Manny Mondays: Holiday Travel Pics Open Thread Edition

Morning all! Due a busy weekend and quite frankly not being in the mood to post anything at all serious, I'm opening things up today. Anything that's on your mind is fair game, so fire away.

However, here's one long Sunday NY Times article about the ongoing, yet under publicized (until now) scam, dubious "accounting" (and time bomb) that is law school in the U.S. (and student loan debts) that definitely caught my eye over the weekend and is well worth reading:

Is Law School a Losing Game?

Much of the content of the article is simply astounding to me (as well as the willful self-delusion among applicants & students), and tells me this problem doesn't reside only with law schools. I gotta believe it's more widespread. Here are a couple of striking excerpts:

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves. “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”

IT is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

It also seems that, according to the article, the lure of the easy money machine isn't only reserved for those well-heeled denizens of Wall Street:

Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think of law schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it.

They are also cash cows.

Tuition at even mediocre law schools can cost up to $43,000 a year. Those huge lecture-hall classes — remember “The Paper Chase”? — keep teaching costs down. There are no labs or expensive equipment to maintain. So much money flows into law schools that law professors are among the highest paid in academia, and law schools that are part of universities often subsidize the money-losing fields of higher education.

“If you’re a law school and you add 25 kids to your class, that’s a million dollars, and you don’t even have to hire another teacher,” says Allen Tanenbaum, a lawyer in Atlanta who led the American Bar Association’s commission on the impact of the economic crisis on the profession and legal needs. “That additional income goes straight to the bottom line.”

I'm sure that saddling many in our younger generations with hundreds of thousands undischargable (and unpayable) debt (and a subsequent life of serfdom) will end well though. What could possibly go wrong?

I'll leave you with a few photos from my recent trip to CO over the holidays: