Georgetown University law students and faculty are discussing whether to expand the credit value of the school's externship program. Georgetown offers a maximum of 2 credits for externships and students are pushing for a 50% increase. The student proposal is here. According to the Georgetown SBA, Stanford allows 12 credits, Berkeley 10, and GW 8. There seems to be some trepidation among Georgetown faculty, at least according to this report.
Since start-up, I've watched the development of our Co-op program – a super-intensive externship. My conclusion thus far is that externships can deliver a great experience…but they require schools to invest a fair amount of money, planning, and human resources. It's not enough, for example, to design an excellent classroom component. You also must build and maintain close relationships with the sponsoring organizations and their staff. Externships don't work unless supervisors actively engage in one-on-one teaching – which often turns out to be a bigger hassle for these employees than having no extern at all. For that reason, a law school needs identify, train, and engage the people who will have day-to-day student contact. If you've got 60 students placed at 60 different sites each term, and an array of 150 externship sites rotating in and out of service, that's a ton of labor.
The growth of externships is good news. The challenge for a school which markets itself as having top-flight experiential education (like Georgetown) is to insure that the externships are as good as the in-house clinics. They're easy to do cheaply; they're difficult to do well. And of course, they have to be crafted to conform with Department of Labor regulations!
(Cross-posted atLeiter Law School Reports)
When I was clerking we had an extern one semester from a 2nd tier West Coast university. Her entire education for the semester consisted in working in our chambers and taking part in some video/phone conferences w/ a professor and other students. She had no other classes. It was sometimes hard to keep her stocked in meaningful work, and whether it was more worth-while than just taking classes I can't say. It was also a lot of work to supervise her work, and we probably should have done more of it. I'm in favor of externships, and enjoyed having law students work with us, but this particular arrangement, where working somewhere completely (or essentially completely) took the place of all classes for a semester seems to me to be too much, unless the school can be very sure that regular and careful supervision and instruction will be given. Many places just can't give that and still get their own work done.
Externships can be enormously valuable, but they are filled with perils as well. Hard-pressed governmental, public interest employers, and overburdened judges (or, more often, their law clerks) have an incentive to push as much menial work as possible to externs, while also investing as little of their scarce supervisory resources as possible in their externs. Law schools have a similar incentive problem. Law schools receive full tuition from externs without having to provide teaching or classroom resources to externs, so externships are quite attractive. At the same time, law schools (and their faculties) have the same incentive as employers to minimize the resources they devote to supervision of externs. The safeguard in the process ought to be the students themselves, but they generally are so thrilled to be in the "real world" and getting lots of easy credits that they rarely complain. Moreover, students often lack the information necessary to know what is a meaningful externship experience, and what will amount to little more than a line on a resume to which potential employers will give little credence. Externship directors, in the meantime, have the same incentive to minimize the time they devote to supervision, and faculties tend to have little incentive or desire to look over the shoulder of the people running these programs. Externship directors, of course, will tell you that their programs are wonderful, but what do you expect them to say?
The market, however, may be creating new pressures in this area. Externship programs that do not lead to jobs may have created tolerable inefficiencies in the boom market, but now, placement will become a critical area in which law schools compete. The smart law school ought to turn over these rock and see what's crawling underneath.
Larry Rosenthal
Chapman University School of Law
I direct Washburn's Externship Program, and I pitched a story idea to The National Law Journal, which was used in an article last fall. Students need good experiential opportunities, and, when planned and managed properly, Externships can be a great experience for students, schools, and alumni (many of whom serve as field placement supervisors). Our enrollment in the program has doubled during the past three years, and schools nationwide are reporting increased levels of interest for aforementioned reasons. Personally, I'd like to see more schools count Externships as "skills" courses.