Thank you to Professors Brophy and Filler for inviting me to the lounge -- I’m looking forward to sharing a bit of the pre-law advisor perspective with you all. (And I especially appreciate the image Prof. Brophy shared of our W.E.B. DuBois Library here at UMass Amherst, for its metaphoric aptness: an imposing edifice of learning with a troubled history, and whose myths are often more entertaining than the truth.)
In this first post, I’d like to just provide some additional context for what will follow. My perspective on pre-law advising, legal education, and the profession is shaped in part by my almost 10 years of practicing law prior to entering academia. The first two of those years were spent in constitutional litigation at what’s now called the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York City. The balance was at what’s now called Community Legal Aid (and formerly Western Massachusetts Legal Services) in Springfield, Mass., where I represented indigent survivors of domestic violence in family law proceedings. My practice experience informs my teaching and advising in myriad ways, but also my perspective on how we can best prepare new lawyers, and my persistent belief in a collective professional obligation to serve others. I teach and advise at a large non-elite flagship university, whose law school aspirants mirror almost exactly the numerical profiles of applicants nationwide (except, I can't help noting, our outcomes are better). I should also note that while by happy accident I teach in a Political Science Department, I am not a political scientist nor even much of a scholar, except to the extent necessary to support my primary roles as a teacher and advisor.
This last is typical of a good portion of the broader community of pre-law advisors to which I belong. I’m a member of the Northeast Association of Pre-Law Advisors (NAPLA), which is one of several such regional associations gathered under the PLANC (Pre-Law Advisors National Council) umbrella. Members come at this work from at least three overlapping perspectives: there are professors (mostly in Political Science and/or Law & Society departments, but also in business, paralegal certification programs, and others); university career development professionals; and lawyers in second careers, often finding ourselves in overlapping Venn circles with one of the other two groups. (The associations for now include only university- and college-based advisors, not the private pre-law advisors, about which I’ll say more in a future post.) We communicate a fair amount via our list-servs, LinkedIn groups, websites and conferences, and we’re generally a pretty collegial bunch.
If you find yourself chuckling at the idea of a professional association for pre-law advisors, you’re in good company – I still smile self-consciously sometimes as well. Like many of my generation, it never crossed my mind to even ask whether there was a pre-law advisor at my undergrad institution when I applied to law school in the early 90s, and, as a non-traditional aged applicant, I probably wouldn’t have taken advantage anyway. What was there to know? You took the LSAT, if you did well you applied, and then you attended the “best school you got into.” That’s what every lawyer told you to do (after they got past reflexively telling you not to go to law school at all). And you figured out what you were going to do with that law degree during the three years of law school, or maybe later. Debt? Feh, worry about that later. It’ll all work out.
Naturally, despite the fact that it only inconsistently “worked out” for me and the rest of my cohort – loan defaults, BigLaw miseries, and public interest burnouts were among the ways it didn’t quite work out -- I duly passed this advice along to the next generation of aspiring lawyers during my years in practice. Only when I acquired the breathing room and broader view that pre-law advising afforded me did I realize what terrible advice I’d been offering all those years.
Now that I'm on the outside looking in, and responsible for helping prospective law students make some important decisions about their lives, the idea of “pre-law advising” as, you know, a thing, feels a lot less amusing. Instead, it’s complicated and individualized and more akin to counseling than to tossing off bits of received wisdom. The students and alums I speak with are trying to puzzle through some important next steps with limited (or conflicting) information in a changing and uncertain world, where the stakes are much greater than a generation ago.
I follow the discussions and research on legal education and the profession, and then try to summarize and translate the most relevant developments for my advisees. When I started this work 10 years ago, staying up to date on the changes in Law World basically entailed a once-a-year check-in, and a few updates to the website, mostly focused on changes in LSAC application procedures.
Now, the changes, developments, new initiatives and thought-provoking essays and scholarship come almost weekly. As an engaged observer, I find it endlessly interesting and even entertaining, but as an advisor, I find it only occasionally relevant to my students’ decision-making processes.
The hallmark of these discussions of legal education, law school admissions and the so-called scam we all seem to be implicated in, is a focus on the institutions. Are law schools ripping off applicants and/or students, is legal education in need of reform, do the schools adequately prepare grads for the practice of law, for academia, for law-related careers, for professional life more generally? What obligations do law schools have toward their applicants? What obligations do LSAC, the ABA, AALS, state bar associations bear in all this? These are vital discussions, and as a member of the bar, I’m very glad they’re finally happening with such fervor.
But as an advisor, my work is less about institutions than about individuals. I find only a small percentage of the discussions helpful to the students and alums I serve. Whether law school should be two or three years, whether clinical experience should be required, whether first-year courses should be taught via the Langdellian or the problem-solving method – none of that will matter to my current advisees, who will in all likelihood have graduated and become attorneys by the time any widespread changes are made.
The scam-themed articles – whether attacking or in defense of law schools -- land closer to the mark, because they at least aspire to a certain kind of advice-giving, or perhaps, consumer protection. But the arguments envision a prospective applicant so generalized as to be mythical (always a naïve college senior aspiring to BigLaw riches), and advice so simplistic (Don’t go to law school unless you get into a T-14! Law school is worth a million bucks over your lifetime!) as to be useless to the individual applicant with particularized experiences, education, and aspirations. The million-dollar premium assertion, for example, whatever its merit in the aggregate, is mostly meaningless to the aspiring local prosecutor trying to decide when/whether to go to law school, or between Regional School A at a substantial discount and More Prominent School B at full fare – none of her hoped-for paths will likely lead to a million-dollar premium, so now what?
Advisors have similarly different perspectives on many of the other important issues: the usefulness of enhanced post-grad employment numbers, the reliance on the LSAT for admissions, all the various “Future of Law” prognostications, and so on. In one sense, the larger discussion is focused on the macro, and advisors are generally focused on the micro. But of course, our individual counseling relationships add up, and patterns begin to emerge.
It’s those patterns I want to focus on in this series of posts, in the two broad areas of my advising: career exploration and the application process. The former includes, among other things, assessing employment prospects, the disproportionate focus on BigLaw, and the issue of unpaid law-related internships; in the latter category, the LSAT, scholarship practices, and of course the rankings. Throughout, the persistent challenges faced by first-generation college students and underrepresented minorities play significant roles. In sum, I want to bring the perspective of actual (real, live!) pre-law students and alums – via the hopefully not-too-distorting lens of a pre-law advisor – into the conversation. I look forward to sharing more after an August break.
I look forward to the new perspective. The view from the prospective new applicant perspective on a number of the perennial issues should be very informative. In particular, I hope you will talk in some of your later posts about what overlap, if any, there is between the two broad areas you identified. e.g., does more granular information, like the ABA employment disclosures, affect how/where you advise students to apply? If so, how? If not, why not?
Posted by: Former Editor | August 04, 2014 at 05:04 PM
"But the arguments envision a prospective applicant so generalized as to be mythical (always a naïve college senior aspiring to BigLaw riches)"
That's no mythical creature. Those people are legion. http://lawlemmings.tumblr.com/
The real mythical creature to me is the straight-laced nice young man, eagle scout, Lions/Rotary club member, 3.5 GPA in Government, 156 LSAT and neatly organized law school appliction folder.
Do you actually come into contact with anyone like this? What are their options? How do you advise them?
Posted by: JM | August 05, 2014 at 12:28 PM
I also look forward to this series.
One question is whether you deal with specific students who have goals that are, if not unattainable, highly unlikely, in the sense that they may be making a very large investment without a very good understanding of the career path. I often hear prospective students express interests in being a "constitutional lawyer" "sports lawyer" "international lawyer" or "entertainment lawyer."
"The million-dollar premium assertion, for example, whatever its merit in the aggregate, is mostly meaningless to the aspiring local prosecutor trying to decide when/whether to go to law school, or between Regional School A at a substantial discount and More Prominent School B at full fare – none of her hoped-for paths will likely lead to a million-dollar premium, so now what?"
Related to this, I was wondering to what extent you've found that students tend to associate price with quality, reflexively attending the higher priced school on the assumption that the job prospects justify the costs.
Posted by: BoredJD | August 05, 2014 at 12:36 PM
I'm curious to see how this plays out, but to be honest, I'm skeptical where you're going. In your final paragraph, you tell us how concerned you are for first generation college students and underrepresented minorities, but nowhere in that paragraph of laundry list subjects do you get around to mentioning the question of the cost of law school versus expected salaries for law school students, the two groups of whom you mention who are most at risk from the lack of honesty by law schools.
Looking forward to see where this discussion leads, but you're not off to a good start.
Posted by: PaulB | August 05, 2014 at 07:32 PM
I went to a lower-tier law school that has been amping up its enrollment of URM's the last few cycles. Due to the law school's below average bar passage rate and URM's traditional problems with bar passage, I would guess that less than half of the URM's at my school passed the bar on the first try. Due to the way merit aid is distributed at such schools, few of them were likely to receive any discounts, thus would leave law school with probably around $150,000 in law school debt alone.
I can't help but think that this segment of the law school's population would have been especially well-served by good pre-law advisers.
The law school gets to tout diversity and inclusiveness, while the students graduate with six figures of nondischargeable debt and poor bar passage odds and the poor job prospects that come hand-in-hand with their diploma.
Definitely looking forward to seeing what the view is from the undergraduate advising end.
Posted by: antiro | August 05, 2014 at 09:40 PM