Thursday, October 27, 2011

Do law faculty care about what happens to their students?

Lemuel asks:

Something I'd be interested in hearing about is how law professors tend to view their students, including whether they only really care about the top x%, so that bad outcomes for everyone else don't really matter to professors.
 This is an important question, and the answer helps explain why legal education is a mess right now.  Of course at the individual level the answer is going to vary considerably, but as always what matters for the purposes of institutional analysis isn't individual behavior per se, but rather the structural effects institutions have on that behavior.


All of which is to say that, while the extent to which law faculty are involved with or aware of the career outcomes of their students varies a lot,  law school is now structured in such a way as to guarantee that the vast majority of faculty will have no idea what almost all of their former students are doing, even a year or two after graduation.

One of the reasons for this has to do with the historical structure of legal education, while another involves relatively recent developments.  The historical reason why law faculty have no idea what the vast majority of their students go on to do is the high faculty to student ratio that characterizes legal education.  At most schools, the majority of classes include many dozens of students and no formal interaction between faculty and students outside those classes.  If you teach a 75-person class, a student who doesn't volunteer in that class on a regular basis and/or come to talk to you during office hours (and this describes the vast majority of students) is going to be invisible to you, unless you're one of those Bill Clintonesque people with a photographic memory for names and faces and the uncanny ability to make people that you don't actually know at all feel as if they're longtime friends.

In other words, the structure of legal education guarantees that most law faculty will know little or nothing about the vast majority of students who pass through their classes when they're actually in their classes, let alone after they graduate.  In this context  it may be worth noting that I've been in the very same business as my former law teachers for more than 20 years now, and, with two exceptions, I have had exactly zero contact with any of them in the years since I graduated  (I can only imagine how much contact they have with actual lawyers).

Which brings me to the second, and under current circumstances much more important, reason why law faculty have no idea what the vast majority of their former students are or aren't doing, even in the year or two immediately after their graduation.  A senior colleague remarked to me recently that, 35 years ago, it would have been far more difficult for the faculty at our school to remain as insulated from  what's happening to our graduates as we are now.  35 years ago the University of Colorado, like the vast majority of law schools at the time, was a far more modest operation in every sense than it is today.  It lacked almost all academic pretension, and while it probably did no better a job than we do now of actually preparing people to practice law, at least the institution at that time was under no illusions that it had any more exalted purpose. (It was also, not coincidentally, ten times less expensive to attend in real terms).

One consequence of this was that the faculty at the time were much more connected to the state and local bar than their successors are today.  A generation ago the average law faculty member drew his professional identity from his connection to the legal profession far more than he did from his connection to academia, which was almost always largely nominal (This was, according to Richard Posner, even the case at the Harvard Law School, let alone at the typical law school).  Under such conditions, I am told, it would have been quite impossible for the typical law faculty member to remain as relatively clueless about the current employment catastrophe as most law faculty have managed to remain.  As Law Office Computing puts it:

We need to wake up the sleepers, that is clear. In my experience, most of the sleepers are hard working, good hearted people who really care about students and the institution. The problem is that too few of them have contact with the outside world, particularly small firm and solo practitioners. I had the good fortune to work with the local bar association on many matters over the years, but my experience is not shared by many of my colleagues. The bottom line is that we need to do a lot of educating the educators before things will change. But, they will change. There have been several "paradigm shifts" in legal education in my 44 years and I sense another one coming soon!
 One inevitable cost of law schools become more self-consciously academic places rather than professional training schools is this increasing loss of connection to the profession itself.   If the basic economic structure of the profession is changing -- and there are many signs it is, in ways that far transcend the current recessionary crisis -- that disconnect is growing increasingly costly to both law graduates and (eventually) law schools, who continue to function according to a business model that makes less and less sense.

I also want to echo Law Office Computing's comments about the good intentions of the typical law faculty member.  The scam blogs are full of comments from enraged graduates claiming that law faculty are "sociopaths" and "criminals," who are living high off the hog while scamming their students into life-wrecking debt. These comments are in a sense understandable, but they are also absurd. (That they are absurd is no reason to dismiss them, however. If some of your former students are inclined to view you as a sociopath and criminal because of the nature of the economic relationship between yourself and them this should, to put it mildly, give you some pause about that relationship).

The average law faculty member is no more likely to be a sociopath than the average member of any other profession (he or she is also no more likely to be a person of better than average moral character either, of course).  The problem is that the average law faculty member has become structurally disconnected from the economic realities of the practice (or increasingly non-practice) of law, as it's experienced by his or her graduates.  "Caring," at the level of individual empathy, about what happens to former law students, is no substitute for the kind of institutional reform that will decrease that structural disconnection.

51 comments:

  1. Funny that you dispute that most law faculty are sociopaths, but don't dispute that they are living "high off the hog." Drive through the faculty parking lot at any law school. It looks like a luxury car dealership. Even the law grads the school has hired to inflate their own employment numbers are driving luxury vehicles within months of obtaining their high-paying academic job, for which most of them are barely, if at all, qualified.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Which faculty parking lots?

    ReplyDelete
  3. at my t1 most of the older faculty drive normal cars with exception of the dean, while mid career and adjunct people all drive luxury cars

    ReplyDelete
  4. That's not the case at my school.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I once spoke candidly with a Professor that I worked for in law school regarding the debt I was in, and how it effected my well being. I did so in a dry, clinical manner. Not a blubbering whiny spectacle.

    She had a look on her face like she was watching something horrible that didn't make complete sense unfold.

    ReplyDelete
  6. In my experience, the profs don't care whether you learn anything at all, much less that you're prepared in any way to utilize what was obtusely conveyed to you in their "class". Why would they bother caring what happens to you once you leave their bubble world?

    That said, it isn't like I enjoy being around them either or would care whether they cared about my career. Law profs are, in my experience, so detached from reality that they are displeasing to communicate with in any capacity. They are often some varying degree of rude, insulting, elitist, impersonal, weird, militant believers of something and hypersensitively dominated by it, and constantly bullshitting you.

    These characteristics do not lend themselves to compassion and empathy.

    ReplyDelete
  7. The average law faculty member is no more likely to be a sociopath than the average member of any other profession (he or she is also no more likely to be a person of better than average moral character either, of course).

    That's an interesting empirical question.

    Seems to me that it's entirely possible (or even probable) that there is something about the nature of "law professoring" that tends to attract the kind of person who is NOT necessarily at the average level on assessments of antisocial personality disorder (commonly called sociopath or psychopath) or on levels of compassionate and moral behavior.

    Mind you, I'm not saying they're more likely to be immoral jerks. In fact, my totally uninformed guess is that they're more likely to score higher on things like Kohlberg's scale of moral reasoning, and to exhibit somewhat more ethical/moral behavior than either the average citizen or the average professional in another field.

    I'd also be willing to guess that they're more likely to exhibit characteristics we associate with "sociopaths", but I wouldn't put any money on that guess.

    I don't necessarily fault them for being out of touch with the bar, since the legal academy has so completely swung the pendulum over to the "academy" part and away from the "legal" part -- the thing that constantly burns my biscuits is that they're such horrible educators, even by the forgiving standards of higher education.

    This semester I'm taking a class at the graduate school (needless to say I couldn't convince the Dean to apply those credits towards my JD). This class has no attendance requirement. Yet week in and week out the class has an attendance rate exceeding 90%.

    It's interesting, challenging, and useful. The professor has no need to force some nonsense ABA-mandated attendance requirement down our throats because he actually TEACHES during class. We attend because we want to. In the 2 1/2 years I've gone through so far, I could count on my thumbs the number of classes taught by JD's that I would actually have attended if it were optional.

    As for not being able to know your students -- that's something of a cop-out to say "oh I have 75 kids I couldn't possibly know anything about them". If professors wanted to, they absolutely could learn a lot about the group as a whole and the individual students. Have them take basic surveys about personality types, learning preferences, patterns of moral reasoning, etc. Have them write up answers to some short questions about themselves. I had one professor (property) who actually did this, and he got to know us quite well.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thanks for addressing the issue I raised. The situation seems to be even worse than I thought. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given the size of most law school classes and the very limited extent to which law profs are involved with their students' class work, let alone their students' efforts to find jobs.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Oh and as long as we're suggesting things:

    I'd be curious to hear what law professor's attitudes are towards teaching? Roughly what proportion of them absolutely hate it, dislike it, kind of like it, and love that part of their job.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Of course I have to compare the profs. I met whilst studying law to those who I met whilst studying physics. Thing is, if someone had told me that there were lecturers worse than the grown-up nerds who in the main teach physics whilst I was an undergrad I would have laughed at them, but it was true.

    Biggest difference - I can't think of any of my physics profs who didn't have at least a basic level of enthusiasm for their subject, or at least a basic level of professionalism in their teaching. Some of my law lecturers, particularly the ones I studied my master's program under, obviously didn't give a damn about what they were teaching and couldn't care a rat's ass what we thought of them.

    Case in point - a guy teaching copyright who used powerpoint presentations which he had obviously downloaded straight off the internet (they still had the names/logos of other firms/institutions in them). This wouldn't have been so bad if he had actually known what the content of each presentation was, but sometimes their only connection to the subject we were supposed to be studying was in title. Other times the presentations would be many hundreds of slides long - far too long for the class.

    Another case in point - a guy teaching us patent law whose idea of a pre-exam revision class was to repeat, word-for-word, a previous lecture which was actually on stuff which would not anyway be on the exam. The whole class staged a walk-out half-way through except for one person who he continued to speak to in this fashion for the remaining 45 minutes.

    When you've sat through lectures like this, it's kind of difficult not to envision the people responsible laughing all the way to the bank at the suckers who were paying their paychecks - us.

    OK, there were some very good people teaching as well, but the two individuals above really did just break any respect I had for the people who taught us. It's now been ten years since I graduated with physic, but I still stay in touch with a couple of the people who taught me. Not so for any of the law profs I studied under.

    ReplyDelete
  11. The most frustrating thing is that the Profs and Admins only want to interact with the best and brightest. EVERYTHING is reserved for them: OCI, Law Review, tutoring positions, etc. I understand that to the victor go the spoils, but at some point there has to be an opportunity for the other 80% percent of us funding these organizations to thrive.

    It is also such a lazy way to run an organization. Profs and Admins can sit around with the top 20%, congratulating themselves on what wonderful teachers and deans they must be to have shepherded such genius. Real teachers teach, and that is certainly not what many Profs are doing. There's always going to be a top percentage who never needed any teaching, so not only are most Profs not teaching their bottom 80%, they're not even really teaching their top 20%.

    ReplyDelete
  12. If a JD were worth the paper that our monthly loan payment notices were written on, far fewer students would care about their professors' capacity for empathy.

    ReplyDelete
  13. @ 9:38

    "The most frustrating thing is that the Profs and Admins only want to interact with the best and brightest. EVERYTHING is reserved for them: OCI, Law Review, tutoring positions, etc."

    This is simply not true. My TTT's career services offers all students the ability to mock interview for jobs that do not exist. We'll always have that.

    ReplyDelete
  14. In my experience professors have very little recourse to help individual students find jobs. I go to a top 6 law school, and really the only times professors can influence entry-level hiring is when they make clerkship calls (or potentially down the road with academic hiring.) They can do very little for students who need to get private sector jobs because they are so divorced from the private sector. They are not tapped into the kinds of attorney networks where their good word would make a difference. For example, I wonder if the criminal law professors at my school could even name the top 10 criminal defense attorneys in the city.

    This all gets back to the structural deficiencies within legal education. Unfortunately this will only get worse as law schools prioritize the hiring of JD/Ph.d's and people with 1 or 2 years of biglaw associate experience.

    ReplyDelete
  15. "My TTT's career services offers all students the ability to mock interview for jobs that do not exist. We'll always have that."

    Lol. Fair enough.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Nearly two decades ago at a top 100 (but not tier 1), expensive, private school whose real world job placement statistics (based upon the observations of all students) were vastly different than its reported job placement statistics even back then, I was amazed at how forthright numerous professors were about what trying to make a living as a lawyer was really like. That is, in one aspect, getting a first law job is only a first hurdle and is something quite different from remaining employed in the law business.

    I remember the contracts professor who said "if this [the teaching job] had not come along, I would have moved to a small town" (lamenting what it was really like to try to work as a lawyer), the other professor who said with rolled eyes "you left profession X for law!" and the other professor and former big law firm partner who said openly "the practice of law is awful."

    This is an aspect of the law school scam that I am particularly interested in highlighting. At the very minimum, a significant percentage of law school professors are fully aware that they are teaching in a discipline that even they themselves no longer wish to use to try to make a living. In view of such expressions as reported above, it is reasonable to believe that at least a significant percentage of law school professors are fully aware that law school is not a good investment for perhaps a majority, perhaps even an overwhelming majority of their students. An inherent evil of the present system is that there is no meaningful reporting mechanism and analysis to determine and expose just how small the percentage of law school graduates that use a law degree to make a living really is, both 9 months after graduation, and 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, etc. after graduation. I know from observation that the percentage generally decreases as the number of years post graduation increases, independent of mortality. Such data would further clarify what really happens to graduates of law schools both in the short term and in the long term.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Just for the record, when I taught 1L courses some years ago, every first year student took legal writing in a class of ten associated with one the major first year courses. That meant that I had 10 students to whom I taught civil procedure and legal writing for a total of 5 or 6 credits. I don't know what the situation is at other schools, but I do know that I got to know my students very well. They came to our house for dinner on a regular basis and I, like my colleagues who taught small sections in other courses, kept a sharp eye out for the students who were having trouble and gave them special attention. I found this model very demanding of my time and effort but very rewarding at a personal level. I don't know if the small section/ first year courses model is still used but I suspect it is in some of the state university based law schools. It is a very expensive model, however, that displaced many other possible educational experiences.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Has the website been prepared listing every law professor, their phone number, email address and whether they responded to the request to sign the petition?

    If you want to actually do something about the problem, that's what you need to do. Prepare that website, have students call the professors and explain to them why the petition is important.

    ReplyDelete
  19. I was amazed at how forthright numerous professors were about what trying to make a living as a lawyer was really like.

    This is something that surprised me also. I did a lot of research before deciding to go to law school (back in the early '90s). Even so, I was not prepared for how little practice experience almost all professors had, or for the view they generally seemed to share that being a law professor was somehow more honorable than being a practitioner. Not simply that being a prof is a different calling, but that being a prof is the ultimate success, and the only people who spend their lives practicing are intellectual mediocrities who were forced to settle.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Hm. Now there's a ripe field for several blog posts: you're paying HOW MUCH for HOW CRAPPY a product that barely prepares you for a field with HOW LOW a job satisfaction rate?

    ReplyDelete
  21. I have one professor from law school who I see routinely lecturing at cle classes at the local bar association, and participating in panel discussions with working prosecutors and defense lawyers that he engages with. He usually makes a good contribution to the discussion and seems genuinely interested to hear what's going on in the trenches.

    But he's the only one.

    ReplyDelete
  22. They came to our house for dinner on a regular basis and I, like my colleagues who taught small sections in other courses, kept a sharp eye out for the students who were having trouble and gave them special attention.

    That's impressive. I went to HYS and was not aware of any professor who did anything close to this.

    ReplyDelete
  23. I went to HYS and knew of several profs who did things like this.

    ReplyDelete
  24. At my school that kinda of stuff is reserved for 1Ls only, by 2L year most professors forget you were in their classes.

    ReplyDelete
  25. It's nice if individual professors build and maintain personal and professional relationships with their former students. I don't care to do so with any of mine, and I doubt that any of them would care to do so with me. The world keeps turning nonetheless.

    What I don't understand is how absolutely incurious the supposedly research-obsessed law academy is about the results of its own teaching. Sure, I'll get an employment survey, and fill it out. But I've never heard of any law school sending questionnaires to their alumni one, two or five years out (bundled with their incessant pleas for donations, perhaps) about how useful what they learned was. It's as if they assume that bar passage and entry into the workforce answers all questions about the utility of law school classwork, and no improvements or redesigns are possible, let alone desirable.

    It would be nice if law professors forged so many relationships with students that their social networks alone would give them an indication of how effective their teaching was. I don't expect that, but there should be institutional outreach to learn that information.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Time was that law faculty were more connected to the practice world, but that was pretty long ago. There is very little legal scholarship produced these days that has much to do with what practicing lawyers lawyers do, and there is not really any interaction between the law school faculty and the local bar in my city except to the extent that practicing lawyers are acting as adjuncts. Even there it is slight-- it's not like we are all going to the same Christmas parties. I'd be pretty surprised if more than a handful of the faculty at my law school belong to the county bar association, and I cannot think of the last time I saw a faculty member as part of a CLE program.

    ReplyDelete
  27. "What I don't understand is how absolutely incurious the supposedly research-obsessed law academy is about the results of its own teaching."

    That raises another question that maybe LawProf could address. Does teaching ability have ANY bearing on a person's compensation, making tenure, etc.? Or is it the same as with law firms that say bar and community service is rewarded, but the guys who make partner never did squat for the bar or community?

    ReplyDelete
  28. @2:44 p.m.:

    How would they know what teaching ability looked like?

    ReplyDelete
  29. We do have pretty detailed teaching reviews and a competitive scoring system at my school. In addition, there is the law school rumor system which in my experience is second only to the Navy.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Yes, most law professors do care about their students. What Law Prof doesn't understand is the power held by most deans and their vindictiveness. Most law professors are powerless to do anything. If you bring up something up at a faculty meeting, like not hiring grads for menial jobs to raise the percentage employed after nine months, it can hurt you or even end your career. Those on contract and those not yet tenured have no power, nada, none. A vindictive dean can have a teaching review done by an ally who will trash a person a dean doesn't like. A dean can even manipulate student evaluations to make them look bad. Even if you have tenure, a dean has ways to get back at discontents, such as salary, teaching assignments, or research grants. If you have a vindictive dean at your law school, the only thing you can do is keep quite, unless you want to be on the street without a job.

    ReplyDelete
  31. "The scam blogs are full of comments from enraged graduates claiming that law faculty are "sociopaths" and "criminals," who are living high off the hog while scamming their students into life-wrecking debt"

    I think the sociopath comments are more intended for CSO offices and deans because they are and have been well aware for years, and, if they truly are not, that can only be explained by some form of sociopathic behavior IMO.

    A better characterizations for many law professors is that they are lazy and self-righteous towards their students.

    ReplyDelete
  32. @8:37. Back up your facts.

    ReplyDelete
  33. @9:28 p.m.:

    Of course a dean is going to write all of this down for later publication, so as to make herself look terrible and the professor look like a hero. Come on. If you don't believe that this happens, then you have obviously never worked for any length of time in a bureaucracy.

    ReplyDelete
  34. @Law Office Computing/5:50 p.m.:

    Who's doing these "pretty detailed teaching reviews"? If professors were held to the standard of "most students know what the fuck is going on, thanks to class," almost none of my 1L professors (and a slightly larger number of my 2L-3L professors) would pass.

    ReplyDelete
  35. A vindictive dean can have a teaching review done by an ally who will trash a person a dean doesn't like.

    This seems to be relevant: http://volokh.com/2011/08/06/wideners-dean-linda-ammons-doubles-down/

    ReplyDelete
  36. Does a rapist care about what happens to his victims?

    ReplyDelete
  37. I went to a top 30 law school 32 years ago. The majority of profs didn't care about us. I learned next to nothing about how to practice law. It was a hoop I had to jump through so I could get out and start learning to be a lawyer. Thank goodness I didn't have to pay what it costs today. If I was deciding whether to go to law school now, I wouldn't -- it costs too damn much.

    ReplyDelete
  38. The vast majority of professors will say they're very in touch with their students, keep up with some of them after graduation, etc. And, I think most professors are in touch with some of their students and do keep up with some after graduation. The problem is likely volume.

    When you ask yourself if you're really connecting with your student, look to your student:faculty ratio. If it's a 10:1 ratio, are there 10 students in the school right now that you regularly meet and chat with? If you've been teaching for 15 years, are there another 50 alumni you keep in touch with?

    I'm guessing most professors are connecting with at best half their share of students. And, to make the problem worse, professors are likely to all focus on the same group. Students on Law Review may have half a dozen faculty mentors, while students in the middle and bottom of the class can't find a professor who would even remember their name.

    ReplyDelete
  39. I wonder which school these guy graduated from -

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/what-the-costumes-reveal.html?_r=1&src=tp&smid=fb-share

    ReplyDelete
  40. Should there be an expectation that professors will keep up with large numbers
    of their students forever? That is not a realistic expectation, and cannot be
    a basis of criticism.

    ReplyDelete
  41. "Students on Law Review may have half a dozen faculty mentors, while students in the middle and bottom of the class can't find a professor who would even remember their name."

    Agreed.

    ReplyDelete
  42. We would have a better sense of the true nature of professors, if we prepared a website listing every professor and whether they agreed to sign the petition.

    You might be surprised at the results.

    ReplyDelete
  43. @10:20: I don't think professors have any obligation to keep up with students after graduation.

    All I was doing was pointing out that professors who think they do a good job of connecting with students are probably not realizing how few students are served in this way.

    ReplyDelete
  44. @BL1Y I don't know what you mean if you were not suggesting that profs who do not keep up with students after graduation are not doing "a good job of connecting with students." The size of classes pretty much limits the number of students who profs will get to know well enough to keep in contact with over the years. That, and the fact that people go on to other things when they leave school. This is true at all levels of the educational process. I have kept contact with a few teachers and profs over the years. But that does not necessarily speak to how well those teachers connected with students overall. Of course there are some profs, in all types of disciplines, who don't
    make connections before or after graduation. That is another issue.

    ReplyDelete
  45. It's like a chef saying his food is really terrific, and showing you the delicious dish he just cooked, while ignoring the fact that half the dining room has been waiting for 2 hours with nothing more than bread.

    ReplyDelete
  46. Okay...if you say so. But I will point out that the chef's job is to cook,
    not to take reservations or seat people who come to the restaurant.

    ReplyDelete
  47. Imagine you go to a restaurant, place your order, and two hours later your food hasn't come out of the kitchen yet. You flag down your waiter and ask about what's taking so long, and he says "well, the chef just cooks 3-4 meals a day, guess yours wasn't one of them." I'm guessing you'd be a bit steamed. But hey, the chef's job is just to cook, right? No. It's to cook a certain amount in a certain time frame.

    There is some question as to just how much mentoring/relationship building is part of a professor's job. The core function is to teach, but obviously a lot of other stuff goes in to being a professor, such as scholarship and admin duties. And while mentoring isn't really part of the job description, I think most professors would say it's part of what they do as a professor.

    When looking at whether a professor is doing a good job at mentoring and building relationships with students and alumni, we have to not only how good are the relationships, but how many as well. There are some practical limitations, such as time and students not keeping in touch. There's also a limit to how many people come into the restaurant and how many burners are on the stove.

    Hitting the cap of either demand for a relationship or possible effort would be excellent. There will also be some people who do an okay job, putting forth a good effort, but less than ideal. And then there are law professors, who cook for their friends, piss in the soup, go home, and brag about how much their friends like their cooking.

    They get an A+ for the student they talked to, but an F for every student they dodged by running out of class immediately after their lecture ended. Another graveyard problem, professors only see the A+ and think they're great, without realizing there are nine Fs on their transcript.

    ReplyDelete
  48. Law Professors aren't alone in their seemingly "incurious" behavior about the effects of their teaching. Professors of all stripe are profoundly lacking in awareness about the effectiveness of their teaching. You need look no further than the fact that the overwhelming number of them think that they're teaching when they engage in lecture.

    The research on this is crystal clear, and decades old: lecturing is almost totally ineffective in creating learning. And yet how many professors (law or otherwise) ever do anything other than lecture, give tests, and give grades?

    Law professors are notably poor in that they only ever assess with a single test, often give no feedback on performance on that test (aside from grade), and never require that the students do so much as a single homework assignment. And they do all of this to customers who have paid through the nose on the promise of fraudulent employment stats.

    ReplyDelete
  49. As I said, if this analogy is doing something for you, fine. I just don't think it works. In even a hypothetical restaurant where a chef cooks only four meals a day...(okay), the person in charge of managing the restaurant or seating people or taking reservations should schedule/seat diners according to what they know to be the chef's level of productivity. That is, in fact, what happens.

    Observing or complaining that profs do not get to know large numbers of their students, or do not keep up with large numbers of them is like saying that is water wet. The very
    nature of educational settings--unless it is a one-on-one tutoring situation, is that the
    teacher will be greatly outnumbered by the students--kindergarten through law school.
    Most people will only have one first year torts professor. The torts professor could have, depending upon how long they teach, thousands of students. Even in an unrealistically
    small class of 30 (taking off from the unrealistic chef/cook who prepares 3 or 4 meals a
    day in a supposedly functioning restaurant), after 3 years that is 90 people the prof is
    supposed to remember and be involved with. Add three other courses, some likely
    much larger, you could be talking 200 people, and those numbers keep growing as new
    students come in. Again, this is the story with education from the beginning. It says
    nothing about people who do not stay after class and talk to students. We agree that is
    not right. But even if the prof stays and talks, it will not change the basic fact that
    students outnumber professors, and it is not likely that the professor can be a mentor to hundreds, then thousands of individuals.

    ReplyDelete
  50. LawProf, look at this latest example of ABA statistical fraud that is especially apropos of your article.

    http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/2011_notice_and_comment_s510_rules_22_and_5.authcheckdam.pdf

    The ABA now require schools to report student loan default rates. However their definition of "default rate" is misleading and does not represent the true number of students who are not making their payments. Students who go on deferment or IBR will not count as defaulters under the ABA's definition, even though the graduate is not making his/her requirement payment.

    The ABA - masters of statistical fraud.

    ReplyDelete
  51. LawProf, Can you please organize a campaign to write the ABA on the above rules change? There is no rational, logical or sensible reason to avoid counting deferments and IBR in the "default" statistic that the ABA seeks to publish.

    I know you started this blog to actually make practical change, and this is an opportunity to do just that. If schools have to publish their IBR/deferment rates then you will quickly see which schools are worth the money. But if they only have to publish default (as defined by someone who doesn't pay anything without enrolling in IBR/deferments, something no rational graduate would do) then they will be free to publish yet another fraudulent statistic.

    As shown in the PDF link, comments are due by Nov. 15 and should be sent to Becky.Stretch@americanbar.org.

    Please organize something.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.