19 Year Old International Lawyer? Um...No.

If you ever want to see a collection of delusional human beings, look no further than this article here and half the comments it's generated:

[16-year-old Kayla Heard] lives with her mother and brother on the banks of the Hood Canal in Union, Wash. Next month, she will become the youngest person ever to graduate from Washington State University. She pursued her degree online.
...
So positive was Kayla's undergraduate online experience, she hopes to attend law school online and to that end will spend her summer filling out applications.
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The homeschooler, who will pursue international law, hopes to work abroad one day.

This is damned crazy, isn't it?

I explained my position in a comment, but just to reiterate, I honestly believe this child's parents are grossly negligent, especially if they promote her getting an online degree.

I am all for nurturing prodigies. If our society somehow (against all odds) produces the next Mozart or Keats, we should celebrate their gifts and do everything we can as a society to aid their progress.

But I want to be crystal clear: getting an online college degree at 16 is neither an indication of prodigy or a process that truly can nurture intellectual gifts. Likewise, getting an online degree in law does nothing to nurture one's innate abilities, nor does it particularly improve one's employability.

This individual is obviously gifted. But checking off perfunctory requirements in a race to get the high school diploma, the B.A., the graduate degree, is an absurd task that detracts from their overall intellect by denying them an opportunity to nurture their talents in other ways. Instead of knowledge being an end in itself, knowledge becomes a means to attaining another notch in the belt, whereby the individual can plow through to another degree.

If Kayla does graduate with a law degree at 19, I would never in a million years hire her as a young attorney. No one should. An important part of being a lawyer (or any profession) is having some level of emotional development. I'm all for homeschooling for elementary school in some cases, but if you rarely leave the house and interact with others, you have no business representing anyone.

If we're ever going to change things in American education, we have to start recognizing some fundamental truths. One such truth is that no matter how smart and how driven you are, you simply cannot always get your dream job. A real parent would grab young Kayla by the shoulders and tell her that if she wants to be an international lawyer, she needs to go to a real brick-and-mortar law school, and that going to an online law school will prove to be a worthless sojourn that may actually foreclose her from working in the firms that do international law.

If we're ever to restore our system of education, we must stop telling these lies. People are not skeptics merely because they are "jealous" of another's abilities. They are skeptics because blind faith in anything - including the "I can do anything" mantra - is one of the worst attributes of humanity.

What happens to these poor children is that they are pumped up by a dim-witted Hollywood-fueled society who wants to tell them they are amazing and push them through the ranks of schooling. But at the end of the tunnel, what happens? They wind up with PhD's fighting for faculty positions like the other schmucks who wound up in graduate school. Or, in Kayla's case, they wind up as unemployed attorneys because in the rah-rah lead-up to her online law degree no one told her that no one at the big law firms is interested in a degree from Concord.

There's a disconnect between what the market really wants and between what people tell these kids the market wants. That's ultimately the problem. The truth is that the only people who want a 19-year-old lawyer are people who looking for amusement, that news article about the youngest-person-ever doing something. The people who actually pay lawyers to do international law work have no business for a 19-year-old lawyer who's never been in a brick-and-mortar school.

Who ultimately loses in this arrangement? The kids, and no one else. The amused get what they want - while calling those of us with an ounce of realism "jealous" - and the employers continue employing people who are actually qualified in their eyes. The kid is stuck with whatever baggage the ignorance of the promoters left him with.

In the end, that's ultimately the problem with our entire educational system: no one's really and honestly interested in making the actual students fit market needs. The teachers teach to tests so they can pass politicians' low hurdles. The college professors teach their research interests. The advisers advise to pre-set scheduling sheets. The law professors never bother actually preparing their students for practice, so long as they set up a class that will make exam-grading easy and allow them to teach socratically.

And so employers are left finding clumsy heuristics. If a student has a B.S. degree, surely at some point, they learned how to function in an office and do basic mathematics. If a student has a M.B.A., surely at some point someone taught them how to manage inventory and do basic accounting. And so with every generation, another degree is required. In my parents' generation, getting a bachelor's set one for the labor market. In my older cousin's, getting a master's degree meant you were in good shape. In my generation, not even an advanced graduate degree can save you unless it's in a niche field of need.

To fix our education system, we have to stop thinking this way. But poor Kayla obviously has too many people in her life telling her that her next step should always be to get a degree. Whoever told her officially entering college at 10 was a good idea should be slapped across the face, and whoever is telling her now that entering a law curriculum at 16 is a good idea should be slapped across the face. And the journalists who perpetuate these myths by appealing to the stupid should be slapped across the face.

The best thing Kayla can do right now is avoid school like the plague for a good 3-4 years. Grow up (from 16-20 is a crucial and large developmental step for anyone) a bit. Travel, work, learn in those ways that people used to learn but now they eschew in favor of yet another degree. Do something else, but for the love of all that's good and holy, do not stay in the education vortex. The world (the real world, the one that matters) simply does not reward you for racing through an education, regardless of what the Hollywood-minded tell you.

And sadly, you are not "unique" enough to change the fundamentals of the world. No one is, and anyone who tells you otherwise is derelict in their duty as a parent, adviser, or global citizen. Knowledge is power, but it has to be the right kind of knowledge, and until you learn the world enough to know who gets hired as international lawyers, you'd be wise to stay away from legal education.

I Should Be Optimistic Because . . .

This is from Larry Ribstein, who has written previously about the slow collapse of biglaw and the future of the legal profession in general:

"I think the horizon for what you can do with a legal education hasn't shrunk, but has actually expanded," said Ribstein, the Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Chair in Law. "Change can be bad for some people, especially for those who have a stake in the current system, but it can also be good, and I think the future is going to be much more complex than envisioned by some critics."

When you say "those who have a stake in the current system," are you looking the mirror at all, Larry?

Regardless, I'm really intrigued by this idea that legal education is now opening more doors than it has in the past, what those doors are (I'd love to find one), and how the educational industry created those doors.

Unfortunately, none of those pesky details made it into the article. They must have been left on the editing room floor. Instead, the writer gives us a rather incoherent stream of reasoning including the following in an unconnected fashion:

• Law schools should focus on meeting global demand.
• Legal education hasn't changed much in the last century because of rigid accreditation standards.
• Biglaw is dying.
• Outsourcing is just a temporary stop-gap until the machines improve efficiency domestically and lawyer work becomes more exciting ("I think this is going to lead to an era of lawyers doing even more interesting things than they're doing now.")
• Most of the professors working now will be dead or retired when these changes really change the profession (as opposed to them being affected by the scores of unemployed recent graduates).

But, yeah, there's room for optimism:

"The plus side for entering law students is that their future is much more wide open than that of their immediate predecessors," he said. "So that's a cause for optimism."

In the future, I hope we have law professors who actually back up their ridiculous statements with actual proof. Frankly, I think a law school graduate in 1960 had it much, much better than a law school graduate of 2010. That is, unless Ribstein can actually show us where these mystical doors that make the J.D. a versatile instead of a one-way ticket to attorney licensing.

The caption on the picture instructs the reader to be skeptical that the future of the legal profession is dire. If baseless statements like "you can do more with a legal education now!" are cause for optimism, I find my healthy skepticism is best used in the opposite direction, especially since people like Prof. Ribstein the marketers with the vested interest in keeping the system pumping.

In the meantime, I'll continue to consider statements like "the horizon for what you can do with a law degree hasn't shrunk, but has actually expanded" no better to the crap spewed by liberal arts advisers selling sociology degrees to future retail workers. Way to aim high, legal education.

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.

Maryland Rakes the Money In

A few days ago, I made a post comparing the elite schools in America to a well-marketed luxury product that attains the additional power of actually increasing one's employability (as awesome as owning a Porsche is, what are you going to do, drive it to the interview? Put "Porsche owner" on your resume?).

An additional perk that separates colleges from other brands is that the consumers actually welcome the opportunity to donate a fortune to them. Instead of finding this clinically insane, people applaud the generous act of so-called public service. Here is an example:

On Monday afternoon, the W. P. Carey Foundation plans to announce that it will give $30 million to the University of Maryland School of Law, which is in Baltimore. It will be renamed the Francis King Carey School of Law, after [William Polk] Carey’s grandfather, an 1880 graduate.

Holy mother of goodness. The university of Maryland law school has about 800 students. Non-resident tuition at Maryland is about $17.5k this year. So ignoring fees and part-time students, their minimum tuition intake this year is about $14 million.

Do you think the Maryland administration is smiling right now?

With that amount of cash pouring in, the university could slash tuition for the next few years. And although that wouldn't be happening in any event, it looks like the money will go mostly towards aiding a joint MBA/JD program, because if you combine two saturated public school degrees together, they might make something marketable.

So what could prompt this crazy uncle moneybags to give away a fortune to a law school despite the absurd amount of genuinely-needy and socially-beneficial alternatives?

“It’s time to think about the future of Baltimore, a great city with a great history,” said Mr. Carey, the 80-year-old founder of W.P. Carey & Company, a corporate real estate financing firm. “The law school is now in the first tier. I’m looking forward to a joint J.D.-M.B.A. program, where it will be one big great happy family, giving people the best education imaginable, in Baltimore.”

He envisions a program linking the Carey School of Law with the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business — named for Mr. Carey’s great-great-great-grandfather after a $50 million gift from the Carey Foundation in 2006.

Is there anything sadder than the name-whores who dump cash into institutions that - all things considered - don't need it just to slap their name on something "prestigious?" If he really believes in education, couldn't he have given his money to the struggling and downtrodden Baltimore public school system, which would infinitely aid the local economy more? And what's this about Maryland being "now in the first tier?" That's really an effective marketing pitch? Really?

Sometimes I think the rich in this country are as ignorant and socially-blind as the French blue-blooded nobles in the 18th century, although I don't see anyone building a guillotine any time soon. All it takes is a phone call and Mr. Carey could have found a thousand different places where his money would have made a real, ground-floor difference in the Baltimore community. Legal aids, for example, could all use the funding to help protect the poor from injustice. Disease research at Hopkins would bring more educated people into the Baltimore community. For $30 million, he could have set up programs and - gasp - actual businesses that could help the mass of urban poor who have few alternatives. Instead, he puts his millions into the economic sink-hole of a law school. Even an ounce of basic, hubris-free, informed humanity would have compelled him to put his money elsewhere. Instead, he gets lauded in the New York Times for his massive waste of resources.

I appreciate his generous spirit. Not all of the wealthy in this country have a philanthropic mindset, but just about the last thing our economy or our people need is massive gifts for law schools.

What's Up with the Virginia Bar Exam?

We all know that schools manipulate employment information because it's self-reported to the ABA and the rankings guru, but I wouldn't think a school could have any way of manipulating its bar exam passage rates. But then I saw this article today and I wondered if the wizards behind the curtain at Liberty had pulled it off:

Liberty University School of Law students achieved a 100 percent pass rate on the Virginia Bar Examination in February 2011.
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Liberty is the only Virginia school to achieve the 100 percent rate in the state this year. Washington & Lee was at 90 percent; George Mason, 84.8 percent; University of Virginia, 75 percent; and the College of William & Mary, 73.3 percent.

I might actually believe the 100 percent claim with minimal skepticism if all the schools were above 90 percent. But with UVa and William and Mary at 75 and 73.3, I'm not sure I can buy it. I'm not an elitist by any stretch, but come on. Liberty is bottom-tier. The median LSAT in 2009 was a 150. 1L attrition in the Class of 2008 was 27.1%.

Liberty has in the past overstated its bar performance, but as far as I know there's no accounting metric that allows you to say student x passed they bar when they clearly failed. The official page says they hit 100%. Did only 5 students sit for it? The percentages look as though it may have been a low turnout.

In any event, it looks like the University of Virginia is taking measures to boost its pass rate (and claim it's doing something for unemployed graduates), but in the grand scheme of things, isn't this report - and others where third-tier toilets occasionally have higher pass rates than better-ranked schools - either an indictment of the bar exam process OR of the rankings system and prestige-based law?

The bar exam is either a good metric of competency or it isn't. If it is, the fact that lower-ranked schools can "do more with less" by taking 153 LSAT kids and getting them licensed while a school with 165 LSAT kids cannot get as many to pass signifies that the former institution is actually a become a competent lawyer. If it's not, then we should just scrap the thing and find a different way to certify people.

See also: http://www.ilrg.com/rankings/law/index.php/1/desc/Bar, where it shows in the 2009 data where you can see many lower-ranked schools outperforming higher ranked peers.

The Waste of Legal Scholarship

This shouldn't surprise anyone, but Richard Neumann of Hofstra has pointed out that legal "scholarship" costs almost $100,000 per article by a full-tenured professor during a recent educational conference on tenure and the future of legal education:

Even articles written by assistant professors at lower-paying law schools come with a price tag between $25,000 and $42,000, he estimated.

Neumann also pointed to research suggesting that 43% of law review articles are never cited by anyone. "At least a third of these things have no value," he said. "Who is paying for that? Students who will graduate with six figures of debt."

Neumann actually uses this as a reason to argue for protecting tenure; he seems to believe that the tenure protection will allow faculty to think creatively about revamping legal education. I think he's a bit biased by his stake in the fight, but no one's perfect, and his realization that student's increasing debt loads are caused in some small part by subsidizing worthless research is a good start.

Also on the panel were Dean Yellen of Loyola-Chicago and Dean Matasar of NYLS. It seems like these guys do nothing but travel to conferences and pontificate. I wonder if Neumann will ever talk about the wasted money paying deans to fly around the country. There's nothing really unexpected from either.

Those unread articles in law journals cost tens of thousands to produce with very low benefits (as in, more people will read this sentence than who honestly read most secondary journals). Under no cost-benefit analysis would these things ever get greenlighted, but unfortunately, American universities not only eschewed cost-benefit analysis, but most made production of this worthless crud the hallmark of a tenure-worthy professor (instead of, say, teaching). Instead of producing only truly meritorious scholarship, the academy (including its legal peers) took to publishing as a CV-stuffer and convinced itself that its "scholarly mission" requires constant publication regardless of the quality. Their work becomes important because they produced it, not because it shares any qualities with truly important work.

And the students are left shouldering the cost of these things, all so the university can feel better about itself under standards and "missions" it fully made up.

I'm not saying all scholarship is worthless, not even all legal scholarship; that would be absurd. But the system we have now is a crap machine that has allows people to be employed at lucrative salaries for writing things no one wants. For the time, effort, and energy spent on articles that have no economic value, all to impress some students on a law review board, these individuals could be doing things that have some value to society, like running clinics to represent indigent clients. At the very least, it's unjust to have students subsidize these quixotic efforts, just as it would be to force students to subsidize novel or screenplay or poetry anthology attempts.

$100,000 with a good chance it never proves worthy enough to cite. If you think of all the alternative uses for that $100,000 per full-time professor article and you write out all the possible options, your list is guaranteed to be far more interesting than 95% of what's come out of legal academia in the last few decades. And it will probably contain some items the paying customers would actually use and appreciate.