An Interesting Answer from New San Diego Dean

The following is a question and answer from AmLaw Daily's recent interview with new U. of San Diego dean Stephen Ferruolo:

[Question]: Law schools have been under fire recently for reportedly misrepresenting post-graduation employment statistics. Did you consider that controversy before accepting the dean position?

[Answer]: I know, from the point of view of someone who's been running a law office for the past few years, what has been going on in the legal marketplace. The expectations of law students from the time they began three years ago to their graduation now have changed dramatically. Students have not been able to fund their lives the way they thought they would be able to when they started law school. But I still believe law is great training for a wide variety of opportunities out there. We just need to work hard to provide our students with the best training and show them the way to the best opportunities.

This may seem unremarkable to some, but notice how the answer doesn't exactly match what was asked. The question was only whether the indisputable controversy (like his lesser cross-town rival being sued) contributed in his decision regarding the job at all. You can admit that a controversy exists without conceding the most salient points of the "other side." And yet, our new San Diego dean didn't repeat the same ol' talking points, but rather admitted flatly that recent students are disgruntled with their return on investment, and that the end result does not match the incoming expectations.

Granted, Ferruolo is a long-time practitioner, so he likely missed the series of lectures about delivering academia propaganda while he was actually working, but consider how radical of a change this is from just a year or two ago, when administrators would defend their statistics and their graduates fortunes.

For all those of you considering going to San Diego law, consider this very carefully: the chief executive at your possible school just admitted publicly that the product did not meet the expectations of its consumers. Would you ever purchase, say, an oven if the CEO came out and said "yeah, the product isn't doing what everyone thought it would?" If the product being sold to you was the exact same thing with no substantive changes? Of course not!

But then one has to wonder: if someone straight from the front line of the legal marketplace says that students are not being able to "fund their lives," how is it that the median salary of San Diego graduates in the private sector is $97,000? And how is the "public service" sector salary $58,000? Will these numbers be similar next year after Dean Ferruolo lets everyone know that the legal marketplace is certainly NOT hiring half the "private sector" graduates at or above $97k??? Will San Diego tuition stay north of $41k to reflect the difficult reality for recent graduates, or will the plundering continue?

Only time will tell.

Arne Duncan is What's Wrong with America

As many of you have probably heard, the Department of Education issued new rules regulating the for-profit education sector, which were significantly watered down from the Department's earlier intentions after the for-profits lobbied extensively, although it still is a net positive.

But if you think the new rules will really have any significant negative effect, or will check colleges' behavior, I encourage you to check out how Wall Street responded to the news:

As the Times article quotes Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, this whole education sector has the characteristics of a bubble, just like the housing market: "that they can capture all the upside of increasing volume while shifting all of the downside to somewhere else, which is students and taxpayers." One would think that applies in equal force for non-profit education as well, as it's hard to imagine how they aren't doing the exact same thing by shifting the downside risk to taxpayers and individual students. And as LSTB explained in its two-part post, people who are skeptical this is a true bubble are missing the mark.

But what really galled me about the Times article was this following quote from government mealy-mouth Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Corporatized Education: "As a country, we need this sector to succeed. This is not about ‘gotcha.’"

Are you serious, Arne? Half your job is to regulate institutions of higher learning, to be a cop that will stand up there and say "gotcha!" to keep ensure that the system stays honest and that good schools that actually exist to better their students' lives can thrive while the dishonest two-bit "you'll be rich!" schools go out of business.

Could you imagine if the executive branch took this approach to all licensing? If the liquor board refused to revoke people's licenses when they regularly sold to 14-year olds because they didn't want to say "gotcha?" Why do we allow this sort of "reform-first" attitude with education? Reform? When has industry-led "reform" ever worked in American education?

This dope had the perfect opportunity to take a major stand against much of the profligate, bad apple behavior that fuels American higher education - not just the for-profits, but the non-profits who were watching from the gallery. Instead, he bent over and let the mafia buy softer policing.

"[W]e need this sector to succeed." Will someone buy this guy a book on capitalism? According to our esteemed Department of Education head, we "need" a sector where students take on non-dischargable debt to give them a credential that may not increase their economic productivity. We "need" a sector that is run by federally-backed loans that would die if left to the free market. We "need" the sector about as much as we "need[ed]" inflated home values, or inflated .com stocks.

Of course, this one is far worse because it involves a generation of consumers taking on debt that can't be discharged, which will move a greater proportion of the future economy into debt servicing and lower home prices, discretionary spending, investment, innovation, new small businesses, etc. Arne, my man, we "need" to ensure that those in generation y can actually earn a living wage and not be bogged with non-dischargable poor investments.

But Arne, I fear, may not be able to see the problems at the ground floor. Let's look briefly at Arne Duncan's biography, shall we?

Arne is from the elite liberal Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, his father being a university professor at the U. of Chicago. He grew up with elite friends attending Chicago Lab School, an elite private school, after which he attended Harvard and majored in sociology and basketball. He then spent four years (1987-1991) playing professional basketball in Australia.

In 1992, a "childhood friend and investment banker" made Duncan - who had no significant work experience, mind you - Director of the Ariel Education Initiative. Four years later, the initiative became the corporate sponsor of a local public school that now feeds kids into "elite" Chicago high schools by getting "half of their funding from the Chicago Public Schools and the other half from a private investor, the Ariel Education Initiative."

Three years later, he got a gig being Deputy Chief of Staff at the Chicago Public Schools. Yes, you read that right: a god-awful public high school system brought in a guy who had done nothing in his life but study sociology, play basketball, and run a school with corporate backing. And of course, the icing on the cake is that two years later he was appointed CEO of the Chicago Public Schools.

How was he qualified, exactly? Running a large public school system means trying to fit square pegs into round holes on a shoestring budget. This guy had no formal training in education, had never actually tried to run a public school, and only had his position in education because of his rich friend. So he added private money to a small, crappy public school and got better results. Anyone could do that, and it's not an option as head of an entire public school system. See here for another take on this.

And now he's our Secretary of Education, and he's a pawn for corporate America and a champion of the "same old, same old" approach. And why wouldn't he be? This guy grew up with elite friends in an elite neighborhood in a professor's house, went to an elite college, and got every major job he's had by association with elites.

He's never been at the ground level himself in anything, preferring to start on third base. He has no idea how real people actually get to third base when they have to start at home, and likely assumes it's 100% the secondary education system (my guess is that he thinks his Harvard degree is what got him where he is). Of course we "need" scamming colleges, because if they're not there, poor people will just remain poor forever and ever! And if we just put a few new multi-billion dollar programs in place, intercity school kids will be doing calculus and they'll have the best test scores and theyll be zit-free and we'll all drive shiny new Bentleys and play polo atop unicorns!

The irony is that Arne may actually want to be helping impoverished youth, but if they go to a college that saddles them with nondischargable debt that can't be paid back, he's only succeeded in making them poorer by his lax standards. Again, this was the perfect opportunity to step in and prevent much of this nonsense, both in the for-profit and non-profit fields. But people like Arne can never truly understand the need for that type of protection when they've never actually had to live near the margin and take a flier on a night program or a new career that will supposedly make them a more attractive candidate in a crowded labor market.

Maybe if Arne had, he would realize that his job is about playing "gotcha" and actually enforcing regulations for the good of the public (note: not equal to the short-term investing public), because if the guy at the top isn't going to stop you, there's no reason to stop the gravy train, which, sadly, is how a large proportion of higher education views incoming students and federal loan money. Arne's apparently too busy with serpent lobbyists hissing sweet nothings into his ear while showing him illogical and skewed charts and clever diagrams, like this one:

'Cause that's pretty much the education plan I'm seeing from our "new and improved" Department of Education.

Kids, if you want to be an executive some day, follow Arne Duncan's lead. Make some rich friends, early and often. Be good at basketball and go to Harvard. Got it?

The next time someone pulls out that ridiculous "pay your dues" line on recent graduates who have the audacity to want enough money to pay back their loans, ask them what dues, exactly, the current Secretary of Education paid, or 75% of people in high places, for that matter. And before you snipe that he graduated with honors from Harvard, I'll tell you there are thousands of kids who graduated Harvard and equally-rigorous schools in far more strenuous subjects than sociology that are struggling right now.

What's wrong with America isn't necessarily that the rich use these connections, though. It's how the sheep just swallow lines like "we need this sector to succeed" without any kind of inquiry, how they accept these unqualified people being launched into public sector jobs, and they refuse to examine basic ideas like the value of a secondary education or the system itself. Arne graduated with honors from Harvard and the best he can come up with is "well, we need this sector to succeed." Brilliant, let's keep sending our kids to these places at any cost and having a malleable-hooker attitude. Just brilliant.

For the [n]th Time, This is Not Recessionary

Prowling through some other non-"scamblogger" legal blogs, I continue to see (mostly older) attorneys claim that the so-called "lost" generation of law graduates, including at least the '08-'10 classes (I would claim more) is somehow purely a function of Great Recession economics.

I beg to differ.

First, I'd like to hope in the wayback machine and take you to the blog Barely Legal, a pretty decent, honest blog run by two University of Illinois students in 05-07ish and no, despite the title, it's not about teen porn or statutory rape (note: with this sentence, my number of hits just skyrocketed). Anyway, I would like to point out these posts:

June 24, 2006: Don't Believe Us? Think We're Just Cynical?, where they cite a Wall Street Journal article explaining bimodal distribution, including the fact that many JDs never find gainful legal employment.

March 26, 2007: The Plural of Andecdote is Data, where they cite the hard statistics to show that there are 670,000 JDs not working as attorneys, noting "[e]ven the national bar association is telling you to be prepared to do something else with your life."

April 2, 2007: Warning Signs, where they note the high number of law students and graduates who cannot find any type of legal employment, including free internships. "[I]f no one is letting you work for free, read the writing on the wall. Even less people will be willing to pay you to work."

The financial crisis and recession did not being in earnest until mid-to-late 2007 (recession "officially" began in December 2007). Bear Stearns did not happen until March of 2008 and Lehman and the mini-stock market crash did not being until September of that year. Despite the housing bubble issues, most financial pundits were not foreseeing the steep declines as of May 2008, and most employers did not take reactionary action until mid 2008:

As you can see, initial jobless claims in early 2007 were virtually as low as they'd been since 2001. So why were these two students at a top 30 USNWR law school - and a place which my experience tells me places fairly well in Chicago - having all kinds of feedback that law graduates and law students were having a hard time finding private sector work?

Because the recession is not the real culprit, that's why.

Which brings me to today's real topic. The NALP has released some of its numbers for the Class of 2010 at 9 months. Of 41,156 law graduates who reported data, 9.4% were completely unemployed at 9 months. 2.9% decided to go back to school. Only 44.6% of graduates are employed in private practice, which makes one wonder how the schools will manage to skew those salaries up over $100k.

But this data isn't entirely helpful in isolation. Let's assume for the time being that the legal market is more or less dependent on private practice and that government positions, clerkships, and public interest positions are a constant. I composed the following chart culling data from the NALP's "summary of finding" sheets from 2001-present:

Year	Entry-Level P.P.	Excess
2001	17976	19711
2002	18246	20330
2003	18387	20487
2004	18407	21611
2005	19458	23214
2006	20347	23573
2007	20603	22915
2008	20511	23076
2009	20149	23852
2010	18325	24997

The second column is the total number of entry-level private practice attorney jobs assumed from the numbers. As you can see, the market itself appears to be identical in size to the private practice market that existed in 2002-2004. Demand for private practice entry-level attorneys apparently did grow in the 2000s, but only at around 10% or so.

What really happened is that law schools began pumping out graduates in a far greater excess to what the moderate increase in private practice demanded. The third column in the chart is the difference between private practice positions and the total number of law school graduates. As you can see, that number increased by almost 20% during the stretch between 2001 and 2006.

Since we think of things in percentages when it comes to employment, that excess is what makes the hiring market so awful. Sure, government and public interest hiring has slowed down, but the increased demand for those positions is largely due to private practice just not having the demand for all of them. The system simply cannot absorb an increase of 500 new attorneys every single year compared to what the economy (private sector) naturally demands by its own growth. If you want to know why every major American city has a backlog, start there. Then add in that many of these hired (especially at large firms) are spit back onto the market after 3-5 years independently of any extra-legal economic conditions. Same with doc reviewers.

The grand point here is that the recession is absolutely not the main reason the legal hiring market is dismal right now. The conditions that led to this glut of entry-level attorneys was evident in the 2001-2006 span, when law schools boosted enrollment by roughly 20%.

Heck, let's assume the recession never happened. Guess what? The excess would be still be so high as to make the entry-level market difficult. It became worse between 2001 and 2006. Why would that trend have ceased?

I'm not saying that the recession has nothing to do with the job market. Obviously, if there 21000 entry-level private practice gigs instead of 18000, the market would be better. But that doesn't change the fact that the main culprit is that ABA accredited law schools started churning out an increasingly-higher excess to the needs of private practice year-over-year before the recession even started. That's the real problem.

Already, one can see that the problem of lawyer supply is unique. There are signs that the job market is improving slightly across the board. But I can tell you from the ground level, that's not really the case for the legal sector. There may be moderate numerical improvement, but if there are 50 fish fighting for a single piece of food instead of 53, it's hardly a practical gain. This is just what happens when you regularly draw in far more input than the market can bear on the other side over a long period of time.

Read, Spot the Similarities Between Law and Higher Education

Although I maintain that there are some entirely unique aspects of the legal field (the limited transferability of the law degree, the seismic shifts in BigLaw creating a domino effect), it's hard not to see some similarities with how education has been handled in other fields.

See, for example, the run-of-the-mill PhD, as explained by this excellent article from The Nation by William Deresiewicz. Reading through it, it's hard not to see the similarities with the legal field:

1. "[T]he feeling is universal. Most professors I know are willing to talk with students about pursuing a PhD, but their advice comes down to three words: don’t do it."
2. "In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one."
3. "[T]hings kept getting worse. Instead of replacing retirees with new tenure-eligible hires, departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers. . . "
4. "Less visible but equally important has been the advent and rapid expansion of full-time positions that are not tenure-eligible. No one talks about this transformation—the creation of yet another academic underclass...."
5. "Graduate programs occupy a highly unusual, and advantageous, market position: they are both the producers and the consumers of academic labor, but as producers, they have no financial stake in whether their product “sells”—that is, whether their graduates get jobs. Yes, a program’s prestige is related, in part, to its placement rate, but only in relative terms. In a normal industry, if no firm sells more than half of what it produces, then either everyone goes out of business or the industry consolidates. But in academia, if no one does better than 50 percent, then 50 percent is great. Programs have every incentive to keep prices low by maintaining the oversupply."
   

In other words:

1. Practitioners regularly advise people not to go.
   
2. A dismal hiring market.
3. Systemic changes that have decreased opportunities for recent graduates by replacing them with off-shored and non-barred employees.
4. A downward shift in wages and job titles that creates a whole new underclass.
5. The education system has perverse economic incentives to flood the market and little to no incentive to actually place all of its graduates, only so long as it has relative success (i.e., US News and World Report).

Yup. Of course I'm simplifying for the sake of comparison. The article runs four pages and is full of nuanced differences in academia vs. other professions, but overall, it's hard to ignore that education systems seem to be run exactly like for-profit businesses, albeit at a slower pace. Those running graduate schools have seemingly cast aside the structural protections of professionalism just as quickly as those running law schools have.

And in both cases, you can ultimately blame federally-backed loans and this stupid folk religion that getting a chiseled-column degree - any degree - is better than working as a tradesman or garbageman or any other blue collar job that the American suburban bourgeoisie has turned its nose at for decades, along with a obedient capitalist media that has made higher education into a necessity of respect and a way to thin the labor pool instead of what is should be: a product evaluated for its usefulness and return on investment.

And that brings me to my next point, on the claimed need for happiness and personal satisfaction in a degree. This article is not only absurd puffery of the job market with lots of go-getter fluff (and it repeated the constant business lie that they want "analytical ability" and "writing" and therefore are peachy with liberal arts grads; earth to Ms. Pynchon: they've been saying that for decades, and it's just not true), but the comments betray a really irrational attitude on behalf of the author:

I went back to school and majored in Literature as had always been my plan – my passion. I figured I could always find A JOB but I had only one chance to study the thing I loved. Would my choice have been the same had my U.C. San Diego education cost tens of thousands of dollars rather than simply a couple of grand? I don’t know. But I’ve never for a moment regretted majoring in Literature – a subject that continues to feed my spirit 35 years after graduation.

Tragically, it's common to completely confuse education and knowledge in this way. People feel that if they want to know, say, "literature," they have to get a fancy certificate from Western Tech State. And the converse: if they don't have the certificate, they don't know it.

Well, neither proposition is true. I know dozens of English majors who wouldn't know a Shakespeare reference if it slapped them in the ass. I know a history graduate student who doesn't know what I consider to be basic nuts-and-bolts talking points of world history. And don't get me started on certain political science, psychology, or sociology disciplines who spend 50% of their time restating the obvious.

Conversely, I know many people - mostly older - who have become mini-experts in a particular area solely out of interest. Military buffs are common. Do you think a Civil War lover who visits battlefields and devours books about Sherman and Lee feels unfulfilled by not having done the procedural requirements to get a master's? In our age, almost anyone can get an advanced degree. Only a few actually love learning and seek knowledge to genuinely pursue it. And if you need some kind of structured setting to learn, get in contact with people in the field or set a schedule of visiting conferences or something.

There's simply no reason to confuse education - a certification process - with the love of knowledge, or its effects. That's precisely what the marketers at the universities want you to believe. Same with law schools: "won't you love learning about the law? You'll be enriched by your law degree, even if you don't practice!" Well, bullshit.

Truth is, if you want to be enriched by literature, you always have the chance to pick up a good book. There is no "one chance" with genuine knowledge, nor is the process ever complete become some trash bin gave you a gloried dead tree. Since anyone can pick up a Norton Anthology or explore the annotated classics at their local library, I see no reason to not apply full investment principles to a degree.

Law works in much the same way. No, you won't be able to get a law license, but if your interest is in "learning the law," there's nothing stopping you from reading good books about constitutional law or a history of English property law. Your odds to practice will only be slightly lower than some of those who spend three years, and your personal fulfillment will be identical, if not greater, since yours wouldn't end with some tenured jackass making you regurgitate every nicety in the rules in a three-hour span and then finding a way to slice 50+ practically-identical exams into grading categories.

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.

Emory Graduation Speaker, Part Deux

If you recall, earlier this week news broke that a speaker at Emory told the students to "get over it," with it being their disappointment over not getting those $160k jobs that are far more endangered than the Emory admissions materials circa 2008 let on.

Above the Law got around to running the story yesterday and today has printed some responses from alleged Emory students (I say alleged because the letters are devoid of actual names) defending Professor Stadler's speech. None of the letters defend the "entitlement" line that really made me (and others) angry, but there are some tidbits worth commenting on. I'll stick to the first letter that ATL decided to publish.

She was not a shill for the administration; her speech was not further evidence of administrative mistreatment. She was there because [the students] asked her to be, with the knowledge that she had free range [sic: way to go, Emory education!] to speak on any issue....Professor Stadler spoke on behalf of the students and at our request.

This is evidence of the absurdity of higher education. The consumers actually believe in their little hearts that the employee-agents of the corporation who sold them an inferior product are on their side speaking on their behalf.

Companies try to get people to think this way all the time, to associate the company's own representative as one working "on behalf of" the consumer. It's a classic sales technique. It doesn't matter if it's Joe's Used Cars or Emory University, the principle is the same. Even if she's selected by students, Emory is ultimately paying her wage at the end of the month. And if you attended three years of a pseudo-elite law school and you believe that she "had free range to speak on any issue," I've got some land I'd like to sell you.

Yes, she very pointedly told people to “get over it,” but she did so as part of a speech extolling the need to see the pursuit of a career as a way to find fulfillment and happiness. Her message, as she plainly told us at the start of her speech, was one of honesty coupled with hope.

"The one thing standing in the way of your happiness is a sense of entitlement" is neither honesty nor hope, it's fantastical delusion. I have no problem whatsoever with a speaker being honest, saying the job market is lousy, most of you should find non-legal work if you're not employed at 6 months, etc. I try to be honest here.

But there's a difference between rational hope (a good thing) and elitist naivete (a bad thing). Stadler's "hope" about being a giver and discarding senses of entitlement and moving to Nebraska and whatnot tends towards the latter.

And the honest thing is that many of the students who want to be givers and work those 45k jobs for the public sector will not be nearly as fulfilled as they think, even if they can land the job. As I'm reading the excerpts and the letters, Stadler basically mischaracterized reality to give an Obama-style hope massage to her students' post-beatdown loins.

She did not tell us to simply get over it — she told us to understand the changed nature of the legal market and to use those changes to find a career that will make us happy, to look for opportunity and to make a way forward.

I got that; the point is that, for most of you, there are precious few careers that will actually use your law degree that will make you happy. Her distortion of that is basically PR for the university. Honestly, how can you not see this speech as shameless PR for the legal education industry?

She did not suggest that we willingly or happily accept low paying small firm jobs or that we ought to heap scorn on Emory; instead, she suggested that we should broaden our horizons and consider alternative opportunities in a world where the coveted BigLaw job may not exist.

Again, imagine this in a different industry: "I know your Dodge's transmission is irreparable, but if you broaden your horizons, it really adds a sparkle to your lawn!"

And as I noted in my write-up, the BigLaw angle is a pure straw man at this point. Most students have already broadened their horizons and considered alternatives, and they're just not there (at least ones that provide a return on the law degree). Again, that's the issue. For another analogy, it's like a city that has multiple bridges going over a river. One (BigLaw) is broken down, so the engineers (Stadler) tell everyone to use one of the other bridges. But they're so clogged you might as well swim or try fording the river. Get it?

I can understand being wary of Professor Stadler’s speech from quoted bits alone, but I think that it is brave for a professor to admit that Emory has failed some students, and to be honest and harsh where necessary.

The first part is brave, I suppose. But there is nothing brave about sugar-coated faux "honesty." If the response to the message was overwhelmingly positive, it wasn't "honest and harsh where necessary." And actually, there's nothing "harsh" at all in such a speech, unless the crowd is a bunch of masochists.

My problem with her speech still isn't that it was harsh or honest or full of hope. I wouldn't object to any of these. The problem is that what was quoted was downright oblivious to the hiring conditions below BigLaw, it glossed over student loan debt and costly tuition (the absurd "entitlement" line), and it distorted reality with the same chicanery the clergy used in the middle ages. The problem isn't that she recognized the hiring poor market (also: the sky be blue), it's that she basically phrased the speech to assuage graduate anger in a situation where I, and most others, think anger is entirely justified. The three letters ATL printed confirm my belief that the crowd was mostly docile sheep, for they completely failed to see hypocritical, blame-shifting corporate PR when it was spoke directly at them.

Introducting a Hot New Practice Area - Move Quickly!

From, of all places, the ABA Journal, it appears that 2007 Quinnipiac graduate Joshua Cohen has developed a solo legal practice around doing nothing but student loan debt counseling and negotiations, all in an attempt to help him pay off his $160k in student loan debt.

Lawyers make up 30 percent to 40 percent of Cohen’s clients, and all of them graduated from law school in the last five to 10 years. “The fact that I have a practice based on student loans is ludicrous,” Cohen told the Hartford Business Journal.

No kidding, but when you think about it, someone had to do it. And frankly, I'm kind of happy it was a TTT/TTTT graduate and not some BigLaw layoff from NYU or a veteran boomer whose real estate practice crashed.

Debtors helping debtors work with the monied elite. Is there a better fact situation to explain today's America, or tomorrow's legal reality? And as an aside, anyone want to partner with me to open a student loan counseling service?