Dean Rudy Hasl of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law has responded to my request that the Law School Transparency Petition be distributed to his faculty with the following message:
"As you can see by our website postings, Thomas Jefferson has been quite transparent about releasing truthful and comprehensive info on our placement of graduates. I do not think that there could be more transparency than we provide. Any thoughts about what we can do better would be appreciated."
I do appreciate Dean Hasl's response. As of today I've only gotten responses from the administrations of about a dozen of the 200 law schools I've contacted regarding the petition. Four agreed to distribute the petition to their faculties, five others responded that they were forwarding the request further up the administrative hierarchy, two replied that they have institutional policies against distributing petitions, and Dean Hasl replied as per above.
A visit to TJSL's website reveals the school has linked to a pdf file of its most recent report to NALP, for the class of 2010. This indeed represents a higher level of transparency in regard to employment outcomes than almost all other law schools have to this point been willing to share (It's possible TJSL's sudden outburst of relative candor may have something to do with the fact it's being sued for publishing misleading employment statistics). Nevertheless, could TJSL do better? I think it could.
Consider some of the holes in this information. To begin with, the school has employment data of any sort regarding just 81% of its 2010 graduates (179 of 221). Of that group nearly a third (57) describe their employment status as "JD preferred," which is of course a very amorphous category. 101 describe their employment as permanent, another 35 characterize it as temporary, and another 43 do not address this question.
Now Dean Hasl might well point out that, under the current ABA regulatory regime, TJSL is already (at least as of a few months ago) disclosing much more information than it is required to disclose, and that in any case TJSL doesn't currently have the power to force its graduates to disclose more information than they're disclosing. Both these points are true, but both are contingent on the present regulatory arrangement, which in theory is easy to change.
The ABA could decide tomorrow to force every accredited school to release exactly the same information TJSL has released. Of course it isn't going to do anything of the kind, since the ABA's section on legal education is dominated by law school administrators and faculty, and indeed mostly people from lower tier schools, who clearly have the most to lose from increased transparency. Far from requiring more transparency, the ABA chose last week to require even less.
As for forcing graduates to reveal information, this too could be managed via the regulation process. After all law schools force entering students to reveal all sorts of information, and state bars impose even more stringent requirements on applicants. There is no reason (again in theory) why graduates couldn't be required to provide employment information as a condition of continued good standing to practice law.
But such measures are probably unnecessary. A potential solution to the transparency mess would consist of requiring every law school to post something along the lines of the following warning on its web site. "The Thomas Jefferson School of Law graduated 221 students in 2010. All these graduates were asked to provide employment and salary information nine months after graduation. A total of six of these 221 graduates reported a salary of $75,000 or higher. The average law school debt of the 95% of graduates who incurred debt was $137,352. The average graduate of this law school would have had to secure employment featuring a salary of at least $145,000 to avoid eligibility for Income Based Repayment, the government's educational loan welfare program."
Such a requirement would, it seems to me, create plenty of incentives for law schools to find out exactly what their graduates were doing nine months after graduation.
Update: See this excellent post from Brian Tamanaha at Balkinization about the myth that things were fine before Great Recession hit. Fully a third of ABA law school grads weren't getting law jobs prior to 2008, even using NALP's very liberal definition of what counts as genuine legal employment.
Keep doing what you are doing. The wind is at your back on all these things despite the forecasts given, ironically, from atop those ivory towers. Perhaps it is the thin air that deludes them otherwise.
ReplyDeleteI posed this question a couple of days ago at the end of a thread that had run out of steam, and it is relevant to today's post. : "On transparency, for those who rely on statistics in law school brochures to decide to go to a particular law school, what response rate from graduates reporting on their jobs and salaries would be enough to make a reliable decision? Fifty, sixty percent -- higher or lower?"
ReplyDeleteWhat regulatory regimes, and do we want to enter them, will force people to report how much money they make? Transparency on the school's part can be achieved, but unless the percentages of people who report is high, it still would not make sense for prospective students to rely on stats. Transparency is for transparency's sake, which is fine.
A solution would be for the DOJ to begin a 20 year overdue RICO investigation into the collusive criminal fraud that the ABA and law schools are guilty of, especially now that they are obstructing Senator Grassly's investigation.
ReplyDelete@Campos - Glad to see you're keeping up the petition drive. Speaking frankly, I don't think you have any right to drop it until you've put at least as much effort into it as the average law student does into finding a job after graduating, and failing (hundreds of emails, days spent filing out forms, unpaid internships etc. etc. etc.).
ReplyDeleteWith the information TJSL presents you can still tell it's a poor decision to attend their law school. I agree it is misleading in terms of the degree of how bad of a decision it is to go there and I agree that more salary data points are necessary for transparency.
ReplyDeleteI disagree that the warning you propose is necessary. I don't think it's too much for applicants to google a mortgage calculator and calculate payments based on three years of tuition plus estimated living expenses.
Somewhere along the line we need to pay attention to other externalities of this mess. Once everybody understands what a bad deal this can be, the people going to law school will be hugely biased toward economic elites. All of our effort over the last 40 years to open legal education to economic and ethnic minorities will have gone for naught. I won't venture a guess about where this will end up but even an old geezer like me can see it is not good.
ReplyDelete"There is no reason (again in theory) why graduates couldn't be required to provide employment information as a condition of continued good standing to practice law."
ReplyDeleteSure, there's no reason why we couldn't force lawyers to provide this information. But, is this really how you want the licensing process to be used?
Law Office Computing - I do not appreciate your tone and feel it provides succor to our distractors. Please stop posting your negativity.
ReplyDeleteLawProf - are you blocking specific IPs now?
ReplyDeleteI'm not blocking any IPs and I've only deleted about five posts in two months for repetitive trolling (none in the last couple of weeks).
ReplyDeleteI think LOC's point is very important.
8:48,
ReplyDeleteMight be an I.E. issue. I can comment from Chrome but not I.E. I've had this problem on multiple computers.
Well, even the open access to legal education for economic and ethnic minorities has been in vain. The old caste system never died. The elites in collusion with big banks would rather make profit off the high tuition rates and interest from loans rather than let the MARKET decide what the price will be for law school tuition.
ReplyDeleteBankers detest free markets because the PRICE you could actually afford would curtail their efforts at lending you money for anything since the price you could afford would likely require little, if any, borrowed money. Since the banks want to make money off of money they lend you and the business/schools want to take in more money, they went in together to thwart the free market.
Now, it is our turn to thwart them with the realities of free market economics, meaning you can't pay with an income you lack from a profession that is no longer economically viable. As they lurch and grasp for other sources of capital(foreign students), their very own plummeting return on investment will be their undoing.
So, let's stand by the shoreline and throw brick after brick onto the sinking ship, weighing it down further and pushing it deeper to its fated abyss.
The only troll here was steroid boy and I didn't see any of his posts banned. Regarding LOC - look up "whoosh" when you have a chance.
ReplyDeleteLOC,
ReplyDeleteAs far as schools outside of the T-14 yes that may be true. Keep in mind that several of the T-14 schools have generous LRAP programs. For example, at my school (and this was even before IBR loan forgiveness) if you work for a non-profit the law school place your loan on a 10 year repayment plan and will make the payments so long as you remain employed by the non-profit with the amount of the payment varying by your income. My school presumes that if you make under a certain amount in private employment that you are representing an under-served group and will also cover your loan payments as described above.
LOC: Reducing tuition to a level where students could work their way through law school (i.e. the level of 30 years ago) would do a lot of good for economic and ethnic minorities (I assume you mean people from disadvantaged backgrounds that are more likely to be minorities as opposed to rich minorities who are the primary beneficiaries from the current preference system.) If you could pay for law school by holding jobs throughout law school or with a modestly sized low-interest federal loan, many more people from disadvantaged backgrounds could go. Of course this would require some massive cost-cutting by ABA schools, but if the choice is between industry-high salaries for law professors/new chairs in the law school/espresso machines for everyone or access to the legal profession for people who have been held down for hundreds of years, I don't know how anyone could call themselves an advocate for social justice and not support the latter.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the ABA should remove the cap on 20 hour work weeks during school so students can hold multiple part-time jobs or work on weekends. I go to a school where anyone with a pulse can pull a B in their 2L and 3L classes and so I would rather be using my non-existent study time to work and try to make a dent in my student loans. It's nonsensical that I can't be doing anything productive for more than 20 hours per week.
Additionally, some on here have suggested that we reform the US News rankings. Since law schools are driven to improve their 25-75% LSAT and GPA medians, they can only allot the bottom 25% of the class for improving diversity, whether that is racial or ethnic minorities, diversity of work experience or life acheivements, etc.
There are a lot of ways to increase diversity by changing the current model of law school education.
@9:40
ReplyDeleteYou are correct. When I went to law school in the 60s it was far more open economically but there were other biases that tended to make the classes male and white. If the economic discrimination can be overcome we still have to be aware of the bias built into the LSAT which I think have not been significantly addressed.
It is also not likely that law schools will reduce their tuitions to lower than the colleges to which most are attached. Actually, law schools (administrators and professors) attached to universities do not set tuition for their schools. I am pretty sure that law profs and administrators could not say to a university, "Guess what, we are going to cut tuition from 45k to 20k next year." In some state schools a Board of Regents sets tuition. Sure, the law school could make suggestions, but it is not their final call.
ReplyDelete10:03,
ReplyDeleteEasy way around that one. The university may set tuition but the law school sets their budget. Cut costs, award all students a scholarship for $X.
And when the university expects its usual cut from the law school to pay for other programs, what then?
ReplyDelete..and financial aid makes up a lot of the budget. That would have to be cut rather than increased.
ReplyDelete10:45,
ReplyDeleteIt's not a perfect solution and around 20% of the tuition would go to feed the hog. Still, target tuition + 20% of present day tuition is better than current tuition.
Sorry to go off topic, but I thought I'd share a couple of links from PrawfsBlawg.
ReplyDeleteHorowitz is getting snippy about student's "consumerist" attitudes apparently
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2011/10/consumerism-and-community.html#more
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2011/10/the-consumer-complaint.html#comments
At least TJSL gives a few categories for graduates to describe their employment status. Many schools twist what graduates are reporting and consider that information to be employment. For example, schools provide a 3 month stipend for graduates who volunteer in public interest firms. If the graduate is able to secure this type of work, the law school marks it down as employment even though the graduate's sole income is derived from his/her university and will expire unless it can be renewed.
ReplyDelete11:11,
ReplyDeleteI noticed my school did something like that (although for six months I think instead of 3) and at first I thought it was nice of them. I didn't think until recently what their ulterior motives might be.
At the same time, if you work for a non-profit like legal services where turnover is traditionally high, if you work there for 3-6 months there's a decent likelihood a position will open up and you'll already be in the door.
I did my part to respond to Horwitz (this comment will be deleted from his blog in 3, 2, 1 . . .)
ReplyDeleteProf. Horwitz,
Students do not expect the school to find them a job. They expect the degree to have the market value that the school advertised. Those are two different complaints, so different that it's not fair to conflagrate them.
In the US the government will give every young person $250,000 for an education of the students' choosing. This money does not have to be repaid until the student earns enough income to comfortably do so. This is one of those rare "only in America" things that make the rest of the world green with envy.
Students choose their program based on a number of factors, but one very important (possibly determinative) factor is the ability to get a job after completing the program. To analogize to another market, customers choose between equally priced cars based on factors like ride quality, MPG, performance and so on.
If a car company lied about their MPGs, performance, ride quality and such in order to get customers to buy their product, they would be sued. If these lies were designed to take federal government (perhaps EPA) money the US Attorney's office would step in an prosecute them. However, law schools are free to brazely turn 25% and 50% employment rates into 99% employment rates with a median salary of $80,000 by (a) counting anyone who does any kind of work as employed and (b) counting only the salaries of those in full time jobs (see LST's surveys showing that about 50% of each class did not report a salary).
It's important to understand how serious this is. It is a crime, an outrageous crime against (a) the student, who is misled away from a more deserving program, (b) the US Treasury who will have to make up for the losses incurred when graduates can't pay the loans back, (c) the country whose economy suffers due to mis-training and (d) other programs who lost out on revenue because they were honest about their placement.
So no, students don't want the school to find them a job. They want the school to be honest about the value of the degree, so they aren't tricked away from a more deserving program. And they expect the school, that is teaching them law!, to not act criminally against them and their country. Thus your response is like Toyota advertising 50MPG on a 20MPG car, and then complaining that customers expect Toyota to buy their gasoline, followed by a lecture about how "you chose Toyota and we could have sold this car to other buyers" followed by a lecture about how "Toyota drivers should act like a community and share driving strategies" and so on.
I did my part to respond to Horwitz. I posted this on his blog.
ReplyDeleteProf. Horwitz,
Students do not expect the school to find them a job. They expect the degree to have the market value that the school advertised. Those are two different complaints, so different that it's not fair to conflagrate them.
In the US the government will give every young person $250,000 for an education of the students' choosing. This money does not have to be repaid until the student earns enough income to comfortably do so. This is one of those rare "only in America" things that make the rest of the world green with envy.
Students choose their program based on a number of factors, but one very important (possibly determinative) factor is the ability to get a job after completing the program. To analogize to another market, customers choose between equally priced cars based on factors like ride quality, MPG, performance and so on.
ReplyDeleteIf a car company lied about their MPGs, performance, ride quality and such in order to get customers to buy their product, they would be sued. If these lies were designed to take federal government (perhaps EPA) money the US Attorney's office would step in an prosecute them. However, law schools are free to brazely turn 25% and 50% employment rates into 99% employment rates with a median salary of $80,000 by (a) counting anyone who does any kind of work as employed and (b) counting only the salaries of those in full time jobs (see LST's surveys showing that about 50% of each class did not report a salary).
It's important to understand how serious this is. It is a crime, an outrageous crime against (a) the student, who is misled away from a more deserving program, (b) the US Treasury who will have to make up for the losses incurred when graduates can't pay the loans back, (c) the country whose economy suffers due to mis-training and (d) other programs who lost out on revenue because they were honest about their placement.
So no, students don't want the school to find them a job. They want the school to be honest about the value of the degree, so they aren't tricked away from a more deserving program. And they expect the school, that is teaching them law!, to not act criminally against them and their country. Thus your response is like Toyota advertising 50MPG on a 20MPG car, and then complaining that customers expect Toyota to buy their gasoline, followed by a lecture about how "you chose Toyota and we could have sold this car to other buyers" followed by a lecture about how "Toyota drivers should act like a community and share driving strategies" and so on.
John Doe Attorney - my school does the same and you can request it to be renewed for another three months. 11:21, the problem is exactly the turnover rate of public interest firms. Graduates who are receiving stipends to work there won't likely pursue a career with that office. They're most likely volunteering just to get by on some sort of income while they wait for the bar results.
ReplyDeleteRather than mis-using (in my opinion) the licensing process by forcing people to report personal information OR requiring schools to post warnings like you mentioned, I think there is a better, and much easier solution.
ReplyDeleteThe ABA could force all accredited law schools NOT to report any employment or salary information.
In my opinion, this would be much less harmful than to continue to allow schools to report inaccurate information.
We're talking about college graduates here, and we're talking about a huge investment in time and money. Let these "bright students" do their due diligence and investigate the job market themselves.
If the students didn't have the "easy way out" by just trusting what the sellers of legal education say about their product, maybe they'd be less apt to pay $50k per year on a pure guess.
This surely isn't as good as providing accurate information, but I just don't see any feasible way you can force graduates to comply with providing it in the first place.
But in the meantime, until a workable solution is figure out about how to provide good, valuable info, no info at all (provided by the schools) would be better.
Avor
"I just don't see any feasible way you can force graduates to comply with providing it in the first place."
ReplyDeleteIt's public information. There's no need to force anyone to tell you where they work, unless they've gone Valerie Plame or something like that and even in those cases their "cover" job will suffice.
However, a refusal to disclose any information would still be better than what we have now.
People's salaries are not public information unless they work for public institutions.
ReplyDeleteFine, for those who refuse to disclose information, prepare a separate list describing where they work and we will *try* to do our best to guess the "mysterious" salary they earn.
ReplyDeleteI am a 2009 law school graduate. I was a certified legal clerk with a DA's office for 2 years in school. I took out loans for school and have deferred the last 3 years (this is now my last deferment). Since graduation and passing a bar exam, I have had to work for the last year as a volunteer Deputy District Attorney. I have handled a full case load and have over 200 felony preliminary examinations and 5 misdemeanor jury trials all gone to verdict. The state I'm in in on a 4 year hiring freeze with no end in sight. Sick of having zero income, and tired of getting rejection letters from all types of companies and legal "jobs" (I actually feel good when I legal job even acknowledges my application even if it is via a rejection at this point), I applied for a bank teller job today. This was the response I received...
ReplyDeleteThank you for completing the assessment. Unfortunately, based upon your responses, this position does not appear to be the right fit for your skill set at this time.
Corporate policy does not allow you to reapply for this position with this company for a period of six months from today. However, please visit the company website to see other career opportunities that may be of interest to you. Thank you.
My law degree has literally left me in a state of purgatory. I am too "overqualified" for basic entry level jobs, and too "inexperienced" for any decent legal job. The idea "you can do anything with a law degree" in my opinion has been a complete farce.
For the above post I also have 2 undergraduate degrees in political science and economics from a top 50 undergrad institution and a law degree from a top 50 school.
ReplyDeleteHere is a comment that I tried to post on Professor Tamanaha's blog that he keeps deleting.
ReplyDelete----------
Prof. Tamanaha,
I am astonished that despite having your error clearly explained to you, you are still publishing statistics that grossly overstate the job placement out of a law school under the guise of criticizing law school.
What you are doing, very transparently, is your own unique form of fraud. Some people commit fraud by just coming out and lying, but you do it by lying while pretending to criticize the former type of person.
AGAIN, to provide an example, at Loyola Law in LA, of their entire class, only 39.6+1.5=41.1% reported a non-zero salary.
http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/?school=loyola&show=salaries&class=2009
(the 39.6% and 1.5% are in the above link in large bold red font)
Yet we are to believe that 81.3% of the graduates were in jobs that required admissions to the bar?
http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/?school=loyola&show=charts&class=2009
(See entry in the above link stating "Bar Required (81.3%)")
(continued below)
THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE. There is no way a surveyor would know that a job requires bar passage if they don't know the job's salary.
ReplyDeleteYour initial response to this critique was to claim that the 81.3% was that portion of students with jobs who were working in positions requiring bar passage. In other words, that if 50% had jobs and 50% required bar passage, your chart plotted 25% (50% of 50%). But that's not as the LST link showing the 81.3% is meant to represent a portion of all graduates, not just those with jobs, and regardless that explanation wouldn't alter the results any way because schools including Loyola generally report 99% employment.
I gave you a simple way to correct this error, by plotting the "% of students reporting a non-zero salary" line (which would be dramatically lower than the two items you plotted) but you refused, continuing to publish the grossly inflated and incoherent "employed at a job requiring bar passage" line.
Prof. Tamanaha, we don't need wolves in sheep's clothing who pump up the value of a law school degree while pretending to advocate for more honesty.
You are doing more harm than good with this chart, which will falsely tell students that a law degree is worth far more than it is.
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/10/poor-employment-market-for-law-grads.html
Prof. Tamanaha wants you to believe that at T100 schools, 75% of the grads get jobs as lawyers (it's more like 33%) and that even at terrible law schools 50% get such jobs!
ReplyDeleteProf. Tamanaha is a special kind of law school fraudster - the kind who presents fraud under the guise of criticizing it.
The fact that he kept deleting the above comment speaks volumes.
Perhaps the people who keep seeing their comments deleted should just take screen caps, make their own blog, and post them there, rather than filling up the comment sections of other blogs.
ReplyDeleteI think anyone who gets his or her comment deleted on a professor should post them here so the community can see what was deleted.
ReplyDelete@:32, Where does the 33 percent of lawyers from T100 schools get jobs as lawyers stat come from?
ReplyDeleteFrom the % of students reporting a non-zero salary statistic that you can find on lawschooltransparency. In the example above, using Loyola, that percentage is 41.1%. For better schools it will be higher. For worse schools it will be lower. So I guesstimated around 33% for the T100ish schools (the 70-80 schools inbetween "good schools" and "sub T100" schools).
ReplyDeleteThe salary statistic is the most credible proxy for those with good jobs because although you can creatively turn a part time job into a full time job, and you can turn a McDonalds/Starbucks job into a legal job, there is no way to turn $15,000/year into $70,000/year.
The point is that Tamanaha's chart ridiculously overstates the employment prospects and I pointed this out to him, and he didn't make any corrections at all, and he didn't even plot the "% reporting a non-zero salary" line so that readers could make their own decisions. He only plotted the most generous statistic he could find.
@ 12:05
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. I think that schools should be banned from listing ANY employment stats and salary data.
But I do think that all students that take out non-dischargeable student loans be REQUIRED to sign the following acknowledgement:
WARNING. You are about take out a large NON-DISCHARGEABLE student loan for law school. Most LS grads do not make enough money to make even a very modest living and still have money left over to make student loan payments. Most would have been better off not borrowing the money to attend LS. By signing, you acknowledge this risk and have decided to go anyway even though you have been informed that the risk of financial ruin is high. You also acknowledge that any govt programs such as IBR that reduce student payments are not guaranteed to be around forever and can be reduced or eliminated at any time.
Signed
LS Lemming
Perhaps Avor and 3:03 are right. If getting honest statistics is not going to happen, then perhaps we should settle for the second best solution which is to prevent them from publishing anything and warning students that they are stepping into a black hole.
ReplyDeletePerhaps BL1Y you should let the LawProf decide what gets posted on his blog. Nobody is stopping you from scrolling down the comments. If you don't want to read it, skip it. Seriously, your tone throughout this blog has been condescending towards other posters.
ReplyDeleteBL1Y is alright. Reminds me of the comic book guy.
ReplyDelete+1 for 3:15. He's so quick to make smart ass remarks about other comments. It's like he thinks his word has authority just because he posts here frequently.
ReplyDeleteCouple of things:
ReplyDelete(1) Treating graduates who report salaries as proxies for graduates with legal jobs is in my view far too restrictive. People don't report salaries for lots of reasons. I agree the NALP definition of full-time legal employment is problematic, since (as Prof. Tamanaha acknowledges explicitly) it relies on pure self-reporting, and also because it includes temporary jobs, which are increasingly common.
(2) That said, berating Brian Tamanaha for his presentation of the statistics is both unfair substantively and basically nuts as a matter of practical politics.
That's perfectly valid point LawProf, and that's why I asked him to plot an additional line in the graph showing the "% reporting non-zero salaries" and let the readers make their own conclusions.
ReplyDeleteI don't agree that criticizing Tamanaha is unfair substantively. See the detailed analysis of one data point above with regards to Loyola. Can you explain how Loyola can have 80% employed in a job requiring bar passage, when it doesn't know the salary information for 60% of its graduates?
I'm not very good at politics and it's a sad state if we need to play such a game.
P.S. I just find Prof. Tamanaha's chart to be so terribly misleading and cherry picked that I wonder if he's on our side. I don't understand why he couldn't add a simple line for the extra data point, and instead chose to publish only the most generous variable.
ReplyDeleteLooking at that chart, attending the 150th school in the country would be reasonable because you have a 50/50 shot of getting a job as a lawyer, and even if you don't work as a lawyer you have a decent shot of getting a good non-law job. See e.g. this US News story talking about $100,000 to $300,000 salaries earned by law school graduates in non-law jobs.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/articles/2011/09/30/in-tough-job-market-law-grads-use-jds-for-nonlegal-work
3:33: This stuff is all self-reported. Grads fill out forms sent to them by the schools. So Loyola is reporting that nine months after graduation 80% of their grads reported having full-time jobs that require bar passage. According to Loyola most of those people didn't provide salary info. Do you find that implausible? (Just to be clear I think the self-reported data is pretty inaccurate in that people don't report their situations very accurately. I think it's probably rare for law schools to outright lie about what their grads report, but I admit I don't have good evidence for that belief).
ReplyDeleteI personally can't imagine someone filling out a survey form and both (a) saying they're employed, but (b) putting nothing in the salary entry. That seems implausible to me, especially if it's done by that many people, but I could be wrong.
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice to get our hands on one school's set of surveys and comb over them.
@3:15: My suggestion was for the benefit of both this blog, and for the people posted comments that are deleted elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteOff-topic comments decrease the value of any forum (and yes, I realize the irony, shut up).
But also, if your purpose is to circumvent the Prawf's Blawg censoring and get your thoughts out there, it makes more sense to create a forum specifically for that purpose, rather than having your comments buried among 100 others on an LP post that's completely unrelated.
If someone is curious in seeing what gets censored on Prawfs Blawg, it would be incredibly useful for them to be able to go to a blog, perhaps called Censored By Prawfs Blawg Blog, and click on a post that has the same title as the PB post, rather than looking for the comments here, especially considering that deleted comments to on PB post might end up in the comments of multiple LP posts, thus completely fragmenting the conversation and making it extremely time consuming to piece the whole thing together.
@11:34: "I actually feel good when I legal job even acknowledges my application even if it is via a rejection at this point"
Ain't that the truth. Even an automated "we received your application" is welcome compared to the radio silence you come to expect these days.
I can imagine it easily. Many people do not like to talk about their salaries. I could see someone saying, "I'll tell you I am working, but I'm not going to say what my salary is." As, I believe, Law Prof said, people have lots of reasons for not giving out their salaries. One, they may not trust that their information can be kept confidential-- and they would be right not to believe there is absolutely no chance that others might not get access to the information. Just because people want information does not mean that others have to give it over. There are competing interests here that have to be recognized.
ReplyDeleteLP: Given that we now know two schools have outright lied about LSAT/GPA stats, I think it's fair to suggest they may also lie about what their grads have self reported for employment.
ReplyDeleteAs for people not reporting their salaries, I know a lot of people who just don't like talking about personal finances. They'll answer every other question in a survey, but when asked their income bracket, they prefer not to answer. Maybe that's just a Southern thing?
As a recent grad I'm less interested in the transparency element of law school reform and am more concerned about changing the structure of law school (and a lot of education in general for that matter). I believe that schools need to add and emphasize more of a vocational element to their programs. It isn't enough anymore to learn esoteric theories and regurgitate endless outlines, but instead we need to be practicing with more real life issues. For example, as an economics major I didn't even know what or how a Roth IRA was until I entered the working force, but I could provide a proof of why imaginary numbers didn't exist in calculus. Also, a law school example would be things like learning how to take a deposition or filing a bankruptcy/dui proceeding (actual skills that a majority of law students will be using to make a living - not classes like international law). I would also like to see the alignment of students finances with schools finances. If schools and students equally shared in the debt obligation for employment after school then I imagine there would be "more" (read "any") effort by career services offices to assist in the placement of its students (not just those in the top 10% that have no problems landing jobs on their own).
ReplyDeleteLaw Prof:
ReplyDeleteQuestion for you. If one was not able to borrow any money from the federal government, how much do you think the avg tuition would be?
Dan: I think the federal loan money makes more and more of a difference as you move down the rankings ladder. The very top schools could probably charge as much as they're charging now even if people had to rely on private loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. That would change pretty quickly as you got outside the very top though. The idea that any bank would loan anyone $150K to go to a bottom 100 school is absurd of course. So lower-ranked schools would have to operate on far more restrictive budgets and a lot of them would probably just go under.
ReplyDeleteThx. Two follow up questions:
ReplyDelete1) What facts are you using to support your opinion that certain higher ranked schools could charge $50,000.00 a year?
2) Assuming you support some form of government subsidized education, do you believe it is appropriate to charge interest on student loans given that other countries (i.e. Canada) do not charge interest?
3) Do you believe education is a commodity?
Thanks, LawProf, for linking to my post about employment.
ReplyDeleteSeveral of the comments misunderstand the data I am using and how the numbers work [I assure the person who complained above that I did not delete your comment. I have never deleted comments and am not sure how to do it. I suspect the reason it did not go up is that your comment was too long for the system. Re-post it in sections, but you might want to read my explanation first.]
To obtain the percentage of lawyer jobs, I made a simple calculation: percentage employed X percentage of JD required jobs. This gives me the total percentage of people in the class who got jobs as lawyers. One of the apparent misunderstandings in the comments here is that a school can have a higher percentage of "JD required" jobs than "percentage employed" because the former is a subset of the latter. For example, 50% of the class have jobs, and 100% of those people are employed as lawyers, so 50% of the graduates have jobs as lawyers.
It is correct that these numbers are unreliable owing to self reporting by schools. Having said that, the picture presented by these inflated numbers is quite bad. To people who don't already agree with you (and I happen to agree), data is more persuasive than ranting. I'm trying to use data (flawed as it is).
@Dan: By and large, students at the T-14(+UT) are able to find high paying jobs (unless they go on to even more competitive things, like academia or clerkships).
ReplyDeleteThings are of course tougher for the recent cohorts because of the recession, but generally when a school like Penn posts their 25th percentile salary as $160k, it's probably true.
I knew of few people at NYU who got panned at OCI, but they're a very rare exception (about as rare as people failing a class, and odds are the groups had a lot of overlap). That makes them a pretty safe bet for banks.
By comparison, look at restaurants that are able to take out $500,000 or more in unsecured loans, even when 60% of restaurants fail within 3 years. A T-1 law student looks way better.
Brian: "data is more persuasive than ranting"
ReplyDeleteReally?
Data doesn't seem to dissuade many law school hopefuls (they all believe they're going to beat the curve, be the top of the class).
However, if you look at the typical argument put forth by a student on a legal issue, it far more closely resembles ranting than data. Speak to them in their own language!
I don't have to put up with this. I have a PhD in folklore.
ReplyDeletePlease use your PhD in folklore and tell us about the alternative uses for a law degree.
ReplyDeleteDan:
ReplyDeleteIf you look at the top 20 or so schools they have enough people attending without taking out any loans to fill out the classes of the top five. There are a lot of rich people in this country and a lot of smart people and there's enough overlap to keep the elite institutions in good economic shape even with no government loan money.
Education itself isn't a commodity but educational credentials are.
Plus many of the top schools have large endowments and get millions in donations from alums. They are not as tuition dependent as schools with fewer resources.
ReplyDeleteLaw Prof-
ReplyDeleteDo you think schools publish employment statistics to highlight the value of the education or the value of the credential? If it's the latter, then isn't publishing knowingly misleading statistics consumer fraud?
So did Hasl sign the petition?
ReplyDeleteGood discussion.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, http://www.newschannel5.com/story/15603878/gonzalez-to-join-belmont-college-of-law-faculty
LOL!
"Please use your PhD in folklore and tell us about the alternative uses for a law degree."
ReplyDeletelol!
Some person name Andrew Mackie-Mason just posted the most absurd rubbish I have ever read on Prawfsblawg. I responded with the following, which I assume will be deleted soon:
ReplyDelete-----------
That is an astonishing post Mr. Andrew Mackie-Mason, but please allow me to dig a bit into your thought process.
1. What exactly is "grey" about the questions: Do you have a job? Did your job require bar passage? What does your job pay? Please provide examples in your answer.
2. Further, if it's a "grey area" then why do law schools present hard and concrete number portending to have job placement that is in fact two or three times better than their actual numbers? Why don't law schools simply state "job placement information is grey and so we can't give you concrete numbers?"
3. If lying about job placement statistics to lure kids into paying you money that they would have otherwise spent on another program is not fraud, then please give me an example of what you consider fraud.
4. What are your thoughts on Solyndra being investigated by the FBI for defrauding the United States government out of $450 million in federal loan guarantees? You claim to be a mathematician. Are you able to do a back of the envelope estimate of how much federal revenue goes to law schools each year?
5. Having answered that, at what level of missed student loan payments (either due to deferments, IBR or default) should law schools & the ABA be investigated for squandering precious taxpayer money? Please provide a dollar amount. $450 million? $1 billion? $10 billion?
6. If a student is denied the opportunity to learn a skill that the economy could use, because he went to law school to learn a skill that - by virtue of the fact that there are no legal jobs - are of no use to the economy, then shouldn't we investigate why he/she went to law school, for the sake of the country?
7. What about a student who feels victimized and defrauded because, rather than enter into a program that would have gotten him/her a job, he chose law school. Do this person's feelings matter?
8. What about the competitor academic programs who are honest, and who lose precious student loan revenue as a result of their honesty. Do they have a right to be upset when law schools beat them out, not by the merit of their program, but rather by lying about job placement numbers?
Also, please avoid playing semantic games in your response (e.g. "Oh, also: the "market value" of a degree is, by definition, what it sells at on a market. You're talking about something more along the lines of ROI.")
ReplyDeleteThis is a very serious matter with hundreds of thousands of victims who lost precious money and years of precious life, and they deserve something better than some Philosophy 101 "define evil" type of response.
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2011/10/consumerism-and-community.html#comments
ReplyDeleteI agree with BL1Y that people should stop reposting comments deleted from other blogs here. If there is a censorship problem at Prawfs, start an alternative blog dedicated to reproducing the deleted/altered exchanges (and feel free to provide the link once here so that interested people can follow that). But posting random deleted comments on this blog is starting to get irritating - more so, when the comments haven't even actually been deleted from their original location.
ReplyDeleteAndrew?
ReplyDeleteI like hearing about other blogs on this blog. I view the comments of this blog as a central repository of the scamblog movement.
ReplyDeleteIf you want a central repository for scamblogs, create one. Then, you get a central repository, and everyone else gets less spam in their conversations.
ReplyDeleteI like seeing the links, but the re-posted comments are beginning to drag. This is especially the case with the ignorant comments being directed by some at Brian Tamanaha, a man who is most definitely on the side of the angels.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, if you want a blog where you decide which comments are relevant and which should be banned as "spam" then start your own and moderate them.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I would much rather hear about news in prawfsblawg, balkinization, US News, abovethelaw or whatever over hearing one of your substantively inane posts such as this "gem" you posted earlier:
"Sure, there's no reason why we couldn't force lawyers to provide [job information]. But, is this really how you want the licensing process to be used?"
I'm really sorry that your comment didn't receive the attention you were hoping but I assure you that it wasn't because of distracting spam. It was because your comment was inane and the lazy intellectual equivalent of posting "why?" or "but where do we draw the line?"
Also, you have a deluded sense of self importance.
If you want a blog where you decide which comments can be read, and which should be banned as "spam" then start your own blog. Then, you can be master of your domain, and everyone else gets less of your deludedly self important whining.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I'm so sorry that your "Sure, there's no reason why we couldn't force lawyers to provide this information. But, is this really how you want the licensing process to be used?" comment didn't receive the attention you were hoping for. But next time try to say something other than the lazy equivalent of asking "why" or "but where do we draw the line?"
I completely disagree regarding Prof. Tamanaha's chart. That presents a ridiculously optimistic and distorted picture of job placement, quite possibly by a factor of two, and he should be called out on it.
ReplyDeleteSomeone looking at Prof. Tamanaha's chart could reasonably conclude that law school is a good idea.
This is especially troubling since he has more pessimistic data to plot in conjunction with the optimistic data and he chooses not to.
"Someone looking at Prof. Tamanaha's chart could reasonably conclude that law school is a good idea."
ReplyDeleteOnly if you totally failed to read what he wrote about the study 1) being a study of the pre-recession situation, and 2) being based on a problematic dataset.
Yeah but you know how some minds work, including mine at times. They see the chart. They see the label of "% employed as lawyers." They see that at a T30 it's like 90%, at a T2 it's like 75% and even at true T4 schools it's 50%, and they say "hey, I like those odds" and they sign up.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm being hypervigilant.
"hey, I like those odds"
ReplyDeleteSure, I do it too. Problem is, the kind of person who makes these kinds of assumptions when making such an important decision is exactly the kind of person you don't want to have giving you legal advise.
You know what would be great? If someone did a "Super-Size Me"-style film on the law school scam. Either following a class all the way to their first year after graduation, or just interviewing students in every year of a school over the course of a year from the spring term. Do it for some midding-good T2 school - I'm sure they'll agree because all they'll think of is the publicity. The students might not be so keen, but they'd hopefully see it was in their interests as well.
It sounds like some people are calling not for mere transparency, but to have data spoon fed to applicants, or perhaps force fed.
ReplyDeleteThat Andrew guy is apparently a college sophomore. It isn't his fault.
ReplyDelete"You know what would be great? If someone did a "Super-Size Me"-style film on the law school scam."
ReplyDeleteThat would be very interesting. You know what else would be great? If Prof. Tamanaha doesn't prepare and publish a pretty color chart using the most optimistic data, that shows employment prospects that are twice as good as they are. -- OR -- If, when he publishes that chart he includes a line showing the "% reporting non-zero salaries" statistic so readers get a clear perspective.
But no let's go make a movie instead.
"It sounds like some people are calling not for mere transparency, but to have data spoon fed to applicants, or perhaps force fed."
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you're the guy in class whose sole contribution would be rhetorical mental masturbation questions such as "why?" or "but where do we draw the line?"
"It sounds like some people are calling not for mere transparency, but to have data spoon fed to applicants, or perhaps force fed."
ReplyDeleteThe data simply needs to be presented in a clear and non-misleading way. Its not that hard. You'd really just need to do this with TWO bar graphs, one showing the type of employment (legal, JD "preferred", non-legal, etc) and one showing salary. If position is voluntary, salary reported is recorded as ZERO in the salary chart.
And the bar graph needs to account for EVERY graduate. If no information is available for said graduate, it needs to go under the "No information" bar.
Perhaps a small "disclaimer" indicating that data is self-reported and unverified and reported data is representative of the group who did not report data.
Two bar graphs, that's all! If you want to call the above suggestion "spoon feeding" then so be it. I would call it providing information in a fully transparent and concise way.
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