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
Anon says:
"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."
These old saws get trotted out every time! The logic failure here is stunning.
First, the "get your own data" canard (this is sandbox stuff, really) is risible in the context of THIS "debate" on THIS thread about WHICH data to use: the more robust ABA disclosures or the "less granular" data that S prefers? S believes that "too much information" about employment prospects might confuse the undergraduate researchers whom he would prefer to rely on his "MILLLION DOLLAR" promise.
On this one, there is no M because S is really in a category all to himself with respect to this pure rubbish. (To be sure, shared by a few others, but very few and very visibly few) I keep asking, why even consider his views about this?
Second, Anon states: "[T]he whole point of the attack on law schools has been the cost." This is just a false premise that Anon trots out to support the hero theory to come: that S&M proved that the investment in law school to be justified, thus defeating the "attackers" and forcing them to go to "DC" for funding! (Really, this person is speaking about "raving"?)
But, the "whole point of the attack" (if one must call it that, that being the mindset of the author, who clearly feels besieged by the frothing mob) has not only to do with cost!
Arguments about cost relative to outcomes certainly has been validly raised, as has a point that federal loan money has caused obviously greedy operators to proliferate and escalate tuition far beyond the bounds of reason (all you JDs posing as economists might consider the reason that fourth tier law schools charge as much as they do in the "market" and given the employment prospects in THOSE schools: a subject that S&M chose mainly to ignore).
No, Anon, the "whole point" of the "attack" has not been solely related to "cost" ... and the fact that you utter this nonsense indicates that, again, you are not listening, but instead, you obviously are reacting to your feeling of being "attacked." This sort of response does not befit your exalted position and vastly superior intellect.
Posted by: anon | May 03, 2015 at 07:37 PM
", 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?"
You'd think it would, right? But here down the rabbit hole a certain number of schools have just dropped standards to chase student loan dollars further down the intellectual and socko-economic spectrum. All the while cost and debt burden more and more students with more and more debt. Perversely, as matriculant quality falls, the problem of poor entry level opportunities and insufferable debt may get worse. Welcome to the madness.
Posted by: Jojo | May 03, 2015 at 07:56 PM
We see on S' favorite blog where the bit about "DC" came from.
The obtuse nature of all this is stunning! Law students who attend Yale surely are not unaware of the old saying: "He didn't go to law school, he went to Yale"!
Many such students do not expect to go straight into the practice of law. Whoopie! They are, all of them, the most brilliant humans on the planet! Why should they?
On the other hand, lesser mortals understand the point Bernie makes above: law students, by and large, go to law school to be trained to practice law and join the legal profession, and want to know, if they graduate from a particular law school, what their chances of getting a law job will be.
Funny how that works. Folks who aren't rich and famous and brilliant and all that need to work to pay off the 200K or so in debt and the three years not working and want to know if they will find a law related job after spending three years and all that money to train for one.
Weird, huh? Why didn't they all just go to Yale? Everybody there gets a job, and they don't care to be lowly lawyers anyway!
Posted by: anon | May 03, 2015 at 07:58 PM
"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."
I don't think this is true. I doubt many people saw the "95% employed" number and thought that meant "95% LT FT BPR jobs."
However, I bet a lot of people see "95% employed" and think that means "95% have jobs." This is where the BLS definition becomes very important, because it differs from the common sense definition of employment. BLS says if you were employed for even an hour, you're employed. Most people wouldn't consider getting a one-off baby sitting gig as being employed. Defenders of the BLS stats would (and have) said that the number of people in these non-jobs is too small to worry about, but many schools have at least 5% of their employed grads in jobs that are both short term and part time, and several schools even pass the 10% mark. That's pretty significant in my eyes.
When considering law school, prospective students consider (or ought to consider) both their chances of getting the type of job they want, as well as how bad their situation will be if they don't get it. They might see only 15% get a biglaw job, but 95% are employed in some fashion, and think that even if they don't get the dream job they at least aren't exposed to a lot of risk. Using the BLS stat misleads students about their risk exposure.
Also, Bernie has missed another way of presenting jobs data that schools have used. Instead of just saying "X% employed" they'll say "Employed in law jobs." Of course, law jobs is a term without a clear definition. Prospective students could reasonable interpret that as meaning working as a lawyer. Schools on the other hand will include JD Advantage positions. I have a hard time imagining that whoever is picking the language is unaware of how someone would likely interpret the stat.
Posted by: Derek Tokaz | May 04, 2015 at 10:33 AM
Bernie, you have written far too much on what is really a simple issue. Law schools should report accurately where their graduates work 10 months after graduation. Thankfully, this is required by the ABA. The mandatory disclosures are fine. It is up to prospective students to inform themselves what it means when a graduate is working in a firm of 2-10 attorneys, or in business and industry, etc. Any prospective who looks at anything other than the mandatory disclosures, such as the crap schools promote on their website and in fliers, is an idiot who deserves the debt. That person is looking to be persuaded for any reason to attend anyway.
If there is one change I could make to the system, I would have the ABA force prospectives to view the employment disclosures for each school that they apply to when they submit their online application, and click that they acknowledge the figures before they submit the application. Then there would be no doubt that every enrollee knew exactly what they were getting into.
Posted by: JM | May 04, 2015 at 10:48 AM
JM,
One could just as easily say that if you're a school that puts out these stats, you're a swindler who deserves to be stuck paying off your students' debt loads.
Posted by: Derek Tokaz | May 04, 2015 at 11:01 AM
Derek:
A new category, I think the university of Denver is using it is employed in "professional" jobs.
However, this reminds me of my aunt's aphorism about the client who says "I'll fight them to the last drop of blood" as in "notice the absence of the personal pronoun."
What "profession" do they mean?
Posted by: [M][@][c][K] | May 04, 2015 at 11:07 AM
Derek,
I just don't think my outrage can stretch that far. People should expect school's to cast their employment stats in a positive light, no different than when someone is selling a security or a piece of real estate. Dispensing with any special status of higher education (which I suppport) goes both ways. They shouldn't be held to a higher standard.
Posted by: JM | May 04, 2015 at 11:39 AM
MK,
It's not a new category. That's one of the ones used by NALP and ABA, and there is a "Non-Professional" job category.
JM,
My point was just that there's fault to go around. Noting that one party made some bad choices doesn't necessarily end the discussion (unless you prefer a contributory negligence type rule).
As for whether they should be held to a higher standard than the rest of the market, the first answer is most definitely yes. But that's because we have legal standards and moral standards. We can certainly hold them to a higher moral standard than what the law requires of the market at large.
Now should law schools have a different legal standard than the rest of the market? That's a complicated question. For starters, the rest of the market doesn't even have the same standards. Real estate comes with certain required disclosures. Drugs have to disclose their side effects. Seafood has to disclose its nation of origin. Pringles can't call themselves "chips." So the "higher" standard could actually be pretty close to actual, existing standards elsewhere in the market, not making it higher at all.
Getting specifically to the standard you raise though, it would be denying law schools the right to engage in puffery. That, I believe, isn't something any field is denied, even when they do have to make certain other disclosures. Ought law schools to be denied puffery? ...Maybe. The argument would point to the huge subsidies law schools get (via student loans). As a society, we can bargain however we want, and I think we'd be in our rights to say if you want to milk the student loan cow there's going to be some conditions. Think you should get to play on the same terms as everyone else? Cool. Everyone else doesn't get access to student loans.
Posted by: Derek Tokaz | May 04, 2015 at 12:01 PM
Derek
As a society, we can bargain however we want, and I think we'd be in our rights to say if you want to milk the student loan cow there's going to be some conditions. Think you should get to play on the same terms as everyone else? Cool. Everyone else doesn't get access to student loans.
That's exactly right.
And, as for puffery in the market, yes, but ...
An expert in a sale of goods (as long as we are speaking of education as a chattel) cannot tell a customer that he thinks a chattel is something he knows it is not without risking big time liability.
e.g., "Economists have proved that you will earn a MILLION DOLLARS MORE over your career with a law degree than if you just stick with your BA" ...
e.g., "In a couple of years, there will be a shortage of attorneys. Now is the best time in history to enroll in law school."
e.g., "Last year, only 10% of our graduates were unemployed nine months following graduation" (Using S's recommended method)
Puffery?
Posted by: anon | May 04, 2015 at 12:58 PM
Derek: "However, I bet a lot of people see "95% employed" and think that means "95% have jobs." "
I don't; I'd love to see any hard stats on people looking at those figures and thinking that (for example) being a barrista was counted, and was the sort of job which they'd find acceptable.
Posted by: Barry | May 04, 2015 at 01:42 PM
Barry,
I'll try to explain how I got to that conclusion. A prospective student seeing a general employment rate for a law school likely does believe it includes some non-lawyers. After all, I doubt many prospective students believe every graduate who gets a job gets one practicing as a lawyer. They're probably aware of fields like academia, consulting, investment banking, various government positions, and have heard the "you can do anything with a law degree!" narrative. If a prospect would think that an investment banker was included in the "95% employed" number, then we know he doesn't think everyone is in an LT FT BPR job.
However, I do think a prospect would not think baristas were counted. Why the disconnect? If they know that some non-lawyer jobs are counted, why think baristas aren't included? After all, "95% employed" doesn't say anything about the quality of the jobs, it's not "95% in careers they're proud to mention at their high school reunion." They wouldn't think baristas are included because they wouldn't think that there are JD baristas to include!
Posted by: Derek Tokaz | May 04, 2015 at 02:30 PM
Derek:
You might want to mention that Federal Truth in Lending regulations apply to almost all lenders, including say car dealers, but has a carve out for educational lending. Used car salesmen are subject to tougher standards that law schools.
Posted by: [M][@][c][K] | May 04, 2015 at 02:35 PM
I applaud Bernie's efforts seeking clarity where confusion reigns. But some of the comments ignore the elephant in the room. How can a discussion about the "law school market" for new graduates proceed without acknowledging that there is no single law school market? Rather, there are three submarkets -- National, Regional, and Problematic. The actual employment prospects (and starting salaries) for law grads depend entirely on a school's submarket. Ignoring that fact is worse than imprecise; it leads to sloppy analysis, misleading rhetoric, and flawed public policies.
I just published an article in the ABI Law Review (Winter 2015) on this subject: "Bankruptcy and Bad Behavior -- The Real Moral Hazard: Law Schools Exploiting Market Dysfunction" -- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2599627.
Posted by: Steven J. Harper | May 04, 2015 at 05:49 PM
Most law professors have never had any real legal employment so I'm not sure why they would have any idea of the types of jobs that students have or want.
Posted by: Anon | May 04, 2015 at 09:01 PM
Derek:- thanks categories are
• Bar passage required
• Juris Doctor degree presents an advantage
• Professional position (job requires professional skills or training)
• Non-professional position
• Job type unknown
I have to say "requires professional skills or training" seems to me to be awfully broad - what does it mean? Does it mean a job requiring professional licensing, which covers everything from cosmetology to real estate depending on the state? Does it mean a quick training course, which has a pretty broad scope, ranging from using the coffee machine to more advanced skills? Does it mean any job the BLS has a professional category for? Any white collar position? Any managerial position no matter how low? It strikes me that this category is wide open to abuse - and given that I see Simkovic's argument that the BLS categories are usable as a manifesto for returning to the bad old days, I suspect it is being abused.
I would add a point - why is the debate about reporting, Simkovic's campaign to lower reporting standards happening now and indeed gaining some traction. Are things that bad at Seton Hall and Fordham, at Santa Clara? Is honest reporting proving that damaging? Until recently there was a consensus that law schools needed to be more honest in their reporting - and now, suddenly, ideas are being floated to lower the quality of the reporting? Simultaneously a large number of law school deans are complaining about the bar exam being too difficult? I mean if a certain person is going to run around claiming that there is a Cato/Koch led conspiracy, it is at least fair to ask the other question, why now?
Posted by: [M][@][c][K] | May 05, 2015 at 04:28 AM
M@cK,
I think you nailed it. Some deans are in survival mode.
I've said it before, and i'll say it again. Law school can be a useful way to train the future members of the bar to be great future guardians of the law. Alternatively, it can be a feather-bedding, indebting three year exercise in futility that harms students and erodes trust in law. Please, law faculty, choose wisely.
Posted by: Jojo | May 05, 2015 at 06:19 AM
Anon: "Most law professors have never had any real legal employment so I'm not sure why they would have any idea of the types of jobs that students have or want."
It doesn't take having any legal experience - just check the percentages by the rank of the law school, and the trend is clear. Those students with choices want (a) lawyer jobs and (b) higher-paying ones.
Posted by: Barry | May 05, 2015 at 08:23 AM
Derek, in the end tou 're just posting words to cover for the fact. That law schools quite delibertely misled thei atudents, at 6-figure prices.
Posted by: Barry | May 05, 2015 at 08:25 AM
What fascinates me about these discussions is that regardless of the topic or angle of the original post, if it has to do with the state of legal ed, the comments are always the same, posted by the same people.
I am as big a critic of law schools, deans, profs and admins as the next person, having worked in that industry for 20 years, but this is getting boring....
No one can predict the future of legal ed and the critics are never going to convince the defenders that law schools have acted dishonestly and unethically, so it seems to me that this is becoming pointless.
Posted by: Just saying... | May 05, 2015 at 08:32 AM