Response to San Diego Student Who Wrote In

Almost two months ago, I wrote a post critiquing the views of future University of San Diego student Marisa Mittelman as displayed in an article she wrote here.

Marisa apparently made a comment on my blog entry that was unfortunately eaten up by Blogger's aggressive spam filter, meaning I didn't see it until today. Here is the response in full (note: because blogger removed any paragraph breaks, I added some for clarity):

Firstly, I would like to congratulate you for being the first person ever to create a blog in which the sole aim is to spread negativity and pessimism! There aren't any other blogs like yours-- and most certainly not any with better layout, better writing, and better content.

That being said, I would like to clarify a few points:

1) You do not know me. Please do not presume that you know my financial situation, my geographical preferences, or what type of person I am.

2) I will proceed to provide you with some actual information, as opposed to pointless assumptions, about myself:

A) I intend to settle in San Diego. This has been my plan for some time. San Diego is an incredible place to live, and I cannot wait to move there. Since 25% of lawyers currently practicing in San Diego went to USD School of Law, more than any other school (Loyola comprises 1.8% and Pepperdine 1.1%), I stand by my statement that, for someone who intends to live in San Diego, USD is an amazing school (Source : californiabar.globl.org).

B) I am not taking out any more loans than I can handle. USD has provided me with a significant scholarship, and my family has been incredibly generous. Going to USD is in NO way, shape, or form a "catastrophic financial decision" for me, personally. I am not saying that is the case for every USD law student, but your promises of buyers remorse and my 20's being lost are unfounded.

C) I would have to argue that family law is a fantastic area for an eternal optimist. I am confident that IF that is the focus I choose (which, if you read the article, I note that it may not eventually be), that my bright outlook and sunny perspective will be great tools in helping couples facing difficult familial challenges, and children going through one of the hardest situations they may face.

So, while I deeply appreciate your condescending paternal advice, in this case I would have to question your failure to consider any alternatives to your decidedly depressing viewpoint. All the Best, Marisa L. Mittelman

I had a point-by-point response written out, but I think the situation calls for generality.

I don't write this blog for my health, or to show off my pessimism, or even to give advice. I write this blog because at one point in time I was in Marisa's place. I soon found that the system - not just law schools, but the whole legal ball of wax - is not what was presented to me (or what I perceived it to be), that hard working students are getting squeezed out of the market, that salaries are far lower than what's advertised, that being an attorney is not really prestigious, etc. I started this blog because I thought it could be part of a positive change that I feel needs to take place.

It's quite possible Marisa will have great success, both in law school and as attorney. Although she misread parts of the original entry, she seems to have the right attitude (ignoring sarcasm): she researched schools thoroughly, zealously defends her reasoning, sounds like she understands finances and the risks, etc. She's going in with her head up, and I won't be surprised if she does well at all.

But in the end, law school is an odds game in so many ways (some you don't even realize when you sign up), and the odds are far bleaker than any 0L ever calculates. Hard work is by no means a guarantee of anything, nor are good grades unless one is at a top school.

I would love for Marisa to review these posts in two to three years. Hopefully she'll look this up and beam with pride that she's got a sitting offer from the perfect San Diego firm/office, on the road to a satisfying legal career, carrying an investment in her education that reaps dividend after dividend.

Save for the San Diego part, I'd still like that for myself.

But the odds seem against it. And in any event, she'll certainly have classmates, those whose hard work she witnessed first-hand, wind up struggling, and maybe then she'll understand these blogs then, and that maybe all those unemployed students worked hard, after all, and that we don't exist just to be depressing.

Overpriced Education Is a Moral Issue

Inside Higher Ed has a respectable write-up of the small shrinkage in law school enrollments coming this fall to at least three campuses. This quote, from California law professor John Yoo (originally posted here back in March), struck me as rather naive:

The decision to reduce the size of a law school class has little to do with morality (though it may have a lot to do with moralizing) and everything to do with economics. Education is a product in the market, like any other. The producers (law schools) sell a service (a legal education) at a price (tuition) to consumers (students). If there is an oversupply of the product, or the demand falls, then the price should drop and eventually the quantity will fall until the market clears. I don't see anything so moral (or immoral) about it.

While his economic analysis is technically correct, education is absolutely not "like any other [product]." I probably should be baffled that a professor at a "top" university is grossly oversimplifying a situation to cleanse his own guilt, but I'm not.

When someone buys almost any other product or service, any liability created by the purchase can be removed by filing a bankruptcy petition. Providing normal credit is an example that would fit into his model. Because consumers can declare bankruptcy and erase the transaction from being a burden, there's nothing "moral" or "immoral" about a credit card company that raises or lowers rates, or creates new cards/marketing pitches to give the illusion of scarcity, etc. The bank retains some risk in the transaction, so economic principles can entirely guide their actions.

Conversely, some jackasses in Congress decided that student loan debt should be treated differently than all other debts. The schools - like Yoo's University of California - sell a product, often with gross exaggerations fueled by fantastical myth-making - with absolutely no risk on the credit side of things, either to the school or the bank.

Because student loan debt is non-dischargable with a standard bankruptcy petition, the risk of a education being a bad investment falls entirely on the students and their parents when they need to use credit (which 90+% do).

At that point, a school's decision to enroll students takes on a moral element. Unlike normal producers, who either have an incentive to sell to those who can pay or can only provide services to credit-worthy people, the schools' abilities to draw in any consumer and saddle them with debt-for-life gives the school a position of power divorced from economic reality. The fact that Yoo even suggests that the market can or will "clear" is perplexing; the market has been willfully prevented from "clearing" for decades by the ABA and the law schools, including his employer.

Plus, educational institutions often invite moral disapprobation by marketing themselves as leaders, subtly vilifying corporate America, justifying their high costs as "good" debt, holding themselves up as prestigious institutions and community-based institutions, etc., which gives them more culpability that Joe the Auto Mechanic, who's at least honest when he says he just wants to make a living.

My gut reaction to Yoo's comment is that he's too enmeshed in the system - and therefore a party to stockpiling some students with unsustainable debt loads - to see a moral issue and moral culpability where it's obvious. After all, if you admit that ruining innocent parties financially is a moral issue, a whole lot of people need to trudge their way to confession tomorrow. Can't have that, now, can we?

Almost every immoral event and practice can be explained in basic economic terms. Slavery's rise and fall, for example. Or teenage prostitution in Thailand. That doesn't make them non-moral issues. A professor of law should know better.

Law in Nebraska Crowded; Creighton Downsizing Law Class

Remember when Prof. Sara Stadler pompously suggested that Emory law students pack the wagon and head for Nebraska?

Well, as it turns out, ain't no jobs there! From the Omaha-World Herald:

Current students say the competition is fierce even for summer clerkships, internships and other steppingstones to post-graduation employment.
...
[S]ome students who graduated at the top of the [U. of Nebraska] class of 2011 are still hunting.
...
Area lawyers said Omaha's legal job market hasn't been as hard hit as in other areas. Although they still make most of their hires from area law schools, law firms are getting more applications from across the country as new lawyers scramble to find jobs.
...
Omaha lawyer Hal Daub...said he would not discourage students from seeking law degrees, which he described as a versatile education that prepares students for a variety of careers.

Nonetheless, Creighton's strategy has merit, Daub said.

“For a small state, we are graduating way too many attorneys. There just haven't been the opportunities that students thought they would have four or five years ago.”

Emphasis mine. Obviously, Daub is a mouthpiece/idiot for suggesting that someone go to law school for the "versatility" of the degree, but I take him at his word that there is overproduction with a whopping two law schools in the state.

The article's main point is that amidst this atmosphere, Creigton is lowering their class size by 13-15%. As I gave hesitant applause to the New York schools who did the same thing, I salute Creigton for acting somewhat responsibly and forgoing almost $600k in revenue even as they could fill every seat.

The article goes on to state that the Universities of Iowa and Nebraska have responded to the lack of jobs by beefing up their career services staffs. I have no idea what the bleep that's going to accomplish in actually creating jobs, but I suppose it's something. Maybe they can improve contacts with non-legal employers, but frankly I'd rather see them slice down their class sizes as well.

Nebraska is a fairly insular place, as far as U.S. states go. People live by UN-L football in the fall, and I imagine the the state school's network mops the floor with anything else. Omaha has a respectable business climate, but it's big enough for the top national schools to have a serious influence.

The fact that there are top graduates from Nebraska who can't find full-time work is scary. Of all the "guaranteed" resumes, I would think finishing near the top of a state flagship where there are no other big-name options would be just below doing well at a T-14. If I were from the state, I'd rather be at the top of the class at Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc. than be at the top of similarly-ranked private schools.

I'm also curious how this will affect Creighton's USNWR rank. In theory, it shouldn't. I mean, if you went to Creigton and ranked 60th/155 or 60th/135, what the hell is the difference to employers, or your employment prospects? You'll sit through the same class, same teachers, etc. But the LSAT and GPA medians may rise a tick or two, and the student-teacher ratio may drop. And the after-graduate employment percentages may rise. They're currently ranked 127th. Let's see what happens when a flawed ranking system encounters shaving from the bottom.

News Roundup: Saturation in Iowa, Crappy Advice from New Jersey, and a Dose of What the Hell from Indiana

1. Message Saturation

From the Des Moines Register, Rekha Basu asks if we need an "explosion" of law students when tuition escalates and job prospects diminish. It's elementary stuff for regular readers of the blog, but the key point here is just how standard these types of articles are becoming. By the end of the year, I imagine it'll be common knowledge for anyone who tries to keep up with news. I'd also like to point out this part of her editorial:

[O]nly 14 percent of college students are majoring in science, technology, engineering and math, according to President Barack Obama, speaking in Durham, N.C., last week. He said while demand for most jobs exceeds supply four to one, the opposite is true for science and high-tech jobs, where skilled workers are in short supply. And those are the jobs of the future.

Although I'm slightly skeptical that this sound advice (I've heard the engineering field is now requiring a master's degree to thin out the pool), herein lies, perhaps, the biggest problem of the law school industry. It's a common refrain amongst petty and jaded people that lawyers aren't smart enough to be scientists, engineers, medical technicians, etc. This is entirely false. Almost anyone who scored a 160 on the LSAT or higher has the mental aptitude that allows for success in so-called "high tech jobs."

In theory, the market should have directed labor where the society's needs were. If the society needs scientists and engineers, those starting salaries would be higher, tuition at the schools would be higher, etc. The market would signal to young people to study those fields.

Conversely, if there's limited or no demand new entrants in a field, the market should signal to prospective students to avoid it, either through low salaries or lowering tuition prices, etc. But even though law became oversaturated long ago, this didn't happen. The institutions (law schools, ABA, US News, etc.) kept reporting rigged statistics to induce talented people (and their higher LSAT scores) to come to law school instead of exploring other career options.

Because here's the truth: very, very few people genuinely love the law or find legal work particularly exciting or life-affirming. No preschooler, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, says "lawyer." Many say relatively non-prestigious careers, like teacher or firefighter or park ranger or construction worker. The shift for my generation was long and slow, but systematically the "bright" people ruled out being a teacher or a firefighter or a park ranger or a construction worker, most often because of the salary and prestige associated with the relative positions. Law only remained an option because people though it was a profession for the affluent and intelligent.

People are, on the whole, rational actors. Most in my generation were presented with blatantly false information from the educational institutions that claimed we would be be able to make some type of living on a liberal arts degree. And in the event that we couldn't, we were virtually assured that by getting a law degree or a master's or an MBA we would make a good living. The institutions willfully engaged in these type of distortions and as a result kept intelligent and hard-working people away from fields like technology where the real demand might be/might have been!

The problem is exacerbated by the duration of education. Law grads are already invested 7 years. When the screwed ones want to "correct" the saturation, they have to take community college classes and then try to get in a master's program, a process that adds another 3+ years. Ten years down the drain, a waste that could have been mitigated if only the schools were required to publish accurate, audited information about their offered investments.

Guaranteed loans haven't helped the situation, of course, but the truth is that our higher educational institutions have completely screwed up the labor market by pushing people towards more profitable options (liberal arts, law, generic business) than more costly - but socially-beneficial - ones (sciences, technology, medical). Everyone suffers as a result of this massive labor misallocation, so I'm truly baffled when people side with the universities when someone has the audacity to use the court system to fix the problem.

2. Hey, Unemployable, Apply for a Clerkship! Speed date!

I started out thinking this article about law students "find[ing] ways to beat out the economy" would be worth it, but after a nice discussion about how saturated the market is, the article boils down to the following:

• Law grads need to be creative
• Law grads need to network (including "speed dating" local attorneys!)
• Look at soloing
• Apply for a clerkship
  

Wow. That'll sure fix the problem, won't it? There's not enough legal work to go around for all the barred lawyers, but hey, you should spend thousands setting up a practice! There's a finite number of clerkships that have never been in want of applicants, but hey, you should apply!

3. Indiana Saturation + 1

Finally, note that in Indiana, public defender gigs for recent graduates dropped slightly when the state reinstated the license of a convicted tax fraud. A former Teamsters attorney, Eric Evans lost his law license a decade ago. I would've thought he would have found something else to do, but apparently he plugged away, did a lot of community service, and now has a law license in an oversaturated market after receiving many letters of support from local judges, politicians, etc.

[One] testified that he wished Evans had been reinstated sooner, because he is "an excellent" attorney and there is a shortage of attorneys, especially local public defenders, in Blackford County. [He] called the crime "an act of omission" and added that Evans probably felt trapped at the time.

The people in Blackford County are either lazy, naive, or lying. All it would take is a drive to Valparaiso or Dayton or Cincinnati or Indianapolis - or even a simple craigslist advertisement - and their shortage would be over in a matter of weeks.

Instead, paid work is going to one who clearly screwed up earlier in his career. Meanwhile, lawyers who have completely-clean records cannot find work as their student loans escalate.

I'm all for rehabilitation, but shouldn't this guy have found an alternative career in the last decade? And shouldn't the state Supreme Court ideally be an active watchguard of the profession? And if there are numerous lawyers in good standing, especially recent bar admissions, who are struggling for work, shouldn't it avoid reinstating convicts?

Just my two cents.

A Rant on Thomas Cooley's Advertising and Budget

I've previously mocked Thomas Cooley's absurd marketing techniques, but I didn't realize the true depths of the demonic awfulness in their hokey solicitations until today.

Sometimes, those who comment and write on these issues luck into finding a graph, a picture, or a table that speaks for itself. This is one of those times.

From Guidestar.org, the following represents the amount of money this set of relatively-comparable schools (private, non-profit, unaffiliated, ABA-accredited) spent on advertising and promotion in 2009 (Form 990, Part IX, Line 12):

Thomas Cooley: 2,167,925
New England: 669,677
Ave Maria: 323,259
William Mitchell: 263,907
Vermont.: 158,475
John Marshall (Chi.): 124,000
New York L.S.: 122,470
South Texas: 89,567
(note: Thomas Jefferson and Brooklyn's numbers were unfortunately not available).

$2 million. If you went to Thomas Cooley that year, you, individually, paid almost $600 so that the school could con someone else into going there. You could have enjoyed a shopping spree, eaten fifteen to twenty top Lansing dining experiences, bought a night with an std-free escort, etc.

Instead, you paid for advertisements so the worst law school in America - North America, in fact - can try to convince people that Cooley is a worthwhile use of six figures and three years.

In 2009, Ave Maria packed up its entire school and moved to a completely different region of the country. It spent a mere 15% of what Cooley did.

Granted, much of Cooley's number might come from its absurd stadium naming-rights deal, but that didn't take place until early 2010 and it still begs the question why a quality professional school would ever need to buy naming rights to a minor league baseball stadium. And they do have the highest enrollment in the country, which may justify some additional promotional costs.

But $2 million? When John Marshall barely spends six figures?

Think of all the superior ways that money could have been used. Cooley could have made a donation to the Lansing public school system, bought an elementary school or something. It could have founded programs for troubled youth, disease research centers, good ol' legal aid foundations: the sky's the limit for the truly munificent.

Nope. A baseball stadium name. And $2.1 million spent on advertising.

And it's not like they're getting a quality product for the money, either. This is some pretty watered-down stuff. God-awful would be one description for their advertising. Hysterical would be another.

Take, for example, Cooley's laughable NFL comparison:

Yes, you read that correctly: Cooley is trying to convince doe-eyed 149ers that because NFL quarterbacks come from places like Miami-Ohio, using prestige in the law school business is as silly as a Matt Millen draft.

I actually like the analogy, but not for the reason Cooley wishes. It's a beautiful illustration of cherry-picking with anecdotal evidence, a really common logical flaw in law school advertising (if not the world at large).

Here's the reality for football players: a high school quarterback who wants to get to the NFL has the best chance to get there if he goes to USC, Texas, Florida, etc. Likewise, A college graduate who wants to work at Cravath has the best chance to get there if he goes to Harvard or Yale.

Ultimately, the concern isn't with the few Cooley graduates who make BigLaw or the few NFL players who hail from Miami-Ohio. It's about the odds of a a random person at Cooley, or at Miami-Ohio or similar football school, to make that end destination. The population isn't the end population (BigLaw or NFL), but the starting one (all people at Cooley or a lousy football school).

To illustrate the analogy, let's say Cooley is the 200th best law school in the country (this is generous, as it excludes some non-ABA accredited schools that may be finer institutions). Last year, Jeff Sagarin's rankings listed Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, and the Citadel as the 199-201st best college football teams in the country.

So how many Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, and the Citadel graduates are in the NFL right now? 1 for Fordham, 3 for Bethune-Cookman, and 1 for the Citadel.

Those teams have roughly the same number of overall players and alumni as schools like Texas (41 active pros), LSU (40), and Miami (40). See a difference in the odds? A random player at the "more prestigious" colleges was 24 times more likely to make the NFL.

This is why top high school talent continues to go to Texas, LSU, Miami, etc. and not Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, or the Citadel. The same principle is why budding lawyers would never, ever dream of going to Cooley when Columbia is an option.

Kids, the analogy works, from the school's own fire-breathing mouth: if you go to Cooley, your odds of making the big leagues are the about as good as a random football player from Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, or the Citadel making the NFL.

The differences? Most of those schools offer scholarships to their football players. At Cooley, you have the privilege of paying $200k for a glorified lottery ticket from a school that's basically conceding that everyone thinks it's a piece of crap. And there are opportunities for the low-level college football players to show off their skills. No such thing exists in law.

You could theoretically be the second coming of Louis Brandeis, but if you go to Cooley, your odds of getting anywhere prestigious in the law are worse than the 65th percentile graduate at Cornell, even if you ace everything and edit enthralling editions of the law review single-handedly. Yes, this is a dumb system, but it's wrong for Cooley to portray it as otherwise and act like its stellar graduates may actually have a good chance.

Of course, anyone with moderate logical ability figures all this out rather quickly, which speaks to the utterly poor quality of the propaganda at issue. Only the least-sophisticated consumer could fall for this shit, meaning Cooley's LSAT median probably isn't going to rise any time soon.

As an aside, their own advertising shows a distinct lack of college football knowledge. Note in the following how Stanford is a more prestigious football program than Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, BYU, West Virginia, Clemson, Boston College, and Michigan State (heck, national title game aside, I don't even Oregon is top 20 yet).

One has to wonder if Cooley used the same formula as their proprietary law school rankings to rank college football programs.

In any event, that $2 million is clearly paying for the best Madison Avenue can offer. It makes one wonder why, instead of naming stadiums and putting out ridiculous Soviet-level propaganda, the administrators don't just hire their own graduates at 20k and have them do it. Surely, a group of Cooley grads could come up with something better than a horrendous NFL analogy that doesn't work in the school's favor for anyone with three brain cells.

Cooley is clearly in a league by itself. As bad as LaVerne or Thomas Jefferson or Florida Coastal may be, they've got nothing on the multi-campus money-sucker of Cooley. It is the 5th tier, the 6th, the 7th; no matter how many tiers of legal education hell one wishes to construct (or deduct...), Cooley is at the bottom of the barrel, the slumpbuster of law schools, the scenic vacation in northern New Jersey, the menu item no one but a drunk would order. As far as I can tell, it's worse than the for-profits, worse than the state-accredited schools, worse than the LLMs in International Donkey Saddle Arbitration.

$2 million isn't going to get it any respect, but rather make sure its place at the bottom of the toilet is firmly cemented. Is there any scenario where such a figure can even possibly be justified? In a world where LSAC and resources like US News are more than happy to advertise for free?

The cherry on top is that when I logged on right before posting this, there was a google ad for Cooley at the top of my page. I find this hilarious and fitting, and it only slightly diminishes when I think about the long-term consequences of having student loan with a low return-on-investment paying off this small part of a $2 million pool.

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.