The following is a guest post by Dean Jay Conison of Charlotte School of Law.
We all want simplicity. The world is complex and we cannot deal with complexity all the time. We instinctively use heuristics to get through day-to-day life. Simplifying our thinking enables us to tell stories and frame theories. And as Daniel Kahneman noted (Thinking Fast and Slow, p. 201), “it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know very little.”
But not all simplifications are innate and not all are benign. We have a sorry history of replacing the complexity of an individual person by a single characteristic (Black, Gay, Woman, and so forth) and acting as if that is all we need to know. One of our great advances in recent times is in getting past this harmful form of oversimplification—not because such characteristics are irrelevant to anything at all, but because they can be used to hide rich and complex stories of persons or groups under a distorting cloak.
Simplification abounds in the world of legal education. We are living through a radical transformation brought about by a network of severe stresses and challenges. These include realignments in the legal services market, an increasingly anti-regulatory culture, a dramatic shift in the nature of preparation of individuals for law school, and much more. It is all very complicated and reduction to a simpler narrative is tempting. In the early days of this transformation, the main oversimplification was the search for perpetrators whom one could blame: Selfish faculty! Corporate mindset deans! A nitpicking and craven accreditor! And so forth.
By now, we are largely beyond this reductive obsession with blame. Yet, there are two broad oversimplifications that, as concerns law schools and legal education, get in the way of understanding, problem solving, and sometimes reasoned discourse.
One is the black-box view of law schools. By this I mean the tendency to see a law school as a machine for converting certain kinds of inputs (mainly LSAT scores) into certain kinds of output (mainly career and bar outcomes). On this view, a few inputs and outputs are all one needs to know about a school; specifically, to judge whether it is a “good” school or a “bad” school, and just how good or bad it is. What goes on inside the box is not a factor and is not of interest.
The poster child for black-box thinking is U.S. News. It notoriously judges law schools mainly on a limited number of inputs and outputs, and ignores what goes on within the school, except— bizarrely—how many dollars it spends. But U.S. News is not alone. A goodly number of bloggers and writers look only at inputs and outputs to draw sweeping conclusions about value and motive, usually negative (Bad school! Shut it down!). On this way of thinking, the character and quality of the education in the box is immaterial.
One problem with black box thinking is that it assumes the input and output data are good measures of something important. But it does not take much to see that the few measures commonly used are slippery and do not necessarily have an unambiguous meaning. Take LSAT profile. In an earlier post, I noted two factors (transfers in and out, and conditional admit programs) that suggest incoming LSAT profile does not have as clear a meaning as we like to think, and that we must take care in making inter-school comparisons. Here are three additional factors: (a) LSAT distribution is affected by incoming student diversity. Different groups have different LSAT distributions and so schools similarly situated can have different LSAT distributions because of different levels of student diversity. (b) Although LSAT is correlated with first-year academic performance, the strength of the correlation varies from school to school. Thus, two students, each with LSAT score of X, may have different likelihood of certain academic or performance outcomes, depending on the school they attend. (c) There are firms in the business of delivering increases in the LSAT scores of applicants. My understanding is that these increases can be substantial. But, to my knowledge, there is no data indicating whether these substantial increases also increase academic outcomes for the students—that is to say, whether the increase really increases the chance of success or just makes the student a better LSAT taker.
Similar points can be made about outcomes such as placement data and bar passage. Yet, even if we could have meaningful and unequivocal measures of inputs and outputs, a deeper problem would remain: that black-box thinking ignores most of what law school is about. Law school is all about educating students and transforming them into professionals. A law school is a complex educational enterprise delivering a wide range of educational services. Different schools have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are very strong in clinical education, others very strong in public policy. Some position themselves to provide opportunity; others position themselves to develop large firm lawyers. Some schools put much effort into developing professionalism and other non-academic competencies; others emphasize building scholarly competencies and future law professors. Understanding what law schools do inside the box is critical to understanding and evaluating them. That is why ABA site inspections involve not only mounds of paper, but two to three days of comprehensive on-site examination, to enable a close and careful look at what law schools do. We can never fully understand and assess a school if we restrict our attention just to a few imperfect measures of what goes in and what comes out.
Black-box thinking is given aid and comfort by another type of oversimplification, a cognitive bias, known as the halo effect. The halo effect is a tendency to attribute an evaluative characteristic (such as goodness or badness) to all aspects of a person or organization, based on a judgment or impression about one salient characteristic. This effect underlies first impressions about people (I like X, so he must be intelligent, so I will hire him) and the tendency to think businesses that are currently successful must be doing everything right (the premise of so many business books sold in airport bookstores).
The halo effect easily links with black-box thinking about law schools. For example, incoming LSAT profile strongly affects judgments about the school: high profile means good school, and thus means good program, good faculty, good teaching, good other things inside the box. But the halo effect in legal education goes beyond LSAT profile and other elements of the black-box model. For example, schools actively seek to build halos by hiring high-visibility faculty, on the quite logical theory that visibly good faculty translate into an overall good impression of the school, and through the halo effect support the conclusion that everything else about the school is good as well. Conversely, certain characteristics create a negative halo. A century ago, such a characteristic was being a part-time evening school, particularly one that served immigrant populations. Today, a negative halo is created by a law school’s taxable status: a school that is taxed is not liked within the law school world. Just as with other dislikes, this one triggers an assumption that anything else about the school must be bad, and that that is all one needs to know.
It is a little surprising to see black boxes and halos so widely used in discussions of law schools and legal education. As lawyers and educators, we are trained to ask questions, to appreciate the complexity of situations, to be able to see the multiplicity of perspectives, and to appreciate that there are few simple answers to hard questions. Black boxes and haloes are attractive because they allow us to tell a simple story with good guys and villains. But they impede our understanding and prevent us from seriously addressing the hard questions about law schools and legal education.
Law schools today do a wealth of different things and will likely do even more and different things in the years to come. Each school, in its own way, is dealing with stresses and changes; is trying to adapt and innovate; is trying to serve students and society in ways consonant with mission, strengths, and vision. There is an enormous amount we can learn about law schools, and an enormous amount we learn from the their experiments and experiences. Black box thinking and halos are comforting, but they disserve us by wishing away so much of what we very much need to know.
"There is an enormous amount we can learn about law schools, and an enormous amount we learn from the their experiments and experiences."
Care to offer us any data on Charlotte's experience with educating entering classes with record low LSAT scores? Maybe you guys are getting sub 145s to pass the test a rate significantly better than your peers. I'd love to know.
Until then, let's be adults and recognize that Infilaw is in the business of generating money for vulture capitalists. That's the mission. The end.
Principal: Mr. Madison, the Industrial Revolution changed the face of the modern novel forever. Discuss, citing specific examples.
[Billy clears his throat several times]
Billy Madison: Uh… Okay. The Industrial Revolution to me is just like a story I know called "The Puppy Who Lost His Way." The world was changing, and the puppy was getting… bigger.
[Later]
Billy Madison: So, you see, the puppy was like industry. In that, they were both lost in the woods. And nobody, especially the little boy – "society" – knew where to find 'em. Except that the puppy was a dog. But the industry, my friends, that was a revolution.
[Long pause]
Billy Madison: Knibb High football rules!
[the crowd erupts into cheers]
Principal: Mr. Madison, what you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Billy Madison: Okay, a simple "wrong" would've done just fine.
This reminds me of "Dear Officer Krupke" …
This is the cogent proof that the legal academy, writ large, is subject to the most bizarre self delusions, based on a proven ability to spin and spin and spin until nothing is true and nothing is false.
It is all so complex … isn't it? Unfathomable, really.
Thus, we don't really need to focus on "certain kinds of output (mainly career and bar outcomes)."
EXACTLY! Why, what a brilliant piece! For the vast majority of students, especially at schools such as the one in question, the goal is to become an attorney and practice law.
Why focus on such narrow criteria, like career and bar outcomes? Please … the bar review courses inside the box are much more important than the bar pass rate, and the illusion of becoming an attorney is far more important than actually practicing law.
But, one need be as brilliant as the author to appreciate these nuances.
I agree with Dean Conison. Surely the students at Charlotte Law School aren't paying $40,000 per year to pass the bar and get jobs. It's about becoming educated and being transformed into the professionals they would need to be if they could pass the bar and get jobs.
"The world is complex and we cannot deal with complexity all the time."
Funny practicing law we deal with complexity all the time, but know how to reduce it to simple questions. Simp,e questions have been put to you Dean Connison – what proportion of the students admitted to your institution with poor GPAs and weak LSAT scores via your special admissions program pass the bar? The question has been put to you by many observers. Frankly, this post is mostly fell-good nonsense that never addresses the basic issue. Why not?
It is quite simply a pile of silly catchphrases, management marketing speak jargon which goes no where, a chain of clichés: "we all want simplify" "the world is complex" "heuristic"" "Black, Gay, Woman" "halo effect" "rich and complex stories" "realignments" "narratives" "black-box thinking" "negative haloes" But of course "VISION."
If I asked a computer program to come out with a trite contentless heap of piffle – it would read quite like what you just wrote. If a witness, an expert witness, vomited up a stream of contentless verbiage in any court of tribunal, he'd be luck not to be held in contempt.
Where is the content in this post – there is no there there – no facet, not substance, just a pile of clichés, I'm embarrassed for you.
Seconding No, breh, here. Conason's post was pretty close to 100% bull sh*t; the only part which wasn't was the straw man.
Your post is what passes for sophistry these days Dean Conison? It's a sad day for snake oil salesmen everywhere.
The best written defense you can come up with for (in my opinion) the terrible and harmful practices of Infilaw is this? It's complicated is your defense?
Why even post something like this? People here who don't know anything about Infilaw and what it is doing aren't going to read your post and come away thinking you're honestly or effectively addressing critics. They'll just think you're being dishonest.
" black-box thinking ignores most of what law school is about. Law school is all about educating students and transforming them into professionals."
" outcomes such as placement data and bar passage … are slippery and do not necessarily have an unambiguous meaning."
That persuasive, isn't it? Ignore the failure rate on the bar (such that persons cannot practice law) and the fact that graduates can't find JD related work, because these measures are not "unambiguous."
The "profit" issue in my view is irrelevant (is there a big salary differential at the "non profits"?) What I want to know is: what makes a good law school dean?
It seems to me that, although trashing this post for what it is (bs), most of the faculty reading this website support the role of dean as bs'er in chief, and support a version of this claptrap in their own schools to justify every policy, every action, every effort to obfuscate and hide negative information, and every self interested effort to feather their own nests and justify their own positions.
That makes faculty jumping all over "Infilaw" as hypocritical as they can be.
This post is just pathetic…
Your law school is a black box that entices rubes to hand you money that they loaned from the government.
This tap dance is the best defense you can muster?
Your schools are no better than the sham medical training programs that prey on the working class.
It is shameful how you earn your living.
Ironically The Charlotte School of Law just moved from it's "campus" http://www.freemorewest.com/assets/img/uploads/locator/Charlotte%20School%20of%20Law1.jpg to an actual black box in downtown Charlotte.
http://www.emporis.com/images/show/392902-Large.jpg A move that has, at some level, at least a poetic sort of justice I suppose. Though I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say that for true poetry nothing beats "contentless heap of piffle".
In a court room when a witness on the stand so clearly avoids answering the question that was posed, one of the standard responses is as follows.
Your honor, will you please order the witness to answer for the jury's benefit, the question that was asked rather the question that he wish I had asked.*
*hat tip, to Attorney Kimbell Hunt of Connecticut
This is a great post. In fact, it's such a great post that I'm sure you'd be willing to tell every prospective student at Charlotte that the school cannot be judged on such "simplistic metrics" as bar passage rates, job rates, starting salaries, or "percentage of graduates who have enough to eat."
But you can take this one step farther. Head over to Infilaw HQ. Tell the Board that despite everything they learned in business school, for-profit educational institutions can't accurately be judged by simplistic metrics like "number of enrollees" "revenues" "expenditures" "profit margins" or "return on investment." That these broad oversimplifications are not really measures of anything important, just comfortable heuristics that business owners use in light of being able to seriously address the hard questions about their businesses.
Do that, and you might find you and Professor Frakt have at least one thing in common.
I'm just waiting for Brian Leiter, Steve Diamond or one of that crew to pop up, explain the the Faculty Lounge has been hacked and that Paul Campos, BoredJD, Dybbuk and I actually wrote this parody-post in an effort to discredit Dean Conison – and that we have been forging legal letters to various sundry philosophers too….
Bored JD, does this mean that Charlotte has now entered the ranks of the post modern law schools? Will there be a Foucault professorship?
Is this guy really trying to convince us that the Charlotte School of Law produces graduates ready to…what? Practice law? What a joke. I'm in the trenches in this town and I promise you that very few CSL graduates show promise. The vast majority, 95%, shouldn't be lawyers. They don't even understand the basics – like showing up on time dressed in courtroom attire.
I'm embarrassed for the young man in a business suit with no socks on who shows up 30 minutes late with his I-phone in his hand wondering why the judge is pissed. Or the young lady in rubber flip flops. Or the guy who files a lawsuit at the last minute and then serves the defendant by first class mail, but can't afford malpractice insurance. Or the woman who insists to the point of hostility to an exasperated judge that she doesn't need a supporting affidavit in her Motion For Summary Judgment – in a lawsuit she filed against her client who is refusing to pay her because she's incompetent. I could go on.
One other thing – in addition to ruining the futures of these student victims, CSL is also destroying the small law firm business model, at least in Charlotte. Even if only half the 400 graduates a year pass the bar, nobody's hiring these people so they have no choice but to hang out a shingle and hope for the best. Our local legal directory is full of strange, ever-changing names with residence addresses or P.O. Box addresses and cellphone numbers only.
They've saturated this market to such a degree, and provide (shoddy) legal services for next to nothing, that the rest of the local Bar is feeling the pinch. Spare me your retorts about healthy competition. Can I handle a traffic ticket for $50? Not if I want to pay my staff. Is the minority or immigrant community served by this influx of lawyers who work for next to nothing? Not if they don't know what they're doing. State Bar grievance filings? Through the roof.
Graduates forever buried in debt. Clients with incompetent and uninsured lawyers. Experienced lawyers and firms with ever-increasing revenue shortfalls. Exasperated judges and court personnel. Overworked State Bar investigators. Everyone loses except Jay Conison and the vulture capitalists at Infilaw's parent hedge fund.
I agree with Paul Campos. If it can't go on, it won't go on. Conison's gibberish nothwithstanding, the real question is how much damage Infilaw will do before he and they leave town.
What can I say about this post that hasn't already been said about North Korea? It's irrelevant, paranoid, defensive, deceptive, and ego-maniacal.
You are the dean of a professional school that teaches students who already have graduated from a four year college. You aren't expanding their minds or teaching critical thought. That was done – if at all – before they arrived. They're borrowing a total of 4 years' worth of per capita GDP so that they can enter a profession. If you can't get them over the modest hurdle of the bar exam, your law school's reason d'être does not exist.
Hard to follow "thirtyyearcharlottelawyer"; would love to see Dean Conison's response to that, but I suspect we won't.
Anyway:
Dean Conison,
You are correct in that black box, quantitatively-focused analysis should not be the only way to look at an institution. The problem is your law school, and Infilaw as a whole, also fail when you apply qualitative, more nuanced analyses at any level.
In my opinion, Infilaw is a hedge fund creation designed with the primary goal of exploiting a poorly-designed federal loan system that provides little oversight. Its primary goal is profit; it will charge as much as it can for as long as it can then cash out if necessary. The lower-performing students are admitted because the federal system does not discriminate between lower-performing students and higher-performing, and they are more likely to purchase your product.
After reading these comments, it is clear that the points Dean Conison attempted to explain have been met with, shall we say, less than glowing reviews.
Given the uniformity of the condemnation, one suspects the Dean will simply conclude that he is the victim of disgruntled "scam bloggers" who have no other purpose other than an agenda to "shut them all down." Or, he will at least conclude, rightly perhaps, that an unfair prejudice exists against "for profit" law schools (Again, please demonstrate how the administrators and faculty are paid less at "non profit" law schools before drawing these negative inferences.)
To the Dean I would offer only this: until and unless you demonstrate that your admissions policies, at each level of admission criteria (LSAT and GPA), are producing graduates who are more likely than not to pass the bar and obtain JD required employment, no one will hear anything else you have to say.
In other words, if persons admitted with an LSAT score below 145 have a slim chance of passing the bar and obtaining JD required employment, for your own sake Dean, admit it!
Either meet the challenge or, if you are wise, stop posting and subjecting yourself to this humiliation.
There is some merit in the point that some of what law schools do is not appreciated due to the relentless focus on student debt, bar pass rates, and employment prospects.
But when it comes to law schools, the focus FIRST should be on student debt, bar pass rates, and employment prospects. When people are entrusting three years or more of their lives, you owe them the basics.
The basics are that they graduate from your institution, can pass the bar, and obtain a job requiring your degree that allows you to pay your debt and save some at a level that your financial straits have improved due to attending said school.
If you're not meeting the basics, Mr. Conison, you can't be charging a premium. According to a quick search, your school has a yearly cost of attendance of $41,000.
If your law school had good job prospects, good bar pass rates, and were giving students careers that were paying them well enough to manage the debt, save, and become contributing consumers, then we could seriously discuss what goes on in the "black box."
But such talk about black boxes when your graduates are faring so poorly is premature.
The meme here seems to be the idea that for profit law schools contribute to a glut of lawyers and that they lure people into law school with the promise they will practice law when they know that is not trued
But national data suggest the growth rate over the last two decades in licensed lawyers is pretty much in line with the growth rate in employed lawyers (actually I think the former has grown slower than the latter).
And getting a license has never meant that one will or wants to practice law. Again looking back over the last couple decades, less than half of all licensed lawyers are employed as lawyers. Hard to imagine that Charlotte is responsible for that data and hard to see how law school applicants can blame law schools for pulling the wool over their eyes for decades.
Of course in any particular region actual mileage may vary so national data may not rescue Charlotte, nonetheless, are we trying to knock down a straw man?
"But national data suggest the growth rate over the last two decades in licensed lawyers is pretty much in line with the growth rate in employed lawyers (actually I think the former has grown slower than the latter)."
Isn't that a "duh" sort of observation, Anon? After all, employed lawyers need a license, no? What's the point of this observation?
"looking back over the last couple decades, less than half of all licensed lawyers are employed as lawyers"
Here is another sort of irrelevant observation, no? What is your point? That one half of newly minted graduates of law school intend to pass the bar and obtain a license, but don't intend to practice law? What's your support for that sort of obviously wrong conclusion?
If your point depends at all upon the notion that graduates of law school expect, generally, to pass the bar and get a license – and, although hard to discern it seems that getting a license is at least one of the suppositions supporting whatever point you are attempting to make – then your comment, whatever your point, misses the point of this thread entirely.
Law schools are in the business of producing licensed lawyers. If law schools aren't producing licensed lawyers at a rate higher than lawyers finding work as lawyers then law schools aren't creating an oversupply problem.
(And from what I can tell from a quick look at the data, over the last two decades the number of licensed lawyers increased about 33% while the number of employed lawyers increased 39%. In other words it has become easier to get a job as a lawyer over that time period.)
As to the point that only half of licensed lawyers work as lawyers I can't obviously conclude that law school applicants don't intend to practice law but it seems hard to sustain a meme that law schools are fooling them about the odds of practicing law in the face of decades of data indicating that the JD leads to all sorts of non-practice careers. (And as the data on JD incomes shows these are quite lucrative relative to going through life with just a BA.)
"as the data on JD incomes shows these are quite lucrative relative to going through life with just a BA"
o rly?
care to share this data?
no, breh: I guess you be a newbie here, eh? well here you go anyway:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/677921?uid=3739560&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21105556479493
No, breh
Anon is likely relying on the infamous S&M paper. 'Nuff said about that. Reading that paper with all the caveats, assumptions and nuances yields the inescapable conclusion that it did not even approach a meritorious and rigorous examination worthy of the hype some afforded it.
As for the blurry nature of Anon's "points," Anon seems to be saying:
1. There are more practicing attorneys than licensed attorneys (over the last two decades the number of licensed lawyers increased about 33% while the number of employed lawyers increased 39%),
2. Law schools are therefore "not creating an oversupply problem" and
3. Only half of licensed attorneys are lawyers.
Points one and three are contradictory (if "employed lawyer" = employed as a lawyer); in any event, these "points" are approaching the appearance of intentional misstatements intended to derail the subject of this thread. Accordingly, I'll leave it to others to decipher Anon's good faith. The "points" Anon is attempting to make are at best irrelevant, and at worst, deliberately wrong.
No I did not say there were more practicing attorneys than licensed attorneys – the opposite is true, in fact. And it has been true for at least the last two decades.
And that is the point.
Anon, you are missing the fact that many lawyers give up their license when they are unable to find a job that requires it. But if the quantitative data doesn't convince you of the severe JD oversupply issue, and the hordes of JDs publicly speaking about how law school was the worst choice of their life, and the exploding debt levels, and the continuing drop in reported lawyer satisfaction don't convince you that something is wrong, then nothing will.
Twbb – data or speculation? Hard to believe that number would outweigh the correlation between licensed lawyers and working lawyers over many years.
The numbers, Anon, are really, really bad, especially at schools like Charlotte. The only way you can spin it as a positive is if you make unwarranted assumptions about what you think graduates are doing. The actual recorded employment rates tell a very dismal story.
@Anon/9:37 p.m.:
If it has actually gotten easier in recent years to find work as a practicing attorney, why have so few law schools over the last six years managed to place than 60% of their graduates in full-time/bar-required jobs within 9 months of graduation and 4 months of bar results being published in most states?
Interesting that the Dean discounts quantitative measures. I know that Infilaw is big into Six Sigma, or at least was. Some of the deans at other Infilaw schools were applying it to their operations. I would assume that was a corporate mandate.
Jay, Are you not going to respond to the challenge to disclose Charlotte's data for low-LSAT students? Nice tap-dancing, but we need data.
twbb – when you say the "actual recorded employment data tell a dismal story" what data are you referring to? my understanding is that except for one down year in 2008, there have been more people working as lawyers every year for more than the last decade at least and earning more income every year even in 2008.
Anon, the absolute numbers is not very relevant and I am puzzled as to why you would even appeal to that. The RATE is what is important, and 36% of your law graduates not finding work for which bar membership is required is a terrible number. Considering this does not include low-paying, no-advancement jobs like document review, or people who start solo practices out of desperation, that number is horrifying. Have you asked yourself why you are trying to measure law school employment outcomes by metrics that nobody else uses? Do you think maybe that this is a sign that you are doing something wrong?
2:55pm – it may be true (may!) that more people are working as lawyers each year. But the number that matters is the number of graduates vs the number of jobs filled each year. So sure, great if 10k more lawyers are out there now than 5 years ago, but if there have been 200k graduates there's a problem. (I know these are not exact numbers).
Earning more income? Well sure once you factor out all the grads who never became lawyers that statement may be true. But I think inflation alone would make that statement true in many professions.
re: the Anon comment w/r/t S&M paper after my comment above, I've actually posted on the problem with that paper before, either here or elsewhere, which I'll summarize as: bad theory, bad assumptions, insufficient and/or improper controls, correlation/causation fail, comparing apples & oranges, and past performance does not guarantee future results.
In short: A JD does not magically lead to improved non-legal career opportunities, and I've not once seen a good, logical explanation of why it should or would.
re: the Charlotte jobs data, good lord that is painful:
http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/charlotte/jobs/employers/2013/
Around 13% school-funded too….jeez….
That's pretty depressing. And of course, "business" probably does not mean investment banker or consulting job.
twbb: not sure where you got the 36% figure but here is what my quick and dirty review of the data I could find show:
1) over the last 20 years or so (and probably going back for longer than that) the number of people working as lawyers is just under 50% of the number licensed as lawyers.
In other words it has been true for many years that only half of all JDs practice law.
Even if one does not accept the conclusions about the value of a JD demonstrated by Simkovic and McIntyre (whose research has been vetted by many scholars no doubt more qualified than "no,breh"), it seems a big stretch to argue that law schools have been fooling people for decades about where JDs end up working.
And certainly since this is a longstanding correlation it makes no sense to conclude that law schools started doing something differently that caused a temporary mismatch in supply and demand – it is my understanding that the critics base their "fraud" claims on law school statements about employment that reach back many years.
2) The data also show that in shorter time frames temporary mismatches in the production of licensed lawyers and people employed as lawyers show up. But they go in both directions. So, for example, from 1998-2002 the number of licensed lawyers increased by 6% but the number of people working as lawyers increased by 17.7%. From 2003-2007 the number of licensed lawyers increased by 8% and the number of people working as lawyers increased by 7.6%. Finally, from 2008-2012 the number of people working as lawyers increased by 5% while the number of licensed lawyers increased by 7%. In other words, when the mismatch was greatest it was because of an underproduction of licensed lawyers.
Of course, none of this makes any difference for a particular individual caught in the downdraft after 2008 but it does undermine the claim that law schools have been over-producing licensed lawyers.
"In other words it has been true for many years that only half of all JDs practice law."
"it does undermine the claim that law schools have been over-producing licensed lawyers."
I'm guessing we won't agree on the second point, and, based on the first point, I suspect that's because we define "over-produce" quite differently.
Posted by: Just saying…
"Interesting that the Dean discounts quantitative measures. I know that Infilaw is big into Six Sigma, or at least was. Some of the deans at other Infilaw schools were applying it to their operations. I would assume that was a corporate mandate."
Stages of bullsh*tting. First, fake the numbers (e.g., count everybody for percentage employed, but only the good jobs for salaries).
Second, call the people pointing out the fraud liars.
Third, invent jobs ('JD Advantage').
Fourth, claim that people want those 'JD Advantage' jobs.
Fifth, scream at the people pointing out the lies and fraud.
Sixth, disparage the whole idea of numbers.
Seventh – recycle as needed.
@Anon/6:19 p.m.:
"Even if one does not accept the conclusions about the value of a JD demonstrated by Simkovic and McIntyre (whose research has been vetted by many scholars no doubt more qualified than "no,breh"), it seems a big stretch to argue that law schools have been fooling people for decades about where JDs end up working."
Before the Internet, I'm guessing that it was harder to find a group of underemployed JDs willing to talk about their experiences in sufficient detail to learn that one's own career disappointments were not unique. It also probably helped that law school used to be affordable enough that the resulting debt could be serviced by other kinds of white-collar work while allowing a typical middle-class American lifestyle. People just assumed that their failures were theirs alone, and quietly moved on with their lives.
Law schools were positioned to observe all this, with desperate graduates coming back to the career development offices to beg for help finding legal work months after graduation. They knew that one's chances of first being hired as an attorney got worse over time. They might not have done any investigating into the lives of their less successful graduates, but they would have known that a surprising number of JDs were struggling to enter the profession. None of that made the brochures or law school rankings guides that were most people's introduction to the life of a law student before the Internet.
Anon: "…, there have been more people working as lawyers every year for more than the last decade at least and earning more income every year even in 2008."
That doesn't mean much at all, and this has been covered again and again and again on the 'scamblogs'.
It may not mean much to you but it explains why law schools will not shut down because they are not over producing licensed lawyers.
"It may not mean much to you but it explains why law schools will not shut down because they are not over producing licensed lawyers."
This is pretty ridiculous. Businesses shutdown when their revenue streams dry up. Even if EVERY law graduate in America ended up unemployed, law schools would remain open so long they could find people willing to pay $250k over three years. Law schools won't shutdown for the same reason that for-profit scams like Kaplan College and Bridgepoint Education won't shutdown – a surplus of unsuspecting victims with easy access to loan money.
Anon: " (Again, please demonstrate how the administrators and faculty are paid less at "non profit" law schools before drawing these negative inferences.)"
Bullsh*t. The thing which people are complaining about is that the tuition is far, far too high for the outcomes.
Nobody here is complaining about Harvard's tuition.
Nathan you display an astonishing naivete about the business of higher education. Many universities are stepping up and supporting the law schools because they know based on long term data and the current ongoing recovery that the law schools will be profitable again. In fact many of them probably are already thanks to the over-reaction of undergrads who have been moving away from applying in larger numbers. That last trend will of course begin to reverse in the next year or two. And then the university investments will have paid off handsomely. The only schools really at serious risk are the stand-alones and the for profits.
Anon's got to be a law professor.
The lack of logic, blithe assertion of non-facts, inability to do math,…
Anon: Many of the mid and lower tiered law schools that still receive "support" from their universities have had to cut to the bone. The support is minimal. The universities support them, in large part, because no U. wants to be the first to close its law school.