To what extent is more transparency the answer to what's wrong with legal education?

The answer, of course, is that we don't really know, because we still have a very inadequate level of transparency regarding a number of important things, most notably job and salary information for recent graduates.  My guess is that the kind of information which would be readily available if the recommendations made by the folks at the Law School Transparency project were adopted would constitute an important first step in reforming legal education, but no more than that.  Those recommendations or substantially similar ones should be forced onto ABA-accredited law schools immediately if not sooner by the ABA, especially given that law schools continue to publish placement statistics that bear little relation to actual employment outcomes.



The current deplorable state of the purported employment information that law schools disclose can cause people discussing the problem to gravitate to one or another extreme.  On the one hand, there's a tendency to believe that the main problem with contemporary legal education is purely informational, and in a narrow sense.  A caricature, although not a very gross one, of this position would run something like this:

Potential law students are rational consumers of information.  If you give such people genuinely good information about employment outcomes, they will make rational decisions about whether to invest time and money in legal education. The law school scam is at bottom really about how law schools hide the truth about how many of their students are getting real legal jobs -- that is, permanent, full-time jobs that require a law degree -- and how much those jobs pay.  Force law schools to reveal the true answers to those two questions, and the scam-like elements of legal education will largely disappear (although this revelation could well cause a bunch of law schools to disappear in the process).

At the other extreme you have the view that even an ideal level of disclosure regarding employment and salary data for recent graduates will have little effect on the decisions of potential law school students.  That view is roughly as follows:

The idea that potential law students are rational maximizers of their utility, who just need better information to make better choices, is a myth.  Full disclosure of employment information regarding outcomes for recent graduates will have little effect on law school admissions for two reasons. First, people assume statistical generalities won't apply to them, which leads them to be over-optimistic about their own prospects even when they are realistic about the prospects of others. Second, there is a very large pool of college graduates who have poor employment prospects, and for whom therefore the opportunity costs of going to law  school are low.  When you combine these two factors with the artificially low front-end costs of going to law school ( which are kept artificially low by government-guaranteed non-dischargeable loans, that potential students would not be able to acquire in a financing market that actually reflected the long-term pecuniary costs and benefits of legal education), this results in a situation in which the vast majority of people who are now going to law school would go anyway, even if they had much better information beforehand.

Now at this point the sage academic will scratch his chin and observe that "the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle."  No doubt!  But of course the crucial question is, how close to the middle? And the answer is -- as the answer so often is to so many questions that legal academics like to opine on with unwarranted confidence -- "nobody knows."

My best guess, which along with $3.75 will get you a large latte at Starbucks, is that the second view will ultimately prove to be closer to the truth than the first.  But my preference for a suitably moderate version of the second view comes subject to a big caveat, which is I do believe some recent law grads and many law faculty have a natural tendency to over-estimate how much information about employment prospects prospective law students can reasonably be expected to acquire under current circumstances. The scam blogs are doing a great service, but for all sorts of reasons prospective students may well find it easy to rationalize away the information available on them, especially given that people interested in going to law school are probably prone to be too trusting about the information given to them by authoritative social institutions, as opposed to that conveyed by disenchanted rebels.  This is long-winded way of saying that it might actually make a big difference if law schools stopped lying about employment stats (Yes I realize that most law schools are not, in the narrowest technical sense, lying about the stats. It all depends on what the meaning of the word "lie" is).  There's an easy way to test this hypothesis, which is for law schools to disclose the employment information they already have in a straightforward fashion: something which again "everyone" seems to be in favor of, but that still isn't happening.

But whatever view on this subject turns out to be correct, ultimately the problems with contemporary legal education -- and, of far more importance, with the careers that this education does (or doesn't) prepare people to lead -- go well beyond anything that can be fixed by more transparency about initial job prospects. Nevertheless it's imperative that all the relevant parties continue to push for more transparency regarding employment and salary data for recent graduates.  It is after all something that can be done immediately at almost no additional cost, and which might have substantial benefits for prospective law students.

In that vein, prospective law students could, through collective action, put significant pressure on law schools to reform their current practices.  Ideally, prospective law students would insist on asking certain questions to any law school to which they were applying, and especially any law school to which they were admitted.  These would include: what percentage of your graduates, nine months after graduation, have permanent full-time jobs for which a J.D. is a prerequisite? (Judicial clerkships could be broken out as a separate category) What percentage of those were sole practitioners?  What percentage of the graduates with permanent full-time jobs that require a law degree reported salary information, and what were the median and mean salaries reported?

 

Prospective students should especially keep in mind that the meaningfulness of the salary figures they're given in regard to the third question is a direct function of the relative percentage of graduates reporting salary information. A school with salary information for only a small percentage of its graduates who have real legal jobs is revealing little of direct significance regarding the salaries of its salaries. (What is of much greater significance is that the school doesn't have good salary information, since graduates with good salaries are much more likely to report them).

I want to emphasize in particular that a crucial piece of this information that isn't currently available to prospective students at all is the answer to the question of how many of the jobs graduates report having are actually permanent (aka real). A huge percentage of recent graduates are doing temporary contract work of various kinds, or poorly paid non-judicial clerkships, or are trying to make a go of it as sole practitioners, with the latter situation often being tantamount to unemployment, except with extra expenses. Again, adopting something like the Law School Transparency project's recommendations remains imperative.

Update:  The comments in this thread remind me of just how much air has to be taken out of the law school employment statistics as currently reported. For example, in addition to the various factors mentioned in the original post, accurate employment stats need to reflect the increasingly common practice of law schools employing their own graduates for a few weeks or a few months (this is another reason why it's so crucial for the stats to distinguish between temporary and permanent employment).  The most critical reform I didn't mention is the need for some sort of auditing of the reporting process, which as of now relies on self-reporting from graduates -- who of course have self-interested reasons for exaggerating their employment status, because of how employment statistics affect their schools' rankings -- and in addition assumes schools will then report this already significantly suboptimal data set accurately.  Given the enormous competitive pressures the rankings game puts the schools under, that is almost certainly an overly optimistic assumption in at least some cases.

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