The New York Times has published an interesting op-ed by Greg Smith, a soon to be former director of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. The gist of the piece is that the bank has fallen away from its historical roots to become dominated by what Smith believes is a corrupt culture, which at every turn encourages its employees to put the bank's profit margin above the interests of its clients.
I know nothing about investment banking, let alone about changes in the institutional culture at Goldman Sachs, so I have no way of judging the extent to which Smith's criticisms are accurate. I do know something about legal academia, and am struck by the parallels between what the writer claims has happened at his employer and what I've seen happen to American law schools.
For example I remember a faculty meeting at Colorado that took place around 1995 or so, at which a senior professor -- someone who had been there for about 25 years -- aired his concerns about rising tuition. We needed, he said, to stop taking so much "out of the hides of the students." What he had witnessed was a rise over the previous 15 years in resident tuition from $980 to $4400 in nominal dollars ($2700 to $6300 in 2010 dollars). The other thing I remember about his remarks is that it was the last time I heard anybody in a faculty meeting, including myself, say anything even vaguely critical about tuition hikes until 15 years later, when resident tuition surpassed the $30,000 mark.
Why did the people running Harvard Law School charge $6300 in tuition in 1981 ($15,600 in 2011 dollars) when they could easily have charged two or three or indeed five times that and still filled their class with bright young people who would go on to make fine lawyers? The superficial answer is that they didn't because Yale wasn't doing that (this kind of explanation reminds me of the famous metaphysical joke about turtles). A more nuanced answer would include observations about having some sense of social responsibility, not to mention shame.
Over the course of the last generation, social responsibility and shame have been defenestrated in favor of profit maximization (or, in the largely "non-profit" context of higher education, revenue maximization). Harvard has tripled its tuition for the same reason Colorado has increased its price tag by 1,053% in real terms: because (a) they could; and (b) because they -- we -- lost pretty much all sense that one had to have a better reason than this for grabbing everything we could get our hands on that wasn't nailed down.
In the world of investment banking this same development has a very straightforward ideological justification, which is that being a pig is good for society. Indeed Smith's criticisms of Goldman Sachs don't really move outside that paradigm, since they add up to the claim that being too much of a pig is bad for porcine well being: his argument seems to be that the problem with ripping off your clients is that they'll eventually figure out you're doing so, which of course would be bad for business. The notion that ripping people off even if you could get away with it in the long run would still be wrong is apparently too radical of a thought to be uttered within the halls of Goldman Sachs, even if one is in the act of going permanently out the door.
In the world of legal academia, the ideological justification for "revenue maximization" must naturally be somewhat more obscurantist than the uncomplicated claim that individual greed redounds to the benefit of society as a whole. Hence we hear much about how very expensive a "first-rate" legal education has become in an ever-more complex global economy, in which we must train future attorneys to structure multinational business transactions conducted simultaneously in English, German and Mandarin.
But in both cases the basic ideological function of the standard theory is the same: to convince people that flagrantly self-interested behavior is actually altruistic. On the one hand, this claim seems rather dubious on its face. On the other, for what ought to be obvious reasons it isn't exactly hard to get those who are profiting from its acceptance to find that theory remarkably plausible.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Top of the pops
Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.
--Swift --
When one of my brothers was getting a PhD in chemistry back in the day, he had fellowship offers from a Midwestern university famous for its adjacent cornfields, and an Ivy League school famous for being famous. He chose the former. I was just getting into the law racket at the time and this choice naturally surprised me. He explained that Moo U happened to have a better chemistry department than World Famous University.
A glance at the current USNWR rankings of such things reveals that Illinois has a higher-ranked chemistry department than Yale, Princeton, Chicago, or Columbia. Of course this could never happen in law, for the simple reason that chemistry is a real academic field, while law is basically a bunch of prestige-obsessed bullshit resting upon enormous piles of money and power.
In law, the same three schools are always The Top Three, the same six schools are always The Top Six, and the same fourteen schools are always the T-14, ab aeterno, world without end amen. Law is all about maintaining hierarchy, and hierarchy is self-replicating and self-reinforcing. This makes reputation "sticky," as a social scientist would say, and since reputation drives everything else that affects the rankings, the rankings always stay the same, with two exceptions:
(1) There are ever-so tiny movements within the elite micro-tiers described above.
(2) There are comparatively large movements within the Outer Systems lying beyond the magic circle of the elites.
For example, this year in the Top Three Stanford jumped Harvard. Incredibly, people at these institutions actually care about this. They may, and they do, excoriate these imbecile rankings, which as many people have pointed out are based on a methodology which is absurd on its face (schools are rewarded for spending more money, i.e., for achieving maximum inefficiency; reputation is measured by surveying people who know nothing about the putative metrics etc etc), but you can bet your rising tuition dollar that this ever-so slight Disturbance in the Force has caused rejoicing in Palo Alto and much rending of garments in Cambridge. This would be merely amusing if it were not for the all-but inevitable fact that this meaningless event will cause all too meaningful amounts of money to be spent by those who deplore the metaphorically bankrupt proclamations of a literally bankrupt news magazine, while continuing to prostrate themselves before it.
Meanwhile, out in the provinces, one school this year fell from 23 to 35, while another rose from 30 to 20 (or something -- I'm not looking it up). Potential law students pay close attention to such movements, even though there's almost no evidence that this kind of thing makes any difference in regard to acquiring the jobs of which there are not nearly enough, especially the tiny percentage of jobs that pay enough to justifying going to any law school period. And because 0Ls pay attention to this nonsense, law school administrators and their university superiors do as well. (Although the former factor seems to be changing slowly. Even at alemming-infested site featuring many naive readers such as Top Law Schools, the word seems to be getting out that The Rankings basically don't mean anything outside the top of the top tier).
A student at a Top Two law school makes the following observations:
--Swift --
When one of my brothers was getting a PhD in chemistry back in the day, he had fellowship offers from a Midwestern university famous for its adjacent cornfields, and an Ivy League school famous for being famous. He chose the former. I was just getting into the law racket at the time and this choice naturally surprised me. He explained that Moo U happened to have a better chemistry department than World Famous University.
A glance at the current USNWR rankings of such things reveals that Illinois has a higher-ranked chemistry department than Yale, Princeton, Chicago, or Columbia. Of course this could never happen in law, for the simple reason that chemistry is a real academic field, while law is basically a bunch of prestige-obsessed bullshit resting upon enormous piles of money and power.
In law, the same three schools are always The Top Three, the same six schools are always The Top Six, and the same fourteen schools are always the T-14, ab aeterno, world without end amen. Law is all about maintaining hierarchy, and hierarchy is self-replicating and self-reinforcing. This makes reputation "sticky," as a social scientist would say, and since reputation drives everything else that affects the rankings, the rankings always stay the same, with two exceptions:
(1) There are ever-so tiny movements within the elite micro-tiers described above.
(2) There are comparatively large movements within the Outer Systems lying beyond the magic circle of the elites.
For example, this year in the Top Three Stanford jumped Harvard. Incredibly, people at these institutions actually care about this. They may, and they do, excoriate these imbecile rankings, which as many people have pointed out are based on a methodology which is absurd on its face (schools are rewarded for spending more money, i.e., for achieving maximum inefficiency; reputation is measured by surveying people who know nothing about the putative metrics etc etc), but you can bet your rising tuition dollar that this ever-so slight Disturbance in the Force has caused rejoicing in Palo Alto and much rending of garments in Cambridge. This would be merely amusing if it were not for the all-but inevitable fact that this meaningless event will cause all too meaningful amounts of money to be spent by those who deplore the metaphorically bankrupt proclamations of a literally bankrupt news magazine, while continuing to prostrate themselves before it.
Meanwhile, out in the provinces, one school this year fell from 23 to 35, while another rose from 30 to 20 (or something -- I'm not looking it up). Potential law students pay close attention to such movements, even though there's almost no evidence that this kind of thing makes any difference in regard to acquiring the jobs of which there are not nearly enough, especially the tiny percentage of jobs that pay enough to justifying going to any law school period. And because 0Ls pay attention to this nonsense, law school administrators and their university superiors do as well. (Although the former factor seems to be changing slowly. Even at a
A student at a Top Two law school makes the following observations:
Yes it is.The numbers are quite depressing. The top 6 have gotten closer and closer to each other, which seemingly suggests two possibilities (or some combo):
(1) Schools have been rat-racing based on the USN criteria to the extent that they're all pushing towards *precisely* the same goal.
(2) USNews is changing its formula to create greater parity at the top, arguably raising the incentive for (1).
One would hope that different law deans have their own independent thoughts/objectives [about what legal education ought to be]...but...oy. While we joke that it is a conspiracy, I sadly think it really, really is. And it's so, so wrong.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Law school numbers
Number of 2010 Columbia and NYU grads who according to the schools' placement offices had impliedly partner-track associate jobs with firms of more than 250 attorneys nine months after graduation:
555
Number of 2010 Columbia and NYU grads who the National Law Journal confirmed were working in such jobs nine months after graduation:
No more than 448 (the real number is lower to the extent that any grads in associate track positions at NLJ250 firms were working at firms of less than 251 attorneys).
Total number of missing BigLaw jobs represented by these numbers:
(At least) 107
Explanation given by the two schools for this discrepancy to New York Post reporter Christine Parker when she requested one:
None
Comparable numbers of missing BigLaw jobs at other top ten law schools:
Yale: Zero
Chicago: Zero
Duke: 1
Michigan: 2
Stanford: 5
Berkeley: 6
Virginia: 6
Penn: 6
Harvard: 27
Number of 2010 NYU grads employed by the law school nine months after graduation, i.e., during the NALP employment reporting window:
38
Monthly salary of these jobs:
$2000
Average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan:
$3000
Number of 2010 Fordham law school graduates employed by the law school nine months after graduation:
70
Number of 2010 Columbia Law School graduates employed by the law school nine months after graduation:
Unknown "While Columbia acknowledged that it offers fellowships to students seeking employment, the schoolrefused to disclose could not say how many jobs it had funded for the class of 2010, or whether they were comparable to the prestigious one- and two-year opportunities advertised on its website."
I'll say this for Columbia: the place doesn't lack for chutzpah. When it comes to fundraising they probably use NSA data bases to secure their alums' cellphone numbers and GPS nanotechnology to track their exact locations, but somehow the answer to the question of the exactly the extent to which they're fluffing their "98%" employment number with law school-created "jobs" remains a deep and abiding mystery, even when one of the nation's largest newspapers (as opposed to a mere blogger) asks them point blank.
Speaking of which, at least NYU has disclosed -- when asked to do so by a large newspaper -- that it was employing eight per cent of its own graduates during the NALP reporting window. It thus joins UVA (11%) as the only other top ten school to reveal this fascinating number.
The Fordham number is the kind of thing that should get even students currently still within the 1L bubble stirred up. Simple math suggests that current Fordham law students are paying about a thousand bucks apiece to fund essentially fictitious jobs for Fordham grads, to fluff up the school's employment rate. (No doubt this money is for accounting purposes coming out of the sort of discretionary slush fund that sloshes around deans' offices, rather than directly from student tuition. But money is fungible).
And what's up with Harvard's BigLaw placement? While the discrepancy in its numbers isn't nearly as egregious as that at Columbia and NYU -- percentage-wise it's about a third as large -- it's still big enough that a nascent Woodward and Bernstein at the Crimson could find a worse use of their time than trying to look into it.
BTW some commenters responding to the original thread on this topic assumed I was accusing Columbia and NYU of intentionally cooking their numbers. I didn't and I'm not. What I'd like to know is why one out of every five BigLaw jobs that Columbia and NYU reported to NALP in 2010 has gone missing in the NLJ stats. There are lots of possible explanations for this that don't include outright fraud by the schools themselves (For instance one possibility is that unusually large percentages of Columbia and NYU grads are taking new non-partner track associate positions, which the NLJ doesn't count when surveying firms).
Simply refusing to answer the question, however, isn't a very good way of getting people to give you the benefit of the doubt.
555
Number of 2010 Columbia and NYU grads who the National Law Journal confirmed were working in such jobs nine months after graduation:
No more than 448 (the real number is lower to the extent that any grads in associate track positions at NLJ250 firms were working at firms of less than 251 attorneys).
Total number of missing BigLaw jobs represented by these numbers:
(At least) 107
Explanation given by the two schools for this discrepancy to New York Post reporter Christine Parker when she requested one:
None
Comparable numbers of missing BigLaw jobs at other top ten law schools:
Yale: Zero
Chicago: Zero
Duke: 1
Michigan: 2
Stanford: 5
Berkeley: 6
Virginia: 6
Penn: 6
Harvard: 27
Number of 2010 NYU grads employed by the law school nine months after graduation, i.e., during the NALP employment reporting window:
38
Monthly salary of these jobs:
$2000
Average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan:
$3000
Number of 2010 Fordham law school graduates employed by the law school nine months after graduation:
70
Number of 2010 Columbia Law School graduates employed by the law school nine months after graduation:
Unknown "While Columbia acknowledged that it offers fellowships to students seeking employment, the school
I'll say this for Columbia: the place doesn't lack for chutzpah. When it comes to fundraising they probably use NSA data bases to secure their alums' cellphone numbers and GPS nanotechnology to track their exact locations, but somehow the answer to the question of the exactly the extent to which they're fluffing their "98%" employment number with law school-created "jobs" remains a deep and abiding mystery, even when one of the nation's largest newspapers (as opposed to a mere blogger) asks them point blank.
Speaking of which, at least NYU has disclosed -- when asked to do so by a large newspaper -- that it was employing eight per cent of its own graduates during the NALP reporting window. It thus joins UVA (11%) as the only other top ten school to reveal this fascinating number.
The Fordham number is the kind of thing that should get even students currently still within the 1L bubble stirred up. Simple math suggests that current Fordham law students are paying about a thousand bucks apiece to fund essentially fictitious jobs for Fordham grads, to fluff up the school's employment rate. (No doubt this money is for accounting purposes coming out of the sort of discretionary slush fund that sloshes around deans' offices, rather than directly from student tuition. But money is fungible).
And what's up with Harvard's BigLaw placement? While the discrepancy in its numbers isn't nearly as egregious as that at Columbia and NYU -- percentage-wise it's about a third as large -- it's still big enough that a nascent Woodward and Bernstein at the Crimson could find a worse use of their time than trying to look into it.
BTW some commenters responding to the original thread on this topic assumed I was accusing Columbia and NYU of intentionally cooking their numbers. I didn't and I'm not. What I'd like to know is why one out of every five BigLaw jobs that Columbia and NYU reported to NALP in 2010 has gone missing in the NLJ stats. There are lots of possible explanations for this that don't include outright fraud by the schools themselves (For instance one possibility is that unusually large percentages of Columbia and NYU grads are taking new non-partner track associate positions, which the NLJ doesn't count when surveying firms).
Simply refusing to answer the question, however, isn't a very good way of getting people to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
The Joint Tenancy
Credit for this legal definition goes to the authors of the Black Label Law Dictionary (BL1Y et. al.):
Joint tenancy: Smoking herb all day in your parents' basement
Admit it, you laughed.
And, as a great philosopher once observed, "it's funny because it's true."
Deborah Rhode suggested to me last week that one source of political pressure for reforming higher education in general and legal education in particular could come from Boomer parents, who are fed up with having their 20something kids migrate back into the suburban walkout basements that were finished in order to quarantine them during their fractious teen years. That struck me as quite plausible, given the extent of the ongoing economic disaster that has swept over the so-called Millenials.
This being America, however, it's going to take awhile before enough of those parents realize that the reason Dick and Jane (or rather Jared and Hannah) can't get a job isn't because they didn't work hard enough or smoked too much weed, but because there are no jobs. We live in a culture where people will do almost anything to avoid considering the possibility that the problems we face might be genuinely structural -- which is to say genuinely political -- as opposed to the product of tens of millions of simultaneous failures of moral character, triggered by reefer madness, or X-Box 360, or too much fast food, or so-called "rap" music, or whatever the moral panic of the moment might be.
Few things are more integral to maintaining the status quo in legal academia than this refusal to give more than lip service (if that) to structural factors. You can tell a legal academic, and especially a legal academic administrator, that half his graduates aren't going to have careers as lawyers at all, and a large proportion of the other half aren't going to be able to make enough money practicing law to come anywhere close to justifying the cost of their law degrees, and he'll nod and smile and start burbling about teaching our students networking skills, and improving the career services office, and better skills training -- all things that, to the extent they can even be accomplished, do exactly nothing about the structural problem, but rather might improve ever so slightly the prospects of the graduates of our school relative to the prospects of the graduates of other law schools.
On one level this might seem like a failure to grasp basic arithmetic -- and given the innumeracy that plagues traditional legal education that may be a factor -- but on a deeper level it's a psychological and moral failure. The psychological failure is a product of the tendency we all have to assume that our own experiences can be generalized. At one extreme this leads to absurdities such as blaming graduates for not having studied harder for the LSAT so that they could have gone to better law schools (I have actually heard a law professor do this).
This reminds me of an argument I once had with a fellow who claimed that any healthy young man could, if he were sufficiently dedicated to the necessary training, eventually run a 2:30 marathon, i.e., 26+ miles at a 5:45 per mile pace. That makes just as much sense as claiming that anybody can learn to throw down a reverse two-handed slam dunk with enough training, but this guy had turned himself from what he considered a mediocre -- actually a very fast in comparison to average humans -- marathoner into a sub-elite runner through "hard work," so he figured anyone else could do what he had done.
In fact there are people who can score a 170 on the LSAT taking it cold, and lots of others who could never score a 150 no matter how hard they practiced, but if one's one experience seems to belie that fact it will be ignored. In any case this whole line of argument is from a structural perspective simply idiotic, since 97% of American law schools would be out of business if their clientele was limited to people who finished in the top 2% of the LSAT, but that doesn't stop your basic "personal responsibility" type from making it anyway, especially if he thinks doing so might help protect his paycheck.
People -- even people in the Clueless Generation -- are beginning to realize the reason Jared and Hannah are living in the basement has almost nothing to do with personal responsibility, and everything to do with a system that doesn't work any more. And this realization is crucial to changing that system.
Joint tenancy: Smoking herb all day in your parents' basement
Admit it, you laughed.
And, as a great philosopher once observed, "it's funny because it's true."
Deborah Rhode suggested to me last week that one source of political pressure for reforming higher education in general and legal education in particular could come from Boomer parents, who are fed up with having their 20something kids migrate back into the suburban walkout basements that were finished in order to quarantine them during their fractious teen years. That struck me as quite plausible, given the extent of the ongoing economic disaster that has swept over the so-called Millenials.
This being America, however, it's going to take awhile before enough of those parents realize that the reason Dick and Jane (or rather Jared and Hannah) can't get a job isn't because they didn't work hard enough or smoked too much weed, but because there are no jobs. We live in a culture where people will do almost anything to avoid considering the possibility that the problems we face might be genuinely structural -- which is to say genuinely political -- as opposed to the product of tens of millions of simultaneous failures of moral character, triggered by reefer madness, or X-Box 360, or too much fast food, or so-called "rap" music, or whatever the moral panic of the moment might be.
Few things are more integral to maintaining the status quo in legal academia than this refusal to give more than lip service (if that) to structural factors. You can tell a legal academic, and especially a legal academic administrator, that half his graduates aren't going to have careers as lawyers at all, and a large proportion of the other half aren't going to be able to make enough money practicing law to come anywhere close to justifying the cost of their law degrees, and he'll nod and smile and start burbling about teaching our students networking skills, and improving the career services office, and better skills training -- all things that, to the extent they can even be accomplished, do exactly nothing about the structural problem, but rather might improve ever so slightly the prospects of the graduates of our school relative to the prospects of the graduates of other law schools.
On one level this might seem like a failure to grasp basic arithmetic -- and given the innumeracy that plagues traditional legal education that may be a factor -- but on a deeper level it's a psychological and moral failure. The psychological failure is a product of the tendency we all have to assume that our own experiences can be generalized. At one extreme this leads to absurdities such as blaming graduates for not having studied harder for the LSAT so that they could have gone to better law schools (I have actually heard a law professor do this).
This reminds me of an argument I once had with a fellow who claimed that any healthy young man could, if he were sufficiently dedicated to the necessary training, eventually run a 2:30 marathon, i.e., 26+ miles at a 5:45 per mile pace. That makes just as much sense as claiming that anybody can learn to throw down a reverse two-handed slam dunk with enough training, but this guy had turned himself from what he considered a mediocre -- actually a very fast in comparison to average humans -- marathoner into a sub-elite runner through "hard work," so he figured anyone else could do what he had done.
In fact there are people who can score a 170 on the LSAT taking it cold, and lots of others who could never score a 150 no matter how hard they practiced, but if one's one experience seems to belie that fact it will be ignored. In any case this whole line of argument is from a structural perspective simply idiotic, since 97% of American law schools would be out of business if their clientele was limited to people who finished in the top 2% of the LSAT, but that doesn't stop your basic "personal responsibility" type from making it anyway, especially if he thinks doing so might help protect his paycheck.
People -- even people in the Clueless Generation -- are beginning to realize the reason Jared and Hannah are living in the basement has almost nothing to do with personal responsibility, and everything to do with a system that doesn't work any more. And this realization is crucial to changing that system.
Friday, March 9, 2012
And that's the way it is
When I was about seven or eight I would watch the CBS Evening News with my father every night after dinner. This was at the height of US involvement in the Vietnam war, around the time of the Tet Offensive, when the anti-war movement in the U.S. was becoming something of a mass movement on college campuses. At that age I was only vaguely aware of all this, but I would follow the war on TV every night, as Walter Cronkite's avuncular voice would introduce in the field segments from intrepid journalists (this was back in the days before the Pentagon had figured out how to properly domesticate the news coverage of our foreign adventures), and once a week there would be a body count: a graphic showing the number of U.S., South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese/Viet Cong troops killed and wounded during the past seven days.
The numbers were generally something like 178 U.S., 331 South Vietnamese, and 3375 North Vietnamese killed. Even in my innocent youth it struck me after awhile that these proportions were so much to the disadvantage of our enemies that surely victory must be at hand. When I asked my father if this wasn't the case he replied casually that the government simply made those numbers up. This came as quite a shock, but of course when I became a man and put aside childish things I learned that this had in fact been more or less the case.
Last night the CBS Evening News aired a piece on the law school scam in which I participated. (For those interested in such things I can report that CBS News did a very thorough job of fact-checking; I spent a lot of time talking with the producer about the precise factual basis for the assertions in the piece). People can judge for themselves, but in my view the piece was quite well-done, especially when one considers that mainstream opinion outside our little world regarding the economic circumstances of lawyers in general and recent graduates in particular remains largely in the grip of a vision of a vanished world -- to the extent it ever even existed at all -- in which being a lawyer means being a member of a high-paying, economically stable, and socially prestigious profession (yes Americans hate lawyers, but they hate them in part because they supposedly garner such great privileges from their social license to harass and complicate, etc.).
In any case, progress on that front is being made. There are plenty of days when anyone working on this topic can feel as if he or she is making no headway against an adamantine wall of denial and incomprehension. This isn't one of those, and it's good sometimes to reflect on how far things have come already, not merely on how far there still is to go. In that spirit I'd like to thank everybody who participates in the conversations on this site, which in their own way are part of a necessary conversation that is starting to happen all across America -- a conversation about social problems which go far beyond the law school scam, but which it in so many ways exemplifies.
The numbers were generally something like 178 U.S., 331 South Vietnamese, and 3375 North Vietnamese killed. Even in my innocent youth it struck me after awhile that these proportions were so much to the disadvantage of our enemies that surely victory must be at hand. When I asked my father if this wasn't the case he replied casually that the government simply made those numbers up. This came as quite a shock, but of course when I became a man and put aside childish things I learned that this had in fact been more or less the case.
Last night the CBS Evening News aired a piece on the law school scam in which I participated. (For those interested in such things I can report that CBS News did a very thorough job of fact-checking; I spent a lot of time talking with the producer about the precise factual basis for the assertions in the piece). People can judge for themselves, but in my view the piece was quite well-done, especially when one considers that mainstream opinion outside our little world regarding the economic circumstances of lawyers in general and recent graduates in particular remains largely in the grip of a vision of a vanished world -- to the extent it ever even existed at all -- in which being a lawyer means being a member of a high-paying, economically stable, and socially prestigious profession (yes Americans hate lawyers, but they hate them in part because they supposedly garner such great privileges from their social license to harass and complicate, etc.).
In any case, progress on that front is being made. There are plenty of days when anyone working on this topic can feel as if he or she is making no headway against an adamantine wall of denial and incomprehension. This isn't one of those, and it's good sometimes to reflect on how far things have come already, not merely on how far there still is to go. In that spirit I'd like to thank everybody who participates in the conversations on this site, which in their own way are part of a necessary conversation that is starting to happen all across America -- a conversation about social problems which go far beyond the law school scam, but which it in so many ways exemplifies.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
New York Stories
Updated below
In the wake of much criticism regarding the lack of transparency in their employment numbers, Columbia and NYU have just posted most of their data they reported to NALP for their graduating classes of 2010. The numbers are rather curious. For one thing, the NALP reporting deadline for the class of 2011 was two weeks ago, so we can assume that these schools simply chose not to post the most recent data they have compiled regarding employment outcomes for their graduates.
In the wake of much criticism regarding the lack of transparency in their employment numbers, Columbia and NYU have just posted most of their data they reported to NALP for their graduating classes of 2010. The numbers are rather curious. For one thing, the NALP reporting deadline for the class of 2011 was two weeks ago, so we can assume that these schools simply chose not to post the most recent data they have compiled regarding employment outcomes for their graduates.
As for the 2010 stats, Columbia reports that 415 out of 430 graduates were employed nine months after graduation, and that 76.1% of employed graduates were working for law firms. According to the school, 68.7% (285) of employed graduates were working for firms of more than 250 attorneys, while another 3.1% (13) were working for firms of 101 to 250 attorneys.
Let’s compare these numbers with last year’s National Law Journal’s annual survey of the nation’s 250 largest law firms, published in February of 2011. In 2010 the smallest of the 250 largest firms in the country employed 160 lawyers. Note that the NLJ survey includes all attorneys (partners, partner-track associates, “permanent” associates, staff attorneys, of counsel attorneys) who work for these firms, with the exception of “temporary or contract attorneys.”
What this means, of course, is that according to Columbia somewhere between 285 and 298 of its 2010 graduates were working for NLJ250 firms, depending on how many of the 13 graduates purportedly working for firms of between 101 and 250 lawyers were working for firms with 160 lawyers or more. Surprisingly (or maybe not, given what we’ve learned about this subject over the course of the last couple of years) NLJ 250 firms reported only 239 2010 Columbia grads working for such firms. This is not, needless to say, a trivial discrepancy.
What could account for this? One possibility is that NLJ250 firms are misreporting their data. Another is that graduates are misreporting their employment status. We can measure the extent to which one or both of these things are likely to be true by looking at the employment statistics posted by other law schools, and comparing them to the NLJ250 numbers. We can do this by adding together all the graduates a school lists as having jobs with firms of 250+ lawyers (since all these firms are in the NLJ250) and then making an estimate of what proportion of their graduates listed as being with firms of 101-250 lawyers are with NLJ250 firms. The latter step is slightly speculative, but since at elite schools very few people get jobs with the latter category of firms this isn’t too big of a practical obstacle. Since there are probably quite a few more firms with 101 to 159 lawyers than there are firms with 160 to 250, we can estimate that perhaps a third of graduates employed by 101-250 lawyer firms are with NLJ250 firms.
Using this method, Columbia’s self-reported employment statistics for the class of 2010 contain exactly 50 more BigLaw jobs than are attested by the NLJ250 stats -- 46 with firms of 250+ lawyers, and four with firms of between 160 and 250 lawyers. This represents nearly one out of every five 2010 Columbia graduates who supposedly got jobs with big firms.
Now let’s compare this estimate to those which can be extracted from similarly ranked law schools’ self-reported data.
Chicago: Chicago reports 136 2010 grads working for law firms. Of these, 112 are working for firms of more than 250 lawyers, while five are working for firms of 101-250 lawyers. Range of possible NLJ hires: 112-117. We would predict Chicago would place 114 2010 grads with NLJ250 firms. The actual number reported by NLJ was 115.
Michigan: Michigan reports 160 grads working for firms of more than 250 lawyers and 20 working for firms of 101-250. Range 160-180. This predicts a total of 167 2010 grads with NLJ 250 firms. NLJ reported 158.
Virginia: Virginia reports 177 grads with firms of more than 250 lawyers and 13 with firms of `101-250. Range 177-190. Predicted total of NLJ250 jobs: 181. NLJ reported total: 175.
Penn: Predicted total: 153. Range 149-160. NLJ reported total: 145.
Obviously all these numbers are close enough that the fairly minor discrepancies between the data reported by the schools and that reported by NLJ could be accounted for by a handful of graduates misreporting their status, and/or inaccuracies in our estimates regarding how many graduates in the 101-250 lawyer firm category are actually with NLJ250 firms. (Note that all the law school numbers correlate almost precisely with the NLJ250 numbers if one simply disregards the ambiguous 101-250 firm category).
What about NYU? For the class of 2010, NYU reported 480 employed graduates, with 61.7% of these graduates (296) working for law firms. Of these, 91.2% (270) were said to be working for firms of more than 250 attorneys, while 3.7% (11) were supposedly working for firms of 101 to 250 lawyers, meaning that we would predict the NYU class of 2010 placed 273 attorneys with NLJ250 firms. In fact the school placed 209.
Remarkably, NYU’s stats appear to be even more inaccurate than those of its intra-city rival. Columbia and NYU claimed to have placed approximately 562 2010 graduates with NLJ 250 firms – indeed the minimum they could have possibly placed according to their own stats is 555, with a maximum of 579 – when in fact they placed only 448. In other words, collectively Columbia and NYU overstated the BigLaw placement rate for their 2010 graduates by between 23.9% and 29.25%.
Whoops.
Update: After some conversations with the National Law Journal, I've learned they employ a survey methodology that doesn't rely solely on responses from firms (even though "the vast majority" of firms reply to the survey per the magazine), and which seems quite comprehensive (hence the very high reporting rate from firms regarding hiring from top ten schools other than the New York pair). I've also learned that, unlike its calculation of firm size, which counts all attorneys other than temporary contract workers, the law school placement survey counts only partner-track associates. This could, I suppose, account for at least some of the discrepancies in the CLS and NYU numbers, if a very disproportionate number of their grads are taking "career associate" and temporary contract attorney positions straight out of law school in comparison to other top ten schools. Why that would be the case is something that would require an explanation.
Update II: To fill out the picture a little I calculated the number of 2010 graduates employed by firms of 250+ lawyers at some other schools, as reported by those schools, and compared it to the number of graduates reported by the NLJ to be employed by NLJ250 firms.
Update: After some conversations with the National Law Journal, I've learned they employ a survey methodology that doesn't rely solely on responses from firms (even though "the vast majority" of firms reply to the survey per the magazine), and which seems quite comprehensive (hence the very high reporting rate from firms regarding hiring from top ten schools other than the New York pair). I've also learned that, unlike its calculation of firm size, which counts all attorneys other than temporary contract workers, the law school placement survey counts only partner-track associates. This could, I suppose, account for at least some of the discrepancies in the CLS and NYU numbers, if a very disproportionate number of their grads are taking "career associate" and temporary contract attorney positions straight out of law school in comparison to other top ten schools. Why that would be the case is something that would require an explanation.
Update II: To fill out the picture a little I calculated the number of 2010 graduates employed by firms of 250+ lawyers at some other schools, as reported by those schools, and compared it to the number of graduates reported by the NLJ to be employed by NLJ250 firms.
Duke: 82 grads listed with 250+ firms. 81 grads listed with NLJ250 firms.
Georgetown: 259 grads listed with 250+ firms. 242 grads listed with NLJ250 firms.
UCLA: 119 grads with 250+ firms. 123 grads with NLJ250 firms.
George Washington: 134 grads with 250+ firms. 127 grads with NLJ250 firms.
In short after analyzing the data from ten schools, at eight of those schools the number of grads reported by the schools to be working for firms of more than 250 lawyers was essentially the same as the number of grads reported by the NLJ to be working for NLJ250 firms.
For whatever reason, CLS and NYU remain huge outliers in this regard. How much so? The eight other schools list a total of 1196 2010 grads working for firms of 250+ lawyers. The NLJ lists 1170 2010 grads from those schools as working in partner-track positions at NLJ250 firms, i.e., a correlation of 97.8% between the two numbers. At CLS and NYU the correlation is 80.7% (448 of 555).
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
The 30 per cent solution
Monday's discussion at Stanford is now available on Youtube. It's in five segments (updated for better sound quality; my thanks to Thom Wolf):
What would happen then? My guess is that Martha Minow and Robert Post, and their respective university presidents, would have a bad day or two. Then they would announce they were doing the same thing. (As a law professor points out law school deans and faculties will in many cases have to fight battles with central administrations to make these sorts of changes. This is another reason why transparency is crucial: the myth that it's either fair or efficient to charge law students a cross-subsidized university tax because of the great jobs they'll be getting needs to be killed sooner rather than later). After all, who other than the Winklevoss twins will choose to go to HLS or YLS at $50K per year, if you can go to SLS for two-thirds as much?
The consequences of this would also be fairly predictable. Can CCN charge 30% more than SYH? Obviously not. What about MVPD? Nope. Etc. Now at some point as one slides down the hierarchy schools will find that they have to engage in truly major long-term (as opposed to moderately uncomfortable short term) restructuring in order to return their tuition to what it was, in real terms, a dozen years ago. And somewhat further down the line, some schools may find it not merely difficult but actually impossible to do this. In other words, some schools will find it impossible to charge a price of attendance that even comes within rough hailing distance of something that would produce a reasonable expected return on investment for a reasonable proportion of their students. Those schools would go out of business -- which, it should be unnecessary to point out, is exactly what should happen.
The idea that there's something inherent about the nature of legal education that requires it to cost at least twice as much as it did in real terms 20 years ago, and third more than it did a decade ago, is so absurd that it could only be believed by people who have an enormous ideological-economic stake in that belief. Stanford was a pretty good law school a dozen years ago, and there's no reason it can't return its financial structure to what it looked like then. The same goes for many, many other law schools (not, as noted above, all). And there's no reason why the process needs to stop there: longer-term structural reforms could reduce the cost of law school to what it was 20 years ago -- i.e., half of what is now -- with little or no loss of real educational quality.
The first law school dean who is bold enough to assert that fact through concrete actions will be remembered for a long time.
I'd like to thank Dave Jackson of Stanford's Computer Science department for taking the time to record the event and put it up on the Internet. I also want to thank him for reminding me that, when Harvard College announced its new financial aid model in December 2007, other elite universities fell in line with it almost immediately. This fact has obvious significance for any law school willing to consider gaining the considerable first mover advantages that would accrue to it if it were to cut tuition significantly.
In the course of Monday's discussion, I suggested that SLS should immediately reduce tuition for its JD students by 30%, i.e., to around $33,000 per year. (This would reduce tuition to where it was, in nominal terms, in 2004. In real dollar terms the reduction would be somewhat larger). The cost of doing so would be about seven million dollars, assuming that the school continued to spend what it's spending now on scholarships and grants.
Now it's true seven million dollars is not a small sum of money, even in Palo Alto. But consider that Stanford University's endowment is currently about $17 billion dollars. The law school's endowment isn't a public number, but given that it was supposedly around $270 million 12 years ago, and that over that same time the university's general endowment has nearly tripled, a conservative estimate would put it in the $600-$700 million range (HLS's endowment is said to be $1.7 billion, although it's a much larger school).
In other words, SLS's endowment throws off several tens of millions of dollars in income every year. Of course much of this income is dedicated to specific purposes, so it's not a simple matter to dip into it for the purpose of cutting tuition. Nevertheless, it's not hard to imagine how some combination of redirection of endowment monies and a fundraising appeal premised on the attractive proposition that SLS is going to take the lead in moving American legal education toward crucial structural reforms (and become the top-ranked law school in the country in the process) could shake seven million dollars per year out of the seat cushions.
The consequences of this would also be fairly predictable. Can CCN charge 30% more than SYH? Obviously not. What about MVPD? Nope. Etc. Now at some point as one slides down the hierarchy schools will find that they have to engage in truly major long-term (as opposed to moderately uncomfortable short term) restructuring in order to return their tuition to what it was, in real terms, a dozen years ago. And somewhat further down the line, some schools may find it not merely difficult but actually impossible to do this. In other words, some schools will find it impossible to charge a price of attendance that even comes within rough hailing distance of something that would produce a reasonable expected return on investment for a reasonable proportion of their students. Those schools would go out of business -- which, it should be unnecessary to point out, is exactly what should happen.
The idea that there's something inherent about the nature of legal education that requires it to cost at least twice as much as it did in real terms 20 years ago, and third more than it did a decade ago, is so absurd that it could only be believed by people who have an enormous ideological-economic stake in that belief. Stanford was a pretty good law school a dozen years ago, and there's no reason it can't return its financial structure to what it looked like then. The same goes for many, many other law schools (not, as noted above, all). And there's no reason why the process needs to stop there: longer-term structural reforms could reduce the cost of law school to what it was 20 years ago -- i.e., half of what is now -- with little or no loss of real educational quality.
The first law school dean who is bold enough to assert that fact through concrete actions will be remembered for a long time.
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