How many law schools should be operating in the United States in 2012?

An anecdote from the good folks at JD Underground, in response to a 0L's question regarding whether he ought to attend the University of Wisconsin  (BTW this web site should be required reading for law school faculty and administrators): 

I'm not saying don't do it. It's great if you can get in to UW-M. Just don't look for a job in Chicago. I went back to a recently formed-firm's website I applied to last year and here's who they hired.

Here is the original job posting:

Suburban litigation firm located in Illinois seeks a
licensed attorney with 0-1 years of commercial litigation and/or
business transaction experience.

Here is who they hired:

Northwestern Univ. JD (top ten school)
10 yrs experience at Sidley Austin (top five international law firm)
Clerk for federal judge

That's the reality of the market. I hope it works out for you.

 Here's an ad from the very top of the employment and classifieds section of the Colorado Bar web site:

Appellate Services

Experienced Appellate Attorney

Reply to this ad

Colorado Attorney with 30+ years of experience available for APPELLATE WORK AND LEGAL RESEARCH, Very Reasonable Rates contact Donald Brenner (303) 321-5459 Posted 03/30/2012
DBren6848@aol.com

Among the many things we need more information on is the reality of the legal market now for people who have been in the profession for five and ten and twenty years. The disproportionate focus on first jobs out of law school is a product not of some methodological choice but of the fact that this data, as flawed as it is, is what's available.  To the extent we have data on longer-term outcomes it's largely from two sources: profession-wide statistics regarding how many people are working as attorneys relative to how many people graduate with law degrees, and indirect evidence from the outcomes for entry-level attorneys when they try to obtain supposedly entry-level jobs.

Regarding the former, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 212,000 jobs will become available for attorneys over the course of this decade, mostly as a result of replacement rather than growth. If the number and size of ABA-accredited law schools remains the same, that means 48% of law graduates this decade can be expected to get (not keep, get) a legal job, if we employ several unrealistically optimistic assumptions, such as that 100% of these jobs will be filled by people who graduate from such schools over the course of the decade, rather than by previously unemployed lawyers, graduates of non-accredited schools, and foreign attorneys.

The BLS projections also produce a daunting relationship between the 35-year ABA law school graduation total and the total number of people expected to be working as attorneys in 2020.  The latter number is 801,000. The former is just over 1.6 million.  So over the course of a generation law schools will have managed to overproduce attorneys, or rather potential attorneys, by a two to one margin, and, given the BLS projections, that ratio will will become worse every year going forward. (The BLS data and projections are bolstered further by the fact that a granular look at the annual NALP data suggests that less than half of recent graduates are getting real legal jobs).

If you think all this implies strongly that ABA-accredited law schools ought to be producing about half as many graduates now as they're currently producing, you're right.  What I would be curious to hear is any argument as to why the number ought to be significantly higher than that.  I'll anticipate a couple of replies that don't seem convincing to me.

(1) Big law business cycle arguments. As a structural matter attorney overproduction in the United States has very little to do with the ebbs and flows of big law firm hiring, which despite the enormous attention that's given to it accounts for only a small percentage of the attorney employment in the American legal system.  So whether big law hiring bounces back to the levels of five years ago has very little to do with the answer to the question of how many graduates law schools ought to be producing, given that for quite some time now schools have been cranking out two graduates for every job, roughly speaking, and the ratio appears to be getting worse going forward.

(2) Versatile law degree arguments.  It's to say the least very unclear whether having a law degree is a net positive for job seekers who don't get legal jobs -- so much so that we can't say with any confidence that, for such graduates, law school would be worth it even if getting involved no direct or opportunity costs. In other words for those who don't get jobs as lawyers, a law degree might well not be worth getting even if getting it were truly cost-free.

(3) Education for its own sake arguments. To put it in crass economic terms, it's possible in theory to model legal education as consumption rather than investment.  In theory.  In practice it can be a form of conspicuous consumption ("my son/daughter the lawyer").  I'm willing to bump the "rational" number of law graduates by 10% above the likely number of jobs available to take into account the trustifarians and their ilk.  So that means 23,000 grads per year rather than 21,000.

Of course there's the minor detail of exactly how we're going to get from here to there.

The reckoning

LSAC has released its latest data regarding the number of total applicants to law school in this cycle (h/t Steve Schwartz).  The numbers are not surprising, but should still be extremely sobering for legal academia.  As of March 30, 60,693 people had applied to at least one law school in this admissions cycle.  This represents a 15.6% decline from the same point last year.  Given that applications last year were down 10.7% from the year before, law schools are dealing with a 24% decline in applicants since 2010, from 87,900 total applicants that year, to 78,900 in 2011, to about 66,500 this year (last year's application pool at this time represented 91% of the final total).  Prior to last year the lowest total of applicants in any year in the previous decade had been 84,000, so it's fair to say that the current situation reflects what can be called a collapse in demand for law school admission.

Interestingly, the percentage decline in applicants relative to LSAT takers is to some extent inversely related to test takers' LSAT scores (in other words the decline in applicants is much steeper among people with high scores relative to those with low scores).   This means of course that high-ranked schools will be under more pressure to secure applications from increasingly scarce well-credentialed applicants.  Low-ranked schools, which in some cases are already pressing against the mathematical limits of lowered admissions standards, will be facing a different set of challenges.

The growing desperation of at least some law schools is reflected in facts such as that relayed to me last week by several 1Ls, who told me they receive regular emails pleas from various schools, promising them instant admission and generous "scholarship" support, including in some cases a full tuition waiver, if they will but apply.  Obviously these schools must be blast emailing tens of thousands of people who got good LSAT scores in the last year or two, in the hope that some of them have not enrolled in law school yet and can be enticed to do so now.

This latest data suggests certain developments are likely in the law school world over the next few years:

(1)  In 2013, average advertised (sticker) tuition at law schools is likely to actually decline in real dollar terms, for the first time in at least the last 50 years.  This fall, advertised tuition is rising only about one percent over inflation at private law schools.  Next fall, advertised tuition may not rise at all, and may even decline in nominal terms.

(2) Real law school tuition -- that is, actual dollars collected -- will decline this coming academic year.  The modest rise in advertised tuition is very likely to be more than cancelled out by steeper discounts over sticker, as schools compete for scarce applicants.

(3) Over the next few months a number of schools will announce reductions in their incoming class sizes as a matter of changing institutional policy. In many if not all  cases this will be making a virtue of necessity.

(4) Several law schools will see tenure-track faculty layoffs.  At other schools, formerly lax tenure standards will suddenly be tightened sharply.

(5) Within the next three years, at least one ABA-accredited school will announce it will be ceasing operations. Several more will then follow suit.

Rome wasn't sacked in a day.   

Update:  See also

The decline of American journalism

The decline of American journalism has some things in common with the decline of the legal profession.  Consider this piece of "journalism," published yesterday in Forbes, by reputation one of the nation's leading financial magazines:

The recent economic downturn has sparked a media frenzy over the value of graduate school. Pundits and young professionals alike are wondering if grad school is still worth the hefty investment. Law school, in particular, has been maligned by everyone from The New York Times to independent bloggers, who use anecdotal evidence to question the job prospects for future graduates.

Business school has also not escaped the fray. While there have certainly been isolated cases of law and business school graduates having trouble finding jobs (this trend is limited primarily to graduates from less well-ranked schools), graduate school is still undoubtedly a “slam dunk” investment for nearly all potential applicants. The costs of business and law school may be substantial, but the significant, lifelong returns justify the investment for the vast majority of applicants. The numbers speak for themselves . . .

The average tuition of a top 14 law school in the 2011-2012 year was $49,551 per year, according to U.S. News & World Report data analyzed by The AM Law Daily, so the cost for the full three years of law school is approximately $150,000. As with business school, the full cost of law school must also account for the three years of lost salary, which comes to approximately $135,000. Therefore the total cost of law school is around $285,000 (and slightly over $300,000 for those with substantial student loan debt).

That number is only a small percentage of a lawyer’s lifetime earnings, which average $4.3 million, according to the same Georgetown University study. Thus over a 40 year career, a lawyer will earn nearly double the lifetime earnings of (or $2 million more than) a person with only a bachelor’s degree.

As this data clearly demonstrates, the full cost of business and law school is only a small percentage of the total income the graduates of these schools will likely earn throughout their lifetimes. The investment a student makes in these degrees today is likely to produce at least a 10x return over his or her career.

It is also important to note that in many ways this analysis is a worst-case scenario. Many students receive substantial financial aid grants and pay far less in tuition than suggested by this analysis. Furthermore, the cost of these degrees is lessened by government and school loan repayment programs for those who choose to pursue non-profit/public interest careers and accept a lower salary as a result.

When considering any type of graduate school, you should certainly consider the cost. But also look at the high returns on this relatively low-risk investment that will have an impact on  your future and can pay exceptional dividends over a lifetime.

How, you might well ask, did this astonishingly mendacious bit of propaganda find its way into what is still for the moment considered a well-respected news publication?  The answer is all too evident if one considers the biography of the author. Shawn O'Connor is:

Founder and CEO of Stratus Prep, an internationally-recognized leader in law, business, and graduate school test preparation and admissions counseling. I also recently founded Stratus Careers, a comprehensive career counseling firm. With many years of experience and success, I provide personalized test preparation and admissions counseling to hundreds of law and business school applicants each year. Prior to launching Stratus Prep, I worked domestically and internationally for McKinsey & Company, Lehman Brothers, Mercer Management Consulting, and the Boston law firm of Sullivan & Worcester. I achieved my Masters in Business Administration with Highest Honors (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School and my Juris Doctor, cum laude from Harvard Law School.

One could call O'Connor a whore but that would be a grave insult to whores, who after all tend to provide at least some sort of reasonable value for their services.  The mystery of how this unctuous creep managed to place a remarkably fraudulent advertisement for his services in a major news magazine under the guise of dispassionately evaluating the substance of a "media frenzy" over the supposed decline in the value of professional degrees is solved if we observe that O'Connor is publishing his lies on the electronic version of the magazine, in the section labeled the magazine's "blog."  By calling part of the content of what appears under its name "blogging," Forbes, like many other publications, seems to have renounced any pretension to enforcing even the most minimal editorial standards (I'm assuming, perhaps optimistically, that Forbes would not allow something like this to appear as a self-identified opinion piece in the print version of the magazine).

The advantages for Forbes of this arrangement are obvious: I would be surprised if the magazine is paying Shawn O'Connor, Esq., anything for being a "content provider" for the electronic version of the magazine, and indeed it wouldn't surprise me if O'Connor is paying Forbes for the privilege of being a "contributor." (I am told that at certain Las Vegas casinos the valets pay the casino for the right to park the cars of arriving guests).  The advantages for O'Connor are even more obvious: he is allowed to expend a bit of Forbes' cultural capital in the form of its reputation as a reputable news source in return for services rendered while running something that ought to be considered actionable fraud even if it were in the form of what was self-evidently an advertisement, let alone a piece of  "journalism."  (Forbes does its best to absolve itself of any responsibility for this fraud by stating that O'Connor's "opinions" are his own rather than the magazine's. Whether his purported "facts" are the magazine's responsibility is another matter).

Why O'Connor is taking advantage of this cozy arrangement is self-evident; the interesting question is why a leading a well-known mainstream semi-elite media source is prostituting its journalistic integrity in this way.

The answers are, ironically, related to why O'Connor can get away with what he's getting away with.  Forbes -- a glossy print magazine -- is a particularly vulnerable example of a business model that's dying.  In its desperation to hold down costs Forbes is willing to sell out its journalistic integrity to the Shawn O'Connors of the world. The parallels with the willingness of law schools to spend their cultural capital in a desperate attempt to survive in the context of a dying business model are fairly obvious. 

Beyond that, the corruption of the news business and of higher education in general and legal education in particular are both driven by the loss of any sense of performing a legitimate gate-keeping function -- a loss which in both cases is a consequence of surrendering to the relentless pursuit of revenue maximization.  Maintaining journalistic integrity means not printing lies even when it is profitable to do so.  The existence of such standards means that readers can to an extent depend on legitimate journalism, in a way that is qualitatively different from the world of advertising.  Maintaining academic integrity means, among other things, not misleading potential students about what an institution is offering them even when it's profitable to do so.  The existence of such standards means potential students can treat the representations of academics about what they are offering as something other than advertising.

A further irony here is that if "news" magazines and institutions of higher learning were actually held to the legal standards applied to advertisers in regard to their representations, both journalism and academia would be more honest enterprises than they have now become.

Nice people

Here's Michigan's response to yesterday's post about the misleading information given to 0Ls at last week's recruitment event.

I have to say I'm simply at a loss to even guess whether these people actually believe their own bullshit any more. Sorry, "Dean Z."  That wasn't very nice of me, and you sure seem like a nice person.  Law schools are full of "nice people," who are genuinely (I guess) caring and empathetic and concerned about their students.  I work with a lot of people like that, and I don't doubt they really believe that they care, deeply, about the actual welfare of the people who pay their salaries.  They believe a lot of things.

This isn't even worth saying because any one who doesn't realize it already is the kind of authority-worshiping tool who is beyond hope anyway, but what the heck: the idea that when Sarah Zearfoss stood up last week in front of that audience of all-too-naive 0Ls she didn't know how many otherwise completely unemployed 2011 UMLS grads took "post-grad fellowships," i.e., barely above minimum wage stipends to perform full-time legal work several months after graduation, is a pitiful, miserable, shameful lie.  Of course she knew. How the hell could she not know?

I mean I can tell you off the top of my head exactly how many of its own grads NYU hired in 2010: 38. Virginia hired 40. Fordham "hired" 14.7% of its own class. CU had 27 people in the class of 20011 in such a program in January.  I swear on the health of Denard Robinson's MCL that I didn't look those numbers up right now.  I know these things because I have voluntarily chosen to make it part of my professional responsibilities at present to know them.  Zearfoss's whole job is nothing but to know exactly this kind of thing about the school that she works at. UMLS's students pay Zearfoss $178,500 per year to know these things. And she wants us to believe that after preparing  a talk for a roomful of prospective students on the subject of whether going to UMLS makes sense for them financially she didn't happen to have this information at her disposal?

What is the matter with you people? Seriously.  Just stop lying.  If for no other reason that it insults our intelligence.

Also, $333.33.  I'll say this for my employer: it least it's paying our unemployed grads $10,000 over three months.  Michigan is swimming in money -- you just built yourself some more swank digs for a cool $102 million -- but you can't come up with more than $333.33 a week for 12 weeks for people that you charged $150,000K for what turned out to be a worse than useless degree?

Oh, and this "success story" you put up about what a wonderful thing you're doing for the one in five of your graduates who are flat-out unemployed several months after getting a degree from a top ten law school ought to be especially inspiring to prospective students:

I really, really wanted to pursue a career in the public sector, and the Postgraduate Fellowship program was definitely central to making that possible. There were over 270 applicants, and they interviewed 18, the vast majority of whom had more experience than I do. Had I not already been working here [as a postgraduate fellow] and proving that I could litigate against more experienced attorneys, there is no way I would have been seriously considered.

Kids, this is a test. See if you can figure out what's wrong with this picture.  Please select the one best answer. Results not typical.  Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns. Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission nor any state securities commission has approved or disapproved of these securities or passed upon the adequacy or accuracy of the prospectus.

Michigan Law School discloses more information

This weekend I noted I'd been informed by a current Michigan Law student that the school had a very large "post-graduate fellowship" program, which involves unemployed graduates securing volunteer positions with government or non-profit legal employers, and then getting paid a small amount of money by the law school on a temporary basis.  I asked the school to pass along any clarifications or corrections regarding this information.

Yesterday, UMLS posted a great deal of information about the program, which apparently has existed for seven years now, but whose existence was not a matter of public record until 24 hours ago.  The program pays up to $4000 over 12 weeks (this is equivalent to an annual salary of $17,000).  Apparently most graduates enter and depart the program in the fall after graduation,

The permanent positions fellows obtain vary. For the class of 2010, 61 graduating students obtained a postgraduate fellowship. Of the 53 who remained in ongoing communication with the Office of Career Planning, 27 obtained permanent post-Fellowship legal employment with government or public interest agencies, 12 began work as law firm associates, 4 went into business, and 3 accepted federal judicial clerkships. The remaining 7 people were still seeking permanent employment at the close of their fellowship: 3 held legal positions that were either part-time or not permanent; 2 continued their education in another field; and 2 remained unemployed.

For the class of 2011—the class widely believed to be most hard-hit by the constriction in legal employment, because of a dramatic decrease in the size of summer-associate classes in 2010—75 students were awarded Postgraduate Fellowships. At the nine-month mark for accumulation of final NALP data, 8 of our graduates were still in their funded fellowship positions, which there is every reason to believe will result—as did the great majority of 2010 Fellowships—in long-term legal positions. Of the remaining 67 graduates, 54 had moved to permanent positions, while 13 remained unemployed. We will post more detailed 2011 postgraduate statistics once we have final data for the 8 graduates who remain in their funded Fellowship positions.

It is of course a step forward that UMLS has disclosed this information.  What's unfortunate is that the school appears to have engaged in material misrepresentation to admitted students regarding it less than a week ago. As a commenter notes in the previous thread on this topic, admitted students who were visiting UMLS last week were told that the post-graduate fellowship program for the class of 2011 employed eight graduates, i.e. two percent of the class, rather than the 20% of the class (75 graduates) that actually took such fellowships (I have heard the same information from other attendees).  The career services office's explanation for this discrepancy is that when prospective students were given the smaller number, the CSO was only referring to those graduates who were in fellowships as of the NALP reporting deadline.

Now this sort of thing would constitute perjury if offered as sworn testimony in a court of law, as it is actually far more materially misleading than simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of a fellowship program at all. (I am told that a similarly misleading account of the program was given to the faculty). Of course the UMLS administration isn't under oath -- at the moment anyway -- so it is free to tell half (really more like one tenth) truths while suffering no consequences other than yet more bad publicity.

On the plus side (sort of) UMLS has also just engaged in a massive data dump in regard to the specific employment outcomes for its last three graduating classes, becoming as far as I know the first law school to actually list the employment outcomes for every individual graduate in those classes.  This is a positive development in that it certainly allows a "sophisticated consumer" to spend a few hours figuring out, with the help of Google etc., more or less what everyone who graduated from UMLS in the last three years was doing nine months after graduation.  The down side is that this blizzard of information does require considerable work to unpack, especially to the extent that one doesn't understand things such as what the likely salary of somebody working as an entry level associate with a 12-person law firm in Southfield is likely to be.

Speaking of which, the percentage of graduates whose salaries were known is misreported on the law school's web site, apparently as a consequence of an inconsistent reporting method.  For the classes of 2009 and 2010 the school reports the percentage of graduates whose salaries were known among those graduates who were in jobs for which bar passage was required.  For the class of 2011 it reports the percentage of known salaries for the entire class. Besides (apparently inadvertently) shifting the method employed to make the relevant calculation, the CSO also got the latter number slightly wrong, reporting it as 52% when it was 50.26%.

The more interesting number in all this is the remarkable contraction in the percentage of UMLS graduates getting jobs of any kind (full-time, part-time, long-term, short-term) that require bar passage, from 94.4% in 2009 to 79.1% two years later (77% not counting the eight remaining post-graduate fellows). In other words, using the most liberal possible definition of what counts as a legal job, nearly a quarter of the 2011 graduating class of a top ten law school didn't have one nine months after graduation.

I have a lot more to say regarding all these new numbers, especially in regard to the relationship between the salaries UMLS graduates are being paid a year after graduation relative to the cost of attending the school, but I'll save that for another post.

Second prize is a set of steak knives

Email exchange:

Dear Professor Campos,

Hello my name is [  ], a prospective admitted student to the University of Colorado Boulder Law School, and I am wondering if I could ask you a few questions pertaining to your take on CU law. I received your contact information from the Faculty Directory on the CU website, and noticed that you received your JD from the University of Michigan Law School. The two schools that I am seriously considering attending include CU and the University of Michigan. As a Michigan graduate and CU Professor, I am wondering if you could potentially provide any insights into your perspective and experiences with these two schools, and potential advantages/disadvantages that both offer?

Important factors that I am using to evaluate schools include faculty accessibility, collegial atmosphere, clinical/externship opportunities, educational quality, and career outlook upon graduation. I really appreciate your consideration of my questions. From communication with other CU Professors, students, and staff, I have found the University of Colorado community to be extremely accommodating and friendly. Thank you very much for any insights that you can offer and for taking the time to provide your opinion. I look forward to speaking with you soon. Have a great day.

Sincerely,

Some background:  The CU faculty has been strongly encouraged by the administration to reply to such messages for the purposes of recruitment.  In fact  we've been told that a bunch of students in the last couple of classes claim they chose CU over other schools because our faculty is such an awesomely responsive and collegial bunch, in that we were the only school where all the faculty who were contacted responded to prospective student inquiries. I'm not implying any nefarious intent on the part of the administrators who have asked us to engage in this sort of recruitment, as I'm quite certain it would never occur to these people that faculty responses to such messages would be anything but helpful in improving the school's "yield" on admitted applicants.

Moving right along . . .

Where are you from and what do you want to do when you graduate?  How much money have CU and UM offered you? Why specifically are you considering CU?

Dear Professor Campos,

Thanks for getting back to me so soon. I am from [large eastern city] having graduated from [pretty good liberal arts college] this past May. I cannot say for certain what I'd like to do after I graduate, but I am interested in clerkship opportunities or possibly something in the field of environmental, Indian, or maybe international law. I am really approaching law school with an open mind, and I am open to any type of law that interests me in school. I don't plan on pursuing a career in the larger DC, Chicago, or NYC markets.

Regarding money: CU has offered me a Dean's Scholar Scholarship, while Michigan has offered no money.

I am specifically considering CU because I am very interested in living and practicing in the Colorado region after graduation, and also because I have been very impressed by the level of support that I have received from members of the CU community thus far. In addition, the small class size of CU also appeals to me, having attended [    ]. The Dean's Scholar Scholarship is also a great opportunity along with the Dean's Fellowship that would be offered in my 1L summer. Please let me know if you need any further information. Thank you again for your help.

Best Regards,

How much money is the Dean’s Scholar Scholarship? What’s the Dean’s Fellowship?

Professor Campos,

The Dean's Scholar Scholarship is a full-ride offer for 3 years (first year covers out of state tuition, while the second two years cover in state tuition), while the Dean's Fellowship is a program being instituted this year in which CU will help Dean's Fellows in finding summer employment working for a faculty member, a law school Research Center, or a nonprofit or government agency in one of four areas: Environmental, Public Interest, Business/Entrepeneurship, or Technology/Intellectual Property Law. In addition, the fellowship includes a $3,000 1L summer stipend along with a mentoring opportunity with an assigned faculty mentor and/or a prominent lawyer to discuss work and career options.

Best,

A few things to keep in mind:

(1)    If you go to CU you are likely to end up needing to get a job in Colorado.  The difficulty with this is that you don’t appear to have any connections to the area, which puts you at something of a disadvantage in comparison to people who do.  CU law graduates are currently having quite a bit of difficulty getting real legal jobs, meaning full-time long-term employment that requires a law degree.  Not having connections to the area will be a problem for you, all other things being equal.

(2)    By contrast Michigan is a national school, meaning you would have more options in regard to potential employment.  However, this is counterbalanced by the fact that COA would be around $200K-$225K in comparison to being perhaps a quarter of that at CU.  Do you understand what $200K of non-dischargeable high-interest debt means? I’m not trying to be patronizing, but with that sort of debt load your only realistic employment options would be a large law firm job (assuming you could get one – 60% of the most recent Michigan class didn’t) or the sort of government or public interest job that would qualify for the school’s LRAP program (Loan Assistance Repayment].  Those jobs are extremely competitive – more so than many big firm positions.

(3)    Do you actually know anything about the practice of law?  Why do you want to go to law school exactly?  There is no such thing as “international” law, and it’s almost impossible to get a job in the Indian law field these days if you’re not an enrolled member of a tribe.

Going to law school is an enormous investment of time and money.   The lower-risk lower-return choice for you would be CU. The higher risk higher-return choice would be Michigan. Both under current conditions would be very significant career gambles.  I don’t know what your other options are so I don’t know whether one or both could be good choices for you, but in any event I would advise you to be cautious.

Dear Professor Campos,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions. I have taken all of your advice into consideration, and I appreciate your insights. Take care.

Best Regards,

Obviously I don't know anything about this kid -- and s/he is obviously a kid -- so I don't have any strong opinion as to whether CU or UM or no law school at all would be a better choice for him/her under these circumstances.  What I do know is that kids like this are basically lambs to the slaughter in this system. They literally have no clue -- none -- regarding what they're getting themselves into.  They might as well be signing up for the Army on a whim.  They don't know the first thing about what being a lawyer might involve, they have no idea what debt or unemployment or debt-ridden unemployment mean, and they just want to be patted on the head and told they're Gifted and Talented and that we would love to have their money them join us. 

The most aggravating feature of this particular subspecies of Puer Ignoramus  is that this kid, if s/he attends CU, will have his/her utter cluelessness subsidized to the tune of $100K by the half of the student body who is paying full freight, some of whom might actually have good reasons for wanting to become lawyers at something like a reasonable price.

The second most aggravating feature is  . . . LMGTFY.

Michigan's real employment numbers

I spoke at Michigan Law School yesterday to a group of around 100 people.  The audience was made up  mostly of current law students, with a few prospective students mixed in, along with one tenure-track faculty member and one administrator.  People asked a number of good questions afterwards, so we had a lively discussion.

The most thought-provoking question was asked by a man who I would guess was in his early 20s, and who I believe was a prospective student.  Paraphrasing, he asked me what I had to say about the position of people such as himself, who were graduating from college with no apparent good options in terms of career choices.  He acknowledged that the information I presented suggested that law school, even an elite law school such as Michigan, was in many ways a very risky and even flat-out bad gamble under present circumstances, but on the other hand what are young people who have been preparing all their lives to be professional-class persons supposed to do?

It's a good question, to which I don't have anything like a satisfactory answer.  Pointing out that his generation has to a significant extent gotten screwed by economic and social circumstances may be accurate, but the short-term practical value of this insight in minimal.  The long-term value may be something else, since a more general recognition of this could be a starting point for various sorts of reforms in the structure of higher education, not just law school.

I also had a spirited exchange with the one faculty member in attendance, who acknowledged that I was making a lot of good points about the need for genuine reform, but that I was in his opinion interfering with the message by making certain hyperbolic statements.  I spoke to him privately afterwards, and came away with the sense that there are at least some people on the UMLS faculty who actually do believe there's a serious long-term structural problem with legal education in general as well as at their school in particular. So that was encouraging.

The most interesting piece of information I picked up was that according to a 3L who has seen the numbers UMLS paid for about 70 "post-graduate fellowships" in the class of 2011. The way this works, apparently, is that graduates who are still unemployed at the end of the summer are told that if they secure a volunteer position the school will pay them a few thousand dollars (the number I was quoted was $4000, total).

Graduates who accept are then counted as employed full-time for the purposes of the nine-month NALP data.  I was told that around 15% of the 2010 class had such fellowships, while closer to 20% of the 2011 class had accepted them. I was also told that the number was likely to be lower for this year's graduating class compared to last year's, because last year's class was given bad advice by the career service office in regard to bidding for positions with Chicago law firms (far too many people bid given the state of the Chicago big firm legal market).  I was also told an unspecified number of these fellowships had developed into real jobs (that would also be a good number for the school to make public).

Michigan is my alma mater three times over, including the law school, and I retain great affection for the institution in general and the law school in particular.  So it was extremely disheartening to hear that the law school's administration has seemingly gone to such lengths to hide such a crucial piece of information from prospective students, current students, and apparently the school's faculty (I spoke at length with a friend of mine on the faculty later in the day, and I'm certain he knew nothing about any of this). 

If 15% or more of Michigan's recent graduating classes have been unemployed several months after graduation then this is something people who are spending, or considering spending, $70,000 dollars a year to go to law school in Ann Arbor need to know.  It's also something the law school's faculty needs to know.

Of course I welcome any clarifications or corrections the law school's administration may wish to make in regard to this information, and will certainly publicize them, should there be any.  But after hearing all this, I went back and re-read the administration's semi-official reaction to David Segal's first New York Times piece on law school unemployment.  Unless what I was told regarding the post-graduate program is seriously inaccurate (and I was also told the numbers for the class of either 2010 or 2011 were actually posted on the web site for a few days) that response, written little more than a year ago, does not do credit to an institution for which I still care deeply.