Prof. Paul Campos Does Some Independent Research for The New Republic

Although this article in The New Republic by Paul Campos, Professor of Law at Colorado, seems to be phrased more as a general myth-busting piece about how law schools push misleading statistics and the results thereof, the most interesting part of the article is when Prof. Campos reveals he did some revealing in-depth study of one school's employment numbers:

In order to calculate [the number of graduates employed in full-time positions], I used employment data drawn from 183 individual NALP forms, in which graduates of one top 50 school self-reported their employment status nine months after graduation. This data suggests that fully one-third of those graduates who report they are working in full-time jobs that require a law degree are in temporary, rather than permanent, positions....

When we take temporary employment into account, it appears that approximately 45 percent of 2010 graduates of this particular top-50 law school had real legal jobs nine months after graduation....

In what may have been a separate research task, Prof. Campos claims to have audited a sample of NALP responses:

[I] found several instances of people describing themselves as employed permanently or full-time, when in fact they had temporary or part-time jobs (I found no instances of inaccuracies running in the other direction). Perhaps some graduates exaggerate their employment status out of embarrassment, or for strategic reasons, but, whatever their reasons might be, this apparently not uncommon practice suggests that the true employment rate should be lowered even further.

Completely unsurprising but still revolting. This article speaks for itself, but I want to make four brief observations:

1. The New Republic is hardly a sworn enemy of higher education; if anything, I would guess a significant portion of their readership exists because liberal arts majors, graduate students, and professors persist.
2. The University of Colorado-Boulder was ranked 47th in the most recent US News and World Reports. Should we assume it's the "top 50 school" he's referring to?
3. Granted, Paul Campos is generally a skeptic of American law, but one reason I think professors like Paul Campos come forward and actually show concern about this colossal mess is that - lost in the system among the tweed jacket privateers - there are actually people who care about their students and build relationships with many of them. As these types of professors see great students and good, hard-working people utterly fail on the job market, they can't help but research what the hell is going on and how this mess happened. I would expect more professorial inquiry as it becomes clear that many high-quality students from the classes of 2008, 2009, 2010, and now 2011 will get absolutely swallowed by an unjust system.
4. If this were published just one year ago, it would have been ground-breaking journalism that would have seemed out of left-field and startled some of those who used to staunchly write-off the so-called scamblogs as bitter extremists shouting in the woods. Now it's fairly routine and accepted fare. Think about that for a second.