Law School Brings Serious BDE (Big Diploma Energy)

// We give Cooley a lot of flack around here, mostly because it continues to put graduates in roughly $270K of debt while posting abysmal bar passage rates. As if that weren’t bad enough, from time to time, the school has the chutzpah to proclaim itself tied with Harvard.

And you thought Harvard being tied with Duke and Penn was bad.

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It’s not that the school doesn’t graduate good lawyers, it certainly does. And not all of them are convicted federal felons! But law schools are a numbers game and for every successful career Cooley kicks off, we know there are more — too many more — students buried in debt and unable to get a job.

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But what the school lacks in employment statistics, it more than makes up in… diploma size?

Somehow, over all the years of reporting on this school, we’ve missed out on the epic size of Cooley’s diplomas. But the school’s 17″x22″ sheepskins dwarf the law school competition. Back in 2020, Professor Emeritus Otto Stockmeyer wrote a blog post about the school’s diplomas:

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One of the many details Judge Brennan had to deal with was designing diplomas for the first graduating class of 67 students. Never one to inquire into other schools’ practices, instead he decided to pattern the law school’s diplomas after the outsized (17 x 22 inches) certificates that the Supreme Court issued to new members of the bar. A collateral benefit would be that Cooley grads who passed the Michigan bar would have certificates that matched their diplomas.

Though the more important collateral benefit might be that the diplomas were bigger than the rest of the state’s law schools. As Stockmeyer’s post noted: “University of Detroit-Mercy’s and University of Michigan’s measure 11 x 14 inches; Michigan State’s and Wayne State’s are 14 x 17 inches.”

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If only U.S. News considered diploma size. Maybe next methodology.

ABOUT THOSE LARGE LAW SCHOOL DIPLOMAS [Cooley Law School]

Earlier: Latest Cooley Law School Rankings Achieve New Heights of Intellectual Dishonesty
You Won’t Believe Which Law School Has The Lowest Bar Passage Rate (Psst… You Totally Will!)

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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Law Schools, Thomas M. Cooley Law School