Of Course Salaries Matter at These Tuition Levels

New York defense attorney Nathaniel Burney has a scathing post ripping the recent fraud complaints filed against Cooley and NYLS. Like I've stated before, I'm skeptical that these suits will go to trial, but I still think the suits have strong value in illuminating fundamental problems with the current legal education model.

Burney, apparently, doesn't see things that way.

Nobody forced you to go to that particular school; it was your own choice. Nobody forced you to take on more debt than you could reasonably afford; it was your own choice....

The school did not “saddle” you with debt. You did it to yourself. And now you regret it. Frantically trying to blame anybody besides yourself for your own foolish decisions only makes you look… well… foolish, at best. At worst, it’s almost like the girl who regrets her drunken orgy and accuses her fellow partiers of gang rape. Either way, you certainly don’t come off as someone with the requisite judgment and brainpower to make it as a lawyer...

It's a classic caveat emptor-style approach. Thoroughly unsustainable as an economic behavioral model, but hey, it sounds nice.

The biggest problem [with these suits] is that, if you really were defrauded, then you had to be basing your decision on whether to go to this particular law school based in large part on how much money its graduates make....If that is true, then you have no business being a lawyer in the first place. You’re in it for the money, and don’t belong here. You selected this law school not because you thought it would help prepare you for a life of service, but because you thought you’d be able to get “a job” and make “good money.” Those are the wrong reasons, entirely.

Did you catch that? If you base your decision on whether to buy a product on what you materially get of the product, you shouldn't buy the product. Regardless of what you might pay for law school, it's "wrong" to go in order to make "good money."

Really?

Sure, law is a service profession. I'll concede that. But it's also a business in most iterations (even the public defender and government employee is "in business for himself"), and a business that runs on cost/benefit principles like any other. You never file a lawsuit that will cost $10,000 to recover $5,000 from empty pockets. You don't take a job where getting there and coming home at night burns 50% of your paycheck, and you don't pay for training that costs twice what your lifetime increased earnings would be.

There is a lot of noble service qualities to social work, art history, and the ministry, but no one in their right mind would pay a non-dischargable $150,000 at 8% interest to enter any those fields. I'm confident that they wouldn't do so even if the entry barriers were what they are for law. Why? Because those professions generally don't make money, i.e., they don't offer a solid return on investment or a benefit that would justify the cost. Law is different precisely because the sellers propagate the myth that the cost is justified by high entry-level salaries.

Virtually every decision that humans make has some sort of cost (including risk)/benefit analysis involved, and I would want no one to make a long-term commitment (including kids, marriage, etc.) without heavily weighing the benefit against the cost. And yet Burney claims that anyone who went to law school "basing [his] decision on whether to go to this particular law school based in large part on how much money its graduates make" has no business making that decision.

This makes no sense. If anything, the world needs more people who fully appreciate the costs and benefits of something, rather than the people who jump headfirst into something they want to do without considering the high costs. The latter has been Congress' strategy for the last few decades; look where it's gotten us?

But Burney apparently thinks that people really don't consider the possible benefits of a course of action, at least in selecting a law school:

It is hard to imagine that anyone would have thought [salary presentations] really were all that material. Would law schools really think their students are so mercenary that the main reason why they chose one school over another was the average alumnus salary? That’s absurd on its face.

Really? Then why does virtually every law school in the country openly advertise its recent grad salaries?! Why does US News publish data on it as a key element of a law school's worth?! Why would they do it otherwise? OF COURSE THEY'RE MATERIAL, especially when the people buying the product have to pay triple figures.

If law school A advertises 120k median salaries and law school B advertises 75k median salaries, and they're in the same rough geographic area, which one do you think will draw students, either directly or through the reporting/ranking of US News?

Maybe he and I just have different views of the world, but people do - and should - base almost every decision they make on the cost of the action versus the benefit to them, generally expressed in and reduced to base financial terms. Hell, Burney seems to admit that students should be doing such a thing:

Nobody forced you to take on more debt than you could reasonably afford; it was your own choice.

So one has to wonder how he can chide students for considering the reported salaries as material when that - and cost - are the two sole determinants that would make a debt "reasonable" or not from the prospective student's perspective.

Thus, in Burney's world, recent non-wealthy graduates are damned if they did, and damned if they didn't. If they considered the payoff at the end of the rainbow, they had no business being lawyers. If they didn't consider the payoff, it was their choice to take on more debt than was affordable.

That seems to be a common motif I see among the older generations (Burney is G'Town, '96), attorney or not. There seems to be an assumption that any type of complaint or gripe about higher education being a "fraud" emerges from greed, sloth, and/or stupidity. The inquiries never go beyond the shallow end of the pool, because they end once that conclusion can be sustained through the quickest means possible. As a general rule, the older generations seem to staunchly refuse to believe that hard-working, intelligent, bases-covering people are being fucked by the triple-team of escalating tuition, non-discharable debt, and a job market that is considerably weaker than the schools advertise (or as it was 15 years ago).

After reading Burney's post, he seems like a lawyer who cares about the profession, but I have to wonder if is he aware that prospective lawyers who want to devote their lives to monkish service in legal aids and public defender's offices now have to, in many cases, take on 100k in nondischargable debt to do it, even living frugally and working non-stop. Those are people who don't enter or stay "for the money," and yet the economics affect them just the same.

Trying to pay that debt back on $25k a year is rough; trying to do it on $15k working at the Gap - because getting those jobs at legal aids or the public defenders office is quite difficult right now - is even rougher. Many people who might have balked before embarking on this quest (and maybe turned to teaching or social work or the military) instead chose law on the assertions that the debts would be easier to pay off than they actually are.

At these tuition levels, often paid by non-dischargable debt, salaries have to be considered, and they have to be material in determining whether to go to law school and which school to attend, for everyone.

Because in the end, it's rarely about the kids who want to get the $160,000 salaries. Rarely. It's about the people who went and took out $100k in debt thinking that a $50k job would be easy to get, and likely the ground floor. It's the people who took out $50k in debt thinking it would be easily repayable with the salaries advertised. It's the people who took out $80k in debt because the school presented that as an "average" salary, and they "reasonably" borrowed on a 1-to-1 ratio as the federal government advises.

Those are the real, ground-level calculations that go on (and should go on!), and for anyone except the spoiled rich kids (who don't take out loans) and the most naive of law students, people actually consider the cost and benefit before enrolling.

If the schools were chronically boosting their numbers to show that the expected pay-off was much better than it was in reality, and thereby distorting those types of cost-benefit calculations, the school was committing a fraudulent act, in theory no different than a car company that ups its mpg by using selective data.

Why do people understand how fraud works in every other context, but when higher education is involved, their knees recoil and they suddenly proclaim caveat emptor and start spouting off on the greed and ignorance of the consumers?