Heat vs. Light III: A Call for Some Clear Thinking and Clear Talk About Law-Graduate Employment Reporting

When I wrote my most recent post in this series, I thought its subjects—“what [law-graduate] employment and earnings data ought generally to be presented, and whether the way such data are generally understood makes their presentation subject to misinterpretation”—were settled, and peripheral to the broader topic of the series.  (Those keeping score at home will recall that the broader topic of the series is the importance and limitations of Mike Simkovic’s and Frank McIntyre’s recent scholarship on the value and purpose of legal education.  The first post is here; the second and more recent one is here.)  Unfortunately and surprisingly, my previous post has proved much more contentious than I anticipated, spawning dozens of Comments here and at least two posts on other blogs (Mike Simkovic on the Leiter blog here, and Brian Galle on Prawfsblawg here). 

As is so often the case, the contention seems to spring from a few basic but important confusions.   Actual common ground having proved too scarce to hope for, in the interest of mutual comprehension I attempt here to untangle the skeins that the combatants seem to be throwing past one another.  I hope to clarify where and how we disagree, and why I hold the views I do.  If you agree with me, that’s nice too.  If you disagree, I invite you to explain clearly how and why.

Advance warning:  This post is a bit longer than usual (around 2,800 words).  The public discourse on these issues is so mixed up that it takes some doing to untangle it.  I beg your indulgence, and thank those who make it to the end for their dedication and patience.   The heavy lifting begins after the jump.

There appears to be little disagreement among the recent contributors to the debate that, before 2011, the ABA allowed individual law schools to report and publicize entry-level law-graduate employment statistics at more or less the same level of detail and in more or less the same terms as the U.S. government generally reports employment statistics of various different kinds.  Among other things, that meant that when (before 2011) a law school said that 90% of its graduates were “employed” nine months after graduation, the 90% included every graduate who had any job of any kind, including part-time, short-term, or non-law-related employment—that is, whether that job was 60+ hours a week doing capital markets work at a Wall Street law firm, 5 hours a week reviewing documents, or taking whatever shifts were available flipping burgers, selling jeans, or mopping floors.  (This is not, of course, to suggest that any of these jobs is not legitimate employment, but it is to suggest that some of them bear a lot less resemblance to the kind of jobs that some people might expect to get after spending the time and money necessary to obtain a law degree than others.)  It also meant that when a law school reported that 5% of its graduating class was “unemployed” nine months after graduation, that 5% included only those actively looking for work, and did not include anyone who was not—whether the reason was that the person couldn’t pass the bar, had concluded that job-seeking was hopeless and had given up, or was temporarily out of the workforce having a baby or tending to a sick parent.

The recent debate has run the gamut, with arguments that the law-school reporting just described was (a) a bad practice, (b) not a bad practice, and even (c) a good practice.  Those participating appear at different times to be evaluating the reporting with reference to at least three different standards:

(1)  The reporting practices were or were not effectively serving the public policy interest in efficient and well-informed decisionmaking by those using the information; or

(2)  The reporting practices were or were not unethical, immoral or otherwise blameworthy; or

(3)  The reporting practices were or were not a tort, a violation of statutory consumer protections, a violation of lawyer disciplinary rules, or a crime.

While each of these standards is significant, I hope it is clear that they are very different from one another.  Yet both those supporting and those condemning the reporting practices in question often invoke them interchangeably in the same argument.  In the interest of clarity, let’s examine them one by one.

I personally have devoted no appreciable time or effort to the third question—whether these reporting practices are or were actionably unlawful.  Some litigators and commentators have insisted that they are torts or civil statutory violations, subject law-school administrators to professional discipline as violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct, and are even criminal.   My own view is that, while those questions are obviously critical when posed in litigation, they are not nearly as useful in the discussion I want to have about the right thing to do.  The reason I don’t consider them very useful or informative for most purposes is that they describe rather extreme results that characteristically turn on technical points of the law in different jurisdictions regarding the scope and terms of various consumer protection statutes; related technical questions regarding local variations in the elements of the misrepresentation torts and fraud crimes (including, among others, what comprises actionable falsity, when omission requires disclosure, and when reliance is reasonable); as well as procedural questions regarding commonality and typicality because the civil cases were almost always brought as class actions. 

Mike Simkovic comments in one of his recent posts that “[i]t is not surprising that the courts have dismissed the lawsuits against law schools,” apparently because he believes no reasonable person could be fooled by reporting comparable to what the government uses in other contexts.  In my view that oversimplifies considerably what various courts have concluded, what’s actually going on in the world, and what we should make of it.  Some state courts did not dismiss suits against law schools for misleading marketing on that ground.  Even in New York, where a law-student class action against New York Law School was dismissed on motion, the Appellate Division took issue with the trial court’s findings that all college graduates “are particularly sophisticated in making career or business decisions.”  The appellate court found “there is no question that the type of employment information published by defendant (and other law schools) during the relevant period likely left some consumers with an incomplete, if not false, impression of the school's job placement success,” but concluded that “this statistical gamesmanship, which the ABA has since repudiated in its revised disclosure guidelines,” did not give rise to a cognizable claim under the limited terms of New York’s applicable consumer protection statute, or under other requirements of New York’s misrepresentation torts.  The court closed:

We are not unsympathetic to plaintiff [law students’] concerns. We recognize that students may be susceptible to misrepresentations by law schools. . . .  As a result, prospective students can make decisions to yoke themselves and their spouses and/or their children to a crushing burden of student loan debt, sometimes because the schools have made less than complete representations giving the impression that a full-time job is easily obtainable, when, in fact, it is not.

Given this reality, it is important to remember that the practice of law is a noble profession that takes pride in its high ethical standards. . . .  Defendant [law school] and its peers owe prospective students more than just barebones compliance with their legal obligations. Defendant and its peers are educational not-for-profit institutions.  They should be dedicated to advancing the public welfare.  In that vein, defendant and its peers have at least an ethical obligation of absolute candor to their prospective students.

(Slip opinion available here; footnotes and citations omitted)

Just to be clear, while I see the point of those who disagree with the dismissals, I’m not shocked by them either.  Not every problem has to be solved by a cause of action, and in my own view reasonable people could differ about whether some of the problems specifically identified in these cases should be, or whether they might be better addressed by other means, for example regulatory steps such as those the ABA has actually taken in this instance.  (Habitual commenters in this space who are tempted to explode in indignation should review the deliberately limited scope of that last sentence carefully.) 

But surely no one thinks that ought to be the end of the discussion, other perhaps than a few radical libertarians and Ayn Rand fanatics, who may imagine that very little should be unlawful, and anything that is not unlawful is admirable good practice if you want to pursue your self-interest by doing it.  What the New York appellate decision illustrates is that there are lots of things that may not be illegal, but are still unethical, immoral, or just bad practice, and may appropriately be condemned as such.  As law teachers, we explore this distinction with our students regularly, so it shouldn’t be novel or surprising to anyone reading this post. 

Once we get to this point, my own views are pretty simple: 

Factually, an appreciable portion of the people who use law-school employment statistics (including particularly prospective law students and their families) did and still do not understand government reporting conventions used in other contexts, and thought that the all-in “employed” percentage most law schools publicized before 2011 meant full-time, long-term jobs as a lawyer, when in fact it did not.  Also factually, quite a few of those same people were and are specifically interested in attending law school (or having their family member attend law school) in order to become a lawyer, so full-time, long-term placements as lawyers actually matter to them.

Ethically and morally, if you know or reasonably should know that an appreciable portion of your likely audience is misunderstanding the information you’re providing in the form in which you’re providing it, it’s wrong to provide it in that form.  I simply can’t agree that, as some recent posts on this subject seem to imply, because the relevant consumers should (in some normative sense) know better, too bad for them if they don’t, and that the potentially catastrophic consequences of such a misunderstanding should provide some kind of appropriate incentive to learn things that you don’t know you don’t know before you make a life-altering decision like investing in law school.  Nor can I agree, as some other recent posts seem to imply, that you shouldn’t care what your chances are of becoming a full-time lawyer after graduation because the “correct” inquiry is broader and has to do with whether you’ll be financially better off with a law degree than without one in the long run; and as a result there is no vice in failing or refusing to provide people who care about careers as lawyers with information about careers as lawyers.  What career you may prefer to pursue at any point in your life is an individual choice that you get to make for yourself.

(What I hope is an obvious corollary is that concluding the reporting practices in which many law schools engaged may be morally or ethically wrong does not justify any leap to a comparison with genocide, even one offered in jest or joined with the conclusion that the likeness is a poor one.  There are, after all, degrees of bad.  It's a long, long way from law school to Dachau, and using both in the same sentence only frustrates sensible discussion and trivializes a human cataclysm of incalculable proportions.)

As a matter of sound public policy and good practice, I have several things to say: 

To start with, the “all-in” post-graduate employment number some appear to praise seems useless for any “properly” relevant purpose.  Remember, Simkovic & McIntyre argue that the only genuinely relevant inquiry in determining the value to you of a law degree (and thus whether you should go to law school) is not what (or how financially) you do right out of law school, nor is it what you do in your career as a whole; instead, it is (a) whether you will make more money (b) over the course of your entire career, regardless of what kinds of jobs you hold, (c) if you obtain a law degree as opposed to just stopping your higher education after college.  And their more recent paper appears to conclude that what (or how financially) you do right out of law school is not a good predictor of the sole metric they deem important, namely career-long earning power.  Similarly, some of Mike Simkovic’s recent posts appear to argue that undue focus on outcomes in the first few years after law-school graduation is itself misleading and leads to bad decisions. 

If you accept this point of view, then what percentage of recent law-school graduates have any kind of job (whether or not full-time, long-term, or law-related) is just as irrelevant if not misleading as any other short-term statistic.  It is at best no better for the single genuinely relevant inquiry that your point of view demands you pursue (earnings over an entire career) than the more granular information that the ABA demands schools report now.  And if you happen to be one of those people who cares what you’re doing in your working life as opposed to what its long-term financial returns will turn out to be, so much the worse.  In short, whether you agree with Simkovic & McIntyre or not, an all-in statistic that says how many law-school graduates have any job of any kind within nine months after graduation does not appear to be informative about what anyone seems to care about.  You may think that the ABA is on the wrong track in demanding the information it now requires schools to report, but you can’t seriously argue that the ABA, or the law schools that cheerfully complied with its earlier and more permissive regime, were on the right (or a righter) track before. 

Next, assuming that you get over the hurdle just discussed, and believe that near-term post-graduation employment outcomes have some useful informational value, you might ask yourself in deciding what is good practice (1) what information would likely matter to the likely users of the information; and (2) who is in the best position to supply it.

As to the first question—what might matter to whom—again I think the answer is fairly clear.  If you care about what law-school graduates are doing soon after graduation, it’s probably because you care what you’ll likely be doing soon after graduation.   It’s all fine and good to say that prospective law students “shouldn’t” be unduly concerned with these near-term outcomes, and it’s more than fine to say that they should be exposed to a point of view that argues that those near-term outcomes are less important than prospective students might be inclined to think.  But if you think that no fair complement of prospective law students is currently concerned about this question, you’re living in a fantasy world.  And if you’re one of those people who cares about what you’ll be doing soon after graduation, then you care a great deal about how many recent graduates comparable to you have part-time, short-term or non-law-related jobs.  Put slightly differently, a statistic that tells you how many people have any job of any kind, indiscriminately combining jobs with characteristics you don’t want with jobs with characteristics you do, is at best useless to you—even if you know exactly what it means.  At best, you will not be informed about what you want to know, even if you’re not misled.  Once again, there is nothing that recommends reporting an “all-in” employment percentage without (at minimum) the more detailed category breakdowns currently required by the ABA.  And if for some reason you are concerned about who has any job of any kind, you can easily construct that from several of the mutually exclusive subcategories that the ABA now requires. 

In short, the notion that the ABA and law schools should collect and report for their purposes information at the same degree of detail and definition that the government does for other purposes just because that’s what the government does, or that the ABA, NALP and law schools were doing anything that was genuinely informative or useful to anybody by disseminating such information, makes no sense I can discern.  It’s lovely to compare apples with apples, but not all that handy if you want grapefruit for breakfast.

As to the second question—who is in the best position to provide this information—again the answer seems clear.  We often allocate the responsibility of supplying needed information to the lowest-cost provider.  Here the law schools have access to their recent graduates far more easily than any prospective law student or other user of the employment-outcome information, and one school can track hundreds of its recent graduates with no duplicated effort, and relatively modest effort overall.  Yes, some of us have concerns that not all law schools will seek out or report this information as objectively as they should, and that some of the categories currently in use are particularly susceptible to motivated reporting, but that is hardly a reason to put the responsibility for gathering any of this information on thousands of scattered prospective law students with neither the contacts nor the resources to reliably obtain it.

That about does it.  For those of you who have gotten to this point, congratulations on your stamina and wakefulness.  Next in this series, I will return to what I think are the more uncertain and controversial questions of what the Simkovic & McIntyre analysis is, and is not, good for.

--Bernie

 

Comments

[[M][@][c][K]]

But Bernie, the big question is, how much are the Koch brothers paying you?Can we compare stipends?

[Jojo]

The answers are remarkably clear and easy -- so long as you don't care about dissuading potential customers with the truth.

[anon]

I'm readily admit that I'm confused. As Bernie states:

"{there are] a few basic but important confusions. {Bernie will] in the interest of mutual comprehension I attempt here to untangle the skeins that the combatants seem to be throwing past one another. ... The public discourse on these issues is so mixed up that it takes [him] some doing to untangle it."

But, what has been untangled? that S, on the one hand, says that law schools should report employment statistics as does a Government agency and just about everybody else, on the other hand, including the ABA and almost all courts that have addressed the issue, say that law schools should report more?

I'm sorry. What is the dispute here? What is the reason for posting this long drawn out essay about one person's blog posts about a subject that has already been decided against his position (a person, btw, who is not a credentialed labor economist and is funded by parties clearly interested in his anodyne findings)?

Who is confused here? Why pay any attention at all to the disclosure issue?

And, btw, the comments to the prior threads really didn't stay on point, so that is no evidence of interest in relitigating the disclosure issue.

As for the point about law school and the MILLION DOLLAR PREMIUM, that issue was discussed at length. As I hope we established, although S&M tried to milk attention by using that canard at firs, they quickly realized to what purposes that claim was being put. Their anodyne conclusion was actually that after putting in an investment of 200K or more, three years of time and significant intellectual capital, the median increase in earnings over a lifetime was actually, after taxes, quite modest. ANd, that is after applying all the skewed assumptions they built into that little cake.

Why is anyone paying attention to arguing about what S says and why not focus on moving on to effect the sorely needed reforms that might start to restore the law academy's credibility?

Endless debating this nonsense, is, as Bernie says, confusing in this context.

[twbb]

I think this is a good post; it's always good to take a step back and look at exactly what's being argued, particularly in light of the emotional timbre and cross-accusations of the recent debate.

I will say I think you may be giving the ABA way too much credit; they had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to this point. Frankly, many of us still don't trust them.

[[M][@][c][K]]

Bernie:

I'm sorry for my earlier snark (though if the Koch brothers are distributing cash...)

Fundamentally I agree with the point you made. Around a quarter of a century ago, when taking legal ethics, I came across the writings of the very odious Henry S. Drinker - the author of the early legal ethics rules, who as I recalled expressed the view that the rules were good because the "Irish, Italians and little Russian Jew-Boys" would be unable to comply with them, and hence excluded from the profession.

On another occasion a lawyer I know who is now dead told me about his father and uncle: "my father was a bigot, he would not have let a black man come in the front door." Yet he found himself bullied on the playground because the Toomey brothers (his father and uncle) and the Murphy's (I know a member of that family, a fine lawyer by the way (in his case it was his great-uncle and great-grandather)) endorsed the application of the first black man to become a member of the DC bar (he needed the endorsement of existing members of the bar.) One of the Murphy's told me that this gentleman spent almost two years looking for those signatures. Tomboy explained to me that when he asked his father why he had signed the endorsement, he had explained - "this negro came to the office, and he'd passed the bar exam and he was a man of good character, he had a right to be a lawyer, it was the right thing to do." Neither the Toomeys nor the Murphys had to sign that endorsement under the bar rules, they did it because it was right.

And here is the thing - you can parse the ethics rules and the BLS reporting writers (which frankly is Simkovic cherry picking a standard) and come up with an argument that if you read the rules and trade practice law in a particular way, maybe the misreporting of data by the law schools was, just technically, defensible. But to conclude that it was right is to be morally depraved. It was wrong, it was dishonest, it was disgraceful, shameful. And trying to justify it is why some people start invoking bizarre conspiracy theories.

[anon]

Here's the problem:

"But surely no one thinks that ought to be the end of the discussion, other perhaps than a few radical libertarians and Ayn Rand fanatics, who may imagine that very little should be unlawful, and anything that is not unlawful is admirable good practice if you want to pursue your self-interest by doing it."

Aside from the snarky attacks embedded in that sentence, and leaving aside that the finger perhaps should be pointed elsewhere, let's ask, law academicians: is this the motto you live by when you argue with others about the supposed evils in which members of that other party engage when they make this very point about the conduct of one of your own?

Again, folks, CREDIBILITY. This whole "debate" is just digging the hole deeper.

[Paul Campos]

I'm fascinated by this "debate," because it's so bizarre on its face.

Somebody who takes the position that there was nothing wrong with law schools reporting, without any further elaboration, that 95% of their graduates were employed nine months after graduation, is not someone whose views on the subject in general can be taken seriously.

It's like having an argument with somebody who says there was nothing wrong with the tobacco companies denying that smoking causes lung cancer, because after all doing so was a sound litigation strategy, or it's never "really" been proven, etc.

BTW Steve, the Koch brothers didn't actually pay me to post this.

[Jojo]

It's been more than 5 years since the law schools first discussed the possibility of a "crisis" in legal education. The only substantive improvement to address said crisis is the disclosure of 509 data brought about by LST and others.

The entrenched interests have done nothing but whine dispute and obscure what those data mean, while taking shots at the motives behind reformers who have no financial skin in the game at all.

Why can't we start talking about how to fix this mess? Can't we at least acknowledge an entry level employment problem and a cost of education problem? These strike me as not seriously controverted (but threatening to the status quo).

There are a lot of good law faculty out there who got into education because they care about the future. To you all, I'd plead that you work to right this ship even if it means the closure of 50 schools to do so.

[anon]

Paul Campos

I obviously agree with your assessment about a "debate" centered around S's recent musings on a blog (that are unmoored from 1. any semblance of labor economics training, education and expertise, leaving aside common sense (the ABA, nearly all law schools, and nearly every court that looked at the issues all agreed that reporting needed to be reformed), 2. a common sense of respect for others and an desire to be as transparent as possible when enticing youth into a very risky and expensive endeavor with misleading slogans and claims (this continues, of course: it is almost worse now) and 3. the need to be completely independent from interested parties who fund opinions that support their enterprises for self interested reasons (see, Bernie's condemnation of this, but only with respect to those he thinks are politically safe targets here in the FL)).

But, Paul Campos, please, stay away from analogies!!!

Steve may be preparing a post right now about his outrage that he has been compared to tobacco companies!

[Voice of Reason]

Paul Campos, you continue to accept a 6 figure salary for a job you've characterized as a scam from an institution you've disparaged. I would steer clear of disputes about credibility if I were you. Since anyone who attempts to contribute even the semblance of reasoned analysis to this debate is metaphorically assaulted by your mob of pitchfork-wielding thugs, I think Prof. Simkovic should be lauded for even attempting to talk sense. It obviously hasn't worked.

Bernie, requiring law schools to provide detailed, granular graduate employment data certainly gives prospective students increased capacity to decide BETWEEN law schools. However, unless someone provides largely equivalent data on the employment prospects for other graduate and professional programs or for the other alternative choices that potential law students might choose to make, it will do nothing to improve the rationality of the choice to attend law school in the first place.

The frothing mob will wave its pitchforks and scream that every student kept away from law school is a victory, but I suspect you are seeking a more reasoned decision-making process, one which will require data that is comparable between career alternatives. The ABA changes don't accomplish that. This doesn't make them useless--Simkovic's earlier posts, at least, acknowledge that the more granular data can be useful as supplemental information. But, if you completely replace the BLS standard definitions with granular data that is no longer comparable to that provided for alternative career choices, you've actually taken a step backwards.

[anon]

"Since anyone who attempts to contribute even the semblance of reasoned analysis to this debate is metaphorically assaulted by your mob of pitchfork-wielding thugs, I think Prof. Simkovic should be lauded for even attempting to talk sense." "The frothing mob will wave its pitchforks and scream that every student kept away from law school is a victory."

The only one demonstrating this form of conduct wrote that comment.

"However, unless someone provides largely equivalent data on the employment prospects for other graduate and professional programs or for the other alternative choices that potential law students might choose to make, it will do nothing to improve the rationality of the choice to attend law school in the first place. "

"someone" has. Do the research, as you likely expect undergrads to do. This information is readily available and, if a student is comparing options, then the more information about each option that is available, the better, right?

What, for the love of "reason," are you so worked up about, Voice of Reason? You are ranting like a person who is deranged, and making no sense.

[Deborah Merritt]

This is a good post, Bernie. I hope that it will, in fact, allow the discussion to move on--after some equally good comments, of course, which have already started to appear.

[Bernie Burk]

Voice of Reason,

First of all, let's dispense with the epithets. I don't see the behavior on either side of this debate being discernibly more civil than the other. Invoking "frothing mobs" and "waving pitchforks" adds nothing to the discussion. There are sober, thoughtful people in this discussion who simply disagree with you for rational and clearly stated reasons.

On the merits, you're still missing three very important points. It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to ask the question that you and Simkovic & McIntyre ask: If I go to law school, will I make more money in the course of my entire career than if I don't and just enter the workforce with my BA, or if I go to Business School, or if I go to grad school in English, or if I go to Medical School, or if I go to Divinity School, or if etc. etc.? There are certainly rational people who would like to know this, so the inquiry is valuable and informative.

The first important point you are missing is that, if your concern is career-long earnings power, which is what Simkovic and McIntyre tell us is the meaningful concern on which we should focus, then Simkovic & McIntire's more recent article tells us that the "nine months after graduation" statistics that were the primary or only statistic that many law schools publicized are USELESS in answering that question. Comparing one statistic that is useless for the purpose you have identified as meaningful with another statistic that is useless for the same purpose is still useless.

The second important point that you're missing is that career-long earnings is NOT the only inquiry that many prospective law students want to explore. Lots of people considering law school are considering law school BECAUSE THEY WANT TO BE LAWYERS. Given this preference, they ask the question "What are my chances OF BECOMING A LAWYER if I go to law school, or if I go to law school X rather than law school Y?" And if you want to be a lawyer, you may be quite specifically concerned with whether you will be able to START YOUR CAREER as a lawyer. If you don't go to law school, your chances of becoming a lawyer are effectively zero. If you do go to law school your chances if you graduated in 2014 are still (depending on how you count) less than 60% of starting your career as one. (And the statistics we have tend to indicate that people who don't start practicing law relatively soon after graduating are much more unlikely to practice law later, however well they may do in other work.) Telling people that 90% of recent law school graduates are "employed" when a third of those recent graduates have jobs with no resemblance to the particular kind of job they want to know about is not useful either.

If you agree with Simkovic & McIntyre about what you should care about when planning your career, then prior to 2011 law schools were not telling you anything you really wanted to know. If you disagree with Simkovic & McIntyre on this point, what law schools supplied was even worse.

Finally, the third important point you're missing is addressed when you say "if you completely replace the BLS standard definitions with granular data that is no longer comparable to that provided for alternative career choices, you've actually taken a step backwards." That is not correct on its own terms for the reasons just discussed. More importantly, it's simply not what's happened. You can easily reconstruct statistics that are identical to BLS statistics in the government definitions of "employed" and "unemployed" from the more granular data ABA now requires. You should not have suggested otherwise.

All of this was set out clearly in my post. You shouldn't accuse "the frothing mob" of not listening until you listen yourself.

Bernie

[Anon]

No, Paul, you are happy to carry out their agenda for free (at the expense of the taxpayers and students of Colorado).

[Anon]

Jojo, Why isn't a 50% decline in applications with the consequential impact on faculty and staff pay and positions a "solution" to what you say ails legal education?

[Anon]

Bernie, I agree with the substance of your most recent comment. I think it puts balance on the issues that a prospective law student needs to consider. I think it likely that most applicants to law school do think they want to become lawyers even if they think they eventually want to do something else. And I agree that entering a world where you know you have a very solid chance of getting a job right out of law school would be reassuring. Nonetheless the whole point of the attack on law schools has been the cost. If cost did not matter then sure just desire to be a lawyer and the opportunity to do so when you come out of this or that law school might be more important. But the critics rave on about the cost (and it seems nominally to be high) and that is why the research that Mike and Frank did is so important. Until that research arrived on the scene it was anecdote v. anecdote and resembled that old Mad Magazine Spy v. Spy cartoon. Now the critics should retreat and come up with their own data. Surely they could get the funding for the research from their friends in DC.

[anon]

Anon

You seem to believe that the "their agenda" (whose?) is to close down legal education entirely:

"every student kept away from law school is a victory"

and

"Why isn't a 50% decline in applications with the consequential impact on faculty and staff pay and positions a "solution" to what you say ails legal education?"

Suffice it to say that Bernie is correct in this respect:
"You shouldn't accuse "the frothing mob" of not listening ...."

The "debate" here is whether S is right that less information about employment outcomes would be preferable, because a government agency counts as "employed" anyone earning anything doing anything during the relevant time period. S says, in a blog, that if law schools would follow that lead, then prospective law students wouldn't be misled and confused by too much information, and could, instead, seek out and read about the putative (but illusory) MILLION DOLLAR PREMIUM without being confused by facts concerning the issues they actually (and should) care more about (as Bernie notes).

Why is this a "debate"? What is the purpose of elevating these ridiculous musings by S to any status whatsoever? The the issue has been litigated and decided, decidedly, by everyone who counts and has a say in the matter. When is enough enough? How much more S... is necessary here?

I have yet to hear an answer to this question.

[terry malloy]

As a member of the "frothing Mob" let me chime in. I've been vocal against what I see as the immorality of monetizing the cognitive errors of 22 year olds to convince them to take on mountains of non-dischargable debt to fund the outsize salaries of law school administrators and the cushy navel gazing of law professors.

I was harmed. I went 143,000 in non-dischargable debt, passed the bar, and have not practiced 1 day. The debt and concurrent identity loss of never practicing, have negatively impacted my life, and the lives of tens of thousands of my peers, in a myriad of depressing ways.

The manner and extent to which schools and their marketeers massaged employment and salary numbers to sell their product, including what S is defending, is unconscionable.

I don't expect the law school defenders to change their opinions. I just can't let them say that no one ever told them what they were doing was immoral.

Cribbing Camus:
'to commit to the fight against injustice in a world in which that fight is almost certain -- or certainly more probable to lose -- is an absurdity. But to not commit to making the fight is equally absurd and only one choice actually offers the choice for human dignity, and dignity matters'

No one pays me to haunt the law school cheerleaders.

I do it to remind them that those they harm are human beings with a right to respect and dignity, not just inflows of federal student loan dollars.

[anon]

Terry

Well said.

Unfortunately, the "debate" here on this thread is about whether S has any basis to claim that everyone - from the courts (who agreed that law schools issued misleading statements but found no reasonable reliance thereon), to the ABA (which now requires the more "granular" disclosures that S questions), to the reform community (e.g., LST) - nearly everyone, everywhere, agrees that the better disclosures now required are a step in the right direction.

If we are going to have this debate, let's start with a debate about Prof S's credentials as a labor economist/analyst, his receipt of funding from financially interested sources and the extraordinary attention he has received from certain of the loudest voices in support of the notion that legal academia is a pristine bastion of ethically superior geniuses under attack by a frothing, ignorant mob with pitchforks.

Or, are we now supposed to "debate" whether S is correct about the nature of required post-law school employment disclosures, and whether, if so, every other relevant actor is wrong? Why?

Yes, Bernie, we need to be enlightened. What is it about S's recent musings do you find worthy of so much of your time and attention?

[Barry]

Bernie: "You can easily reconstruct statistics that are identical to BLS statistics in the government definitions of "employed" and "unemployed" from the more granular data ABA now requires. You should not have suggested otherwise."

Yes, and this is solely due to the 'scambloggers'; the ABA and the law schools and people like you had no problem with the previous system.

BTW, I note that you and S (M seems to have faded away), SD and others seem to lean very heavily on BLS definitions - but for no good reason.

First, Saying that you (in a certain aspect, viewed very narrowly) followed a government definition is not proof that you are ethical. It's not even proof that you are acting legally; I have heard it said that the US government has imprisoned more people for whistle-blowing on torture than for torturing. The current US standard for torture is clearly (a) be dumb enough/unlucky enough to have pictures hit the internet and (b) don't have connections whom one can implicate.

Second, when the BLS says that the yearly demand for new lawyers is X, while law schools are graduating ~2X, I don't see these same people pointing at that as a golden standard which commands obedience.

However, it is interesting to see the counterattack and party line form up. I note that at both here and Prawsblog, the comments which are disappeared are not selected due to more heat than light, but for the wrong sort of light.