Washington Post Reports on Law School

Sometimes I wish journalists would just let the subjects speak on something a la a film documentary or an interview. Today's Washington Post article on law school employment numbers and transparency is an example of this.

A chorus of complaints from newly minted lawyers who say they were lured into the profession by schools that reported too-rosy employment prospects found a sympathetic ear last week, as the American Bar Association urged law schools to present more accurate information.
...
Law school, once viewed as a golden ticket, has become for some graduates a liability. Though law school has never been cheap, annual tuition and fees at private schools on average increased from $21, 790 in 2000 to $35,743 in 2009, with graduates typically borrowing more than $100,000 to finance their education.

It's about as pedestrian as you can get, and I have to wonder what the Post's motivation was in publishing a fraction of what the New York Times did last month. And I don't understand the shout-out to Esq. Never, a blog that's updated once in the last six months, when there are so many better examples of "scamblogging" out there. Doesn't "Jobless Juris Doctor" convey the message clear enough?

But I suppose any publicity for the truth about law school numbers is good publicity, even if it's just an elementary summary of what other media outlets have been doing for the last month.

But I do wish they would have checked their facts a little bit:

Promoting this sort of voluntary disclosure is the mission of a nonprofit group called Law School Transparency, started by two Villanova University law school students in 2009, but thus far it has received little concrete response.

Yikes; hopefully this is corrected soon, for the LST guys' sake. They went to Vanderbilt, which is a significantly better school than Villanova, a place that has submitted false data to reporting agencies, which did not get a mention in the article; personally, I think it's a wonderful example of a well-known school fudging the numbers. Also would have loved to see them mention that Georgetown has manipulated its employment data, since that would appeal directly to the Post's readership.