About Columbia Law School and Employment

In case you've missed it, Columbia Law School has been rather vigorous in their attempts to correct the impression made by the recent New York Times article that an indebted student featured in the Times' expose graduated from Columbia Law. A good summation of the situation can be garnered by checking out the recent posts at First Tier Toilet, whom the Law School has repeatedly contacted regarding the error and on which the former student has allegedly posted in an attempt to clear the matter up.

Columbia is, of course, correct, and they're entitled to their correction. The student, it appears, was never an enrolled student in Columbia Law, and he did not graduate from there as the article implied.

But by no means does clean Columbia from the article's scope. Consider the following:

• Columbia claims on their website that "98% of the Class of 2009 was employed by graduation in a variety of legal fields," although they provide no source for this claim. It seems high, considering only 90% of Columbia grads taking the NY Bar passed on the 1st try in 2005. Why would someone hire a 90th percentile Columbia grad knowing that? Is working at the law school a "legal field?"
  
• On the same webpage, Columbia claims that "82% of Columbia's Class of 2009 chose to join law firms of varying sizes and areas of practice immediately after earning their J.D. degree...6% immediately entered public interest, government, or academic positions; Eight percent of the Class of 2009 received federal clerkships throughout the country; and 2% entered the business sector." (emphasis mine).
  
• But, in May of 2009, Columbia "offered their unemployed graduates low-paying eight- or nine-month-long fellowships so as to be able to count those students as employed for the purposes of USNWR." According to Above the Law, there were five of these fellowships offered.

Now, I would hope readers of this blog are sharp enough to figure out that something here smells repulsively of bullshit. And no matter which part is bullshit, somehow it all comes back to Columbia School of Law.

The grand point here is that even if Columbia wants to cry foul over the bruising indignity of having a Columbia M.A. in International Law / Florida J.D. graduate confused with a Columbia J.D., Columbia is playing the numbers shell-game as much as anyone else.

No one has a 98-100% response rate on voluntary surveys sent to 300-400 people. Temporary fellowships are not employment, and they wouldn't be necessary if 98% could actually find "legal field" employment. "Within nine months" is not "immediately," and I imagine few of Columbia's lower-tier graduates had the pleasure of "choosing" the firm they practiced at.

I'm not going to sit here and say that Columbia is not a good school. On the contrary, it has an excellent placement record and is probably worth the expenditure for a student going in to law school fully-informed; for a student whose goal is to work in the Manhattan skyscrapers, there might not be a better option than going to Columbia provided he or she can gain admission and put up with the people there. It's one of maybe 20 or so schools I'd actually consider paying full tuition at.

But let's not pretend schools like Columbia are exempt from the "creative accounting" explained in the New York Times article. Whether a fourth tier for-profit counts Arby's employees as "employed" or a certain school concocts some fellowship to boost employment and stay ahead of a NYU and Penn in the rankings, it's manipulation, it's unfair to consumers, and it's ethically abhorrent, no matter what the ABA finds permissible.