TRU IS RESCINDING OFFERS

[Renerik]

1 hour ago, CleanHands said:

A sampling of public opinion (since this was a topic of speculation earlier):

P.S. - I'm not saying the affected students weren't wronged or don't have a right to feel they were, because they were and they do. It's just that not everyone appreciates that.

I used to work customer service for Postmedia so I spent a lot of time reading some of their papers. The comments on their online articles were the most braindead, pseudo-intellectual, terrible takes. The amount of antisemitism, q-anon, racist and ignorant vitriol that had to be taken down (I'm all about free speech but some of the most "liked" comments called asians c***** and blacks, well, you know)...

I dont think public sentiment will be entirely supportive towards the plight of these applicants, but I'm certain this sample is not representative of the greater public.

Edited June 22, 2021 by Renerik

[Abc321]

1 hour ago, CleanHands said:

A sampling of public opinion (since this was a topic of speculation earlier):

P.S. - I'm not saying the affected students weren't wronged or don't have a right to feel they were, because they were and they do. It's just that not everyone appreciates that.

I figured as much 🤷🏻‍♀️ 

[LMP]

1 hour ago, CleanHands said:

A sampling of public opinion (since this was a topic of speculation earlier):

P.S. - I'm not saying the affected students weren't wronged or don't have a right to feel they were, because they were and they do. It's just that not everyone appreciates that.

Translation: "My recent legal experience didn't play out like it did in my imagination. Lawyers are a scam". 

[TobyFlenderson]

What's disappointing (but not surprising) to me about those comments is that they seem to think that people applying to law school (who are, obviously, not yet lawyers) are entirely defined by their application. That they are not people, they are future lawyers. There's no compassion for the fact that real people, many of them probably in their early-mid 20s (an age where meaningful commitments do exist), have made substantial sacrifices only to be completely let down. Or that older people, with serious employment commitments and families, have uprooted their lives for nothing. 

It's not about law school. It's about people making major changes to their lives and being left holding the bag. I'm sure those same people would be unhappy if it happened to them in the course of whatever career they've pursued, regardless of whether "the world needs more of them".

I hope that those affected by this do not take those comments to heart.

[BlockedQuebecois]

I did the math on the discord, but thought I would share it here.

According to TRU's dean, the maximum class size is 124 people.

Last year, they sent out 286 offers and filled 122 seats, netting a yield rate of 42.7%. This year, they sent out 283 offers. Assuming they filled the class (124 seats) before revoking 42 accepted offers, they had 166 acceptances. That's a yield rate of 58.7%. 

That represents a 37.47% increase in yield rate year over year. 

Someone on the discord mentioned that TRU can extend its class size up to 5% based on Federation of Law Societies regulations. If you assume they did that, that pushes the class size to 130 students, acceptances to 172, and yield rate to 60.8%. That represents a 42.38% increase in yield rate year over year. 

I have to imagine either of those values—37.5% or 42.4%—are unprecedented year over year changes in yield rate. 

Edited June 22, 2021 by BlockedQuebecois

[kiamia]

I've been puzzling over the mechanism of how estimates can be off by that much. The most reasonable way I can think of that this happened is that if there are more applications across the board, there are also more applications by top candidates who didn't apply to TRU at all, and TRU didn't account for those. 

Like if I'm TRU and I throw out 300 applications a year, and usually UBC snags 50 of those applicants, but this year UBC only took 30 of them because they had another 20 really good applicants who didn't bother applying to TRU (and hence TRU has no knowledge of), then I've gotten 20 extra students all of a sudden. Obviously more schools are involved and the numbers are likely not that stark, but you can see how it could add up. 

Oversubscription may be an issue for other schools, but it probably depends on your offers:class size ration and would be a bigger problem for "backup" schools. [Note: I'm not speaking of backup in terms of quality of legal education, but in terms of factors that might dissuade a student from choosing the school if they had other options eg. location, cost, etc.] 

Edited June 22, 2021 by kiamia

[CleanHands]

1 minute ago, kiamia said:

-Snip-

I would speculate that it's less a matter of fewer strong candidates bothering to apply to TRU, and more that due to the increased competition this cycle, fewer TRU admits received acceptances from other schools with higher admission standards and thus more opted to rely on their "backup" TRU offers.

[kiamia]

That's what ultimately happened, but as a consequence of what I pointed out above. I'm just trying to reason out why the school's estimate would be so wrong. TRU wouldn't expect that it would send out the same number of offers as previous years but far fewer of those students would be accepted into other schools. The only way that it makes sense is if TRU can't see those applicants and didn't know about them.

If the applicants that applied to eg. Victoria and UBC and were accepted had applied to TRU as well, TRU would've presumably extended them offers as part of the 300 and they would've demurred, bringing TRU's offer acceptance down. 

Anyways, I just find it an interesting question re: foreseeability. TRU has to be aware that there is a pool of applicants every year that simply aren't applying to TRU for various reasons. Should they have foreseen that this year that the pool would have increased, and adjusted the number of offers they extended to compensate for that? I don't know; I don't work in admissions.

Edited June 22, 2021 by kiamia

[123]

16 hours ago, Renerik said:

I used to work customer service for Postmedia so I spent a lot of time reading some of their papers.

You poor soul. What sins in a past life must one commit to be reincarnated as a customer service associate at postmedia? 

[ZineZ]

This is a great article on the rescindments and how they've affected applicants.

https://www.citynews1130.com/2021/06/21/thompson-rivers-university-kamloops-law-school/

[AllanC]

3 hours ago, kiamia said:

That's what ultimately happened, but as a consequence of what I pointed out above. I'm just trying to reason out why the school's estimate would be so wrong. TRU wouldn't expect that it would send out the same number of offers as previous years but far fewer of those students would be accepted into other schools. The only way that it makes sense is if TRU can't see those applicants and didn't know about them.

If the applicants that applied to eg. Victoria and UBC and were accepted had applied to TRU as well, TRU would've presumably extended them offers as part of the 300 and they would've demurred, bringing TRU's offer acceptance down. 

Anyways, I just find it an interesting question re: foreseeability. TRU has to be aware that there is a pool of applicants every year that simply aren't applying to TRU for various reasons. Should they have foreseen that this year that the pool would have increased, and adjusted the number of offers they extended to compensate for that? I don't know; I don't work in admissions.

It probably went something like this:

1. Assume yield data (historical acceptances / offers) is gaussian or student distributed with mean = mean(all prior years) and sd = sd(all prior years) 

2. Select an upperbound that produces a non-zero but "acceptably small" probability that more than X number of students accept. Presumably we know X - 120 students - and the upperbound maybe is set at 5% or less.

3. FIO if the low probability event occurs

Or timeseries of the same if year over year is highly autocorrelated. 

I mean, if they had inhouse statisticians they could fit a much more sophisticated hierarchical model (Bayesian style of course) where one could plug in measurement error models and other things that account for 1-off events not captured by the data. But lets be honest, that likely is not happening and the 1-offs are assumed to be captured by the tail (and reasonably have been in the past).

It may also be the case that they augmented the above and did offer less, but just not enough less. How much blame should be placed on an administration for non-historical type events whose direction is perhaps knowable but whose magnitude surely is not? 

Agreed that caution should have been exercised and perhaps it might have been better for a longer waitlist or a smaller class than over enrollment. But lets not pretend that the actual magnitude of the change in yield rates could have or even should have been ACCURATELY predicted by law admissions staff.

Edited June 22, 2021 by AllanC

[Diplock]

Just to acknowledge my earlier prediction, I'm glad the media picked up on this story and ideally maybe that'll put some pressure on the school to do...well, something more than they are already doing. Whatever that might be. But I still believe public outrage will be slight, and this plays more as an interesting "wow, schools are over-enrolled" story, rather than a "it's terrible how these poor people got screwed" story. That isn't to say I see things that way myself. Just that my area of practice has taught me to be very skeptical of anyone who expects public outrage to come to their rescue.

Also, I'm still unsure what the school even has the ability to do, regardless of the amount of pressure on them. But that's another story.

I'm glad this has gotten some attention and that this forum exists as a place to organize and discuss. Imagine if this happened and the old forum had just shut down with no consensus replacement? That would have been very bad timing indeed.

I hope this works out somehow for everyone. I'm not sure what that would even look like, but I hope it does.

[epeeist]

Re @BlockedQuebecois

Anyone paying attention was aware of something called Covid, and TRU should have expected the unexpected. A higher degree of variance or uncertainty. And, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't TRU the only Canadian law school ever (or at least in decades) to do this? If so, unprecedented or not, that suggests they deliberately go to the high end of acceptances and deliberately run the risk of something like this happening.

And, did they even try asking e.g. the LSBC for permission to admit more students? I mean, if the only impediment is regulatory or administrative inertia, it's not like a boat that sinks if you add an extra person to it.

[Byakkosan]

57 minutes ago, epeeist said:

Re @BlockedQuebecois

Anyone paying attention was aware of something called Covid, and TRU should have expected the unexpected. A higher degree of variance or uncertainty. And, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't TRU the only Canadian law school ever (or at least in decades) to do this? If so, unprecedented or not, that suggests they deliberately go to the high end of acceptances and deliberately run the risk of something like this happening.

And, did they even try asking e.g. the LSBC for permission to admit more students? I mean, if the only impediment is regulatory or administrative inertia, it's not like a boat that sinks if you add an extra person to it.

I think its been mentioned previously on this thread that schools are only allowed to increase their class size by 5%. 

[epeeist]

5 minutes ago, Byakkosan said:

I think its been mentioned previously on this thread that schools are only allowed to increase their class size by 5%. 

Yes, exactly, they're only allowed to increase by 5%. It's not an immutable law of the universe like the maximum speed of light. Did TRU try to seek permission to exceed this, or did they not bother asking?

And, even if this is in practical terms an insurmountable obstacle in this timeframe at least, the other points about it being totally foreseeable that this was an unusual year, and no other schools have overoffered, still holds. I mean, when I read the maximum places and the number of past admits for TRU, it already was clearly running very close to the limit.

[LMP]

Well seems like they're really doing it. Two people just reported being offered $11k to defer until next year. That's a pretty fair move by TRU.

[Pantalaimon]

17 hours ago, LMP said:

Well seems like they're really doing it. Two people just reported being offered $11k to defer until next year. That's a pretty fair move by TRU.

That seems very reasonable, especially if you haven't incurred any expenses.

[Thrive92]

18 hours ago, LMP said:

Well seems like they're really doing it. Two people just reported being offered $11k to defer until next year. That's a pretty fair move by TRU.

Good move TRU; cant help but think that those scathing news articles helped in bringing this outcome

[Byakkosan]

Where was this posted?? Now I'm jealous haha 

[Byakkosan]

On 6/18/2021 at 10:55 AM, Byakkosan said:

I am so sorry to all who had to hear about this terrible news and be negatively impacted by TRU's decision. 

But, I'm curious. What kind if compensations/reparations would people be seeking? I would wager that having a year of tuition of even a full ride for the entire 3 years would be worth the deferral? 

I posted this last week. Looks like it's happening 

[studentoflaw]

There’s a lawyer in BC speaking with students who had their offers revoked, PM me if you want his info. 

[Moomee]

Hey all who had their offer rescinded if you are interested to know what our legal position is there is a lawyer who has been reading the forum and has contacted some of the students who posted here. He is asking for all students affected to contact him as he indicated the issue is the loss of the year of income by entering the work force - substantially more than the current offer. Message me privately if you are interested and I will provide the contact info. There is no cost to talk to him and no obligation afterwards.

I am unable to post his contact info due to forum rules (although quite frankly I think an exception should be made as this entire thread notes how unprecedented this situation is). 

 

[123]

I don't know anything about this lawyer, don't practice civil law, and don't give legal advice here.

But as a matter of general principles:

1. If you are getting free legal advice from someone, who I assume might be hoping that their opinion will lead to a retainer, then always ask yourself if you might be getting what you're paying for;
2. Consider getting second opinions (including ones you might pay for) before you rely upon first opinions; and,
3. If something seems too good to be true, it is probably is. 

Anyway, good luck, no matter what you do. 

[Cpeaks]

I havnt read through the entire thread but am just wondering what the final result of all of this was? Are there a ton of deferrals now who will be starting Sept 2022?

[Thrive92]

2 minutes ago, Cpeaks said:

I havnt read through the entire thread but am just wondering what the final result of all of this was? Are there a ton of deferrals now who will be starting Sept 2022?

There are just over 100 seats available this cycle (admissions said somewhere around 105 ish but not sure as of yet).

It seems like there are 26 applicants who chose to stay on the waitlist (source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tru-law-school-26-students-acceptance-1.6073889 ).

Admissions said that it probably wont be as competitive as the last cycle, but it would still be more competitive than the cycles prior to the last due to the reduced seats available.

Good luck everyone