More Graduation Mockery: Integrity? Really?

Justice John Paul Stevens spoke at Northwestern's graduation yesterday, and since he's 91 I'm going to cut him some slack because these really aren't his problems, but this is a doozie of ridiculous graduation-type advice:

Stevens . . . told the students to “remember that your most valuable asset . . . is your integrity.”

“If your adversaries and colleagues know that your word is good, you will be a successful lawyer,” Stevens said.

Even at places like Northwestern, students are feeling the pressure of lawyer oversaturation, offhosring, etc.

Take this Above the Law writer, for example:

I graduated from Northwestern Law in 2009. It is now 2011, my loans are coming due (real due — not the fake, put ‘em in forebearance, due of yesteryear), and I am currently “employed” doing two things: reviewing documents at an embarrassing hourly wage on projects that start and stop without any sort of consistency, and writing “jokes” about the Microsoft Zune every weekday morning, every other week.

Yet, all he needs to "be a successful lawyer" is integrity? What a crock of insulting horseshit. It's like telling a starving African that all they need to eat like kings is hope and prayer. It sounds nice, but it just ain't true.

And to my mind, telling law students that all they need is integrity is especially egregious because their suffering is the result of a system that completely lacks integrity. Where is integrity in bogus and misleading employment statistics? Where is the integrity in training professionals by teaching them things other than the what the profession demands? Where is the integrity in price gouging a non-dischargable debt? Where is the integrity in numerical legerdemain to jump up 5 USNWR spots at the expense of your students' educations? Where is the integrity in drawing a 200k+ salary running an institution selling products 1/2 of the customers can never possibly use?

And all that is not to mention the obvious flaw with Justice Stevens' remarks: if your adversaries know your word in unflinchingly good, in this world, they'll play you like a sucker for it.

The pie-in-the-sky visions of inevitable legal success are insulting and offensive enough, but talking about integrity at a modern law school graduation? That's hypocrisy at its finest, even if the speaker himself has personal integrity to spare.

In non-law graduations, my quote of the day has to come from this Boise State graduate:

“It feels pretty good, it's more of a transition. Walking after law school, I'll be excited.” — Justin Jeppesen, BA in history, going on to University of Idaho law school.

How about you check back in three years and tell me how "excited" you are, Justin, to get that Idaho degree?

Law Grads: You Can Be Just Like Justice Thomas, Too! Just Follow Your Glimmers

It's graduation season, meaning another wave of 40,000 are told they can fit into a shrinking job market that has little use for half of them.

Up first we have Justice Clarence Thomas, who spoke at Nebraska Law School's graduation ceremony last Saturday. Even though Thomas went to Yale Law School almost forty years ago, he attempted to find relevance for today's graduates:

His attempts to get a job at a law firm resulted in numerous rejection letters, stirring anxiety in the future justice who had a young child at the time and staggering student loans. His lone job offer came from the state Missouri attorney general for meager pay and a long distance from his hometown of Savannah, Ga.

"Getting on the bottom rung would have been enough for me, but I couldn't even do that," Thomas said. "But I got to sit where you are today with that solitary job offer as my tenuous lifeline to that glimmer of hope. Little did I know what was in store for me."
...
"As will be the case for each of you, the people who really mattered were supportive," he said. "But many others were not the least bit encouraging, and some even chose to pour salt in the wounds of disappointment and despair. Whether it was those who looked at me with pity, or those who assured me that my one job offer was a waste of a Yale Law School education, many were just plain unhelpful, unsupportive and mean."

What the article (and presumably the justice) left out is that he got his job at the Missouri ADs office because he networked with the sitting attorney general of the state, John Danforth, who wound up being an influential Republican Senator and who was a Yale law alum himself. And on his oyez biolgraphy, it states that he had ample offers and chose to go to Missouri because the AG would left him work on tax and antitrust stuff. And according to a New York Times column, Thomas has previously mischaracterized his past for his own motives.

But all that murky stuff aside, the point is the message, right? That these graduates may be spat on, rejected, or be greeted with people who tell them their education was a waste, but they can really make it if they just follow that "glimmer of hope?"

Yes, kids, if you just happen to be the right color, make the right ally at Yale, finagle your way into the Reagan administration and land a judicial appointment just in time for Thurgood Marshall to retire, you can have great things in store for you, too! Even if you have Anita Hill speaking against you! And when your opinions are mocked by TTT law professors who point out your numerous errors, you get the last laugh!

I'm not going to deny that Clarence Thomas had a rough childhood that he persevered through it all towards success (and I don't question that southern law firms refused to hire blacks at all), but for most of those kids graduating today, their "glimmer of hope" is that a weird disease immobilizes 1/3 of the attorneys in Omaha, or that they win the lottery, or that their student loans are forgiven via an accounting error. Something tells me their networking at Nebraska did not land them in the company of many future Senators.

Frankly, hearing Thomas talk of "staggering student loans" and dim job prospects to this generation is insulting, almost like a celebrity complaining because their double-platinum card's APR rose from 0.7 to 1.2% or because they can't get their custom Mercedes for another month. Thomas' starting salary in Missouri in the early 70s was the equivalent of about 45k today. If you offered that job - which, remember, Thomas got because he was a Yale graduate with connections - 85% of the students in the audience would take it in a heartbeat. And Thomas' student loans from Yale couldn't have been that bad compared to what today's average graduates face. Yale tuition in 1976 was 4150 a year. Assuming it was slightly lower when Thomas was there, his total debt-to-salary ratio would have been manageable, especially since Yale offered him generous financial aid on account of his race. And his student loans were dischargable in bankruptcy. Today, it's become routine for students to try to pay back debt with a 3-1 debt-to-salary ratio, if not higher.

The overall appearance here is one of a condescending, out-of-touch buffoon who thinks his overstated struggles and extremely good fortune can somehow furnish sound advice to people cruelly disabled by a system rigged against them. What these students really need to hear is exactly what Thomas told them to ignore. They need to have a realistic viewpoint and not rely on "glimmer[s] of hope." They need to confront the fact that law is an oversaturated field and that other areas may provide them with better success. For many of them, they need to embrace the fact that their education might have been a waste. If you don't take that view, you wind up with a bunch of people continuing to try and find nonexistent jobs for years.

What really matters to these kids is exactly what mattered to Justice Thomas: finding remunerative work and a healthy role in society. Your family can be supportive, but if you can't find a decent job, all the "you can do it, Billy, we love you, don't despair" in the world isn't going to help you put bread on the table and pay debts. It's a one-way ticket to depression and deep feelings of personal failure where there was very little chance to succeed.

What really galls me is that people like Justice Thomas are in a position (well, at least in theory) to really change things, get people to think differently about education and young adulthood and debt and finding work. And yet they all talk about working hard and fighting through rejection and turbulence and valuing your support system and blah blah blah. I'm not arguing that life should be rejection- and hardship-free (on the contrary, both are necessities), but central to having success in the world are knowing when to fold your cards and knowing when you're being screwed over. If something is more or less impossible, there's no point wasting further energy trying it. We're quickly approaching an age where restaurants, the notorious "look before you leap" business, will have more of an economic life than JDs.

I would love for just one speaker to get up this graduation season and say something like this:

"I'm mad as hell and you should be, too, because 1/2 to 2/3 of you are never going to really work as attorneys. Many of you would be better off finding a restaurant gig and writing your Congressmen daily. Sorry, kiddos, we abandoned professionalism a while back and the law schools decided to exploit the lack of youth jobs, the popular image of the Perry Mason attorney, and the myth that they're all rich. Have fun paying your non-dischargable debt working at the Gap."

Graduation ceremonies are supposed to be a welcome to the next world, right? And in many cases, isn't honesty the best possible virtue you can give to these graduates? It sickens me that the majority of law school students and recent graduates still seem to sit on their hands, waste two years of their life, and have a Pollyanna view of the world that they'll land a high-quality job if they're just tough enough.

Ultimately, that's the sort of passive egocentric optimism that needs to stop. It has nothing to do with you, whether you land a job or not. It's the system. It needs to change, and shame on Justice Thomas for apparently looking away and preaching the same old garbage. You'd think with his background he would be sensitive to social systems that screw people regardless of their merit, hard work, or character.

Blogger Fails As Much As This Career Student

I had a long post yesterday about this article here, where Philosophy PhD student Brandon Hogan claims he stayed at Harvard Law School because he was voted "most likely to succeed." I pointed out the numerous problems with this belief, including:

• Staying at Harvard Law School when you have no intention to practice law is a sign of insanity, not success, especially when one writes and thinks such complete and utter bullshit as can be seen on his Pitt page ("I am interested in understanding what it is that we do with our words," really?).
  
• There's nothing really prestigious or "successful" about graduating from Harvard Law (as opposed to "getting in") in 2011.
• Degrees themselves are not good indicators of success in anything given the modern education system.
• Brandon is 11 years out of high school and training in a field where jobs are extremely scarce, even for top graduates, therefore he is more of an abject failure than a success, even if he's intelligent.

Each one of these points had a paragraph or more of my wonderful and expensive analysis, including a new Elie Mystal dumbness cite and a parody of Brandon's philosophical quote along with a musing on why budding philosophers fall into the education money-grabbing rigmarole just like everyone else.

But alas, Blogger was offline yesterday and deleted my post in its entirety.

Journalist of the Day: Brad Kane

Today I want to feature two articles from the Hartford (CT) Business Journal, both written by Brad Kane.

First, we have Lawyers' Debt Hits All-Time High:

Today’s law school graduate has more debt than ever before, and is facing a market where getting a job is an extensive, grueling process. First-year lawyers are leaning on clerkships and part-time legal work, forced to abandon — or at least delay — their dream jobs to make their monthly debt payments.
...
The large debt is what sets this recession apart from all others, said James Leipold, executive director for the National Association for Law Placement.

That quote isn't completely correct, and I wish he had focused on someone broke and unemployed rather than the cute blonde who landed a job two weeks after the bar exam by "networking," but at least people might start to understand that the law school bubble is different if mainstream journalism keeps repeating these types of articles.

With that need for repetition in mind, Brad is the journalist of the day for publishing a second article on the profession as a whole on the same day, which I haven't seen posted anywhere else:

The message from Connecticut’s attorneys is clear: Unless you love the law, you’ll hate being a lawyer.

That’s the message more lawyers are telling their children.

And that’s a concern for an industry that finds itself in turmoil. The price of admission is up and interest in being a lawyer is down. The passion that once marked the profession is fading in the face of business pressures as law firms race to be the biggest and most comprehensive, judging lawyers’ value on the revenue they generate.

This is obvious to many of us who have already paid the for the boat show ticket, but ordinary people (and businessmen, like the readership of this newspaper) cannot hear it too many times: law is not what's on TV, and it's not what it was even 30 years ago.

And in this article, we get an actual anecdote of failure:

Avon native Daniel Lindenberg graduated in 2009 from Albany Law School in New York. . . .

Over the next 15 months, Lindenberg interviewed for 80 jobs. With $200,000 in deferred law school debt looming, the riches weren’t flowing. He moved back into his parents’ house. Connecticut bar exams, he started his job search.

Over the next 15 months, Lindenberg interviewed for 80 jobs. With $200,000 in deferred law school debt looming, the riches weren’t flowing. He moved back into his parents’ house.

He finally got a full-time job in January. The article talks about cutting costs, disbanding summer programs, and generally how the shift from profession-first to a business-first has fallen disproportionately on new lawyers.

All true, and I wish every newspaper in the country ran a story like this so the masses could see the major problems in the legal field.

Update on U. of La Verne Accreditation; ABA Recommends Denial

So as it turns out, one of the most popular entries on this blog recently has been my entry from January on the University of La Verne, where I discussed their provisional accreditation status. As far as google keywords go, "La Verne" is up near the top, somehow topping the lost porno searchers (seriously, if you're googling "pornography" and you wind up here, you epically failed; also, my hits for this entry will skyrocket as a result of using the word "pornography" multiple times. go me).

As it turns out, the ABA's accreditation committee is recommending a denial of full accreditation to La Verne. According to this article, a final decision will come June 11, after the ABA Council issues its finding on whether it accepts the recommendation or denies it, and whether La Verne will continue to have provisional accreditation if denied. La Verne will have a chance to present its argument for accreditation, but it seems they're not overly optimistic:

"There's a pretty good chance that we won't get full approval because the odds are stacked against us right now," said Allen K. Easley, the college's dean and professor.
...

During [a meeting last Wednesday with 150 concerned students], Easley said college officials were discussing the denial with their lawyers.

Meanwhile, officials said, the university is applying for state bar accreditation to ensure every current student will be able to take the exam after they graduate.

I would hope so, although I think "the" exam is faulty wording; it should be "a" bar exam. Rightfully, students are pissed.

"Even looking at this with the most likely and optimistic view of the school is that we're probably going to lose our accreditation in June," said Rachael Alcorn, 24.

"When I graduate in (May) 2012, I'm only going to have the California bar (and not ABA backing). That's not what I came to this school for."
...

Student Ali Kazmi, 25, of Rancho Cucamonga said he was trying to determine what his next move would be.

"It catches you off guard ... I'm worried about the school's reputation now," Kazmi said.

Well, it's not like the school had a stellar reputation to begin with, but I completely understand where these students come from. The ABA's course of action during the entire law school bubble was to "Always Be Accreditin'." It was a logical assumption to make that all provisionally-accredited would be fully-accredited in due time. The students couldn't have predicted the ABA would wake up and enforce standards, and so I think they have a right to be angry at the situation.

For example, here is what the 2010-2011 Course Catalog says about accreditation:

The University of La Verne College of Law has been provisionally approved by the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar of the American Bar Association since February 13, 2006. The Section of Legal Education may be contacted at 321 North Clark Street, Chicago, IL 60610 or by phone at (312) 988-6738.

Provisional approval precedes full ABA approval. ABA policy states that students enrolled in a provisionally-approved school are entitled to all the rights and privileges as students at fully approved schools. A law school must remain in provisional status for a minimum of two years before becoming eligible for consideration for full approval.

Do you see that? It "precedes full approval" as if it's a given, a guarantee, an inevitable turn-of-the-page consequence. No mention of the chance that the ABA will say "no." No mention of the 5-year provisional expiration or the school's previous issue with low bar passage rates. That seems like misrepresentation of a material fact, and that's not right, La Verne.

Unfortunately, the students are the ones really getting screwed here. The school will go on, possibly as a state accredited institution, but that model seems to work in California and they'll have a better reputation than the other California-only schools. The students, however, are stuck with a J.D. from a non-ABA school, which means they can't practice in most states. Even though they'll be denied the benefit of an ABA-approved education, they'll still be paying the massive costs (I think it's around 36k a year). If La Verne loses 2012 accreditation, the Class of 2012 will be truly and royally screwed. Most law students severely overpay for a product. La Verne's 2Ls and possibly 3Ls will be overpaying for a product they can't even fully use.

So here are my pithy, but completely serious suggestions for all involved:

-If you're the ABA, make a rule or exception that allows students who enrolled at a provisionally accredited school to finish as if they'd gone to a provisionally-accredited school.

-If you're a 1L at La Verne in the top 1/3 or so of the class, transfer. For the love of all that's holy, get out of Dodge. If you're in the bottom 2/3, find something else to do with your life unless you have a warm seat waiting for you on the other side.

-If you're a 2L or 3L at La Verne, complain, protest, and spread awareness about the massive screwjob that the school and the ABA seem to be performing.

-If you're the La Verne administration or faculty, ask yourself why you're running an institution that charges around $36,000 a year for an education where students aren't even equipped to pass the bar, may not have a chance to even take the bar, and, even if they pass, are thrown into a saturated legal market that has almost no use for them.

Also, ask yourself why your school has been less-than-upfront about the possibility that the school would lose accreditation (see my previous entry, or the course catalog entry above) and why I'm not able to find up-front tuition and costs on the school's website. Are you hiding this information from prospective applicants? Are these the operational values that you want to be associated with?

Also, I honestly think the La Verne administration should seriously consider some type of rebates to students for the school's failure.

Overall, it's hard to not see La Verne as the epitome of the law school bubble. From the first article linked:

The college has 420 students, up from about 250 or so prior to it gaining provisional accreditation from the ABA, he said.

A 68% jump. Think students don't factor in accreditation? Think the school didn't advertise it to the max?

I have no connection to La Verne, and I know no one who's ever talked about the place, but it's hard to not blame the school in this situation. Hopefully, the school can retain provisional status, only to prevent a large amount of students from being doubly screwed. If the ABA leaves the school with no accreditation, I really hope they find a way to except the current 2Ls and 3Ls, because it's really not right leaving them as the hot potato victims of this mess.

Delaware "Delaying" Law School; Hofstra Professor Rips on Merit Scholarship System

In case you haven't heard yet, the University of Delaware is delaying its plans for a new law school. At some point, cooler heads have to start prevailing. Let's hope we continue to see more articles like this and less articles like the ones where cray Alaskan representatives/candidates who spam my email think a law school in Fairbanks is a good idea.

In a mostly unrelated story, Hofstra Law professor Daniel Greenwood has written an article worth reading for the HuffPost on why merit scholarships are a market irrationally that should be regulated as price fixing.

"Merit" scholarships should more properly be called "US News & World Report Ranking Rebate Fees": schools give them because they need to maintain entering class GPA and LSATs in order avoid sinking in the rankings -- not because they believe recipients are likely to be better law students or happier, competent, just or successful lawyers.

This is a new angle, but one I like given my affinity for the "law schools act like for-profit businesses" viewpoint. I'm not sure it would fly legally (honestly, I don't know; my guess would be that non-profit businesses and those heavily backed by state policy are exempt from anticompetition statutes, but I'm not going to research anything), but I give him major props for creativity nonetheless.

Additionally, he has some dead-on-point remarks about the USNWR rankings scheme.

USNWR's rankings quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Schools that learn how to play the rankings game attract the students, faculty and money necessary to make real improvements, while schools that don't -- don't. Any school that dares to ignore the USNWR rankings risks a death spiral of rapidly departing employers, students and faculty, leading to lower ranking and even more problems.

Unfortunately, rankings are a zero sum game: if everyone learns to game them, no one can get a competitive advantage.

He goes on to articulate fully how everyone loses under the current system.

Throughout the article, he makes it crystal clear that what exists in legal education is not the result of a pure free market, but rather a distorted market, of capitalism gone wrong, in stark contrast to the stances taken by many industry apologists. However, the solution he believes would fix the problems would violate current antitrust laws, he claims.

Overall, I'm not entirely sure I agree with Professor Greenwood's solution of more stringent regulation, but the article's analysis of the problems is spot-on and a welcomed look from the inside of the legal academy.

If Ranking Rebates were illegal, many schools could immediately cut their tuition by a quarter or a third. Admissions officers could focus on the qualities that actually predict success in the law, instead of the ones that are easily measured in numerical rankings. Law students would be better able to focus on education, group learning and building relationships with their peers and professors, instead of competitive grade grubbing to keep their grant or transfer to a higher ranked school. And scholarship money could go to those who would best make use of it, instead of those who make schools look better on USNWR's arbitrary rankings.

It's hard to disagree with that, unless you've drunk from the bin of kool-aid that actually makes you believe LSAT scores are the end-all-be-all of a student and school's worth.

I encourage others to read the article, as there's more good in it than what I could reasonably exploit here.

Bob Morse Responds, Tries to Push Blame on Law Schools

Well, after last week's New York Times story on how law schools use merit scholarships to boost their USNWR ranking, which get pulled away after the first year. As I noted, this is the expected response to such a system where schools are incentivized to act in a way that doesn't always neatly conform to standards of ethics or what an objectively-good law school would do. All of this is the natural consequence of the USNWR rankings having almost no merit in actually evaluating law schools.

Naturally, Bob Morse has decided to respond to USNWR role in the scholarship game and, as seemingly usual, wants to pretend it's someone else's issue. After a "no duh" paragraph about students understanding risks and the need for disclosure, Bob lays out this gem of a passage (numbers mine for purposes of commentary below):

It's clear that the U.S. News law school rankings have a (1) large impact on law schools and prospective law school students. (2) However, the U.S. News Best Law School rankings are not why students lose their scholarships. In addition, the article (3) implies that the U.S. News rankings are the key factor behind why law schools are offering more merit-based aid and less need-based aid in order to enroll students with higher LSATs and GPAs and, as a result, improve in the rankings. (4) Law schools need to take far more direct responsibility for their policies instead of citing the oft-repeated claims that they are forced into these actions solely because U.S. News exerts so much power over law school behavior.

(1) With the power of national journalism (or are we going to admit that USNWR is no longer "journalism?") comes a grave responsibility in understanding the effects of one's words. That's why it's essential for the journalist to report accurately what happens, not base his conclusions on small sample sizes or unexamined self-reporting. And the journalist has a responsibility not to have a conflict of interest in the resolution of what happens. Bob's admission that his rankings have great effect is an admission that he either has a great amount of responsibility to get it right or that he's not a journalist at all.

(2) Technically, no, Bob, but your rankings are essential in establishing a system where parties act on reliance on insincere (as in, they're getting pulled after one year) scholarship offers - often advertised as three-year deals - that only exist because your magazine irrationally believes the LSAT to be relevant to how good a law school is; and many of those students actually do lose their scholarships. It also causes the rankings to favor richer schools, possibly at the expense of more efficient ones, and it causes schools to shift more money to their merit scholarship balances. Your magazine is a but-for cause of this mess, and disclaiming responsibility because you had nothing to do with Johnny taking the bait and getting a C+ in torts is absurd.

(3) "Implies?" No, Bob. The article "implied" nothing, and to say otherwise is disingenuous weasel-wording.

(4) Why don't you take responsibility as a "journalist" for the power your words have over people's actions, especially those who need metrics to boast of their accomplishments? There are countless steps you could take to prevent potentially-deceptive and abusive behavior from occurring. You could factor scholarship retention rates into your rankings. You could factor need-based scholarships into your rankings. You could collect and disclose scholarship offering and retention rates. You could do surveys comparing students' expected debt totals to their actual debt totals and penalize schools for the difference.

There are all sorts of steps to take to aid USNWR be a detached voice that helps the consumers understand the truth and have the facts necessary to make a decision about what law schools are good. To date, USNWR has done none of them and has persisted in using a formula that has nothing to do with actual law school merit. And yet, when they're called on it, they throw up their hands and say "that's the law schools' fault!"

Well, no, it's not. As a news institution, USNWR has a responsibility not to be a party in things like this. As long as they have the word "news" in the masthead, people like Bob Morse can't abnegate that responsibility by some twisted logic. So Bob, don't throw up your hands. Do your damned job.

Either that, or change the name and admit you're just a puppet for the elite educational lobby.