Misinformation Runs Rampant in this Business

It's kind of astonishing that, with all the articles and data and simple graphs out there, people still pop up on these blogs and say things like "any licensed attorney can land a job or hang a shingle!"

Um...yeah, and if you make toast and scrambled eggs, surely you can set up a diner somewhere. And surely if you can drive a car, you can just get a job driving a truck. Golly, unemployment would just be solved like that if people would just "hang a shingle" at whatever they're competent.

But I digress. 2011 has been a year of almost nothing but articles and studies confirming what the so-called "scambloggers" have alleged for some time now. And yet the misconceptions not only exist, but in many cases plague the dialogue.

I give you, for example, this column by Chris Mondics at the Philadelphia Inquirer. It's not a bad column; it highlights the need for employment transparency. But then I read lines like this:

...the high paying jobs at big firms that justified high tuitions...

And this:

The concern raised by Grassley and others is this: Law students have been taking on loans of $100,000 or more on the assumption that they will obtain lucrative employment once they graduate. And that was a reasonable assumption until 2008, when big firms in New York were starting first year lawyers at $160,000; the going rate in Philadelphia was $145,000.

Just to make sure readers don't continue these misconceptions after reading this post:

1. The high salaries never justified the rising tuition at the 150+ schools where less than 5% of the student body had any prayer at getting those jobs, which exist on a do-or-die basis thanks to the bimodal salary curve.

2. The concern raised by Grassley is not limited to those who go to law school on the assumption they'll get "lucrative employment," an assumption that was never reasonable at 180+ law schools. Grassley's concern - and that raised by these bloggers - is that law schools misrepresent their data to make law school seem like a much better investment than it is.

Columns like this inadvertently do exactly what the law schools want them to do: make it seem like prospective law students are greedy gamblers who only went for six-figure jobs.

In reality, the six-figure, top law school job market is a small potato. The bigger issue is that 95% of the schools out there lure students in with implied promises of a better life and white collar prestige in a profession where they'll get to help people and practice law, a reality that only 1/2-2/3 of their graduates see under the best-case scenarios.

Very few people go - or ever went - to fourth-tier schools expecting a big payday. Multitudes, however, go - and went - expecting a stable middle-class escape from Baristaland. The schools didn't just advertise the $160,000 jobs to pull in greedy people seeking those, they also used them to imply that making $60k as an attorney is really easy, and therefore worth a larger debt load.