You get what you pay for

As a follow-up to my last post I think my problem is with expectations and the performance I expect for what I'm paying. I know as an undergrad it never occurred to me to complain about how I was being taught because I was a paying customer rather than a student but as I've moved out into the professional world I'm learning that I should be getting something in return for the amount of money I'm spending. Post graduate educational institutions don't operate from the perspective that they have to provide useful goods and services but that they're the only provider and we're stuck with what we get.

I ran into this dilemma in business school and the administration and I went round and round about it. For the ~$60k I paid for my MBA I expected to be taught whatever material we were covering. Sure I know I had to take a specific set of courses and some electives to meet the MBA criteria, but I expected teachers to be able to teach the material we were covering.

In the instances where this wasn't the case I talked to the administration and was not satisfied with the responses I got. They thought I should be honored to be able to go to school there and that the education they could provide was the best available. I tried to explain to them that they were merely an education vendor to me and that sense they were the best school in the area the expectations for them were higher than if I'd gone to a lower ranked school.

As a law school student I understand that there's a certain curriculum we need to follow to teach us the stuff we're supposed to learn. I also know that the teaching methods are designed to help us learn how to understand and process the information a certain way, thus I don't have a problem with the Socratic method. But there are other areas of our legal education, like LWRA, where a little teaching would go a long way to making the material easier to process. This isn't like boot camp where I'm paying to get beat up. I'm paying to learn and when I don't learn because of how the material is being presented it's frustrating.

I don't know how to resolve this mental dilemma short of accepting the philosophy that I shouldn't expect anything for the $22k I'm spending each year for law school. I guess I also have a problem with a curriculum that doesn't ever seem to change. LWRA has been taught this way for ever and will always be taught this way. No one is looking at the teaching method and trying to improve it from year to year. Sure, assignments are changed and re-arranged to make it easier or harder as necessary, but the teaching method doesn't seem to change from year to year with a goal towards improving the overall learning experience.

Maybe this is just the time of 1L where everyone gets frustrated. I know I am. I'm not comfortable with the material I'm being expected to reproduce and there's not a venue for me to discuss my concerns in detail because of how our assignments are laid out. I know I face similar dilemmas in my working environment where I'm not sure what output is expected from me, but they're paying me to come up with a solution, where as here I'm the one paying to learn. Somehow I feel I should be getting more out of this than I am but yet I know the school isn't going to provide me any more than they already are. This isn't right but I know I can't change it. No wonder I'm frustrated.