In Brief, It’s Little Law School That Could : Education: Once an object of derision, the college has enhanced its stature through the deeds of its graduates, some of the top lawyers and judges in Ventura County.

Call it the law school of hard knocks.

Its students are cops and construction workers, paralegals and probation officers, homemakers and schoolteachers. A disenchanted doctor here, a corporate executive there.

The 170-student Ventura College of Law is where the frustrated and ambitious go at midlife for a new start, or for a leg up in a career that needs a boost.

Typically, they are 37 years old, work full time and are raising families. To that they add the long hours of night law school and weekend study.

More than half eventually drop out as nerves fray, marriages falter or they lose their will to carry on under such a burden.

“This is not the Harvard Law School. This is the antithesis of ‘The Paper Chase,’ ” explained the law school’s chief administrator, Dean Donald A. Bright, a Harvard law graduate.

“More so than the young students who go to law school with their parents’ checkbooks,” Bright said, “these people do a day’s work, grab a bologna sandwich or wipe a baby’s bottom, and then come here. And they do that for four years. . . . It takes an enormous sacrifice. It’s brutal.”

But the survivors are so steeled through this trial by fire and fatigue that they have become some of the top lawyers and judges in Ventura County.

Not many years ago, the same tiny law school--tucked away on a back street in Ventura--was sometimes the object of derision in news articles. “They likened it to the Mickey Mouse of law schools,” said Municipal Judge Edward F. Brodie, a 1980 graduate.

The school also was taken over temporarily in 1986 by the state attorney general’s office, which said its former dean had mismanaged funds. But since a new administration was installed, the school has enhanced its stature through the deeds of its graduates.

Its alumni, now more than 500 strong, stand out among the county’s foremost prosecutors and defense attorneys. One is the president of the community college board. Another was mayor of Ventura and a third is a Santa Paula councilwoman. The new chairwoman of the Republican Party in Ventura County also is a graduate.

During the last two months, Gov. Pete Wilson appointed two graduates to judgeships for a total of four alumni on the Municipal and Superior courts of Ventura County.

“But for the Ventura College of Law, I absolutely would not have had this opportunity,” said new Municipal Judge Rebecca S. Riley, 49, a onetime Camarillo real estate broker who switched careers 11 years ago. “I would not have been an attorney or a judge. I had two small children at home and needed to continue to work to bring in an income.”

Riley’s story--and those of the three other local judges--Brodie, David W. Long and Colleen Toy White--is typical of the people who have successfully juggled families and careers with the demands of the school.

White, 51, now the law college’s president and something of a school icon, was a single mother with two children and $800 in her pocket when she graduated. Long was an insurance claims adjuster looking for a change. And Brodie was a California Highway Patrol sergeant seeking a new challenge.

“For me it was literally the opportunity of a lifetime,” said White, who became a wife and mother in her teens and earned her high school diploma as an adult. “It’s not even a dream come true because I never expected to be able to get a law degree and have a wonderful career.”

White and Long still have not graduated from a four-year university, holding community college degrees instead. And to this day, the law school does not require a four-year degree for admission, although nearly all of its students have one.

Indeed, Bright said the school exists not to pluck the best young students out of fine universities, but to give determined residents a chance at more fulfilling lives.

“Opportunity is the key phrase here,” he said.

Part of the school’s allure is cost. Many students working to support a family can still scrape together $5,000 a year for tuition, fees and books. Or at least float a loan.

By comparison, such costs total about $10,000 a year at the University of La Verne Law School campus in Woodland Hills--the closest state-accredited competitor to Ventura--and $10,000 at UCLA and $22,000 at USC.

Founded in 1969, the Ventura College of Law is one of 35 night law schools statewide that meet the needs of students who have neither the money nor the opportunity to be full-time students taught by full-time faculty in a school recognized by the American Bar Assn.

The Ventura facility falls into the top tier of 16 night schools that are sanctioned by the State Bar of California but not by the ABA. The second tier of 19 schools has neither state nor national accreditation.

These night schools produce about one of every 10 new lawyers in the state. Many, in fact, give relatively short shrift to the theory of law and focus primarily on teaching students to pass the bar examination so they can work as lawyers.

Ventura College of Law remains heavy on theory, as are most large ABA schools.

But its students pass the bar exam on their first try at a rate above the average for night schools--53% of graduates over the last five years compared with 51% for similar schools. That compares with an 82% average pass rate on the first try for graduates of ABA schools.

Although first-time pass rates are the usual standard for comparisons, officials report that 82% of Ventura’s graduates eventually pass the bar.

Yet, one criticism of students, past and present, is that the Ventura college should better prepare them for the crucial bar examination.

Cindy Pandolfi, 40, a third-year student and small-business owner, said she is impressed with the quality of her legal education but would like to see more bar preparation.

“Students say, ‘Why won’t you help us pass?’ ” she said. “But some professors won’t do a review. It’s a lawyer thing. They don’t want to dilute the ranks. They’re not going to put stuff on a silver platter. Part of law school is making you work for it.”

Bright, appointed dean five months ago after a career as a corporate attorney for Arco, said boosting the bar passage rate is one of his prime objectives.

Another big difference between Ventura College of Law and larger, more prestigious schools is its dropout rate. Of the Ventura school’s class of 1994, 86 students enrolled in 1990 but only 36 graduated, an attrition rate of 58%.

“So they take the [students’] money and then fail them?” asked Liz Cheadle, dean of students at the UCLA School of Law, where she said just 2% of students drop out.

Countered Bright: “If you take the same UCLA law student and get them a job eight hours a day and they have to take care of a family of four and a sick grandmother, then you’d see how many people were there after three years.”

Supporters say the strength of the Ventura school is its tie to the broader community. Most of its two dozen faculty members are prominent local attorneys. Hundreds of its graduates work within the county.

None of the law school’s instructors are full-time academicians, a potential failing for a school of higher learning. But students say their part-time teachers bring to class real-life expertise.

The school’s catalog warns that many states outside California allow only graduates of ABA schools to practice law.

And law school officials readily admit that students who want to work outside Ventura County--or Santa Barbara County, where a sister campus is located--should perhaps consider enrolling elsewhere.

“But that’s not the goal of the vast majority who come here,” Bright said.