Sunday papers

Updated below

In one of those remarkably smooth mental transitions that people whose salaries depend on not understanding something are adept at performing, the law school scam has been transformed almost overnight from something that didn't even exist, into something that was so obvious that those who fell for it should be blamed for their willful blindness (the key phrase here is "personal responsibility.").

This being legal academia, such claims tend to be made without the benefit of supporting evidence of any kind.   Therefore I did a Nexis search of the ALLNEWS database, to try to get a little data regarding the question of how much discussion there's been in the mainstream media of law school graduates facing employment difficulties.  I used a query designed to call up stories exploring the issue of whether law school was worth its cost, with the following results:

Stories in the English language mainstream media pulled up by this search making any mention of the possibility that law school might cost too much, given employment prospects for graduates:

2001: 0
2002: 0
2003: 0
2004: 0
2005: 0
2006: 1 
2007: 0
2008: 1
2009: 2
2010: 3
2011: 12
2012: 14  (so far)

At no time in the last decade have any less than three out of ten law graduates failed to get a legal job within nine months after graduation, meaning, of course, that at perhaps half of all law schools the ratio between graduates who got legal jobs and those who didn't was more in the neighborhood of one to one, even in the "best" of times:

Here are the percentages of graduates of ABA-accredited law schools who, according to the annual NALP survey, were employed in full-time positions requiring a law degree nine months after graduation in each year since 2001:

2001: 68.3 percent

2002: 67.0 percent

2003: 65.5 percent

2004: 65.1 percent

2005: 66.7 percent

2006: 68.3 percent

2007: 70.7 percent

2008: 67.2 percent

2009: 62.5 percent

2010: 59.9 percent

2011: 57.9 percent

Note that these percentages include temporary positions, including temporary positions created by law schools for their otherwise unemployed graduates.  They also exclude from the denominator the roughly six percent of each national class whose status was unknown.  In other words, even using an extremely generous definition of what constitutes obtaining a legal job, fully one-third of ABA law school graduates were not obtaining such jobs prior to the recent recession.

Of course it's true that law school tuition has increased fairly drastically over this decade, so a bad situation has become much worse.  But it also couldn't be more obvious that, to the extent prospective law students are somewhat better informed of the risks they're undertaking than they would have been even two (let alone five) years ago, this is a product of information regarding employment and salary prospects being made public, in the wake of media/political pressure that has required "the ABA" (again, in this context "the ABA" means the deans of low-ranked law schools who control the Section of Legal Education) and individual law schools to reveal data that simply wasn't available to the public until the last year or so.

Anyway it's striking how quickly the narrative inside legal academia has moved from "it's outrageous to call law school a scam" to "it's not our fault you believed our lies, because in retrospect they were so obvious."

Update:  This comment sums up the entire division of responsibility issue very well:

Enough with the binary thinking about which side is responsible. It should be obvious to anybody that both the law schools and the law students share responsibility. I don't know any law school graduate, including myself, who doesn't agree that we should have known better, should have done more research, should not have been so confident, should not have developed special snowflake syndrome, etc. These were hard lessons learned, but they were learned.

Now there are two types of taking responsibility in this world. There's saying that you take responsibility, and then there's actually paying the price for something. Right now, even though the blame should be shared between the law students and the law schools, the law students are the only ones paying the price. The students ARE taking responsibility, in the literal sense (as will the taxpayers eventually). The schools are not.

That's why the focus on this blog and in these comments is so heavily focused on the law school's culpability and what can/should be done about it. Not because they are the only ones to blame, but because they the ones who have yet to take any responsibility for their role in this. The students sure as hell have, and pay the price for their mistake every month.

 

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