Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this job is that doing it seems to entail making an implicit representation to one's students that attending law school is going to end up being a good long-term decision for at least a solid majority of them. It doesn't seem plausible to me to characterize accepting money from students in return for a legal education (or in any event a law degree) as an arm's-length transaction.
This is particularly evident when we're asked by the school's administration to attend events at which admitted prospective students have a chance to meet faculty, as they attempt to decide whether to enroll at this or that law school. I doubt that the average dean, or for that matter the average faculty member, seriously considers the possibility that a prospective student at such an event might be told to think about going to another law school, or, even more shockingly, to not go to law school at all.
Now why is that? It's not, I don't believe, because such gatherings are conceptualized by administrators and faculty as sales events, so that giving prospective students genuinely candid advice about going to law school would be considered as strange as a car dealership giving people looking to lease new cars genuinely candid advice about whether leasing a new car was a good idea for them all things considered.
Rather, my impression is that for most people in legal academia the proposition "our students would as a group be better off if they hadn't enrolled in law school" is as a practical matter an unthinkable thought. That isn't a thought which is available to a well-socialized legal academic, because being a well-socialized legal academic means, among other things, that one's social identity is constructed on the basis of an axiomatic assumption that going to law school is a good decision for one's students -- not in every single individual case, of course, but "generally," which is to say collectively.
Since producing a collectively beneficial outcome for one's students would seem to be the minimum criterion for doing a job worth doing, rejecting that assumption means accepting the possibility that one's job -- which is to say a core aspect of one's identity if one is an upper class professional -- is in an exercise in bad faith. And since that is an extremely unpleasant possibility, most people don't find it too difficult under most circumstances to accede to whatever combination of social, psychological, and ideological forces keep that possibility from ever being considered seriously.
But let us consider it anyway. To frame the question in economic terms, at how many law schools at present are the transactions involved in getting a law degree going to end up being "efficient" for the student body as a whole?
Now obviously something like getting a law degree is even under the best possible social and economic circumstances never going to produce Pareto efficiency for the collective student body. (Pareto efficiency is defined as a transaction that leaves some party or parties to it better off, while leaving no parties to it worse off.) But what about the far more modest demands of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, which is defined as a transaction that produces a collectively positive result for the parties to it, although some individual party or parties to it may be left worse off?
I'm not asking this question rhetorically. I'm merely suggesting that it's a question that, under present circumstances, should become a very real and pressing one at every law school in the country, as it is not, I would suggest, completely clear that any law school now meets this criterion, while it is quite clear that many do not.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Half as many students at half the price
I wrote and then accidentally deleted a heartbreaking post of staggering genius this morning, so this is going to be a shorter version of that. (It was somehow deleted while I was trying to copy and paste the words of a Cooley law school administrator. Coincidence? I think not). Update: I've just been advised that there is a thing in the toolbar called the "undo" button. If only life itself came with one . . .
One critical issue at the core of the current crisis of the American law school is the extent to which that crisis is amenable to market self-correction. The strong version of this view is that the crisis is largely if not wholly a product of poor information, and that the market for law school admissions will self-correct as buyers punish sellers for failing to provide adequate information about what they're selling.
There is a good deal of evidence that something along these lines is beginning to happen. The law school applicant pool has shrunk by nearly 25% over the past two years, despite the comparatively poor alternatives available to recent college graduates, which keep the opportunity cost of continuing their education relatively low. In addition there's evidence that law school applicants are getting increasingly price sensitive.
For example I've gathered from various sources that seat deposits at a number of schools are way down. (A seat deposit is the several-hundred dollar payment that an admitted prospective student must make by a certain date in order to reserve his or her place in a law school's entering class.) In particular it appears that something like panic may be breaking out in some admissions offices of what could be called legal academia's upper middle class -- "top tier" schools outside the semi-charmed Top 14.
Certain sub-elite schools that feature large entering classes, high tuition, and especially squirrelly recent employment numbers are admitting unusually large numbers of people off their wait lists, and more significantly still are offering steep tuition discounts to many of these prospective students, who until a week or two ago they had not deigned to even admit, let alone admit at half price.
Indeed it may make sense for applicants to employ a kind of Priceline strategy, in which they wait until late in the cycle to make lowball offers to schools which are in danger of having significant numbers of unfilled seats in their entering classes. Sticker price tuition at some schools is coming to resemble the initial offered price of items at a suburban garage sale: that is, it increasingly bears little relation to what buyers eventually pay.
All this indicates that, to a certain extent (a crucial caveat which I want to emphasize), a kind of market correction seems to be happening. Sites like Law School Transparency and Law School Numbers are arming sophisticated consumers, to the extent that prospective law students fall into that category, with more information than ever regarding both the actual price at which they can buy seats in law school classes, and the actual likely expected return on that investment.
But the situation remains complex. For one thing, many prospective law students and their families are far from sophisticated consumers. They remain in thrall to the powerful culture myth that greatly exaggerates the extent to which being an attorney means being a highly-paid high-status professional who does interesting and socially useful work. This helps explain such otherwise inexplicable facts as that, at least according to its administrators, Thomas M. Cooley's new Florida campus (the school's fifth) has just admitted a first class nearly twice as large as that which the school anticipated admitting. According to the campus's associate dean, "these numbers indicate the Tampa Bay area was ready for a law school." Well that's one interpretation.
Another is that, despite all the very real progress that's being made on the transparency front, the various "market distortions" at work are still powerful enough to ensure that law schools are still admitting twice as many students, and charging them twice as much, as what a well-functioning market for legal education in America would yield.
When the number of law school graduates, and the average tuition they pay, have both been cut in half, we will begin to be able to say that "the market is working." Until then, we will still be dealing with the product of a massive mis-allocation of social and human capital, which is only in part a product of informational failures in the classical economic sense.
One critical issue at the core of the current crisis of the American law school is the extent to which that crisis is amenable to market self-correction. The strong version of this view is that the crisis is largely if not wholly a product of poor information, and that the market for law school admissions will self-correct as buyers punish sellers for failing to provide adequate information about what they're selling.
There is a good deal of evidence that something along these lines is beginning to happen. The law school applicant pool has shrunk by nearly 25% over the past two years, despite the comparatively poor alternatives available to recent college graduates, which keep the opportunity cost of continuing their education relatively low. In addition there's evidence that law school applicants are getting increasingly price sensitive.
For example I've gathered from various sources that seat deposits at a number of schools are way down. (A seat deposit is the several-hundred dollar payment that an admitted prospective student must make by a certain date in order to reserve his or her place in a law school's entering class.) In particular it appears that something like panic may be breaking out in some admissions offices of what could be called legal academia's upper middle class -- "top tier" schools outside the semi-charmed Top 14.
Certain sub-elite schools that feature large entering classes, high tuition, and especially squirrelly recent employment numbers are admitting unusually large numbers of people off their wait lists, and more significantly still are offering steep tuition discounts to many of these prospective students, who until a week or two ago they had not deigned to even admit, let alone admit at half price.
Indeed it may make sense for applicants to employ a kind of Priceline strategy, in which they wait until late in the cycle to make lowball offers to schools which are in danger of having significant numbers of unfilled seats in their entering classes. Sticker price tuition at some schools is coming to resemble the initial offered price of items at a suburban garage sale: that is, it increasingly bears little relation to what buyers eventually pay.
All this indicates that, to a certain extent (a crucial caveat which I want to emphasize), a kind of market correction seems to be happening. Sites like Law School Transparency and Law School Numbers are arming sophisticated consumers, to the extent that prospective law students fall into that category, with more information than ever regarding both the actual price at which they can buy seats in law school classes, and the actual likely expected return on that investment.
But the situation remains complex. For one thing, many prospective law students and their families are far from sophisticated consumers. They remain in thrall to the powerful culture myth that greatly exaggerates the extent to which being an attorney means being a highly-paid high-status professional who does interesting and socially useful work. This helps explain such otherwise inexplicable facts as that, at least according to its administrators, Thomas M. Cooley's new Florida campus (the school's fifth) has just admitted a first class nearly twice as large as that which the school anticipated admitting. According to the campus's associate dean, "these numbers indicate the Tampa Bay area was ready for a law school." Well that's one interpretation.
Another is that, despite all the very real progress that's being made on the transparency front, the various "market distortions" at work are still powerful enough to ensure that law schools are still admitting twice as many students, and charging them twice as much, as what a well-functioning market for legal education in America would yield.
When the number of law school graduates, and the average tuition they pay, have both been cut in half, we will begin to be able to say that "the market is working." Until then, we will still be dealing with the product of a massive mis-allocation of social and human capital, which is only in part a product of informational failures in the classical economic sense.
Monday, May 7, 2012
The actual cost of law school
Georgetown’s law school has put a very useful calculator on
the internet, that allows prospective law students to calculate how much debt
they are likely to accumulate by the time they graduate, and what their monthly
loan payments will look like afterwards.
It also includes a calculation of what students who qualify for the
school’s LRAP program will pay. (Georgetown
has moved to a model in which the school requires LRAP-eligible graduates to
enroll in the federal government’s Income-Based Repayment program. Depending on the graduate’s income,
Georgetown will then make some or all of the graduate’s IBR payments. This appears to be the new wave in LRAP: for
example, Michigan, Virginia, and UCLA have enacted similar programs).
It’s easy for prospective students to overlook – indeed I’ve
tended to overlook this myself – that the current financial structure of legal
education, which is based on students taking out high interest (6.8% Stafford
and 7.9% GRADPLUS) loans, ensures that the actual debt loads of graduates will
be, by the time they graduate, nearly 20% higher than the principal on the
loans those graduates took out. This is
because interest on these loans begins to accumulate as soon as they are
disbursed. The GULC calculator makes this easy to see, and the results, when
combined with information it provides regarding repayment options, are
startling.
Let’s look at three hypothetical law students, who will be
enrolling at three different law schools this fall. Kim will be attending a low-cost institution:
a state law school with low resident tuition, for which Kim qualifies, and a
low cost of living. Kim’s cost of
attendance for her first year will be $35,000. This represents roughly what the
typical COA for state residents will be this fall at the less expensive public
law schools, such as the Universities of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.
Lamar will be attending a law school with what will be an
average cost of attendance this fall, i.e., about $50,000. This represents the typical COA at the
cheapest private law schools, as well as the cost for state residents at some
of the more expensive (but not the most expensive) public law schools. Schools that will have a COA in this range
this fall include the University of Texas, the University of Colorado, and the
Thomas M. Cooley School of Law.
Meanwhile Khloe will be attending an expensive law school in
a high-cost city. She will pay $75,000. Schools that will have a COA in this
range this fall include Berkeley (for California residents; non-residents will
pay about $80,000), George Washington, Cardozo, and New York Law School.
Now let’s look at what these prices will add up to for the
graduating class of 2015. We’ll assume
Kim, Lamar, and Khloe are borrowing the cost of attendance courtesy of U.S.
taxpayers, and that the COA at their law schools sees only cost of living
increases during their attendance.
(Until this year this would have been an unduly optimistic projection,
but there are growing signs that even university administrators are coming to
understand that law school tuition can’t continue to rise in real dollar
terms).
Kim will graduate with a total law school debt of $122,434. If she opts to pay this off via the standard
ten-year repayment option, she will make 120 payments of $1,441, meaning that
she will end up paying $172,931 for her law degree in the decade after
graduating. If she opts for the
government’s extended 25-year repayment plan she’ll be sending in her final
$889 check in the fall of 2040, after having paid a total of $266,849 for what
is one of the least expensive legal educations obtainable at an ABA-accredited
law school in A.D. 2012, at least in terms of advertised prices (about which
more shortly).
Lamar will conclude his moderately-priced legal education
with a total law school debt load of $177,896. He’ll either be paying $2,112
per month for ten years ($253,480 total) or $1,315 per month for 25 years ($394,373
total).
As for Khloe, she will owe $270,572 at graduation, and will
be paying $3,231 per month for ten years, or $2,023 per month until 2040. In the latter case, she will have obtained
her law degree at what according to Dean Christopher Edley is now the minimum
price at which a “first-rate” legal education can be provided, that is,
$606,913 over 25 years. (Note that none of these figures take into account opportunity cost.)
Now consider these prices in the context of what lawyers in
America actually earn. Despite their
best efforts ABA law schools were only able to confirm that 20.8% of their 2010 graduates had acquired salaries of as much as $63,000 per year by the winter of
2011. It’s a highly problematic question
whether such a salary justifies the debt load generated by borrowing the cost
of attendance at the least expensive law schools, given that the latter figure nearly
doubles the 80th percentile of salary for the class of 2010.
By contrast, it’s easy to answer whether
these salary figures come close to justifying the cost of “moderately priced”
-- let alone expensive -- law schools:
it would be an understatement to say they do not.
(As for the projected long-term earning potential of people
with law degrees, keep in mind that roughly half of the practicing lawyers in
America are sole practitioners, while seven out of ten work for firms of less than 20
attorneys. Furthermore there’s evidence that the long-term earnings of attorneys have
been deteriorating for at least two decades now).
One consequence of all this is, as prospective law students
and their families ever-so slowly come to appreciate that the advertised price of
law school has now come to be in no kind of rational relationship whatsoever
with the net present value of a law degree, law schools are being forced to
offer increasingly steep discounts on that price. That
development will be the subject of my next post.
Friday, May 4, 2012
Using the legal process to silence critics
The Thomas M. Cooley Law School served me with a subpoena yesterday afternoon, commanding me to produce certain documents purportedly relevant to this civil action. The documents in question include all my communications with the defendants, and "all documents and communications . . . that you had or exchanged with any person regarding how (i) Thomas M. Cooley Law School reports its post graduation employment rates or (ii) your communications with David Anziska regarding any inquiry or investigation he discussed with you about how law schools report post-graduate employment and salary data."
Now it so happens that this discovery request isn't going to discover much. A year ago Anziska called me a couple of times because he wanted to discuss the class action suits Kurzon Strauss was then contemplating against various schools, but to the best of my recollection we didn't talk about Cooley specifically. And while I've published the equivalent of a fairly long book since then on various aspects of the law school scam, I've barely mentioned Cooley, and have certainly never bothered to break down the school's post-graduation rates for anyone.
I haven't warned people about the dangers of enrolling at Cooley for the same reason it would be a waste of time to warn a parent that it's a bad idea to hand a 15-year-old boy a bottle of Jack Daniel's and the keys to a new sports car. Some things are so obvious that it's pointless to belabor them.
In retrospect I rather regret having practically nothing to produce in response to this particular legal command. After all, in the context of the gathering disaster that is contemporary American legal education, Cooley is without question the prime example of a shameless diploma mill that would be shut down immediately if American law schools were subject to more than the most cursory regulation by either the ABA or the federal government, which through its no-questions-asked student loan programs pays a large portion of Cooley's operating budget.
Nevertheless, there is something potentially useful about reviewing Cooley's employment stats at the level of detail that is now available through the efforts of people such as Law School Transparency, in something of the same way it's useful to show 15-year-olds gruesome films of alcohol-related car crashes. In that spirit, let's compare Cooley's stats to, say, Stanford's, on the working assumption that the outcomes SLS graduates obtain are the kinds of things people borrow $115,364 (this was the average law school debt taken on by 2011 Cooley grads) in high-interest non-dischargeable loans in order to be able to do.
Graduating class of 2010:
Percentage of graduates who obtained jobs with law firms of more than 25 attorneys:
Cooley: 1.1%
Stanford: 51.1%
Percentage who obtained federal clerkships:
Cooley: 0.0%
Stanford: 29.3%
Percentage who were unemployed nine months after graduation, or whose employment status was unknown:
Cooley: 34.4%
Stanford: 0.6%
Percentage who were employed and reported a salary:
Cooley: 6.5%
Stanford: 88.5%
And so on.
Now it so happens that this discovery request isn't going to discover much. A year ago Anziska called me a couple of times because he wanted to discuss the class action suits Kurzon Strauss was then contemplating against various schools, but to the best of my recollection we didn't talk about Cooley specifically. And while I've published the equivalent of a fairly long book since then on various aspects of the law school scam, I've barely mentioned Cooley, and have certainly never bothered to break down the school's post-graduation rates for anyone.
I haven't warned people about the dangers of enrolling at Cooley for the same reason it would be a waste of time to warn a parent that it's a bad idea to hand a 15-year-old boy a bottle of Jack Daniel's and the keys to a new sports car. Some things are so obvious that it's pointless to belabor them.
In retrospect I rather regret having practically nothing to produce in response to this particular legal command. After all, in the context of the gathering disaster that is contemporary American legal education, Cooley is without question the prime example of a shameless diploma mill that would be shut down immediately if American law schools were subject to more than the most cursory regulation by either the ABA or the federal government, which through its no-questions-asked student loan programs pays a large portion of Cooley's operating budget.
Nevertheless, there is something potentially useful about reviewing Cooley's employment stats at the level of detail that is now available through the efforts of people such as Law School Transparency, in something of the same way it's useful to show 15-year-olds gruesome films of alcohol-related car crashes. In that spirit, let's compare Cooley's stats to, say, Stanford's, on the working assumption that the outcomes SLS graduates obtain are the kinds of things people borrow $115,364 (this was the average law school debt taken on by 2011 Cooley grads) in high-interest non-dischargeable loans in order to be able to do.
Graduating class of 2010:
Percentage of graduates who obtained jobs with law firms of more than 25 attorneys:
Cooley: 1.1%
Stanford: 51.1%
Percentage who obtained federal clerkships:
Cooley: 0.0%
Stanford: 29.3%
Percentage who were unemployed nine months after graduation, or whose employment status was unknown:
Cooley: 34.4%
Stanford: 0.6%
Percentage who were employed and reported a salary:
Cooley: 6.5%
Stanford: 88.5%
And so on.
One of many useful things law schools tend to fail to
teach their students is that lawsuits are often filed for reasons that have
nothing to do with actual legal rights and wrongs. A classic example is a strategic lawsuit
against public participation (SLAPP). The point of a SLAPP suit is not to
litigate valid legal claims but rather to censor critics, through legal
intimidation.
It is something of an irony that the first exposure many
current law students and people considering going to law school will get to how
a SLAPP suit works is being provided by the suit Cooley has filed against the attorneys representing former students suing the school, and the even more preposterous suit the school brought against four scam bloggers.
For instance the law school is suing "Rockstar5" for defamation and
wrongful interference with its business relations. As a strictly
legal matter, the complaint against Rockstar5 is very weak. For example, it claims the author is defaming
Cooley and its representatives by calling them "criminals." The
specific passage in which that word appears criticizes the school for admitting
people who shouldn't be in law school, and allowing them to spend $50,000 per
year in tuition and living expenses, even though such people "don't have a
shot in hell of practicing law."
The author then says, "Congrats you criminals, you have
accomplished robbery!"
You don't have to be a lawyer to realize the author is
not literally accusing Cooley's administration of robbery, but rather is
employing a metaphor to state his opinion regarding what he considers the
ethically dubious character of Cooley's business model. Indeed with trivial exceptions, almost
everything in the post is either a matter of undisputed fact or the statement
of an opinion-neither of which can form the basis for a valid defamation suit.
But SLAPP suits have little to do with legal rules, and everything to do with
the economic rule that rich and powerful institutions can employ the legal
process to crush dissent, by burying critics in a blizzard of litigation
expenses.
Cooley's real problem has nothing to do with supposed
defamatory claims on what, until it filed this suit, was a profoundly obscure
blog, and everything to do with what has been dubbed the the Streisand Effect. The Streisand Effect got its name from an ill-fated lawsuit brought by the
famous singer against a photographer who published a photograph of her Malibu
house on the internet. Streisand's suit backfired when publicity regarding it
led to the photograph being viewed by hundreds of thousands of web surfers.
Cooley is getting more on-line publicity than ever these days, such as for example this blog post, pointing out that the school's founder, "Professor Emeritus" Thomas E. Brennan was paid more than one million dollars between 2007-08 and 2009-10 for what even the school characterizes as less than ten hours per week of "work." Brennan's days seem to be in significant part filled by authoring a blog chock full of classic cranky old man rantings about, among other things, how The Gay is destroying the nation's moral fiber, while being paid more than $700 per hour (this assumes a 52-week work year) to compile "Judging the Law Schools," Cooley's very own ranking system, which in its 2010 edition is gracious enough to allow Harvard to deny Cooley the honor of being ranked the top law school in America (global and inter-galactic rankings are not yet available).
Rather than analyzing this matter any further I'll defer to the (apocryphal) words of P.T. Barnum, and cite H.L. Mencken's most famous dictum.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
One million and counting
Recently this blog hosted its one millionth site visit, so it seems like a good time to look back at a few things that have and haven't changed in the world of legal academia over the course of the nine months of its existence.
(1) Law schools have reacted to pressure to release actual employment and salary data. There's much more data out there now than was the case last summer, and indeed due in large part to the ceaseless efforts of Law School Transparency nearly a quarter of ABA law schools have released their 2010 NALP reports. Here's an idea: Why doesn't some graduating class donate its class gift to LST, rather than buying an overpriced gee-gaw for its law school's already-sumptuously decorated grounds?
(2) While lots of progress has been made, extracting employment info out of law schools in many cases still requires employing the rhetorical equivalent of the Jaws of Life. For instance a couple of months ago NYU reacting with remarkably sanctimonious outrage after I raised some questions about apparent inconsistencies between their and Columbia's self-reported employment numbers and the NLJ's report regarding how many graduates were getting jobs with big law firms. This reaction does not read very well in the light of the school's continuing refusal to reveal such key data points as how many of its graduates are in full-time jobs, and how many are in full-time legal jobs.
All this information and much more of interest to both current and potential law students is contained in the school's 2010 NALP report, which it won't release despite the fact that this data is now between two years and 15 months old, and the numerous polite requests from recent alumni that it do so.
As for NYU's friends a few subway stops to the north, it's fair to note that extracting information from Columbia regarding such matters as how many of their own graduates they've been employing has been a strenuous and illuminating process. In March Columbia "could not say" in response to media inquiries how many of its 2010 graduates it had placed in school-funded fellowships. In April the ABA forced all the schools it accredits to disclose how many of their 2010 graduates were in school-funded positions nine months after graduation. Columbia then had to decide what to do about disclosing the same information in regard to the class of 2011, since it had recently published "comprehensive" employment data regarding the 2011 class on its web site.
Steve Schwartz's LSAT Blog looked into this further and dug up some very interesting numbers. Columbia disclosed to the ABA that five of its 2010 graduates were employed by the school as of February 2011. If you visit the employment data published on Columbia's web site, you will find a footnote to the "government" and "public interest" job numbers that notes these numbers include students on "fellowships," along with a hyperlink to more information regarding these fellowships. The hyperlink sends the sophisticated consumer to a paragraph featuring the following information:
But consider the 2011 information: Columbia put 38 graduates into school-funded fellowships. Surely if "many" out of this group (which included one out of every 11 students in the graduating class) acquired jobs prior to the nine-month reporting deadline, this is something the school would disclose? Schwartz emailed CLS earlier this week regarding this matter, and got the following reply:
What I find perplexing about CLS's behavior is that it's so unnecessary. Admittedly the school knows that under the ABA's new reporting regime it will have to disclose eventually how many 2011 graduates were put in school-funded jobs; in addition the fact that half the top ten schools (the bottom half, not coincidentally) have "voluntarily" revealed this information already puts additional pressure on CLS to disclose the 2011 data sooner rather than later. So it makes sense for Columbia to disclose the 2011 numbers now. What doesn't make sense is for the school to make a gratuitous and very misleading representation regarding the outcome of those fellowships. It's just not true that "many" CLS grads in school-funded jobs are getting permanent jobs even before the fellowship ends if one is referring to the most current (and therefore most relevant) data: per the school only four of 38 have.
Pushing for more transparency in legal academia is a bit like dealing with substance abuser who is trying to get clean: Schools are subjected to various interventions, get on the transparency wagon (sort of), but keep falling off.
(3) What's happening with law school admissions waiting lists suggests how soft the market is getting. In the past week I've corresponded with a 0L who as of two weeks ago had only gotten into Touro (unranked), Hofstra (#89), and St. John's (#79). He was then admitted to Cardozo (#56) and, much more significantly, offered a $30,000 per year discount on tuition in the bargain. A few days after that he was admitted to George Washington (#20), and shortly afterwards GW offered her a more than 50% discount off the (increasingly fictional) official tuition price. Cardozo reacted by raising its offer to $43,000 per year, i.e., more than 80% off sticker. A glance at sites like TLS reveals that even schools like Chicago are offering significant tuition discounts (20%) to people who they just offered off their wait lists this week.
For some reason all this reminds me of Ingmar Bergman's one-word reaction when he was told that, after the initial airing of his multi-part film Scenes From A Marriage on Swedish television, the country's divorce rate had gone up: "Good!"
(1) Law schools have reacted to pressure to release actual employment and salary data. There's much more data out there now than was the case last summer, and indeed due in large part to the ceaseless efforts of Law School Transparency nearly a quarter of ABA law schools have released their 2010 NALP reports. Here's an idea: Why doesn't some graduating class donate its class gift to LST, rather than buying an overpriced gee-gaw for its law school's already-sumptuously decorated grounds?
(2) While lots of progress has been made, extracting employment info out of law schools in many cases still requires employing the rhetorical equivalent of the Jaws of Life. For instance a couple of months ago NYU reacting with remarkably sanctimonious outrage after I raised some questions about apparent inconsistencies between their and Columbia's self-reported employment numbers and the NLJ's report regarding how many graduates were getting jobs with big law firms. This reaction does not read very well in the light of the school's continuing refusal to reveal such key data points as how many of its graduates are in full-time jobs, and how many are in full-time legal jobs.
All this information and much more of interest to both current and potential law students is contained in the school's 2010 NALP report, which it won't release despite the fact that this data is now between two years and 15 months old, and the numerous polite requests from recent alumni that it do so.
As for NYU's friends a few subway stops to the north, it's fair to note that extracting information from Columbia regarding such matters as how many of their own graduates they've been employing has been a strenuous and illuminating process. In March Columbia "could not say" in response to media inquiries how many of its 2010 graduates it had placed in school-funded fellowships. In April the ABA forced all the schools it accredits to disclose how many of their 2010 graduates were in school-funded positions nine months after graduation. Columbia then had to decide what to do about disclosing the same information in regard to the class of 2011, since it had recently published "comprehensive" employment data regarding the 2011 class on its web site.
Steve Schwartz's LSAT Blog looked into this further and dug up some very interesting numbers. Columbia disclosed to the ABA that five of its 2010 graduates were employed by the school as of February 2011. If you visit the employment data published on Columbia's web site, you will find a footnote to the "government" and "public interest" job numbers that notes these numbers include students on "fellowships," along with a hyperlink to more information regarding these fellowships. The hyperlink sends the sophisticated consumer to a paragraph featuring the following information:
In 2010, we offered 10 of these government and public interest fellowships. For the Class of 2011, as the job market tightened, we further increased the number of government and public interest fellowships to 38. As a result of these opportunities, graduates have engaged in challenging legal work at a broad range of public interest organizations and government departments. We are pleased that the skills, networking opportunities, and experience gained during this fellowship year help graduates obtain permanent employment, in many cases, even before the fellowship ends. (Emphasis supplied).The italicized phrase seems fair in regard to the class of 2010, since Columbia put ten graduates in school-funded jobs that year, and, per the information Columbia reported to the ABA, half of those graduates weren't in school-funded jobs at the nine-month reporting deadline. (This of course assumes that none of the five graduates who left the fellowships prior to nine months after graduation were among the ten 2010 CLS grads who were either unemployed or whose employment status was not known at the nine-month mark).
But consider the 2011 information: Columbia put 38 graduates into school-funded fellowships. Surely if "many" out of this group (which included one out of every 11 students in the graduating class) acquired jobs prior to the nine-month reporting deadline, this is something the school would disclose? Schwartz emailed CLS earlier this week regarding this matter, and got the following reply:
Four of the 38 fellows in the Class of 2011 are in permanent positions, however, all 38 were still in fellowships nine months after graduation when we reported to the ABA.
What I find perplexing about CLS's behavior is that it's so unnecessary. Admittedly the school knows that under the ABA's new reporting regime it will have to disclose eventually how many 2011 graduates were put in school-funded jobs; in addition the fact that half the top ten schools (the bottom half, not coincidentally) have "voluntarily" revealed this information already puts additional pressure on CLS to disclose the 2011 data sooner rather than later. So it makes sense for Columbia to disclose the 2011 numbers now. What doesn't make sense is for the school to make a gratuitous and very misleading representation regarding the outcome of those fellowships. It's just not true that "many" CLS grads in school-funded jobs are getting permanent jobs even before the fellowship ends if one is referring to the most current (and therefore most relevant) data: per the school only four of 38 have.
Pushing for more transparency in legal academia is a bit like dealing with substance abuser who is trying to get clean: Schools are subjected to various interventions, get on the transparency wagon (sort of), but keep falling off.
(3) What's happening with law school admissions waiting lists suggests how soft the market is getting. In the past week I've corresponded with a 0L who as of two weeks ago had only gotten into Touro (unranked), Hofstra (#89), and St. John's (#79). He was then admitted to Cardozo (#56) and, much more significantly, offered a $30,000 per year discount on tuition in the bargain. A few days after that he was admitted to George Washington (#20), and shortly afterwards GW offered her a more than 50% discount off the (increasingly fictional) official tuition price. Cardozo reacted by raising its offer to $43,000 per year, i.e., more than 80% off sticker. A glance at sites like TLS reveals that even schools like Chicago are offering significant tuition discounts (20%) to people who they just offered off their wait lists this week.
For some reason all this reminds me of Ingmar Bergman's one-word reaction when he was told that, after the initial airing of his multi-part film Scenes From A Marriage on Swedish television, the country's divorce rate had gone up: "Good!"
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Clueless baby boomer judge orders poor lawyers to subsidize rich ones
That's one functional economic effect of New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman's announcement yesterday that New York will become the first state to require bar applicants to donate 50 hours of legal services before they can be admitted. Lippman's initiative is so utterly wrongheaded on so many levels that it's tempting to reply to it with exasperated silence than to even begin to point out why. But for the public good:
(1) This kind of thing is the Platonic form of limousine liberal idiocy. Memo to Chief Judge Lippman: not having a lawyer is approximately item #714 on the list of what the average poor person in New York would spend money on if that person had extra money to spend. Here's a thought experiment: Give 100 poor New York families $10,000 cash each. How much of that one million dollar bounty is going to get spent on legal services? Practically nothing, that's how much.
You have to be pretty rich in this country before you start thinking of legal services as necessities rather than luxuries. Another thought experiment: how much money have you, dear reader, ever spent on legal services? If you are broadly speaking middle class the answer is more probably than not "nothing." This is why lawyers who don't work for rich people or corporations or the government are slowly or not so slowly going broke: because ordinary people, let alone poor ones, generally don't employ professional legal services except in very limited circumstances (some but not most divorces, bankruptcies, arrests for minor but not too minor crimes. principally DUI).
If the people who control entry into the New York bar are so concerned about helping poor people, it would be far better to simply require members of the bar to give poor people money, rather than offering them free legal services, which most poor people at most times will find, in comparison to various far more pressing needs -- food, shelter, clothes, transportation, medical care etc. -- about as useful as an annotated copy of Finnegans Wake. (This isn't meant to deny that some poor people will sometimes be in desperate need of legal representation, but rather to emphasize the problems of the poor are largely a function of not having money, rather than of not having access to the legal process. For example, people are usually evicted from their homes because they can't pay the rent, not because their legal rights are being violated, since in this country you have no legal right not to be forced to live on the street).
(2) Speaking of which, while I personally am very much in favor of forcing rich people to transfer wealth to poor people, I'm strongly against using professional licensing requirements to enforce my or anybody else's political desires, which is exactly what the learned judge is doing:
"Committed to our values" in this context means "being forced by the power of the state to participate in Jonathan Lippman's pet political project if you want to be a lawyer in the jurisdiction entry into which he controls." I could go on a rant here about how one of the unconscious ideological functions of legal education is to produce people who can say things like this without realizing that, in this context, "law" is completely indistinguishable from "politics," but as the kids say these days, whatever.
(3) As for kids these days, Jonathan Lippman paid about $10,000 per year in tuition in current inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars to attend NYU's law school in the late 1960s. He has spent his entire professional career as a functionary within New York's court system. I'm betting a Megamillions ticket that he doesn't have the faintest idea how preposterous it is, under current circumstances, to expect aspiring lawyers to work for free as a precondition for bar admittance in New York of all places.
Consider that these conditions include that nearly 10,000 people were admitted to the New York bar last year, while according to state and federal calculations the state will produce 1,700 jobs for lawyers each year over the next decade, via net replacement and growth combined. What this means of course is that the large majority of people admitted to the New York bar aren't going to get jobs as lawyers in New York. I imagine it would also come as quite a surprise to the learned judge to be informed that most people taking the New York bar have very negative net worth, enormous educational debts (graduates of 13 New York law schools had average law school debts of more than $120,000 in 2011), and income streams -- if any -- that are far too small to service their debt obligations which means that . . . wait for it . . . they couldn't possibly afford to pay for legal services, making them ideal candidates to receive pro bono legal representation (it's like rain on your wedding day).
(4) Exactly how is this requirement supposed to be discharged? Another piece of information that Chief Judge Lippman seems to be overlooking is that people who graduate from law school don't know how to practice law (this is why they can't purport to legally render legal services unless they're being supervised by an individual attorney or a legal organization). Medical schools train future surgeons by having them work on corpses, but apparently we're supposed to "train" nascent lawyers by handing them the legal problems of living, breathing people, the idea here being the dubious proposition that law students and new graduates will do more good than harm to the wretched refuse of our teeming shores if we entrust these proto-lawyers with the legal affairs of people currently slated to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
(5) Where are these aspirants to the New York bar supposed to find attorneys who will supervise their fledgling attempts at rendering legal services? By a remarkable coincidence this new barrier to entry will be only a minor inconvenience to people who at least for now are at the top of the legal heap -- Columbia Law School already requires its students to do 40 hours of pro bono work as a prerequisite for graduation; people who get associate gigs with large firms should have relatively little trouble fulfilling the requirement since its far easier for large firms to take on, assign, and supervise pro bono matters than it is for ordinary lawyers, etc. (Needless to say New York's other law schools will no doubt spring into action, devising yet one more hoop that their soon to be under or unemployed graduates will have to jump through before paying their bar admission fees.).
In short, this requirement will burden attorneys and aspiring lawyers in New York in pretty much precisely inverse relation to their social and economic status: High status lawyers will have to do nothing they're not doing already, lower-status lawyers are going to be pestered to "supervise" people who have no idea what they're doing, high-status law students will find this to be just another in a series of endless aggravations, and low status law students will find that in at least some cases it will serve as a significant barrier to entry. Indeed the latter outcome is what "some" might suspect functions as the unconscious economic basis lurking beneath the ideological superstructure of the judge's clueless bloviations.
(1) This kind of thing is the Platonic form of limousine liberal idiocy. Memo to Chief Judge Lippman: not having a lawyer is approximately item #714 on the list of what the average poor person in New York would spend money on if that person had extra money to spend. Here's a thought experiment: Give 100 poor New York families $10,000 cash each. How much of that one million dollar bounty is going to get spent on legal services? Practically nothing, that's how much.
You have to be pretty rich in this country before you start thinking of legal services as necessities rather than luxuries. Another thought experiment: how much money have you, dear reader, ever spent on legal services? If you are broadly speaking middle class the answer is more probably than not "nothing." This is why lawyers who don't work for rich people or corporations or the government are slowly or not so slowly going broke: because ordinary people, let alone poor ones, generally don't employ professional legal services except in very limited circumstances (some but not most divorces, bankruptcies, arrests for minor but not too minor crimes. principally DUI).
If the people who control entry into the New York bar are so concerned about helping poor people, it would be far better to simply require members of the bar to give poor people money, rather than offering them free legal services, which most poor people at most times will find, in comparison to various far more pressing needs -- food, shelter, clothes, transportation, medical care etc. -- about as useful as an annotated copy of Finnegans Wake. (This isn't meant to deny that some poor people will sometimes be in desperate need of legal representation, but rather to emphasize the problems of the poor are largely a function of not having money, rather than of not having access to the legal process. For example, people are usually evicted from their homes because they can't pay the rent, not because their legal rights are being violated, since in this country you have no legal right not to be forced to live on the street).
(2) Speaking of which, while I personally am very much in favor of forcing rich people to transfer wealth to poor people, I'm strongly against using professional licensing requirements to enforce my or anybody else's political desires, which is exactly what the learned judge is doing:
"If you want the privilege and honor of practicing law in New York, you're going to have to demonstrate that you're committed to our values," Lippman said.
"Committed to our values" in this context means "being forced by the power of the state to participate in Jonathan Lippman's pet political project if you want to be a lawyer in the jurisdiction entry into which he controls." I could go on a rant here about how one of the unconscious ideological functions of legal education is to produce people who can say things like this without realizing that, in this context, "law" is completely indistinguishable from "politics," but as the kids say these days, whatever.
(3) As for kids these days, Jonathan Lippman paid about $10,000 per year in tuition in current inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars to attend NYU's law school in the late 1960s. He has spent his entire professional career as a functionary within New York's court system. I'm betting a Megamillions ticket that he doesn't have the faintest idea how preposterous it is, under current circumstances, to expect aspiring lawyers to work for free as a precondition for bar admittance in New York of all places.
Consider that these conditions include that nearly 10,000 people were admitted to the New York bar last year, while according to state and federal calculations the state will produce 1,700 jobs for lawyers each year over the next decade, via net replacement and growth combined. What this means of course is that the large majority of people admitted to the New York bar aren't going to get jobs as lawyers in New York. I imagine it would also come as quite a surprise to the learned judge to be informed that most people taking the New York bar have very negative net worth, enormous educational debts (graduates of 13 New York law schools had average law school debts of more than $120,000 in 2011), and income streams -- if any -- that are far too small to service their debt obligations which means that . . . wait for it . . . they couldn't possibly afford to pay for legal services, making them ideal candidates to receive pro bono legal representation (it's like rain on your wedding day).
(4) Exactly how is this requirement supposed to be discharged? Another piece of information that Chief Judge Lippman seems to be overlooking is that people who graduate from law school don't know how to practice law (this is why they can't purport to legally render legal services unless they're being supervised by an individual attorney or a legal organization). Medical schools train future surgeons by having them work on corpses, but apparently we're supposed to "train" nascent lawyers by handing them the legal problems of living, breathing people, the idea here being the dubious proposition that law students and new graduates will do more good than harm to the wretched refuse of our teeming shores if we entrust these proto-lawyers with the legal affairs of people currently slated to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
(5) Where are these aspirants to the New York bar supposed to find attorneys who will supervise their fledgling attempts at rendering legal services? By a remarkable coincidence this new barrier to entry will be only a minor inconvenience to people who at least for now are at the top of the legal heap -- Columbia Law School already requires its students to do 40 hours of pro bono work as a prerequisite for graduation; people who get associate gigs with large firms should have relatively little trouble fulfilling the requirement since its far easier for large firms to take on, assign, and supervise pro bono matters than it is for ordinary lawyers, etc. (Needless to say New York's other law schools will no doubt spring into action, devising yet one more hoop that their soon to be under or unemployed graduates will have to jump through before paying their bar admission fees.).
In short, this requirement will burden attorneys and aspiring lawyers in New York in pretty much precisely inverse relation to their social and economic status: High status lawyers will have to do nothing they're not doing already, lower-status lawyers are going to be pestered to "supervise" people who have no idea what they're doing, high-status law students will find this to be just another in a series of endless aggravations, and low status law students will find that in at least some cases it will serve as a significant barrier to entry. Indeed the latter outcome is what "some" might suspect functions as the unconscious economic basis lurking beneath the ideological superstructure of the judge's clueless bloviations.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Law School Transparency publishes comprehensive 2010 employment data
Law School Transparency has produced a clearinghouse of collated employment and salary data for the class of 2010 at all ABA law schools. LST took the numbers reported by schools themselves, USNWR, and the ABA and created a series of metrics that attempt to measure, within the limitations of the available data, how many graduates of particular schools got jobs, what those jobs pay, and whether these outcomes are minimally acceptable, given the cost of acquiring a law degree from the schools in question.
Let's select a random law school to see how it works. RLS has an "employment score" of 59%, which means that 59% of the class had, nine months after graduation, a job requiring a law degree, if we don't count solo practitioners or people known to be employed temporarily by a law firm. (Why LST excluded only temp jobs with law firms from the employment score, as opposed to all temporary jobs, is unclear, but I imagine it has to do with the difficulty of coming up with a consistent metric in the context of inconsistently available information across law schools).
RLS has an "underemployment score" of 24.6%, which consists of unemployed graduates, all graduates working part-time, and all graduates working full-time in "non-professional" (not merely non-legal) positions. This number attempts to capture the percentage of the class that had an unambiguously bad outcome, given why people go to law school.
50.3% of RLS's class was employed and reported a salary. At least 10.7% of the class had a salary of $80,000 or more. This latter number represents the number private sector salaries at or above the median reported salary for that sector.
The non-discounted cost of attendance with debt at RLS for the entering class of 2012 is estimated to be $193,290. This number is derived by extrapolating the likely total cost of (non-resident) tuition and living expenses for a 2012 matriculant, assuming a 3% annual tuition increase and a 2% annual COL increase, then assuming this sum will be 100% debt-financed at current rates, then calculating what the graduate's total debt will be in the summer of 2015.
These numbers represent just a piece of the picture that LST has put together. There's much more information here -- for example what percentage of graduates are getting federal clerkships, and big firm jobs, and public interest jobs, and jobs funded by their own schools. A particularly nice feature is LST's attempt to reconstruct as much of the 2010 NALP forms as possible of the three quarters or so of ABA schools which have refused to release this data, which as LST points out could be scanned and uploaded to a school's web site in about five minutes. (Here's the list of the schools which have released their NALP data).
I encourage readers to browse through LST's numbers in regard to a few of their favorite legal academic institutions, to begin to get a sense of the extent to which the advertised price of legal education no longer bears any rational relationship to the economic outcomes the typical law school graduate can expect from that education.
What's happened in legal academia is roughly analogous to walking into a car dealership for the first time in 20 years, and seeing that the MSRP of a seven-year old Ford Focus is $75,000, while that of a top of the line new Lexus is $85,000. If cars were priced like that the sales of seven-year-old compact cars would instantly fall to zero. But legal education doesn't work like that, apparently because it's literally priceless.
Speaking of priceless, throw these people, who have performed this extremely valuable public service for free, some money. In the alternative, if you're affiliated with Vanderbilt's or NYU's law school, you might try to help your alums out a little more, so that your extremely intelligent, hard-working, and public-spirited graduates don't end up with quite so much time on their hands.
Let's select a random law school to see how it works. RLS has an "employment score" of 59%, which means that 59% of the class had, nine months after graduation, a job requiring a law degree, if we don't count solo practitioners or people known to be employed temporarily by a law firm. (Why LST excluded only temp jobs with law firms from the employment score, as opposed to all temporary jobs, is unclear, but I imagine it has to do with the difficulty of coming up with a consistent metric in the context of inconsistently available information across law schools).
RLS has an "underemployment score" of 24.6%, which consists of unemployed graduates, all graduates working part-time, and all graduates working full-time in "non-professional" (not merely non-legal) positions. This number attempts to capture the percentage of the class that had an unambiguously bad outcome, given why people go to law school.
50.3% of RLS's class was employed and reported a salary. At least 10.7% of the class had a salary of $80,000 or more. This latter number represents the number private sector salaries at or above the median reported salary for that sector.
The non-discounted cost of attendance with debt at RLS for the entering class of 2012 is estimated to be $193,290. This number is derived by extrapolating the likely total cost of (non-resident) tuition and living expenses for a 2012 matriculant, assuming a 3% annual tuition increase and a 2% annual COL increase, then assuming this sum will be 100% debt-financed at current rates, then calculating what the graduate's total debt will be in the summer of 2015.
These numbers represent just a piece of the picture that LST has put together. There's much more information here -- for example what percentage of graduates are getting federal clerkships, and big firm jobs, and public interest jobs, and jobs funded by their own schools. A particularly nice feature is LST's attempt to reconstruct as much of the 2010 NALP forms as possible of the three quarters or so of ABA schools which have refused to release this data, which as LST points out could be scanned and uploaded to a school's web site in about five minutes. (Here's the list of the schools which have released their NALP data).
I encourage readers to browse through LST's numbers in regard to a few of their favorite legal academic institutions, to begin to get a sense of the extent to which the advertised price of legal education no longer bears any rational relationship to the economic outcomes the typical law school graduate can expect from that education.
What's happened in legal academia is roughly analogous to walking into a car dealership for the first time in 20 years, and seeing that the MSRP of a seven-year old Ford Focus is $75,000, while that of a top of the line new Lexus is $85,000. If cars were priced like that the sales of seven-year-old compact cars would instantly fall to zero. But legal education doesn't work like that, apparently because it's literally priceless.
Speaking of priceless, throw these people, who have performed this extremely valuable public service for free, some money. In the alternative, if you're affiliated with Vanderbilt's or NYU's law school, you might try to help your alums out a little more, so that your extremely intelligent, hard-working, and public-spirited graduates don't end up with quite so much time on their hands.
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