The New York Times: Dealbook had a brilliant article yesterday, written by Noam Scheiber, called “An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It.” Don’t let the 2009-era headline fool you, this thing is actually a case study of one, totally screwed, lower tier law school. It’s jammed packed with personal anecdotes that put a human face on the tragedy of bad law schools.

I encourage you to read the whole thing. The school is Valparaiso and… Jesus, the confluence of bad decisions is just amazing. Look at the first student profiled, a 39-year-old former cop who is trying to start a criminal defense practice:

By most measures, John Acosta is a law school success story. He graduated from Valparaiso University Law School — a well-established regional school here in northwestern Indiana — in the top third of his class this past December, a semester ahead of schedule. He passed the bar exam on his first try in February… Yet in financial terms, there is almost no way for Mr. Acosta to climb out of the crater he dug for himself in law school, when he borrowed over $200,000. The government will eventually forgive the loan — in 25 years — if he’s unable to repay it, as is likely on his small-town lawyer’s salary. But the Internal Revenue Service will treat the forgiven amount as income, leaving him what could easily be a $70,000 tax bill on the eve of retirement, and possibly much higher.

Just marvel at the things that are wrong in those two paragraphs:

* You don’t borrow $200,000 to go to Valparaiso Law. If somebody gave you $200,000 and you spent it on Valpo Law, you should be kicked in the nuts, daily.

* You don’t borrow $200,000 to go to ANY law school, if your goal is to hang out a shingle as a criminal defense attorney.

* You are not a “success story” if you can only crack the top third at freaking Valpo. Going to Valpo and finishing out of the top five percent means you failed.

John Acosta had a good job and not $200,000 of debt, and he traded it for a Valparaiso Law Degree and the magic beans of hope.

And Acosta isn’t in the worst shape. The article closes by profiling a woman who graduates in 2015 and now works at Meijer (Meijer is like K-Mart and Gristedes had a baby that grew up homeless in Flint) having failed the bar twice. Staring into the abyss, this light of humanity closes with:

“I wouldn’t trade my law degree for anything,” she added. “I would trade the debt.”

That’s like saying “I wouldn’t trade all of my unprotected sex for anything… the AIDS though, I’d get rid of that.”

Kyle McEntee and Paul Campos pop up throughout their article. They’re there to try to keep the focus on the larger racket that the school is running, instead of the individual marks the school has duped.

When the article does turn to the school, it lightly exposes how the administration has taken advantage of these people. One of the most damning sections addresses how the admissions committee decided to deal with the drop in student applications at the turn of the decade.

The [admissions] committee agonized over whether it should accept fewer students or keep its class size roughly constant and admit weaker candidates. In the end, it opted for the latter, a decision [Bruce Berner, retired Valparaiso associate dean] admits wasn’t entirely on the merits, since fewer students would have meant less revenue. “There was a lot of pressure, of course, from the central administration to keep the numbers up,” he said. (Mark A. Heckler, the university president, said that admissions decisions were entirely up to the law school but that the financial model was for the school to fund itself.) By 2014, the limitations of the strategy had become apparent: The figures the school reported for the rate at which its graduates passed the Indiana bar exam, which had already been dipping, crashed to about 61 percent, from about 77 percent the year before. An enormous number of students wouldn’t be able to work as lawyers in the state even if jobs were theoretically available.

This is a significant passage. It’s almost impossible to get law school people to admit to what they actually did. Here, we have a guy who was in the room saying the OBVIOUS truth, law schools made a conscious decision to admit less qualified applicants in order to keep the money coming in.

We know this to be true because the choice for a law school like Valparaiso is so obvious that the Times even came out and said it:

[S]chools like Valparaiso essentially face the following choice: Admit a large number of marginal students, or shut down.

Y-e-p.

Again, you should read the whole thing. There are so many good nuggets. There’s a group of like five gunners that the faculty call “The Legion of Boom,” which really could have been an entire post on its own. There’s the professor who encourages his students to work at “We Buy Liens.” There’s the student who wonders what’s the point of passing the bar when you’re going to end up “working at Starbucks for less than $40,000 per year.”

If this article wasn’t published in the New York Times, it would have been called “When The Toilet Is Clogged: All Of The Lives That Can Be Ruined By Law School.”

An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It [New York Times]

Elie Mystal is the managing editor of Above the Law Redline, the Legal Editor of More Perfect, and has been haunted ever since he killed a goldfish as part of an ill-fated science experiment. Reach him @ElieNYC.