Law Grad Wants FTC to Investigate Law Schools

The only surprising thing about this article is that the ABA Journal actually ran it.

Joel Murray, a recent graduate of the University of California at Davis law school, posted a paper outlining his conclusions at the Social Science Research Network, the National Law Journal reports. "Many law schools are violating the FTC Act by reporting false and misleading employment statistics,” he writes. "The FTC should begin an investigation into U.S. law schools."

Apparently, Murray must not have "networked" enough at the 23rd-best law school in the country to get a job that would compensate him enough to not think of writing this article.

We also have quotes from professors Gerald Thain and Paul Campos, the latter noting that "schools are, essentially, lying to the federal government for the purposes of getting benefits."

Not that I have much faith in the FTC, but it's nice to see people showing some creativity in finding ways the law schools have done wrong. Some day I would like to compose a compendium of all the possible laws, rules, and common sense public policies violated by the law school system, but frankly that task seems more herculean by the week.

Bob Morse, Champion for Change

The most passive journalist on the planet is at it again today, where he discusses the latest ABA jobs data changes.

U.S. News had been among those urging the ABA to take action to improve the credibility of the important consumer information.

Yes, "urging." See, kids, this is how reform works. Figureheads like Bob Morse are a position to change the system immediately, and yet they do nothing. Then, when the people who actually care about reform show up and make a self-evident point, the coat-riders like Morse join the chorus. Then, when they write the history, they were a full-fledged member of the justified opposition, even though they refused to enact any reform steps for years.

But that's not all the magic from Bob's hand.

If the new ABA rules are implemented, U.S. News will use our own law school statistical surveys in fall 2011 to collect and eventually publish the entire new richer and more detailed set of employment and jobs data from each law school for 2010 J.D. graduates. When we gather this richer data set, we will be able to make a more exact determination of how our ranking methodology will change.

Think about this for a moment. The new ABA guidelines already make clear what information will be collected. Granted, Morse and Co. don't know what the response rates will be or how reliable the state-wide surveys will be, but you'd think they could be working with the methodology prior to getting the data itself. After all, statistical methodology should be theoretically-sound independent of the data.

Is Morse being ambiguous and as commitment-free as possible so he can make methadological adjustments to keep the T-14 the T-14, or the T-6 the T-6? I'll leave you to speculate, but it's hard for a cynic like me to not make that assumption given the nature of the propaganda business.

Viva Reform! ABA Adpots Some Changes to Reporting, Industry Shill Objects

The ABA Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has adopted more enhanced reporting standards. Law school transparency has a good write-up of the changes, and I encourage readers to just go there, but the basics, and my minor criticisms, are as follows:

1. Job placement: Will be divided into (1) employed in position w/ JD; (2) employed w/ JD preferred; (3) another professional job; (4) non-professional job; (5) student; (6) unemployed, seeking; (7) unemployed, not seeking; (8) unknown.

I really dislike keeping the "unknown" category, and believe those students should be presumed unemployed, seeking. I also dislike the "professional/non-professional" dichotomy and feel a generic "non-law" category with salary data would suffice. My fear is that schools are going to count legal and administrative assistants and anything "sales" as "professional" jobs.

A very welcome change is that schools will now apparently be required to disclose if they are funding any of the positions. The type of job (firm size, government, etc.) information looks the same, but they've added an "employment location" section, so prospective law students can know where they'll likely wind up, how they have no prayer at practicing internationally, etc.

2. Salaries: As far as I can tell, this is the biggest change. Salaries are now going to be divorced from the institution. They seem to be doing away with school-specific salary information, citing the unreliability of the surveys, the lack of available data, the granularity of the data, etc. Instead, they're going to look at it by state.

I think this is still subject to being confusing (e.g. Syracuse and SUNY-Bufallo are going to be advantaged by higher New York City salaries, right?), but it's a step in the right direction, because it at least seeks to address the "skewing" that takes place that allows schools to report median private practice salaries in the six figures.

LST has a summary of the other minor concerns. Also on their entry is a comment by Linda A. Spagnola-Wendling, assistant dean at N.C. Central, who whines for far too many paragraphs about the "statistics beast."

Law School Career Services Offices (CSO’s) cannot mandate, coerce, bribe, or otherwise direct their new graduates to answer the annual questionnaire. It is a completely voluntary exercise which only goodwill and nagging manages to elicit responses.
....
Compounding this stress now is US News & World Report’s new method of calculating the overall employment rate used in their ranking system. Instead of using the number of graduates whose status is known as the denominator, they are using the number of total graduates. What this does in practical, mathematical terms is calculate all unknown graduates as unemployed. Regardless of the reason that the graduates failed to respond, to presume that they are unemployed is inaccurate, misleading and extremely detrimental to all the constituencies that rely on this information.
...
Calculating the employment rate based upon the known statuses of graduates who have responded supplies us with a representative sample – a well-known and widely accepted statistical practice. To deviate from this simply counters good reporting practices.
...
The statistical beast does not serve any master, either; merely its own greediness. Prospective law students will not get any more accurate information from this process, in fact it may be worse than before. The new ranking system races full steam ahead without notice to the law schools and without a plan of guidance or tools to help them reach the same point.

I've read a lot of dumb comments in my time blogging on this field, but this woman might take the cake in terms of unabashed, lazy inanity, and it appears that her poorly-written whine-fest was copied-and-pasted from elsewhere to boot.

First, she is statistically retarded. Voluntary "opt-in" responses from a diverse population never provide a valid sample when the variable affects the likelihood of response! To even use the term "representative sample" when the survey participants have the option to respond or not borders on statistical blasphemy. This is taught during the first week of any self-respecting college statistics course. But apparently this nimrod didn't learn basic statistics on her way through Rutgers (Bachelors) and Seton Hall (J.D.).

As I've explained previously, there was no basis for the previous U&S News assumption that 25% of the unknown graduates were employed. What that baseless assumption did was promote the unscrupulous to ignore graduates that they might have otherwise known to be unemployed, or to be more aggressive in contacting those who graduated at the top of the class.

No one is "presuming" that anyone is unemployed. But what I and the new U.S. News ranking will not do is presume someone is employed without proof. That's what the old system did. That's why it's changed, and why career service shills are the only people who favored it.

Second, Linda, no one is asking you and your crappy little office to be perfect and collect a response from every single graduate. But what I expect, and prospective law students need, is an accurate portrayal of that data. Notice in the standards that no one is really asking your office to work harder; I'm sure you work hard already. The crux of the changes is on the presentation side.

Her stringent efforts to oppose it with distortions of basic statistics and clumsy, heavy-handed metaphors suggest that she prefers the old, demonstrably-flawed system to the changes being made, which are being unanimously met with approval from groups like LST (although they say they don't always go far enough; I obviously concur). Gee, I wonder why that is?

Is this not a blatant admission that the old system distorted reality in favor of the law schools and the people who benefit from them? Is this not a strong sign that the changes are closing some oft-used loopholes to make the sky appear more blue?

Third, did y'all notice her use of words? "The statistical beast does not serve any master, either; merely its own greediness." This brazen piece of human waste is a law school administrator accusing industry reform advocates of greed, truly a ballsy approach. Linda Spagnola-Wending makes $75,000 a year working a relatively cushy administrative job (stable work week, light summers, etc.) in a low-rate state school whose tuition has increased 90+% for in-state residents since 2005 (hint: that's far more than the flagship university...), all in a state that has seven law schools and no major metro areas (unless you count Charlotte or Raleigh, which you shouldn't).

And yet we - those who want to better illuminate the collected data so that the numbers reflect reality instead a marketing narrative - are the greedy ones. I would have thought her Seton Hall legal education would have given her a better term, but I suppose not. In any event, this is truly Orwellian: those who want to enhance consumer protection and prevent consumer regret are greedy.

The real tell that this woman is an insufferable education-sector bureaucrat comes in the last paragraph of what I've quoted: "The new ranking system races full steam ahead without notice to the law schools ...."

Because, you see, to a career services person, the endgame isn't actually employing students or even getting accurate data, it's gaming the rankings. Don't take my word for it. Take hers. Why else do you think she feels the law schools need "notice" of how a 3rd-party "journalism" outlet ranks their institutions? Why should they be entitled to notice, and what self-respecting journalist outlet would actually give it to them? And if all the law schools are on an even playing field with respect to presentation, is it really a problem? And why, regardless of what the journalist outlet decides to do with the data, does that have anything to do with how the ABA collects data, which, one would assume, would have more to do with accreditation concerns?

In this ridiculous and ill-conceived letter, Spagnola-Wending wants us to believe that transparency is important, but not worth the extra effort for her office; that data collection issues are the same as data presentation issues; that the ABA somehow has authority over third-party ranking systems that should give schools notice so they can be more quickly manipulated; that we can assume many students not responding may "be indeed employed but merely too busy working in fulfilling and demanding legal jobs to respond" (yes, she actually wrote that); and that the ABA/state bars need to put another mandatory hammer on recent law graduates, as if non-dischargable debt isn't enough ('cause, you know, everything should be blamed on students and graduates; note how in this industry the previous customers are the bad guy...think about it).

Again, no one is asking career services offices to track down every last graduate. But if they do present the information, it needs to be an accurate portrayal of the class rather than a misleading presentation where half the class is in private practice making six figures when, in reality, 50+% are working jobs no one would ever go to law school to take. That's what these reforms get at, and that's why I think they're a positive step.

In fact, almost anything is a positive step when the previous methods of data collection have led to complete retards like Arthur Snyder ignoring the brutal job market while he builds a useless law school. The time for the ABA to stop being complicit in the misrepresentation of the legal reality has long passed. It's nice to finally see an attempt to correct some of the loopholes.

Thoughts on the Thomas Jefferson Law School Class Action

As many of you likely know, Thomas Jefferson College of Law, brand new campus and all, has been sued in a class action lawsuit:

According to the complaint, plaintiff Anna Alaburda graduated with honors from the San Diego law school in 2008 and passed the California bar examination, but has been unable to secure full-time employment as an attorney. She sent more than 150 resumes to law firms and received only one job offer that was "less favorable than non-law related jobs that were available to her."

...

She accrued more than $150,000 in student loans during her law school years, the complaint says.
...

Beth Kransberger, associate dean for student affairs at Thomas Jefferson, said that the school does not misrepresent its employment statistics.

"The school has always followed the guidelines established by the ABA. We've always been accurate in what we report, and we've always followed the system given to us by the ABA," Kransberger said. "This lawsuit is very much about a larger debate. This is part of the debate about whether it's practical to pursue a graduate degree in these difficult economic times."

Others have already covered this fairly well (see First Tier Toilet, PresTTTigious, and SubprimeJD) and I have skimmed the complaint and I don't wish to go on a point-by-point review of the merits, suffice to say that: (a) I'm happy that someone finally did this; and (b) it will be very interesting to see if the fraud claims can get past a motion for summary judgment. My opinion, devoid of any knowledge of California law and not exactly experienced in fraud, is that there are a few hurdles that might prove tricky to clear (e.g., reasonable reliance). It will also be very interesting to see if the USNWR or the ABA become involved somehow.

But I would like to point out a few things from the National Law Journal's write-up.

First, this student attended TJLS from 2005-2008, when the cost of attendance was around 43k (LSN currently lists the 2006-2007 number at $42,948). Her $150,000 in debt may seem obscene, but consider that in the 3-6 years since she's been in law school, tuition alone has risen to over 40k per year. The TJLS website does not list a total cost of attendance with this figure, but it has to be around 60k. As bad as the complaint looks with respect to Ms. Alaburda, students entering in the fall of 2011 are going to significantly worse off.

Second, Beth Kransberger is.... well, wrong. That's about the nicest way I can put it.

As far as I know, compliance with standards established by one's own industry almost never can completely relieve an industry participant of liability when they're dealing with an outside party; at an absolute minimum, it shouldn't. For example, if every participant in the automotive industry uses the same style of brake pads because the brake pads are endorsed by the safety committee of the industry's trade association, the automotive manufacturers may (and should) still be possibly liable in tort for brake pad failures. Why? Because it's possible that the entire industry has the standards wrong, for whatever reason.

Another example of this is in accounting and securities fraud. If I'm not mistaken, a company can comply 100% with standards set by FASB in its financial reports and still be liable for misrepresentation under various fraud provisions. Compliance with the existing standard is positive evidence for the company, but it's not dispositive because the standard itself may not completely align with the other area of law (here, fraud).

There's no perfect alignment between the ABA's reporting metrics and the California fraud statutes, and I doubt that the California legislature has ever endorsed compliance with ABA rules as a safe harbor against fraud claims. Fraud ultimately isn't about forcing companies to comply with their own industry's practices. It's about forcing companies to be honest with the public at large. So TJLS' compliance with the ABA's guidelines should have very little to do with whether their admissions presentations were deceptive to the average consumer.

Furthermore, this idea that this action is merely part of a "debate about whether it's practical to pursue a graduate degree in these difficult economic times" is laughable. This has nothing to do with "difficult economic times" and nothing do with general graduate degrees.

Am I skeptical of graduate school - and higher education - in general? Yes. But not all graduate degrees are cut from the same cloth. Medical school and dental school live by their own rules. Liberal arts PhD programs often have an intrinsic, non-economic value, and the market in those areas has been tight dating back decades (and has relatively little to do with the economic cycle). Advanced degrees in the sciences and engineering are more dependent on the economic cycle, but are generally still in demand (or so people say).

What is spelled out in this complaint is unique to law and exists independently of the economic cycle. Indeed, the complaint itself mentions that TJLS supposedly increased its graduates' employability in the 2007-2010 years. If Beth Kransberger insists that this is really about a JD possibly diminishing in value solely from external economic forces, why was there no drop after the recession began in earnest?

The numbers cited in the complaint say that TJLS law graduates weren't terribly effected by the recession. Dean Kransberger suggests otherwise, that it might be "impractical" to get a JD because of the rough economy. Well, which is it? Either Kransberger is lying and it has little to do with the economy or - gasp - the numbers were misleading.

But this is a side issue about an administrator who apparently didn't think through her words. The real point is that this isn't an economic issue at all, but rather something that has gone on for years. The complaint itself goes back to the early 2000s and if the student enrolled in 2005, the recession was non-existent when she chose TJLS, which is the time point truly relevant to the fraud claim.

And as others have pointed out - including our favorite Emory speaker - the changes in the legal field are not temporary adjustments of scale to account for a revenue shortfall, but rather systemic changes that affect the number of laborers needed in the field. Law firms are continuing an ongoing change that drastically reduces the need for new law graduates. Kransberger and others use the recession as a salve, a sort-of "get out of jail free" card that can relieve them of their failure to adjust to the brave new world where menial tasks are sent to India, partner tracks are non-existent, and paid work for young attorneys generally evaporates.

We're at a very interesting point in the law school bubble with the commencement of this suit. Rumors are circulating about possible class actions in New York, California, and Michigan (please see the message on Nando's page if you attended law school in one of those states). I imagine someone, somewhere, is researching the Florida schools, the Massachusetts schools, and perhaps even the Illinois, Ohio, Virginia, or Texas schools. If this class action against TJLS is successful in any way whatsoever, about 180 lawsuits will be filed the very next day.

It's an interesting time period, and although I'm skeptical and not sure what will happen with this particular case, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't more optimistic for the future as a result. It's uncertain, and there are all sorts of hurdles and pitfalls and complications, but no one ever said undoing and correcting a lousy system was easy. The fact that there's now a professional, non-pro-se complaint written by a decently-sized Los Angeles firm filed against a law school is a huge step from where we were just a year ago.

Edit: I just found this article on Miller Barondess' website that makes Kransberger look like an even bigger fool than I thought she was. Choice quotes:

Kransberger said student debt involves complex class issues, since those without inherited family wealth will almost certainly have to take out loans. Thomas Jefferson’s students are 35 percent first-generation college students, 25 percent first¬generation U.S. citizens and 40 percent students of color, she said. The school is one of the least expensive in the state, with annual tuition at $40,100.

Yikes. If I was an attorney for TJLS, I'd put a muzzle on this woman and attach it with superglue. She basically admitted that the school targets poor minorities, who, one should note, are less likely to find legal work sufficient to pay off the debt than those who have preexisting connections. Sorry if I'm not being politically correct, but to be honest, the legal field isn't, either. Diverse law schools are only a good thing to academics concerned with what the working world sees as a frivolity. Surely the school knows this, since it's a training ground for the legal profession and all. Given that TJLS is alleged to be a bad investment engaging in deceptive practices, admitting that you were targeting an abnormally high number of minorities, poor people, and new arrivals (read: less-sophisticated parties) seems like a very ill-advised move. And the school being "one of the least expensive" is a tallest dwarf competition, or a purest hooker competition. You get the idea, even if Kransberger doesn't.

Kransberger said Thomas Jefferson doesn’t cater to the rankings and that she’s been appalled by reports of other schools’ misdeeds.

You mean like building a new campus while your honors graduates are unemployed or working as waiters?

“A law degree remains an amazingly versatile degree, and that continues to be what drives us.”

No, what "drives" you is abuse of federally-backed loans, you lying sack of garbage. Versatile, my ass. Does anyone believe that crap anymore? And note that she's countering a fraud allegation with a bald-faced lie. Stop and think about that for a second.

Holder Gives Good Advice to UVa Grads

Attorney Eric Holder spoke at Virginia's commencement yesterday:

He asked of the audience, "I hope in the spirit of Robert Kennedy your most famous predecessor and mine, that you will dare greatly. That you will question what is accepted, and that you will change what is objectionable and that you will weed out injustice in all it's [sic] forms and that you will always remember the truth of his enduring words - 'The future is not a gift, it is an achievement'."

Absolutely.

I'm all for "weed[ing] out injustice in all its forms." Not that it's the most pressing form of injustice, but I certainly wouldn't object if they started with the law schools themselves.

On a related, here is the University of Virginia's "Facts and Statistics" page, where you can see that they're clinging to the '07, and '08 numbers:

More than 96% of the Class of 2008 reported employment at graduation

More than 99% of the Class of 2008 reported employment nine months after graduation.

Presence in Top Law Firms, Classes of 2007-09

• 73% with firms in American Lawyer's top 100 by gross revenue
• 11% with firms ranked between 100 and 200
• 16% with smaller firms

*Rankings according to American Lawyer 2008 survey

Public Interest Jobs, Classes of 2007-09

• 31 public interest groups
• 22 federal government
• 14 state and local government
• 16 military

Clerkships, Classes of 2007-09

• 9 U.S. Supreme Court (alumni clerkships, 2006-08)
• 44 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
• 93 U.S. District Courts and other federal courts
• 12 state courts
• 1 international court

It's now 2011. With a school the size of Virginia (>350 students per graduating class), there's no reason to lump classes together aside from rigging the statistics to allow the 2007 numbers to balance out the 2009 numbers. And you have to wonder why the 2010 graduates aren't mentioned at all.

Meanwhile, employment is so "99% guaranteed" amongst Virginia 3Ls that someone actually saw fit to publish this piece as an April fool's joke.

As its US News and World Report entry states, the salary discrepancy between public service employees and private sector employees (i.e. BigLaw) is over $100,000. But as this article states, the class of 2010 had a record number of people entering the public sector. Of course, the school tries to play it as a "we're committed to service" type of thing, but it can't be an accident that Virginia had a record number go into the government and public sectors in 2010 while the law school still finds it necessary to include 2006-2008 numbers in its employment and placement presentations, can it? Hmm....

Law School Psychology 101 And A Texas A&M Law School?

When researchers study the psychology of consumers, they often find that individuals will continue researching information about a product they've already purchased after they've bought it in order to rationalize their behavior and cure any buyer's remorse.

We see this all the time among law students. Today's example would be Marisa Mittelman, who seems excited about going to the University of San Diego Law School in the fall:

When choosing between my final two schools (UC-Hastings and USD), however, I have to say that from every angle these things seemed nearly equal. I heard amazing things from students at both schools, saying they loved their professors, that the administration is always helpful and available, and that job prospects weren’t looking great anywhere. Is this last part discouraging? Of course. The fact is, though, that students who are working hard are still getting jobs. Clearly, the market is not what it once was. That applies to any law school, though, and I think that if you’re one hundred percent sure you want to be an attorney, you need to just sort of go for it. I plan to work my ass off and hope for the best—I don’t think there’s anything more that someone who is intent on practicing law can do.

Here's an idea: How about getting rid of this idea that's it's justifiable to make a bad decision so long as you're "intent on practicing law." Can you imagine this logic applying to any other product?

"But, honey, I was intent on being a Bentley owner! That's why I signed the papers!"

And Marisa is remarkably cavalier about the lack of job opportunities. "[S]tudents who are working hard are still getting jobs" is (a) complete crap that's disrespectful to recent graduates and unemployed 3Ls who are probably smarter than her; and (b) not dispositive of whether she'll have a job if she works hard. (On the bright side, you may not have a job, but you'll integrate words like "dispositive" into your everyday vocabulary.)

Again, this type of logic never shows up in intelligent investment situations. "Yes, I understand the entire sector is down in the toilet and has limited prospects, but this little stock is the best of this small, affordable bunch, so I'll buy it." Not quite. Getting a law school degree right now is like buying a house in 2007. It may work out for you. You might have a nice place to live. But it's a catastrophic financial decision even if you're "100 percent sure" you want to be a homeowner. There are much better options out there. A helpful administration and lovable professors can't pay bills or compensate for the loss of your mid-20s.

USD is an amazing school...Call me an eternal optimist, but I can’t wait to become a lawyer. And I can’t wait to begin my time at the University of San Diego School of Law.

Reality check: USD may be the best school in San Diego, but it is not a well-regarded law school outside that city, therefore it cannot be "an amazing school." This woman wants to be a family law attorney. There are two other law schools in San Diego who feed into areas like family law in addition to the transplants from places like Loyola and Pepperdine. And if she has any designs on moving back to New York, she'll be in for a rude awakening when Brooklyn Law School grads are beating her out for jobs.

And it's not like family law is generally a field for self-styled "eternal optimists," anyway, but she may be saved from that rude awakening by the rude awakening that a much-smaller-than-advertised segment of her graduating class will have full-time employment, no matter how hard they work.

As if it were bad enough that places like San Diego are still reeling in those blinded by an irrational desire to be a lawyer at all costs, Texas Governor Rick Perry threw out the idea of a Texas A&M law school:

Gov. Rick Perry floated the notion in an offhand comment today as he began a speech honoring women in the state Legislature. After being introduced by actress and conservative activist Janine Turner, the governor talked about trying to convince Turner’s 13-year-old daughter, an aspiring lawyer, to enroll at A&M, his alma mater.

“By the time you get there, they will have a law school,” Perry predicted.

With the rate they're being proposed by insane politicians, it wouldn't surprise me if he was serious in his intent to mar a great university with a bubble-fueled law school.

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.

Yale Applications Down; William Mitchell Goes Transparent

As Above the Law reports today, Yale applications are down nearly 16.5% this year. Naturally, this doesn't quite make sense to Elie Mystal:

The NYT says “stay away from law school,” and applications to Yale drop. But if you read Above the Law, you pick up nuances like “stay away from crappy law schools.” See how much more subtle and informative that is? I know, I know, it bothers me too when the print media sensationalizes things.

No, Elie, you elitist T-14 marketing shill, the point is that it's so bad that even going to awesome schools may be a losing proposition. See, for example, you! People who went to T-14 schools, did well, scored at BigLaw, and were spit out 3-5 years later are a dime a dozen. In a world where even Georgetown has to fudge numbers, you know something's up with the game itself.

But Elie found a "more plausible" reason why there was a catacylsmic drop: Yale decided to start requiring a "dean's certificate" from one's former school:

Ah, now that’s an explanation that comports with what I’ve come to know about prospective law students. For many of them, it’s their first important professional decision; why would they put in the extra work required to apply to the very best law school? Paperwork? Bah. “I don’t want to do no paperwork, I want to be a lawyer.”

Look, I know it seems like I want there to be fewer law students by any means necessary. But really I just want people to be making intelligent decisions.

Not applying to Yale just because it requires more paperwork is not smart. But I suppose the kids not applying to Yale for that reason weren’t going to be Yale Law School material anyway.

Does this idiot honestly believe that otherwise-serious applicants strayed from a tip-top law school because they had to a dean's certificate, something that some other law schools already require, if I'm not mistaken? Seriously?

I know this might be a shock to people like Elie, but it wasn't just the 155 LSATs who are affected by the legal profession's down-turn. Those with 175 LSATs and shiny credentials are less likely to go as well if they understand it (properly) to be a giant crapshoot. If anything, the B.A. holder with the 170+ LSAT is more likely to be able to score a lucrative job absent law school than the 155 LSAT holder. Thus, Yale's prospective applicant pool might drop, as the 165 LSAT kids may not think themselves good enough to even bother.

It's all about alternatives. The kid who can get into Yale often has many of them, meaning there's no reason to take the (increasingly-higher) risk that law will not pan out. Kids lower on the academic totem pole may not have those alternatives and may keep applying to solid schools hoping they can secure a job down the line. Above all else, it's downright stupid to assume that high-achievers are not applying to a top law school because it involved an extra step when the LSAC process is already a bunch of hoop-jumping and the high achievers are more likely to jump through hoops, anyway. How condescending, yet entirely unsurprising.

Elie would, I suppose, rather propagate his elitist worldview that there's something magical about Yale ("Yale Law School material," blech) and the other top schools that somehow immunizes them from a lack of interest in law school unless students are being lazy and irrational.

___________________________________________

In happier news, William Mitchell has decided to be more transparent and has published a wide array of helpful information of its website to better diagnose the school and its propensity for producing quality graduates. Check this out:

• 67% of reporting employed 2009 graduates hold a position where bar admission is required.
• Overall average salaries range between $39,000 and $75,000, although there was a steep decline in the number of 2009 graduates reporting information.
• The 2009 overall average of $58,687 for 176 people includes at least 15 salaries of $100k or more.
• 11 graduates are working in publishing (Westlaw is in Minneapolis, if I'm not mistaken)
• 21 are in "solo practice," a dramatic rise from the '06-'07 numbers.

I still think there's some creative accounting going on here (they get 93% employed by discounting people who went back to school and are not seeking work, which to me presents a chicken-egg problem), but overall it's wonderful to have more informative numbers about what is going on.

Clearly, they're still oversaturating the area if only 2/3 of their employed graduates actually need a J.D. The salary information seems far more reasonable, even if it's still on the high side for 50-70% of graduates. I also find it curious that they used to focus on medians and now they're doing averages (I wonder which one is higher...).

The bottom line is that there's no way in heck I pay 50k a year plus interest to have a chance at a job averaging 58k with all sorts of strings attached.

Hopefully more schools will put out detailed information like this, even if it's buried deep on their side. I'll snoop around and see if I can find some others, and I encourage readers to email me if they spot any that I can dissect here.

NLJ Report Shows Contracting Proportion of Graduates Going to Top 250 Firms

The National Law Journal has conducted a survey of hiring at its top 250 law firms.

I'm not going to copy the list, suffice to say that many of their results match up with the similar small-scale study I did awhile back on this exact same subject. Stanford did more poorly than you'd expect; Howard, BYU, and Rutgers-Newark did better than expected. But there are also some surprises. Yale finishing only 15th is a surprise. Same with Wake Forest, Seton Hall, and Maryland being more highly rated that I'd expect.

But what's really noteworthy is not the order of the schools, but the percentages. Texas is 20th on the list and only a quarter of its grads land jobs at these firms. By the 50th school, the number drops to 10%. It's not just conjecture: you really do have to be in the top 10% for the jobs most of these schools portray as what the median graduate does.

The most noteworthy result is the comparison to 2009, most notably how more exclusive legal hiring has become:

[T]he top two schools on the list supplied nearly 3% more of their graduates to the nation's 250 largest law firms, compared with 2009. But overall, this year's Go-To Law Schools sent fewer graduates into the big-firm market. The percentage of 2010 graduates taking jobs at NLJ 250 law firms was 27.3%, compared with 30.3% of 2009 graduates.

With 45,000 graduates, a 3% drop translates into 1,350 people who are looking for jobs elsewhere. But if the top schools' numbers are increasing, that means that 1,350 deficit is coming disproportionately from lower-tiered schools. In other words, it seems big law firms are being more exclusive in their hiring practices and taking fewer chances on kids from second- and third-tier schools.

Thus, when the job market fully turns around, it looks like there may be a trend towards elitism instead of away from it. With fewer big law jobs to go around, big firms may be more reluctant to "take a chance" on no-name school graduates, instead making certain that they fulfill their "prestige" quotient. So when you third-tier career services' offices claim the job market is turning around, even if it's true for Cornell graduates, it's not necessarily true for everyone else.

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.

ABA Young Lawyers Division Adopts Tranparency Resolution

From the ABA Journal:

The ABA's Young Lawyers Division on Saturday voted to press for greater transparency for would-be lawyers considering law school, giving them a greater understanding of the risks of assuming the sometimes staggering debt required to obtain a J.D.

The division's assembly adopted a multi-point policy resolution, dubbed "Truth in Law School Education," urging law schools to improve post-graduate employment information provided to prospective students and to ensure that information is prominently featured in communications. The division is next expected to bring the resolution, which has had the support of ABA President Stephen N. Zack, to the ABA's policymaking House of Delegates at its annual meeting in August.

To remedy to current problem, the resolution calls for the following changes:

• that all ABA approved schools gives full employment information, including distinguishing between law/non-law and temporary/permanent.
• that all applicants to law school should have easy access to this data (either sent with enrollment information or "conspicuous notice" of where to find it.
• that ABA-approved schools should be more transparent with regard to graduate salaries and costs of attendance.
• that these should be integrated into the standards of approval for law schools.

The accompanying report also has some golden information regarding the Class of 2009's salary data (e.g., 69% of the academic jobs that are created by the schools are temporary, the percentage of solo practitioners among recent graduates rose 51% from 2008 to 2009).

Nice work, Jacqueline Epstein and whoever else put hard work into this. Hopefully the full ABA actually takes action on your resolution.

Meet Mary Cheney, #3 in her Class, Retail Clerk

For those of you who automatically think people who go to lower-tiered schools and can't find work don't work hard (or if you think that the legal profession is, in any way, promoting an efficient use of human resources, I encourage you to read the testimonial of Mary Cheney on IPWatchdog:

First-year law students are told to study hard, earn that invitation onto law review, become involved in extracurricular activities, obtain real-world experience through legal externships and graduate at the top of their class. They are told that if they do these things, they will land that Associate Attorney position at a reputable law firm. I followed this advice. I earned those honors, and I am currently working, not as an attorney but in the retail industry for about minimum wage.

Mary has an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from UC-San Diego. She graduated #3 at Thomas Jefferson Law School (now with new campus!), where she also served as a Law Review editor. She also has multiple items of legal experience, including an intern stint at Pfizer.

If you read this, or her resume, and your first response to her working in minimum wage retail is "she should have gone somewhere like UCLA," you need to have your god-damned head examined.

ChicagoNow's Michael Helfand on Law School and the Myth

ChicagoNow has a nice little blog written by attorney Michael Helfand that has now weighed in on the situation with law schools:

The number of law school graduates is increasing, even though the number of jobs has decreased. And even for those who do get jobs, not many are earning the $150,000 a year they thought they would. It's a myth. And the reality is especially harsh for those with huge loans to pay off.
...
Our society has this idea about lawyers - that they all make a lot of money and have prestigious careers. Like many things, what you see on TV or in the movies is not reality.

Helfand got his J.D. from the Chicago-Kent College of Law (ranked 67th or so in USNWR) and has been practicing law for 13 years.

So, for all those of you who think it's just the bitter recent graduates who can't find work that are complaining, it's not. At least from what I've observed, there's a widespread consensus among Gen. X and Y attorneys that the field of law as advertised by law schools and the Disney Corporation is as mythical as Never Never Land.

Minnesota Bar's Practice Blawg Running Law School Debt Survey

From Andrea Hable at Practice Blawg:

I feel really, really lucky. Why? I know so many people who have barely paid on their student loans at all. Which is not to say that it’s been easy for me, I just know that it could be much, much worse. I think most of my classmates acknowledge that our law school employment statistics are not close to what we see in real life, and I am no exception, which makes me curious what “realistic” employment statistics would look like. And, in the interests of seeing the bigger economic picture, I’m curious how new lawyers are really dealing with their debt burden.

If you graduated from law school in the last 10 years, please take our Practice Blawg survey below. Are you part of the 25% of new lawyers in temporary jobs? Or are you working two jobs to make ends meet? We’d like to know so we can push this discussion further.

Hable is a 2008 graduate of William Mitchell for what it's worth regarding her "luck."

The survey is anonymous. It asks for basic employment information on work, loans, etc. I strongly encourage readers who qualify (graduated from law school in the last 10 years) to fill it out regardless of your current employment/loan repayment situation, especially Minnesota Bar members who may pass by here.

Hiring Bottleneck for Lower-Level New Jersey State Courts

This shouldn't surprise anyone, but it's a message that should be shared since there are apparently people still under the delusion that the tip-top law school grads still have it hunky-dory and that you have to do something "wrong" to not get a good job.

Competition for jobs as a law clerk making $48,000 in Passaic County, New Jersey has skyrocketed.

State Superior Court judges in New Jersey have seen a substantial jump in law-clerk applicants — many from Ivy League schools all over the country — as big law firms cut back on hiring attorneys fresh out of law school.

“Over the last two years, I would say I’ve had four times as many applicants. And of those applicants, they’re all with superior grade averages of over 3.5 from law schools all over the country,” said McVeigh. “I normally get excellent r[e]sum[e]s. But the volume of excellent r[e]sum[e]s — even the quality — far surpasses anything I’ve ever seen. These are the kinds of applicants that would normally have gone to [state] Supreme Court, or one of the large-starting-salary firms.”

There are no Ivy League law schools in New Jersey, so if he strictly means "Ivy League," that means there are Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Harvard, or Yale grads applying to this place. If "Ivy League" was a misstatement for "top schools," that probably means there are U. of Chicago and Cal-Berkeley kids sending their resumes to the New Jersey State Supreme Court.

And tell me, exactly, how even lower-tier schools can continue to claim 100k+ median starting salaries if their 3.5+ kids are applying en masse for $48k jobs? At most law schools, a 3.5 is a pretty high GPA given the harsh curve. I'd estimate a 3.5 translates to being in the top 15-20% anywhere, and that's with a loose curve (with a tight curve - say, where the 1L median is a 2.5 - maybe only 5% of the 1L class would have a 3.5 or higher).

Out of all law students in the country, kids applying for these jobs are easily in the top 10%. The job pays $48,000 and is not that prestigious. How can anyone at this point believe the other 90% made a sound investment?

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.

Administrative Hypocrisy Rampant in NYT Article

Wow. For those who haven't seen it, the NY Times (David Segal) has done a seven-page article on the problems with law school (the law school "scam"). Special recognition to Kimber at SMS is owed for her presence and role in the piece. BIDER and JJD have already commented on the article, and there's little I can add to either their commentary or the article itself on its basic idea.

But I do want to call some of the administrative hypocrites in the article out for what they are, as it seems that part of the article may get lost in taking in the whole seven pages while people digest the enormity of having the problem showcased in the NYT. Considering the administrators in isolation shows why change to the current system must come from the outside, as the law school administrators become too biased in maintaining the status quo that benefits them. I think this is a point that needs to be made explicitly.

I greatly respect the work of Mr. Segal, so I'm going to borrow as minimally as possible to make my point, and I encourage all my readers to go to the Times and read the entire article; it's absolutely worth it.

First up is Beth Kransberger, associate dean at Thomas Jefferson School of Law (one of the law schools who occasionally advertise on this site via cheap google ads), who offered this:

[She] stands by [their 92% employment] figure, noting that it includes 25 percent of those graduates who could not be located, as well as anyone who went on to other graduate studies — all perfectly kosher under the guidelines....

“You need to take the high road,” she said. “Schools that are behaving the most ethically want students who come to law school with their eyes open."

Ms. Kransberger, you know very well that less than 25% of the non-respondents are employed, don't you? And you realize that graduate school is not the same thing as a remunerative job, right? So if you really want to "take the high road" and give students enough information to keep "their eyes open" as they enter law school, why are you adding them in?

No one cares about the "guidelines" except the USNWR people and the ABA. Students need to know how many of your respondents are actually employed as lawyers or at work similar in prestige and pay. "Schools . . . behaving . . . ethically" do not include an arbitrary figure of non-respondents as "employed" merely to boost their numbers, regardless of what the guidelines say what you can and can't do. You also should not be including baristas at Starbucks to behave "ethically." As a lawyer (I presume), you should know that law and ethics do not always align. As a legal educator, you should not be mistaking compliance with the law with moral behavior.

Next up is Phillip Closius, now dean at the University of Baltimore School of Law, who manipulated where low-LSAT students were placed to cause his former employer, Toledo, to shoot up in the rankings. He gets on the list with one paraphrased, self-explanatory sentiment:

In his estimation, a dean who pays attention to the U.S. News rankings isn’t gaming the system; he’s making the school better.

...as if the average student could tell one lick of difference in the education he or she received because the school's USNWR rating shot up 50 spots. On the previous page of the article, Dean Closius had said there were fallacies in the USNWR rankings; now he says following them makes the school better, which is an admission that they have value, which would suggest they are not based on fallacies. Make up your mind.

Next is Dean Yellen at Loyola, who gave this revelation:

...I do know that a lot of schools are hyping a lot of misleading statistics.

Yes, Dean Yellen . . . LIKE YOUR OWN!

Finally we have Yellen's cross-town rival David Greenberger, associate dean at DePaul, who added this:

I think [prospective students] should have all the info, and the info should be accurate, but saying once they know that they shouldn’t be allowed to come, that’s predicated on the idea that students are really ignorant and don’t know what is best for them.

Dean Greenberger, if this is what you believe, why does your school not give "all the info" and why is it not accurate?

Take a look at the following, directly from DePaul's prospective student profile in its admissions department:

Employment & Career Services Information

In 2009, 92.8% of the graduating class reported employment within nine months of graduation. While most DePaul graduates choose to stay in Illinois, specifically in Chicago, many choose to practice in other states. Popular employment locations for 2009 DePaul graduates include California, Indiana, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Washington, DC, and Wisconsin..

Employment Categories

Private Practice	50%
Business	26.1%
Government	12.1%
Public Interest	4.4%
Judicial Clerkships	1.5%
Academia	4.4%
Unknown	1.5%

Salary Statistics

Average Starting Salary in Private Practice	$97,056
Average Starting Salary in Business	$74,267
Total Starting Salary Range	$25,000-190,000

That's it for the website. What in the hell does any of this tell the average prospective student?

Anyone who's taken even an elementary course in statistics knows that an average is not a good measurement for data like this, as they are more susceptible to being skewed by outliers (like the $190,000 graduates) than a median.

What does "business" mean? Is stocking shelves at Costco "business?" How does one know anything by knowing the "average starting salary in business?" Is that all non-J.D. positions, or is it consulting and sales gigs? Is it J.D.-required jobs serving as inside counsel for major corporations?

What does it mean to say "92.8% of the graduating class reported employment within nine months of graduation." Is that permanent employment or do temporary gigs count, i.e., if they were employed for a 2-week gig during the nine month period? Is it really ALL graduates, or just survey respondents (ABA guidelines would suggest it's just survey respondents). Is it legal employment or non-legal employment? How many people even responded to the survey about their salaries? Obviously, if you had at least 7.2% unemployed, your salary range should be 0-$190,000, right?

To Dean Greenberger, I have no problem with the attitude in the latter half of your quote, but the students must have sufficient information first. Unless people like you and Dean Yellen start at home and have your own schools providing accurate, helpful information, your words are meaningless. It's one thing to talk about full and accurate information; get off your butt and do it. Set an example for your peers and the rest of the legal community and push for change in the ABA.

Until then you are nothing but another hypocrite spitting out empty buzz-words and platitudes trying to thrust blame on someone else. You have the power to change the system.

But unfortunately, as the article suggests (notably by Prof. Henderson), change is not likely to come from that quarter. There are at least six law school administrations mentioned or quoted in the article (including Georgetown's) and not a damned one of them comes off as defending anything of virtue. The quoted non-administrator professors all know what they're talking about and as far as I recall, each one puts a hammer to a nail. Something must change when you become an administrator; either that or the wrong people get promoted to that type of work.

These are the people who are to lead the next generation of lawyers, a field where ethical considerations are paramount. If they cannot perform their jobs without blatant hypocrisy or a confusion of ethics with following some silly guidelines, it speaks volumes about the state of legal education, as well as the ability of the profession to self-regulate.

Massachusetts School of Law: Can You Love and Hate A Thing Simultaneously?

Michael Coyne is the Associate Dean at the regionally-accredited Massachusetts School of Law, although given the tone of his recent piece in the Worcester Telegram, he might be promoted to Minister of Propaganda.

It's hard to disagree with sentiments such as this:

• Tuition costs at law schools accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) have doubled in the last nine years....
• Nowhere is the need for reform of higher education more obvious than in legal education....
• The ABA continues its monopolistic control over access to legal education, imposing its costly outdated model of 19th century legal education on all ABA law schools, where annual tuitions have now reached $50,000, with $60,000 annual tuitions likely just three years away.

I love that there is, somewhere, someone operating a law school that is pissing off the ABA. I love that they do not use the LSAT and rely instead on personal interviews. I love that they try to keep tuition down (40% of other schools) while spitting out functional lawyers.

What I don't like are ridiculous statements like this:

Mortgages, bonds, and long-term loan forgiveness programs are now needed to pay for the cost of a law degree at an ABA law school.

With ever-escalating tuitions and access to loans dwindling, our country’s middle class finds itself hard-pressed to see the promise of opportunity that a law degree provides as nothing more than a mirage on an ever-elusive horizon.

Access is not really the issue. Virtually anyone has access to federally-backed loans to go to school. The problem is that the return on the investment is not high enough to justify the cost. In my experience, very few people have problems with "access to loans;" if anything, the problem is that loans are too freely given without concern for the loan being paid back. There's no need to rephrase this issue as one of class or access. It's bad enough that they lie about the return on investment to rake in more money.

And then there's this strain of junk:

The MSL model is a highly successful, practice-based, lower-cost method of legal education patterned after the medical school approach to higher education.

...

MSL is now nationally recognized for its effectiveness at training law students and its success in winning various regional and national advocacy awards. Legal journals are reporting on the growing number of ABA law school graduates vocal about having been forced to sacrifice their lives on the altar of high ABA law school tuitions.

Highly successful? Nationally recognized? Really? And why do complaining students show that your school makes any more sense than the rest of them? Again, the problem isn't restricted to tuition, it's a debt- and rate-of-return problem. MSL could cost $10 for a degree, but if the degree is only worth $5, it's just as much a scam as any other school, just on a smaller scale.

And then there's this whopper:

Americans have a God-given right to higher education. It is the promised path to a better future that every generation of Americans has passed on to those that followed. Let freedom and innovation ring. We will then be able to provide the “justice for all” that the inscription above our Supreme Court promises.

Um...yeah. The inscription is "Equal Justice For All," higher education is not a "promised path" to anything, and if we were really to "let freedom and innovation ring," the last remnants of professionalism in the attorney field would perish.

There's a bunch of phony rhetoric about how the LSAT discriminates against minorities and how law schools are too white, but to me the real problem in the article is that he misses the point.

That outdated model of 19th century education is not "costly" to run. On the contrary, it's quite cheap: pack 80 students in a room and get someone to talk about negligence or equitable servitude. The high costs seem to come from elsewhere, specifically the human resource department. Many law schools are still profit centers, and the fact that for-profit enterprises can compete with public schools and non-profit universities should give you a hint that the cost really isn't that prohibitive.

The problem isn't, either, that we've closed access. It's that demand for a legal education has risen dramatically on manipulated statistics, a distorted public perception, and federally-backed loans that are remarkably easy to get.

Remember the housing crisis? One of the factors of rapidly escalating home prices was the fact that we had this idea that there was a strong preference (bordering on a right) for everyone to own a home. Lender standards were relaxed so more minorities and other poor people would have more access to home ownership. Within a decade, people were defaulting like crazy - and it wasn't just those who purchased expensive, overpriced homes, but also those poor people who suddenly had access to 75k-100k homes. Message: you should not be "promising" or give a "right" to what are basically high-cost economic goods.

I swear this all just happened less than 5 years ago, but people like Michael Coyne seem to have missed the message. If the MSL's idea of fixing the law school problem is to admit all comers on lower tuition than the other guys with no regard as to the chances of paying it back, they're just as bad as everyone else. How do they think poor minorities come up with the 15k a year needed to pay tuition? Last time I checked, not many poor people have 45k in the bank and very, very few could pay that and their living expenses without incurring more debt. And when they graduate with 45k (or more) in unsecured, non-dischargable debt, how are they going to pay it back? Their school will not have a good reputation and they will have little chance at getting a mid- or large-firm job.

To my eyes, there are two things that need to fundamentally change with law schools; there are many minor changes, but many can be seen as tangents of these two:

1. The curriculum needs to be changed to adequately prepare and develop modern working lawyers; this is an issue with the ABA's standards.
2. The law schools must reduce the number of graduates and/or the cost of a legal education to accurately meet the demand for legal services; this is an issue with ABA accreditation, federal bankruptcy law, federal higher education lending standards, and plain old false advertising.

MSL seems to have figured out the first. But Mr. Coyne seems out to lunch regarding the second, and MSL's solution would only serve to saturate the legal marketplace ever more. There may be fewer students with 300k in debt under the current MSL model. But if lawyer work is only valued at 25k a year, is 75k in total law school debt even worth it? With completely-opened access to legal education, the market only becomes more saturated, and the earning power of every law degree - especially MSL'S pieces of paper - drops dramatically.

Grasp that, Michael Coyne, and you'll see why I can't embrace your school, even though I salute it's general attitude towards the ABA.

Best Value Law Schools - Does Such a Thing Exist?

Something called preLaw magazine (no, really, that's how they capitalize it) has come with a list of 60 of the "best value" law schools in the United States. I think it's odd that there's 60 of them in a pool of only 200 or so, but for purposes of this blog I want to look only at the top of the list:

If I'm reading this correctly, the average student leaves the University of North Dakota Law School with $67k in debt and the median salary of employed private sector people is only 48k. Furthermore, only 81% of the graduates actually find work. As the median numbers for public and private are very similar, let's set the median salary at $47.5k.

These numbers mean that out of 100 graduates from the UND Law, at the nine-month period 41 will be making 47.5k or more. 41 will be making less than 47.5k, and 18 will be up a creek without a paddle. For the 41 making more, a debt load of $67k is probably manageable, but for the 59 who are making what is likely considerably less, the 67k in average debt doesn't seem to be justified. At best, it's a very risky proposition given such low reported salaries (imagine how low the actual long-term salaries are?).

10-year payback on a 67k loan @ 7% requires a monthly payment of about $800.00. That's $9,600 a year, which is a really high debt-to-income ratio for someone making under $45k (the government calculator I just checked claims that debt is only sustainable at 60k+). I suppose it's manageable for someone who's single in the low-rent areas of North Dakota, but try doing that with a family or dependents or other burdens (want a decent car?) and good luck.

And that's the 19th "best value" in the country. To be fair to UND, its tuition is very reasonable. The problem is that at such a low tuition, it seems as though the average student borrows the entire cost of attendance to have that much debt. You would think people living at home or working prior to school or getting scholarships would offset this, but somehow their average student has borrowed the entire cost. That's not entirely the school's fault.

And I have to give credit to a school like BYU, which keeps tuition low despite a fairly good reputation and being a private school.

But when you have a list like this, and four of your top nineteen "values" provide no return on investment information, you know there's a problem. How is that even responsible journalism? Northern Illinois is a "value" but you have no idea what graduates are actually making? Could you imagine other investments working this way? Of course not.

And if the median University of Georgia grad is really making $130k a year, I'll eat Burger King every day for a month and suffer the consequences.

The grand point in this exercise is that if the "A"-graded "values" are this flawed, how much of a non-"value" must the other 180 schools in the country be? If a place like UND is a "bargain" when odds are that over half its students graduate looking uphill at difficult debt repayments, what does that say about places like Cooley or New England or Golden Gate?

Perusing this list should remind one that in some situations there is no such thing as a "value." Home mortgages in rich suburbs in 2005 come to mind. When fairly-priced schools like Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississsippi, etc. are considered "values," I think a rational economist would have to move law schools into the same category good, where almost nothing nothing is a genuine "value."

The New Normal; Can "Entreprenurial" Dayton Adjust?

Great article from Claire Zillman at AmericanLawyer.com:

After two years of turmoil, the nation's largest law firms are settling into a new normal.
...
"The loss of leverage is not a short-term reaction, it's a significant long-term change," says Bingham McCutchen chairman Jay Zimmerman. "We're hiring selectively and using paralegals and staff lawyers for more mundane tasks." He's not alone: A little more than half of our respondents (55 percent) said that their firm had used contract lawyers, up from 44 percent a year ago.

Moreover, few firm leaders worried that a smaller class size would leave them short-staffed in the event of a sudden uptick in work. With so many recent law school graduates looking for jobs, firms can staff up quickly if the need arises, says Perkins Coie managing partner Robert Giles.

However, the law schools continue admitting students by the thousands even when their most notable practitioners have full cognizance that there is a massive oversupply of labor, so much so that elite students no longer have leverage.

And yet law school administrators, charged with instilling ethics in the next generation of lawyers, continue to place a premium on advertising. For example, Dayton just hired SIU Law Professor Paul McGreal as its new dean. What drew him to Dayton?

"This is a law school that's been entrepreneurial in looking at curriculum and the recruitment of students."

"[E]ntrepreneurial in . . . the recruitment of students?" It's hard to tell what exactly Dayton is doing that is so "entrepreneurial" since it's attracting students with a median LSAT of 152. Perhaps it's in the slick marketing as evidenced in their 2010 Viewbook that drew McGreal's attention. Let's see some samples:


For those who cannot read the small type (or cannot avert their eyes from the egregiously-hilarious large type), on this second page Dayton boasts of having a 94% job placement rate for the class of 2008 within nine months of graduating and having 90% of graduates pass the bar on the first time.

This is curious, to me, because their 2005 numbers were only 85.4% employed and 81% bar passage. Given that the school obviously has no scruples with lying ("the world definitely needs more lawyers?" "Long hours in the law library" will make someone NOT want to call Dr. Kevorkian?), my healthy skepticism is running at full blast. Perhaps this link for the Class of 2007's data better explains why the school can claim 94%:

					Job Type
					Bar admission required or anticipated (e.g., attorney and corporate counsel positions, law clerks, judicial clerks)		83.0%
					J.D. preferred, law degree enhances position (e.g., corporate contracts administrator, alternative dispute resolution specialist, government regulatory analyst, FBI special agent)		11.0%
					Professional/other (jobs that require professional skills or training but for which a J.D. is neither preferred nor particularly applicable; e.g., accountant, teacher, business manager, nurse)		5.0%
					Nonprofessional/other (job that does not require any professional skills or training or is taken on a temporary basis and not viewed as part of a career path)		1.0%

Right. 2007 was before the "new normal" fully set in and 17% of your grads did not need a Juris Doctor. Tell me again why the world needs more lawyers, please. Tell me why I should invest 3 years in a field where the "new normal" means the labor supply is so grossly oversaturated that firms believe they can hire good talent quickly if they need to.


Ah, yes. Dayton, that city of my dreams. To think someone actually wrote these pages and didn't collapse, instantly dead of a laughter attack, is astounding.


I agree completely.

Dean McGreal, if the outright dishonesty at work here is what you call "entrepreneurial," I think you need to brush up on your ethics. This is a moral issue, and viewing prospective students the way large retailers view poor people with welfare checks is unethical behavior.

As the survey and article cited above point out, there is a "new normal" in the legal world. Telling your students or prospective students the old one will return is no more based in rationality than believing Santa Claus will show up with a bag o' jobs this Christmas. The world does not need more lawyers right now. It needs better lawyers, and even better models of doing things, but raw fourth-tier graduates are not likely to be the former or do the latter.

Law firms no longer hire in increasing class sizes and raise fees every year. As they are now run like businesses, they track every associate's financial contributions to the firm in ways not present under the old model. Your job as an educator should be helping whatever students you have navigate a world where they will not only be attorneys, but also salesmen and debt collectors. If you have a model that you think will train students to excel in this world, by all means, continue it. But under no circumstances is it ethical or moral of you to charge tuition as if the old model were still in place at large firms and 90% of your students had hopes at attorney work. They don't.

McGreal plans to assess . . . ways to keep tuition affordable. Fundraising will be a key aspect of his new job. "We have to think about ways we can address the increasing cost of law school," he said.

Considering that most law schools are highly profitable cash cows for their larger universities, how about you start by slashing tuition across the board and lowering salaries in line with the reality that there is an oversupply of attorneys able to teach at your law school?

Just a simple suggestion, but maybe it's not "entrepreneurial" enough for Dean McGreal.