Well, the 1hr program discussing the problems with law schools, the legal marketplace, and what we can do to solve the mess was interesting, certainly not revolutionary, and Nando (who was, to be honest, the main draw) said very little of any value. I thought we might be in for some Nando-style trashtalk early on in the program, but he was quickly told that his views were simplistic and that he needed to stop trying to win arguments by quoting/misquoting people. After that, he pretty much shut up and let the grown-ups do the talking. I guess he prefers to show his claws only when behind the safety of the Internet. (His other main contribution was a weird mini-rant about how law schools are affecting the birth rate because grads have so much debt that they don’t want to have kids. Okayyyyy…)
And the grown-ups showed that they are aware of issues with the cost of law school, the poor job market, and suchlike, and that they are trying to solve these problems within the framework provided to them. For example, Phil Closius, the Dean of the University of Baltimore School of Law, said that all law schools have the employment data everyone is looking for and they want to give it to US News, but US News isn’t asking for it. (Bob Ackerman, Dean of the Wayne State University Law School, made a good follow-up point by stating that there’s nothing stopping law schools from voluntarily posting this data on their own web sites, which I believe he said his school does.)
There was a certain level of “we’re not the problem; society is the problem” from the law school side of things, but I tend to agree. We do live in a debt culture, we do live in a country that glamorizes lawyers, and that law schools themselves are just a tiny part of this huge education and cultural machine and can’t make the huge changes demanded by some people. In short, the law schools are playing a game that the students (as a whole) want them to play.
Bill Henderson, Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, made a great point (and one that I have always believed to be true): many students suffer from a self-serving bias and even when presented with accurate data about the cost of law school and the chances of getting a highly-paid position upon graduation, they will tend to believe that they will get lucky or work hard enough and end up getting one of those highly-paid jobs. (IMO, these are the students who end up graduating and turning into scambloggers: it’s not that they were cheated by the law schools, but rather they were cheated by their own self-serving interpretation of the data prior to enrolling in law school.) I truly believe that since the advent of the Internet, there is no excuse for anyone to attend law school not knowing that there’s little chance of getting a highly-paid job upon graduation, and that those who complain about an unfair lack of employment upon graduation are typically those students who ignored the clear advice that law isn’t a ticket to a stable and lucrative career. There is simply too much information out there – independent from that provided by law schools – for anyone to have attended a low-ranked law school in the past five years without knowing deep down that they would likely end up under-employed, unemployed or struggling to pay off the debt. But I digress.
All of the deans/professors know that the economy is poor right now, they know that law school is expensive, and they know that there are many other problems with the whole system, but the general message they conveyed was that this isn’t a problem they alone can solve by simply reducing tuition or spending money on scholarships. It’s a problem that involves the ABA, US News, self-serving students, the law schools, the media, the government and society as a whole. And while they are aware of the problems, they really can’t do too much to solve the problems overnight when there are so many independent players. (One example: Baltimore is building a new law school building. Nando tried to call out Phil Closius and asked why he couldn’t spend some of that money on scholarships to reduce debt. Closius said that the money was coming from the state government and he didn’t get a choice in where to spend it, and that if Nando would bother to come to the school, he would see that it is in dire need of a new building because the current facilities are awful. It really isn’t as if law school deans are these evil overlords who could solve every problem if they just woke up one morning and decided to change things up.)
Which highlights one important point: for reform to take place, people can’t just focus on a niche player. Scambloggers can’t just sit there complaining that law schools are the source of all their woes. To change law schools requires the involvement of the ABA, state and federal governments, law firms, society as a whole, and so on and so forth. It’s a massive problem, perhaps far larger than any of us can imagine. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure that the problems with the legal education system are the disease – after listening to the discussion, it sounds like the problems with the legal education system are merely a symptom of far deeper disease within US society.
Interestingly, Ackerman said that 15 or so years ago, many students attended law school part-time and worked to cover the tuition costs. But his (and other) part-time programs have suffered from reduced enrollments recently, primarily because students aren’t prepared to work their way through law school anymore. Again, students are part of the problem here – there are ways to reduce law school debt, but people aren’t taking advantage of them. Another example: Ackerman said, in response to a suggestion that schools should provide a low-cost degree for students who only want to practice low-end law in small firms, that such opportunities already exist; students who don’t want to work in large law firms can simply attend a lower-ranked law school and take advantage of the more generous scholarships that are offered to good students at such institutions, resulting in little or no debt and a degree that is suitable for working in low-end law jobs.
All in all, it was a decent program. Worth listening to if you have a spare hour. There were no smoking guns, no eureka moments, and nothing discussed that we don’t already know, but it should help people to understand that law schools aren’t merely institutions set up for the sole purpose of ripping students off, and that law deans are sympathetic to the plight of grads and are trying to help. And it was good to hear that deans are actually aware of how bad things are for many grads – they do read the news, they do know what people are going through, and they’re not stuck away in little offices insulated from the real world. Yes, there are problems with the legal education system, but it’s not just the fault of law schools; we, as a society, are an impatient, greedy bunch of people, we all want the opportunity to take a roll of the law school dice, we all want to believe that we can become a hotshot lawyer like we see on television, and we don’t want to work through law school to pay for it because we rely on debt. That’s America, folks. Car payments, mortgages, student loan payments, instant gratification, winners and losers. Law school is just one tiny piece of that crazy puzzle.
Update: I guess not everyone sees the discussion in the same light. Here’s an alternative interpretation, although I’m not convinced. The deans hardly showed “nauseating arrogance” and were not “belittling” and “contemptuous”, but I guess that some bloggers seem to think that insulting their targets somehow discredits them. I agree that Nando barely featured in the discussion, but that was hardly because the deans hogged the limelight – there was ample opportunity for anyone with something to say to jump in and get a point across (and when the floor was opened at the end, nobody spoke up). I personally think that Nando was out of this depth when it came to informed, intelligent debate with professionals, but that’s just me. Thankfully (although unentertainingly), I think Nando realized this too after a few minutes and decided to shut up rather than risk looking foolish.
Dude, you are completely off base. This is not “society” doing this; law school administrators made conscious decisions to release fraudulent employment statistics (“but everybody does it!”) and unnecessary capital expenditures. Nando made a very justified criticism of the ridiculous amount of money Baltimore spent on a new building, and the dean responded by saying they “needed” a new building. This is flat out false. They are not sympathetic. If they were they’d try to not raise tuition every year by several times the inflation rate. If they were they’d reduce the class sizes. If they were they’d show a modicum of integrity when dealing with the universities they’re affiliated with; no, “we need to make a profit to send to the rest of the university” is not a valid excuse for piling debt on their students. It’s saying let’s have law students subsidize everyone else without any moral justification whatsoever.
I disagree. We have one verified example of a school releasing “fraudulent” employment statistics – Villanova. If there are others you know about, please share.
I fully agree that law school tuition is outrageously expensive, that no law school should be sending any money to the university-at-large, that class sizes are too big, that we’re producing too many new lawyers, and so on and so forth. I’m on the side of the little guy, but I temper that support with a little reason. Otherwise I’d end up like Nando – impotent everywhere except on my little blog.
There are huge changes that should be made to the legal education system, but I simply don’t agree with the whole idea that law schools are the sole source of everyone’s misery. Law school employment stats might be off (by a bit – they’re not 100% false). Great. That’s a problem we can solve. But law schools are hardly “piling debt on their students”. Students attend law school voluntarily, they sign the loan paperwork voluntarily, and they sit through three years of school knowing damn well that the chances of getting a decent job at the end of it is often poor. Any law student at any time can get out and limit their losses. Most don’t, even though they know they are digging a hole.
In other words, I don’t buy any argument that law schools should take 100% of the blame. To be honest, law schools don’t deserve even 50% of the blame. Maybe 25% of the blame. The other 75% rests with the student who decides to attend that school. If the student does proper research (which isn’t hard) and still decides to attend, then that student has to man up and accept that his lack of a job and his loan payments were his own fault. And if the student claims that he was “misled by the employment stats put out by the school”, then to be honest that student made a stupid decision to attend law school – a decision about what he wanted to do for the rest of his life – by looking at just one source of information.
It makes absolutely no sense to conclude that law schools are a complete scam simply by pointing to a handful of instances in which employment statistics were massaged. It’s like someone claiming that they got sick with lung cancer because they smoked one cigarette a decade ago – there’s just no link between cause and effect. Students attend law school willingly, and these days (and over the past decade) students have attended law school knowing that there are people out there who didn’t succeed in the job market after graduation. Those who end up running scamblogs are the students who simply can’t admit that they went into law school expecting the best, but ended up losing the gamble.
Maybe that’s a little harsh. But the fact remains that it’s no secret – and has never been a secret – that law schools (especially low tier law schools) have poor employment prospects. And the fact remains that students voluntarily attend those law schools, take on the debt, and waste three years of their lives (and many decades afterwards suffering from overbearing debt loads) because society as a whole – not just law schools – paint law as being an attractive, exciting and lucrative career.
There’s just so much blame to go around for this entire mess. Law schools are starting to admit their part. But don’t expect law schools to accept 100% of the blame – students, whether they like it or not, aren’t innocent victims.
The fraud is done via the collection methodology. They’ll grab at any chance to count someone as employed. They also will count someone they can’t reach as employed; so how hard do you think they investigate their students? The fact still remains that when a third tier school says their graduates, 6 months out of law school, are employed 94% of the time, with an average salary of $160,000, they are lying. They know they are lying. They are lying in order to induce students to attend. In other words, they’ve met the elements for a civil fraud claim. To say it’s the student’s fault for believing the USN&WR and LSDAS and NALP figures and the brochures and the school’s representatives is ridiculous. What kind of “proper research” is a student supposed to do? Maybe that’s a valid viewpoint for the past two years when the issue has actually made it into the mainstream news and scamblogs are available, but for most of the past 20 years all a student had to go on was what the schools said.
This is where the whole argument falls down in a mess of falsehoods:
“When a third tier school says their graduates, 6 months out of law school, are employed 94% of the time, with an average salary of $160,000, they are lying.”
I agree. So show me the third tier school(s?) that says 6 months out of law school, 94% of its grads are employed with an average salary of $160,000. (And if you can do that, then I’ll show you a bunch of students who (a) went into law for the money, and (b) showed such poor analytical/research skills that they believed such a ridiculous claim in spite of clear and plentiful evidence to the contrary.)
You may have a point – law schools do inflate their employment stats a little in some cases. But that hardly discounts the whole legal education system as a scam or some kind of huge fraud. The real fraud, in my opinion, is the high cost of law school, the overpaid professors who know very little about the law, the oversupply of lawyers etc. Not the fact that a few gullible or moneygrabbing law students are mad that they didn’t get the $160,000 per year that they thought the law school was promising them.
I await your findings…
And your claim that the only information that law applicants had about actual employment prospects came directly from the schools is equally flimsy. Even when I was looking at law schools in the 1990s, the advice was clear: ask local attorneys what the market is like, look at employment ads for salary data, use government salary sources and private salary databases etc. It’s simple, common-sense due diligence. Nor do I even believe that most law students don’t look at third party sources or look beyond the rankings for their information. I believe that most law students DO proper research, then make the fatal mistake of picking the information that best suits their overinflated opinions of their abilities and prospects, and ignoring anything that suggests that law might not be the best career option. Self-serving bias.
I just don’t buy it. For such an educated, intelligent, motivated and (once) professional group of students, scambloggers simply can’t expect people to believe that law schools put a blindfold over them during the entire application process and then the three years that followed. It’s just not true!
There are many legitimate complaints with law school that many people have. Most scambloggers actually illustrate many of these legitimate complaints, but make the fatal error of concluding that they were scammed. The system may be weighted in the law schools’ favor, but it ain’t no scam – and the louder people cry “scam”, the further from the real debate they drift.
Yup, just as I expected. This mysterious, fictional tier 3 school that claims 94% of its students are employed with an average salary of $160,000 didn’t materialize. This is typical of the scamblogging movement (passing off crazy made-up stats as facts) and typical of those who read scamblogs (gullible, or unwilling/unable to conduct basic research).
But my main point of revisiting this post is to ask why on earth only two blogs, one of which is this blog, seem to have covered this “event”. The two bloggers who actually participated (Third Tier Reality and All Education Matters) have nothing on their sites at all. My guess is that this event turned out to be exactly as I described – distinctly unfavorable to the scamblogging movement – hence the way it’s been swept under the rug.
I attended IU Maurer, and while he’s probably right about some people attending law school despite the warnings (which until recently was an untested theory, and applications went down by a lot last year after several articles were published, so just saying…) Anyway, from my experience in Bloomington, it would be exactly wrong to say that the people who expected the highest salaries are the most bitter about the scam. It was the people who expected law to be a real profession, something more than the almighty dollar, who were the most upset (including me) when they discovered the schools were basically just about producing revenue. I attended law school expecting it to be more than a business. I only ever expected to make $60,000 a year. The public interest law foundation was the largest student organization on campus, and the source of most of the people who now complain.
The students who wanted huge salaries seemed to have a better understanding of the gamble they were taking, and so showed very little bitterness towards the school when they didn’t reach their hoped-for salaries.
The “I went to law school to help people” types, on the other hand, were extremely upset when the realities of scarce government positions and high debt levels set in, and they blamed the schools both for telling us $60,000 would be a reasonable salary to expect, and for failing to warn us about how competitive the public interest positions really were.
Point taken. Negative information about law school and legal career prospects has been widely available on the Internet for around a decade – it’s only recently that it’s been brought into the mainstream as part of a wider examination of rising college tuition as a whole. Law applicants performing even routine research prior to attending law school any time since the turn of the millenium cannot have failed to uncover some negative info, but it was probably ignored or downplayed in light of the large amount of “law school is a great investment” data provided by US News and the law schools themselves.
I too fell into the same hole as you did: the stats provided by my school strongly suggested that anyone graduating in the top half of the class would have no trouble getting a job paying well over $65,000 (which was the average for private practice reported), and even over $55,000 (which was the average for all jobs – private practice, government, etc. combined). Worst case scenario, I thought, would be a salary just under the average, and I would have been happy with that. I graduated just outside the top 10% of my class and had the usual employer-friendly ECs such as being an editor on the law review, and ended up with zero job offers at graduation. I scrounged around and ended up with a job paying $40,000 per year with no benefits just before I took the bar exam – this put me beneath the lowest private practice salary reported, and the two years I spent in that job put me further into debt but I needed the experience. I feel your pain, along with that of many other law grads. But things to get better. A career takes years to develop, and few people are lucky enough to start where they would like to. It’s only in the past year that I’ve found my place (after about a decade), earn enough money (but still not even half what a biglaw first year associate earns) and enjoy what I do.