 for more information.
Now those worlds are set to mix even further. Ad agencies have long worked to produce various pieces of video content, even full-blown TV programs, but the growth of video platforms has heightened demand for those services, which have been seen as a side business for agencies.
“The agency model is evolving,” said Jon Hamm (no, not the actor from ad-agency drama “Mad Men”), chief creative and innovation officer of Momentum Worldwide, an agency owned by Interpublic Group that typically specializes in generating promotional events and experiences. These days, Momentum has five or six programs in advanced stages of development, Hamm said. One series, “Full Circle,” created and written by playwright Neil LaBute, debuted on DirecTV last month.
Earlier this month, Viacom’s Spike TV opened the third season of “Nissan GT Academy,” which shows fans of vidgame “Gran Turismo 6” for Sony PlayStation competing to drive a race car on the Silverstone racetrack in the U.K., while highlighting some of Nissan’s sports cars. TBWA Worldwide, an Omnicom Group agency better known for its decades of commercials for Apple, has a strong hand in the show.
To be sure, none of this stuff would likely air on a broadcast network, but the programs are not aimed at TV’s biggest, broadest audiences — and that’s where the agencies come in. Ad firms specialize in identifying and crafting messages for specific groups of people, including racing fans and budding chefs. “This has to be absolutely laser-focused,” said Hamm.
Mining niches is what attracts sponsors. Hard-core fans take to social media and, hopefully, word spreads. “The level of enthusiasm and engagement that you have with this type of an asset goes wildly beyond what a 30-second or 60-second spot could do,” said John Brancheau, VP of marketing at Nissan North America.
The agencies can make their programming pitch as more space opens on the media landscape. “The rise of digital media as a signifi cant platform of engagement for brands and consumers is creating much more opportunity, and also creating a much greater need for content,” said Peter Tortorici, chief executive of GroupM Entertainment, a unit of ad giant WPP that is creating some of the new entertainment forms. GroupM has in recent weeks aligned with SpinMedia to produce an online video series featuring celebrity-stylist Johnny Wujek, and partnered with Alloy Digital to invest in two new Web series.
Others have joined the fray. To sell two new sauces branded as Kraft Recipe Makers, agency Zero Dot, part of French ad titan Publicis Groupe, created a companion game for Bravo’s “Top Chef” program that lets viewers compete online. Putting one of the new sauces in the show itself would distract, said Steve Bonner, a senior veep with the agency — why would a chef rely on a new product? But a “Top Chef Home Edition” aimed at fans of the Bravo program would reach the foodies Kraft hoped would use the sauces.
The move into production also comes as the ad world finds itself increasingly buffeted by technology. Ad agencies have long made most of their money by creating and placing TV ads. As more clients earmark cash for promotion in other venues, that revenue is under threat.
Ad-buying firm ZenithOptimedia predicted in September that TV’s share of global advertising would peak in 2013 at 40.1%, before falling to 39.5% in 2015, while mobile’s share would rise to 6% of all ad spending by 2015, up from 1.7% in 2012. If ad agencies are making a move to produce more video, it’s because the ads that traditionally support such content are no longer such a sure thing.
After months of disruption caused by foreclosure proceedings on the house she rented, Yvette Blanton is getting a new lease on life — and new lease on a house in Northeast Minneapolis. Next, community groups will help her refurnish the home.
In May 2007, Yvette Blanton put down a $1,500 deposit on a house rental in North Minneapolis. Money was tight, but she stayed current with her rent and kept her four children fed and clothed by working as a receptionist at a weight-loss clinic in Edina.
Blanton, 39, initially wasn’t concerned when the money order she mailed her landlord for rent was returned undeliverable late last year. At that point, the landlord started sending a messenger to pick up her payments. But several months later, when she returned home from work, she found a letter informing her that the house she was renting was heading into foreclosure.
So, she had planned to spend the next few months there while searching for a new place to live, as tenants have the right to do. But before she could find other accommodations, the electricity and water were shut off, forcing her to move early.
The People Serving People shelter, for example, is serving 25 percent more guests today than a year ago — nearly 300 a night — for an average of 28 days at a time. Hennepin County’s contracted shelters saw a 43 percent increase in families signing up to use their shelters between January and April 2008, compared with a year earlier.
And Minnesota Housing conducted a six-week survey of seven shelters in six metro-area counties that found 23 percent of families reported that their homelessness had been affected by foreclosure in some way.
A study of several sources — including a state public assistance database, the Hennepin County shelter data files and the Hennepin County Sheriff’s foreclosure database — indicates that at least 6 percent of those families had lived in a home that is going through foreclosure.
The overall number is likely considerably higher, says Pat Mack, human services area manager with Hennepin County’s Human Services and Public Health Department.
That’s because the study only took into account Hennepin County records. For example, if a family in Ramsey County lived in a house that went into foreclosure but then contracted for temporary housing in Hennepin County, that wouldn’t show up in the records.
“This is a difficult number to get to,” she says.
Genevieve Gaboriault, staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Minneapolis, says nearly half of the foreclosures in Hennepin County have involved non-homesteaded properties, most of them rentals. She believes some landlords don’t inform their tenants of financial problems to ensure that rent checks continue coming, but she also thinks many of them don’t know the rules either.
Gaboriault says tenants with questions should call the Legal Aid Society or HOME Line, or other organizations that can help renters maximize their time and options.
That’s what Blanton did, seeking assistance from Section 8 Housing Choice and Minneapolis human services staff. As a result, she spent a week at an area hotel and then about a month at the People Serving People facility in South Minneapolis.
The shelter has everything her family needs — three meals a day, activities, private bathrooms and a place to sleep. But she’s required to be with her children at all times when they’re not at school, so she hasn’t been able to work. She’s had to give away most of the family’s possessions, and thieves have broken into her old rental house twice.