"NYU Responds To Attacks That The Third Year Of Law School Is Utterly Useless."

Is the response: We get 50% more tuition with 3 years? No. It's: We're going to make 3d year different and special.

The school is expected to announce vast changes in its third-year curriculum, including the option of studying abroad—Shanghai or Buenos Aires—or working for the Environmental Protection Agency or Federal Trade Commission....

Including study abroad and internships? That's vast? Let's get see what else is included. Here's one more:

[Give] students the chance to build a specialty. Called “professional pathways,” the program will offer eight focused areas of instruction, including criminal law and academia.

I love the idea of "academia" as a specialty. Somehow that seems to underline the complaint that the 3d year isn't there for the students but for the law academy itself and those odd lawyers/not lawyers who find their way into the comfortable cul de sac that is lawprofdom.

There has been much debate in the legal academy over the necessity of a third year.... While classes like “Nietzsche and the Law” and “Voting, Game Theory and the Law” might be intellectually broadening, law schools and their students are beginning to question whether, at $51,150 a year, a hodgepodge of electives provides sufficient value.

Step into my seminar and experience the life of the mind... the life of my mind.

NOTE: I fixed the math in the first sentence. I'd had "30% more." Shamefully typical innumeracy. Thanks to Panachronic in the comments for correcting me, a law professor.