Degrees for Sale

California is a state of opportunity. Need an elephant? A Los Angeles firm can rent you one. Want to found your own church? No problem--a religious sect in Modesto advertises charters at $2 a month. From fast food to faster skateboards, whatever Californians want, there is usually an enterpriser around to sell it. The trendiest item now on the market: legal education.

Teaching law is a boom-time business in California, home of one-quarter of the more than 200 law schools in the nation. Admission can be a cinch. Though quality institutions like the University of California Law School at Berkeley still look for top college graduates with 700 scores on the law boards, moonlight legal factories such as Van Norman University and Magna Carta University welcome anybody with two years of college--and at least $4,000 to spend on the dream of courtroom glory. The state's education code asks mainly two things of a law school: it must be a corporation and show assets of $50,000. The California Supreme Court recently added further minimum requirements for books and curriculum. Having put up the ante, 32 schools (enrolling 4,350 students) are doing business without accreditation by the American Bar Association or the state bar. According to John Gorfinkle, consultant to the state committee of bar examiners, "Seventeen of these schools are run for profit."

Their graduates, however, are not cashing in. Sixty percent flunk the California bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation, and Gorfinkle reports that barely a fourth of those who enter the uncertified law schools ever graduate. Since 1968, for example, only seven students from Los Angeles' Van Norman have passed the bar exam. Moreover, since California requires students at unaccredited law schools to study for four years instead of the usual three and to take a "baby bar" exam after their first year, many never even get the chance to flunk the big test. One reason is third-rate teachers, most of whom are local attorneys trying to beef up their incomes at $20 a lecture. Says Gorfinkle: "I have often encountered professors who were teaching erroneous law."

Quick Buck. Why do students bother? "Romanticism, a certain Perry Mason complex," answers Gorfinkle, who also points to the social turmoil of the past decade, when many became convinced that law was a key to changing the system. The Educational Testing Service reports that nationwide, 133,000 students took the law boards in 1975, four times as many as six years ago. A big factor in the jump is the large number of women who want to become lawyers. At Berkeley last year, 102 out of 292 law students were women.

Though many of California's unaccredited law schools have eyes fixed on quick bucks, at least one offers a kind of legal education hard to find elsewhere. San Francisco's pioneering New College, which will graduate its first class next year, attracts applicants because of its apprenticeship program in public-interest law. Last year 60% of its first-year students passed the baby bar exam. Getting a job, however, is another matter. In 1975 there were 34,000 law school graduates round the country looking for work--and only 26,000 jobs.

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