But You Can’t Eat Passion

Or can you?

Catherine Groux, “Law School Students Use Passion and Flexibility in Struggling Job Market,” U.S. News University Directory.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics states that [the reason the NALP says the employment rate for 2012 law school graduates hit its lowest point since 1994] is largely due to the fact that accounting firms and paralegals now handle many of the tasks once reserved for lawyers.

No, that is not what the BLS said. Its reference to paralegals and accounting firms was a future projection:

[G]rowth in demand for lawyers will be constrained as businesses increasingly use large accounting firms and paralegals to do some of the same tasks that lawyers do.

The BLS said that some amount of the current law graduate underemployment is due to there being too many law schools:

Competition should continue to be strong because more students are graduating from law school each year than there are jobs available.

The important words being “should continue” because it’s been going on before. The other reason the 2012 grads couldn’t find jobs is that the currency isn’t circulating, i.e. the economy is in a depression.

Yes, rich people are loaning the government money at a loss.

But that’s just par for the course. The substance of the article is much more entertaining:

According to a new survey by Kaplan Test Prep, half of pre-law students say they plan to use their JD in a non-traditional legal field, largely because of the current job market for lawyers. Approximately 43% of these individuals said they hope to use their legal degree to work in the business sector.

Oh God, half of pre-law students are sold on the juris doctor’s versatility?

Although the legal industry is struggling, many students say they want to earn a JD because they are passionate about law. About 71% of pre-law students said the main reason they are applying to law school is to “go into a career [they] are passionate about,” while only 5% said their primary motivator was the potential for a high salary.

Passion won’t make those bondholders sell their inflation-protected Treasuries and invest in real goods and services.

According to the Kaplan survey, 43% of pre-law students said they would be likely to postpone or alter their law school plans if they did not receive enough financial aid.

Except we all know they will receive enough financial aid—as much as they can spend really.

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In other news…

Tom Brennan, “The Looming Threat for South Korean Law Grads? Unemployment,” The Asian Lawyer.

The large expansion in the number of law graduates stems from the introduction of U.S.–style postgraduate law schools in 2009. Before then, the law was only open to 1,000 students a year who passed a notoriously hard bar exam and then trained at the government’s Judicial Research and Training Institute. Unemployment was practically unheard of in this elite group. But the 25 new law schools pumped out about 1,900 graduates from their first classes last year.

I wrote a while ago on how Japan did the same thing: Adopt the defective U.S. legal education model right as it alienates just about everyone outside the law schools.

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And finally, you should watch this:

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Send a Comment to the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education

A while back I wrote about how the ABA was convening a Task Force on the Future of Legal Education and how it has its work cut out for it. It’s asking for comments before its February 9 meeting in Texas, so if you feel like saying something, do so. I’m reprinting my comment here, with a couple of corrections to watch out for in the endnotes. I admit I didn’t plan on submitting a comment until I was asked to, but it helped me summarize my thoughts on what the problems are and how they should be solved. It also gave me an opportunity to dumpster-dive into the LSTB and find posts on topics that don’t come up often but lurk in the background. The LSTB crested 300 posts recently, so there’s a lot there.

I’ll add that some of the comments are quite good (UC-Hastings dean Frank Wu’s is getting some deserved attention), and I mentioned a few of the better ones. I’ve at least skimmed through all of them (not so much the one by the Canadian lawyers that spanned hundreds of pages), but of the ones uploaded after mine I recommend most the one by UC-Los Angeles law professor Richard L. Abel because it addresses the history of how lawyers are licensed in the U.S.

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Matt Leichter

[email]

lawschooltuitionbubble.wordpress.com

January 16, 2013

Task Force on the Future of Legal Education

c/o Art Garwin, Deputy Director

Center for Professional Responsibility

American Bar Association

futurelegaled@americanbar.org

To the Honorable Randall T. Shepard and Task Force members,

I write at the encouragement of Task Force member Thomas Lyons, and I thank you for considering outside opinions such as my own. The Task Force is to be commended for accelerating its timetable, for such eagerness reflects positively on the ABA’s willingness to take seriously the problems facing new lawyers and legal education.

Until now, legal education reform has primarily focused on what I consider “demand-side issues”: furnishing more accurate information about law school graduates’ employment outcomes to prospective applicants so they can hopefully make informed decisions about becoming lawyers. The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar responded quicker to the information deficit than I’d predicted, but the successes of demand-side reforms of legal education pale against those problems remaining on the supply-side of lawyer licensing: The barriers to obtaining a law license (which includes law school costs) are too high and arbitrary, and they harm both aspiring lawyers and the public the profession serves. I recommend the Task Force consider legal education as one of many practices that require reform.

The Task Force Should Encourage the ABA to Shift Its Position on Federal Student Loans and Bankruptcy Reform, Embrace Novel Education Financing Options

            That said, the education requirement for becoming a lawyer is obviously the most salient issue today, but recognizing that one of the Task Force’s subcommittees is dedicated to improving the delivery of legal education, I believe this is one of the last items that require revision. Overall, I find demands for “practice-ready” attorneys to be a distraction from more legitimate concerns. If employers want certain skills they should train their workers themselves and advocate simplifying the lawyer-licensing process accordingly. That’s how it works other industries, and asking educators to provide training for jobs that employers aren’t obliged to create costs students unfairly.

Rather, the dominating problem with law school is the over-generous Federal Direct Student Loan Program (DLP), which obligingly lends most students up to $20,500 in Stafford loans and the remaining total cost of attendance plus living expenses in Grad PLUS loans each year. I believe that access to unlimited student loans, well-intentioned as it may be, enables law schools to increase their tuition for as long as people are willing to attend them.[i] I suspect that without Grad PLUS loans and the restrictions on discharging private student loans in bankruptcy, both authorized in Congress’ 2005 bankruptcy reform,[ii] tuition at private law schools would have begun to level off or even decline by now because students would have been unable to finance it.

My views break with those long held by the ABA, which regularly supports increased lending to law students,[iii] and calls for ending the DLP are often met with hostile responses that the legal profession would only be accessible to the wealthy. I disagree. With the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting a surplus of law school graduates into the indefinite future, I see no justification for the government to lend money to people to buy degrees for which jobs are unavailable.[iv] Nor am I convinced that legal education is a public good requiring government support. I further believe the often-made claim that legal education is versatile and opens job opportunities beyond law practice to be unsubstantiated and fallacious.[v] Cheaper lawyer training is possible, and the current system does not open doors to the poor but in fact creates poverty by saddling law students with large loan burdens.

Consequently, many of the people who will graduate law school in the future, to say nothing of those from the past, will have very large debts and no place in the legal profession commensurate with the effort they put into law school. Although the government’s Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan will rescue these students from destitution, it will still require them to pay essentially an additional, regressive tax on their earnings for twenty years, which will be acutely felt if they are not working as professionals. IBR’s loan cancelation privilege (if it is not abolished in the near future)[vi] coupled with excessive loan burdens persuade me that the federal government will lose billions of dollars canceling money lent to law students. Law schools and the ABA ignore the approaching confrontation with legislators at their own peril.

The ABA’s most-recent response I know of to existing student loans is to advocate requiring private lenders to extend IBR-like protections to debtors.[vii] I think instead the ABA should shift its position towards reforming the bankruptcy code to restore full bankruptcy protections to all student loans and ending the DLP. It can also encourage state governments to require their public universities to offer, instead of debt financing, an equity option called “human capital contracts,” which obligate graduates to pay a certain portion of their incomes for a fixed time period back to their universities. Unlike IBR, this type of policy forces universities to internalize the costs of their own programs, and if their programs become insolvent, universities should terminate them.[viii] Embracing these policies would signal to the public that the ABA understands the causes of factors enabling law school tuition increases and excessive student debt, and it would begin to heal the generational rift forming between new law school graduates and the profession from which they are increasingly alienated.

As for the law schools themselves, the student loan system animates many of their frequently discussed inefficiencies, such as competition over U.S. News rankings, overcompensation of employees, needless new buildings, funding positions for graduates to improve their employment statistics, over-focusing on GPA and LSAT scores at the expense of other factors,[ix] and using fees from some students to attract well-credentialed students with scholarships. If possible, rather than regulating bad behavior, the ABA should address the incentives that encourage bad behavior.[x]

Even other reforms such as easing accreditation requirements or reducing the required number of credits for law school[xi] might not affect how law schools operate so long as their students are fully financed by the government. For example, many private law schools that do not rank very highly on U.S. News are nevertheless very expensive. Also, the lure of federal loan dollars is so powerful that many law schools in states that license graduates of non-ABA institutions forgo the option of delivering cheaper legal education in favor of national accreditation and the DLP loans that accompany it. For these reasons I believe the Task Force should take student loan reform as the most urgent priority for law licensing and legal education reform.

The Task Force Should Encourage Bar Authorities to Reduce Remaining Entry Barriers to the Profession

Student loans, however, are not the only problem the profession’s entry system faces. In recent years critics have used the discontent directed at law schools as an opportunity to advocate for deregulating the legal profession entirely. Many of their arguments are poorly researched, particularly those demanding reform by claiming without evidence that doing so would cure an attorney shortage in the United States.[xii] They are correct that the profession’s entry barriers are arbitrary, and the longer the profession defends them and the DLP, the more likely outside forces will unilaterally rescind its autonomy. Outside of the risk of incompetent practice, this might not be a bad thing, even if done for the wrong reasons, but rather than resisting calls for change, the Task Force should acknowledge the weaknesses in most states’ lawyer-licensing rules and encourage efforts to change them.

For instance, bar exams in their current form are not defensible entry barriers. They almost always occur long after bar petitioners have sunk enormous costs into legal education,[xiii] they are too hard for some people who might otherwise make fine lawyers (“false negatives”), they test many obsolete legal doctrines, and they also omit entire substantive practice areas to which many attorneys dedicate their entire careers. Although I agree that some showing of legal knowledge (especially of ethics and constitutional law) is justifiable, demanding too much is not. Streamlining bar exams along practice lines would greatly reduce the incidence of false negatives among bar petitioners and conserve resources for all test-takers.

Simplifying the bar would also reduce the possibility of law schools knowingly accepting applicants who probably lack the aptitude to pass the exam because of the correlation between LSAT scores and bar passage.[xiv] Perhaps between five and ten percent of ABA law school graduates who take a bar exam never pass. Some test-takers might take more than one exam, passing one and not another, but the ABA should do everything in its power to prevent law schools from enrolling students who will waste precious time and money for a license they probably will not obtain, even if it means tightening bar passage requirements for accredited law schools. It’s unfair to deny people a place in the profession because the exam wasn’t calibrated to the knowledge they need as practicing attorneys. It’s also unfair to the clients they could have served.

It’s also probable that the law licensing system allows too many “false positives,” people who by virtue of their LSAT scores and GPAs appear to make good lawyers but don’t.[xv] I’m not knowledgeable of data on firm associate retention rates or similar topics, but front-loading the legal education requirement makes it too easy for people who do not know if law practice suits them to enter the profession. It also widens the information asymmetry between law school applicants and law schools, which the latter has greatly used to their advantage by admitting applicants who serve law schools’ reputational goals before their students’.

The mandatory legal education requirement doesn’t serve potential lawyers well either. For instance, the aforementioned correlation between LSAT scores and bar passage rates disserves those on the opposite end of the bar exam aptitude spectrum as well, which raises the question: Why require someone who will likely pass the bar exam by self-study anyway to attend law school? If the principal benefit law school provides these individuals is signaling their competence for good job opportunities, then I believe the Task Force should consider eliminating the formal legal education requirement altogether.

Conclusion

Declining applications and hostility towards law schools and law practice are teaching the public that demand for legal education (or, rather, law licenses) is not connected to demand for legal services. If the near-term solution to many of legal education’s problems is curbing the government’s lending to law students, the longer-term solution is to align the profession’s licensing system to the public’s need for legal services. I believe adopting my suggestions will accomplish both goals.

Thank you for considering my thoughts.

Regards,

Matt Leichter

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[i] For information on the theoretical basis of my beliefs, I recommend, Andrew Gillen’s “Introducing Bennett Hypothesis 2.0,” from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Introducing_Bennett_Hypothesis_2-1.pdf (PDF). I have yet to see a convincing author discredit Gillen’s analysis.

[ii] [Update: This is incorrect. Grad PLUS loans were authorized separately from bankruptcy reform by Congress in February 2006.]

[iii] See e.g. ABA president Carolyn Lamm, “Law School Debt Has a Manageable Solution,” 2009. http://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_students/initiatives_awards/advocacy/debt_solutions.html

[iv] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Lawyers,” Occupational Outlook Handbook. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm

[v] Matt Leichter, “The Juris Doctor Is ‘Versatile’ Thanks Mainly to Numerous Logical Fallacies,” The Am Law Daily, August 14, 2012. http://www.americanlawyer.com/PubArticleALD.jsp?id=1202567415810&The_Juris_Doctor_is_Versatile_Thanks_Mainly_to_Numerous_Logical_Fallacies

[vi] One bill that may make its way through Congress proposes to end the loan forgiveness portion of IBR for future students, which will condemn many law school graduates to a lifetime of debt. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-04/student-loan-collection-targeted-for-overhaul-in-congress.html

[vii] ABA Resolution 111A, Young Lawyers Division, http://www.abajournal.com/files/111a.pdf (PDF).

[viii] Similar ideas have been proposed by a student organization advocating reform of the University of California systems, called “FixUC,” which I wrote about here: http://lawschooltuitionbubble.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/fixuc-stumbles-onto-human-capital-contracts/.

[ix] One comment to the Task Force that illustrates law schools valuing incoming student credentials over applicants’ strengths is by non-traditional law student Elizabeth Paskiewicz, who has significant experience in the legal profession as a non-lawyer and performed very well in her paralegal education, but most ABA law schools overlooked her because of their mechanistic decision-making processes that exclude applicants with low undergraduate GPAs.

[x] For example, even without the student loan system, law schools still have an incentive to compete over their magazine rankings, which is fine, but they may still falsify student data they send to the ABA. If so, then auditing them is a good idea.

[Update: This sentence didn't come out right. Something more like "If possible, rather than regulating bad behavior, the ABA should address the factors that aggravate bad behavior." My point is that we might not be able to live in a world where law schools don't engage in needless competition (over their U.S. News rankings, for example). Regulations like auditing make more sense if addressing the loan program is insufficient.]

[xi] Although there have been growing calls (most recently in New York) to reduce the education requirement from three years to two, I discourage the Task Force from endorsing such proposals simply because the third year is expensive and not useful. This ignores the root cause of tuition increases, and one private law school in five has raised its tuition by 50 percent or more since 1999, meaning two years in 2011 buys a full degree then. Rather, I recommend the Task Force address the DLP but flip the question of usefulness around: How much formal legal education is necessary and why?

[xii] The primary example that springs to mind is Clifford Winston’s, Robert W. Crandall’s, and Vikram Maheshri’s book, The First Thing We Do, Let’s Deregulate All The Lawyers, 2011. A blurb from their Wall Street Journal article on the subject can be found on TaxProfBlog: http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2011/08/its-time-.html. I’ve written more on the topic: http://lawschooltuitionbubble.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/wsj-op-ed-brings-shock-doctrine-to-law-practice/, http://lawschooltuitionbubble.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/the-economist-has-never-heard-of-the-bureau-of-labor-statistics/.

[xiii] One influence for this section are the sentiments expressed in the comment to the Task Force by Nicholas L. Georgakopoulos.

[xiv] Here are two examples documenting the connection: http://www.unc.edu/edp/pdf/NLBPS.pdf (PDF); http://academic.udayton.edu/thewhitestlawschools/2005twls/chapter2/Legaled04.htm (more recent, but hearsay).

[xv] I believe the “26 factors of lawyer effectiveness [plus one]” cited in Nancy B. Rapoport’s comment to the Task Force are the definitive factors for “true positive” lawyers.

Who Are American University’s 79.6 Percent?

I’m sure readers are aware of the Washington Post Magazine‘s “The Case Against Law School,” which carefully goes through all the BLS data that readers of the LSTB found out about at least a year and a half ago. (Just stroking your vanity, reader) Among other points, the Post Magazine calls out American University for expanding its facilities even though only 35 percent of 2011 graduates had found full-time long-term lawyer jobs.

It’s one thing when this information is publicly available on the ABA’s Web site, but when mainstream sources start converting them into fractions and publicizing them, then the unenviable task of defending the system falls to the deans, such as American University’s Claudio Grossman.

The Post focused on a single employment statistic that is grossly misleading and relied on a number taken from only one of 16 primary employment categories collected by the American Bar Association … In the case of American University Washington College of Law, a far more appropriate statistic than the one The Post cited is 79.6 percent, which reflects the true employment data and career choices of our 2011 graduates. These graduates are employed in positions requiring bar passage, in positions in which a law degree provides a distinct employment advantage or in other professional positions where developed legal skills are highly valued, or they are pursuing advanced degrees.

Superficially, I think the Post is justified in using law schools’ “Employed Bar Passage Required Full-Time/Long-Term” as their success rate. For 2011, the average law school’s was 54.1 percent (average deviation, 11.6 percent), which places American University unusually far down in the scale.

But what are these 79.6 percent doing? (Actually it’s 79.7 percent.)

Most of the remaining employment status categories aren’t as glamorous as Dean Grossman makes them sound. For one, “pursuing advanced degrees” is not an employment category at all. It means that 3Ls had no jobs lined up in the fall of their third year so they triple-downed on more degrees as a backup plan if nothing good emerged by graduation. Their alternative outcome, unemployment, has been blessedly shifted off the law school’s books. So take 5.6 percent away and make it 74.1.

And how many of those 74.1 percent were employed part-time, which isn’t much of a success for three years of legal education costing $130,000 in tuition alone? I count 53 out of 467 graduates. Take 11.3 percent: 62.8. Employed full-time short-term isn’t a very impressive outcome either. That’s another 10.5 percent, what’s left rounds to 52.2 percent.

Two graduates out of 27 are working full-time long-term at American University itself, but we’ll leave them in the total. Who knows? Maybe they were hired as law professors. Another 34 of the remaining 244 graduates are in clerkships, which are counted as full-time long-term even though they are jobs with indefinite employment periods, but I’ll be generous and leave them in too.

One could do this kind of calculation for all the law schools, but in the end I think relying on full-time long-term lawyer employment isn’t “grossly misleading” at all. Taking all the law schools together, this employment status correlates negatively to every other one for which the ABA collects data, especially unemployment, which is tautological yet not trivial. Apparently, the more a law school’s graduates are employed full-time long-term as lawyers, the less likely they are to be doing anything else.

(Note: The “Other Employment Statuses” include all part-time and short-term jobs as well)

More crucially, it doesn’t even correlate to categories like “JD Advantage” or “Professional Position,” which is important for superficial versatile JD arguments, which Dean Grossman provides with full force.

A legal education is important preparation for a wide array of career choices, including employment in highly competitive jobs and fellowships in legislative and political offices, in federal agencies, in the many public-interest, trade-association, corporate offices and international organizations in and around Washington.

If this is true for American University graduates, the dean will have to do more to demonstrate why his school’s graduates are the exception. If the J.D. were versatile at graduation, then we’d expect more positive correlations with bar passage required jobs. I can see why some of the 52.2 percent of a D.C. law school’s graduates might find themselves in Washington-ish jobs rather than law firms, but without a clearer breakdown on what the 35-79 percent of graduates are actually doing, the Post Magazine is well within bounds relying on that one employment status.

Chronicle Publishes Law School Dean’s Argument From Authority

Via the ABA Journal, Katherine Mangan, “America’s Longest-Serving Law Dean Defends the Value of a Law Degree,” Chronicle of Higher Education.

The news is Rudy Hasl, the dean of Thomas Jefferson School of Law, whose former career services staff claimed under oath that she was told to juke graduate employment data, is stepping down after 32 years of law school deanery. To honor him, the Chronicle captures his parting thoughts because he’s a law school dean, which means anything he says should be taken with equal validity to what anyone who researches the issues says.

This has been a tumultuous period for law schools. It’s not that we haven’t gone through similar periods. It’s just that the trough is a little bit deeper and the issues are a little more difficult than they were in previous times when we reached those bottoming-out periods.

So the problems are quantitative, not qualitative. The fact that the applicant nosedive is occurring during a period of McJobbery for college graduates instead of high employment doesn’t faze the dean. However, we have to credit his gall for looking at employment data and saying, “BAH!”

I remind students that what law schools are providing is a set of skills that are valued in our society and that will ultimately lead to a meaningful employment opportunity. To try to measure that by what job you have on graduation, or even nine months later, doesn’t make sense.

In 2010, only 46.2 percent of TJSL’s graduates were employed long term; 19 percent were unknown. In 2011 that dropped to 37 percent and 3.4 percent, respectively, but don’t worry 31.4 percent of them were unemployed and seeking. While we should credit TJSL for doing a better job of finding its unemployed graduates for the purposes of the employment survey, it doesn’t look as though society values their skills much.

Whether legal education “leads to” a meaningful employment opportunity is a claim that’s difficult to substantiate. Those making it must demonstrate that (a) the graduate’s job requires a law degree, or (b) the substantive knowledge gained in law school is a substantial factor in the graduate’s employment. Contributions that supplemental knowledge like computer programming or chemical engineering adds to a job must be discounted as well. This does not bode well for law degree holders, which is not to say they’ll be unemployed forever (the economy has to recover someday, right?), just that many of them will find their earnings no higher than college graduates’. They’ll be IBR-ing away their law school loans while think tanks tell them that people in their positions should pay more because they’ve gotten a free lunch.

The good news for TJSL, though, is that under Dean Hasl’s stewardship the law school is solving the profession’s “diversity problem.”

The legal profession has been slow to respond to the increasing demand for diversity. Students of color made up 10 to 12 percent of the student body when I arrived here, at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in 2005, and they’re a little over a third of our student body today. For me it’s an important social issue that we produce individuals who can work within their communities to provide service and develop leadership … I’m optimistic that we’re producing graduates who will be quite attractive to firms and have a great future ahead of them.

Tell that to all of TJSL’s unemployed graduates. They’re unlikely to ever work in firms, and in 2011 only 11 out of 236 graduates were employed full-time/long-term at law firms larger than 10 lawyers. A mere two of them were at firms larger than 50. Law school deans’ optimism is not valid grounds for future predictions, nor does it put food on graduates’ tables.

The we-need-more-minorities plea never fails to displease me. The idea that minorities are better off and can better serve their communities with mountains of law school debt is toxic garbage. Those interested in making the profession more accessible can do so by … making the profession more accessible: eliminating the three-year graduate education requirement, focusing licensing along practice lines rather than generalist lines. These policies would make it a lot easier for minorities, and everyone else, to become lawyers, and the only people who lose out are the handsomely compensated deans.

Speaking of which, Rudy Hasl did quite well for himself a-deaning. According to Guidestar, in 2011 TJSL paid him $366,514 in base compensation plus $51,332 in other compensation. If you think that’s too low for a law school dean, fret not, for TJSL also extended him a $977,179 loan for “housing assistance”—something I’ve never seen in my admittedly scant experience with Guidestar reports. Such a large loan for “housing assistance” suggests that he’s not living in the 21^st century’s answer to Pruitt-Igoe (a fucking depressing documentary I wholeheartedly recommend).

Maybe instead of allowing Dean Hasl to dictate an editorial with unsubstantiated claims to readers, the Chronicle should ask him how he intends to repay such a generous loan while in retirement.

Original Article: ‘The Juris Doctor is ‘Versatile’ Thanks Mainly to Numerous Logical Fallacies’ on the Am Law Daily

“The Juris Doctor is ‘Versatile’ Thanks Mainly to Numerous Logical Fallacies,”

…can be found on the Am Law Daily.

In other news, there won’t be many new posts (to the extent I have time to churn them out) as I’m committing myself to updating the law school tuition data page. It can’t be done at once, so I’m doing it piecemeal. I’m going in reverse order and am up to Virginia.

For you, though, I’m showcasing one of those songs that’s been in my head for years but couldn’t place it. I heard it my local watering hole and the bartender told me what it was.

Class of ’11: This is Your JD on Versatility

On Sunday, July 29, 2012, minutes after his first career at bat, Brewers closer John Axford got one out in the top of the ninth, and with the score 9-7 in his favor he had a 96.4 percent chance of winning the game against the Nationals.

But the 3.6 percent won.

The Brewers lost in the bottom of the 11^th, but the good news is that the extra innings gave me more time to reorganize the ABA’s data on the class of 2011′s employment outcomes to glean insights into the JD’s versatility.

I’m not sure I’ve seen it discussed elsewhere, but the new questionnaire creates what I see as four broad types of information:

(1)  Total number of graduates (43,979) – This is our sacred denominator.

(2)  Classification #1: Employment Status (43,979) – This is the upper section in the individual law school reports and tells us whether graduates are employed or if they bothered responding to the survey. It contains ten categories, the first five of which are employment categories, that is, graduates who are actually working for pay (volunteers are Unemployed – Not Seeking). These account for 36,281 graduates and are also broken down by full-time/part-time short-term/long-term (FT/PT-ST/LT) status.

(a) Employed – Bar Passage Required (27,639)
(b) Employed – JD Advantage (5,260)
(c) Employed – Professional Position (2,218)
(d) Employed – Non-Professional Position (817)
(e) Employed – Undeterminable (347)
(f) [Un]Employed – Pursuing Graduate Degree (959)
(g) Unemployed – Start Date Deferred (108)
(h) Unemployed – Not Seeking (1,021)
(i) Unemployed – Seeking (4,042)
(j) Employment Status Unknown (1,568)

(3)  Classification #2: Employment by Type (36,273 graduates, plus eight graduates due to tabulation errors) – This is the breakdown of what occupations people in the first five employment status categories are in ((a)-(e) above). There are 17 categories also broken down by FT/PT-ST/LT.

(a) 501-Plus Law Firm (2,932)
(b) 251-500 Law Firm (880)
(c) 101-250 Law Firm (989)
(d) 51-100 Law Firm (887)
(e) 26-50 Law Firm (1,088)
(f) 11-25 Law Firm (1,888)
(g) 2-10 Law Firm (7,700)
(h) Solo Practitioner (1,170) – This is the only employment type that exclusively falls into the Employed – Bar Passage Required employment status
(i) Unknown Size Law Firm (449)
(j) Business & Industry (6,578)
(k) Government (4,324)
(l) Federal Judicial Clerkship (1,266)
(m) State/Local Judicial Clerkship (2,094)
(n) Public Interest (2,684)
(o) Academia (1,052)
(p) Other (34)
(q) Unknown Employer (258)
(r) Employment Status/Type Tabulation Error (8) – Three law schools (UC-Hastings, NYU, and SUNY Buffalo) lose a total of eight graduates from their Employment Status classification, which I attribute to an error on their parts.
(s) Unemployed/Not in Labor Force (7,698) – This is the sum of Employment Statuses (f)-(j), including those who didn’t reply to the survey.

(4)  Classification #3: Law school-funded positions

(a) Law school-funded positions (1,973 graduates)
(b) Other Employed (34,308) – Simply everyone else
(c) Unemployed/Not in Labor Force (7,698) – This is the sum of Employment Statuses (f)-(j), including those who didn’t reply to the survey.

This means that Employment Status, Employment Type, and law school-funded positions are superimposed on one another like a 3-D Venn diagram. Allow me to animate an approximation:

The hard part was ensuring that all the numbers in the classifications’ categories added up to the total number of graduates. Many law schools include graduates in the total Employed Undeterminable employment status category but don’t break them down by FT/PT-ST/LT, creating a 261-graduate deficit if you sum the FT/PT-ST/LT breakdown. There’s also the tabulation error mentioned above.

Once this was complete (and the Brewers were futilely hitting home runs again), it was an easy matter to divide the Employment Status, Employment Type, and law school-funded classification categories by the total number of graduates and then run correlations between them to get where we want to go.

Why correlations? Because that’s the best way (short of something like chi-squaring and p-valuing them, which I don’t have time for) to find relationships between the three classifications for graduates’ outcomes.

Important #1: Pay attention to whether the correlation is between classifications or among categories in the same classification. The former means the correlation can be inclusive, e.g. graduates in Employed – Bar Passage Required can also be in 2-10 Law Firms if the correlation is positive. The latter means the correlation is exclusive, such as if the correlation between 2-10-Size Firms and Academia is positive, it means that the classmates of those who went to 2-10-Size Firms found jobs in Academia. Important #2: I also sometimes included the law school-funded classification in charts of Employment by Type correlations.

For example, we can find out what employment types law school-funded graduates (and their classmates) fell into. Behold:

From this chart we can make these kinds of statements:

“The more a law school’s graduates were in law school-funded positions, the more [they and their classmates were in Public Interest positions].”

As one might expect, there was a negative correlation between law school-funded employment and not being in the Unemployed/Not in Labor Force employment status. This is good. Any employment type or status that correlates positively with people out of work or not responding to the survey is bad for law schools and their graduates.

The important fact to take from law-school funded positions is that they might significantly weaken the meaning of the “Public Interest” and “Academia” employment types. This is the consequence of separating out law school-funded work from the other two classifications; it makes being a law professor’s post-graduate research assistant sound like a public service because law schools are mostly non-profit organizations.

If we want to know if the JD is versatile we have two employment statuses (Employed – JD Advantage, Employed – Professional Position) and one employment type (Business & Industry) that fit the bill. The problem is definitional, and you can find those in the ABA’s questionnaire (DOC). We find that the terms “Employed – JD Advantage,” (or “JD Preferred”) and “Employed – Professional Position” are undefined. “Business & Industry,” on the other hand, is defined:

Business and industry employers include legal temporary agencies, accounting firms, investment banking and financial institutions, entertainment/sports management companies, insurance companies, management consulting firms, publishing houses, technology/e-commerce companies, trade associations, political campaigns, etc. [LSTB: They don't exclude everything else in the private sector, e.g. retail clerkery.]

Positions held in business and industry include temporary attorney work, temporary law clerk or paralegal work, in-house counsel, management, business development/sales/marketing, human resources, consulting, etc.

In-house counsel includes positions with the legal department of a company if that position reports directly or indirectly to the office of general counsel.

A graduate working at a law firm but employed by an agency that places attorneys in temporary positions is included in the Business and Industry category.

If the JD is versatile, then we would expect that businesses would compete with law firms for the top law schools’ top5%mootcourtlawreviewrequired, which would make the correlation positive between large law firms and federal clerkships with things like JD Advantage, Professional Position, and Business & Industry.

To test this hypothesis, the schools whose graduates have an employment status of Employed – JD Advantage, also have graduates who end up in the Business & Industry, Academia, and Government employment types.

I’m guessing there is significant mutual inclusion; however, it appears that law schools whose graduates are in JD Advantage positions tend not to send their classmates to larger law firms. Either government and business aren’t as interested in prestigious law school grads as large firms and judges are, or the opposite is true: law grads prioritize using their JDs in legal positions before government or academia. Looking at the data, the solution, I think, is that it’s regional: graduates from DC area law schools find their way into FTLT government positions nearby. This suggests a qualified versatility to law schools in that region, though this is only one graduating class and there will be no endorsement without a clear job description breakdown.

The same cannot be said for Professional Positions:

Remember what I said about correlating to the Unemployed/Not in Labor Force employment status? It would appear the term “professional” is unlikely to be what prospective students want to think it means and is associated with down-market legal work and underemployment.

Here’s how Business & Industry correlates to the other employment statuses, employment types, and law school-funded classifications:

The first chart tells us that graduates in Business & Industry don’t need law licenses (oo~h, big insight, LSTB) and that they split among JD Advantage, Employed Professional, and Employed Non-professional categories. This likely waters-down the definition of Business & Industry. The second correlation chart, on the other hand, is pretty damning. Correlating to small-firm work and underemployment suggests that Business & Industry is not very professional in any way we understand it.

Negatively correlating to law school-funded positions in particular really weakens the case for the versatile JD because it means that given the choice graduates would rather work at their law schools than positions in Business & Industry. Recall that law school-funded positions also correlated strongly to not being in the Unemployed/Not in Labor Force employment status.

The takeaway from this is:

(a) Capital region law schools with JD Advantage graduates might be able to make a claim to versatility if they back it up, e.g. FBI agents and people who could do the work without a law degree don’t count.

(b) Employed – Professional Position is a misleading employment term as those in that employment status and their classmates tend to be in down-market (and out-market) work.

(c) For most schools, Business & Industry mostly means non-professional work (which it always has). More prestigious law schools, ironically, are the ones that suffer from these blurred terms because if they do manage to place their graduates in versatile professional positions (like lobbying firms), their success is drowned out by graduates at other schools working at law firm temp agencies.

This is what happens when the Questionnaire Committee doesn’t rigorously define its terms.

‘Do Not Trust Deans Bearing Versatile Juris Doctors’ on the Am Law Daily

In which I impeach law school deans’ credibility.

“Do Not Trust Deans Bearing Versatile Juris Doctors“

And, for those of you who didn’t get enough 1970s power pop last time, here’s the Raspberries’ song I’ve been listening to on repeat. Every time I hear the album version of this song, I like to pretend that the muse of rock inspired them to record it right on the first take. Behold, the hair of Eric Carmen, 1974.

Top 10 Jobs Held by 4-Year College Grads That Don’t Require 4-Year College Degrees

Today’s SEO-pandering post is sponsored by Robert Samuelson, who wrote an editorial titled, “It’s Time U.S. Dropped the College-for-All Crusade.” I’m linking to the Japan Times syndicated piece because I’m fond of that publication. He writes:

“At last count, roughly 40 percent of Americans had some sort of college degree: about 30 percent a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution; the rest associate degrees from community colleges.”

Samuelson’s misreading the numbers. There are two good sources of U.S. population by educational attainment: the Current Population Survey and the beleaguered American Community Survey (S1501), and their college-educated percentages total 39 percent and 36 percent, respectively. Out of the national population, the share of college-educated Americans is significantly less than 40 percent because both surveys exclude people under 25 and (for the sake of usefulness) include older, retired Americans:

Next, there are two sources of employment by education data, the Current Population Survey, again, and the BLS’s Employment Projections Program (XLS). The EPP, which we’ll stick with for its detail, distributes the employed population along these lines:

Comparing the CPS to itself, and the EPP to the ACS, here’re the employment-population ratios.

For some reason, the CPS found 20 million fewer employed Americans 25 and over than the EPP did in 2010: 122 million vs. 143 million. Note also that the Bachelor’s and higher crowd isn’t suffering from 30 percent unemployment, it’s just that growing proportions of Americans who are retiring happen to be college educated, and many more are out of the workforce for other reasons, e.g. homemakers.

As for the value of the sanctified four-year Bachelor’s degree? Using the EPP data above, here’re the types of jobs that employed BA/BS holders had by required qualifications:

“Postsecondary Non-BA/BS Jobs” includes jobs requiring an Associate’s degree (e.g. nurses (whom we’ll see plenty of today)), “some college no degree” (actors), or a “postsecondary non-degree award” (airplane pilots). So are only 40 percent of BA/BS holders in jobs at their qualification level or better? A few thoughts:

(1)  Yes.

(2)  This is 2010. There were a lot of underemployed people due to the housing bubble popping, to say nothing of those who are actually unemployed.

(3)  There are a lot of people over 24 years old, and many’ve lived unusual lives. Some of them might have gotten their return from their college degrees years ago and are simply doing jobs that are more comfortable for them. I doubt it’s many, but it’s some.

(4)  Some of these people might be students working part-time.

Still, 16 million out-of-position BA/BS’s is a lot, and this comes on top of the 31.6 million Americans who went to college yet have no degree whatsoever to show for it. That’s a pretty severe indictment of higher education right there.

Now to give you some SEOy fun: “Top 10 Non-BA/BS Jobs Held by BA/BS-Holders in 2010,” unsorted because I don’t want to bother resorting my spreadsheet:

These sum to about a third of those 16 million workers, and it largely discredits the would-you-like-fries-with-that liberal arts major jokes (“Combined Food Preparation and Serving Workers, Including Fast Food” is further down at 126,000). More likely, they’re working at Old Navy or they went to nursing school.

And what of those who hold Doctoral/Professional degrees, e.g. the juris doctor?

Doctoral and professional degrees are required for 25 job classes, the vast majority of which require a science or medical background. Here’s the list:

• Computer and Information Research Scientists
• Animal Scientists
• Biochemists and Biophysicists
• Biological Scientists, All Other
• Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists
• Astronomers
• Physicists
• Clinical, Counseling, and School Psychologists
• Lawyers
• Judicial Law Clerks
• Judges, Magistrate Judges, and Magistrates
• Postsecondary Teachers
• Chiropractors
• Dentists, General
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
• Orthodontists
• Prosthodontists
• Dentists, All Other Specialists
• Optometrists
• Pharmacists
• Physicians and Surgeons
• Podiatrists
• Physical Therapists
• Veterinarians
• Audiologists

If law degrees are versatile, it ain’t for jobs requiring doctoral or professional educations, as far as the BLS is concerned, and unless there’s a supplemental knowledge prerequisite for employment.

Of the 2.8 million doctoral and professional degree workers employed in jobs requiring their educations, 702,710 are lawyers (out of 728,200), 1,190 are judicial law clerks (29,800(!)), and 32,810 are judges (34,000). That’s 26 percent of the 2.8 million-person blue-blob in the last chart. Incidentally, the BLS managed to find 730 lawyers who never finished high school and another 730 who did but had no education beyond that. 24,030 lawyers have only a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree. These non-JD lawyers are probably mostly in California.

The good news is that most workers with doctorates and professional degrees don’t end up doing work that never required them to set foot outside of high school (the three percent “End of All Things” category in the chart above), but undoubtedly the non-blue chunk in the chart contains a good number of people with juris doctors. Here’s their Google-pandering top 10 list:

This amounts to 23 percent of that non-blue chunk. Some of these are more understandable than others, e.g. clergy.

So, I’m going to quit my job and this blog to start writing my network sit-com pitch now: Nurse, J.D.…

No Massachusetts, Law School Should Not Be More Like Medical School

Lisa van der Pool, “Report: Law school should be more like medical school,” in Boston Business Journal.

van der Pool is given the task of reporting on what the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Task Force on Law Schools, consisting of 14 lawyers, thinks needs to be done about “Law, the Economy and Underemployment.” Task force co-chair Eric Parker of Parker-Scheer LLP tells her:

“In Massachusetts, we are a relatively small state that has nine law schools. When you start to realize the sheer number of lawyers who are flooding into the job market … you say something’s got to change.”

So naturally the Task Force recommended Massachusetts’ universities draw straws and shut down all but two law schools, including the newly ABA-accredited UMass School of Law, and, sadly, the renegade Massachusetts School of Law. Right?

To identify the causes of legal underemployment, the report examines the medical and dental school models, which focus on practical training, something that law schools have increasingly been accused of lacking during the past several years. In a tough economy, clients have increasingly refused to pay for inexperienced lawyers.

Nope.

I mean, it’s not like law schools’ lack of practical training is a new problem. Presumably lawyers including those on the committee had similar legal educations as today’s new lawyers. They just benefitted from a less glutted market and less debt. Frankly, if clients (and really we’re talking about Biglaw corporate clients, not people looking for someone to represent them in traffic court) are satisfied with the services they get without inexperienced lawyers, it probably means they’re not necessary.

That said, deploying the word “economy” in its name, one would think the Task Force would come to the same conclusion that mere mortals do about what causes underemployment, which is lack of demand. Instead, after six months, the Task Force concludes that law schools need to change their curricula, which will cost more tuition. This “mal-training” argument is really just a generic structural unemployment one: We have the wrong lawyers for the right jobs; retrain them and scambloggers will go away. Except structural unemployment is a load of crap. If it were true, we would see Massachusetts’ lawyers’ wages rising to meet the high demand and experienced lawyers from other states would be moving there to take advantage of the high salaries and available work. Instead, there’s across-the-board lawyer unemployment, but that doesn’t discourage the Task Force.

“It’s no wonder that when physicians and dentists graduate, they’re ready to earn,” said Parker. “They have marketable skills that people want to pay for. By contrast we found that law graduates come out with a generic exposure to legal theory and lack the experience and practical training that converts into a marketable skill.”

It’s also no wonder that physicians and dentists also benefit from entering a profession that has a shortage of practitioners, whether it’s deliberately engineered or not. It follows that these two professions’ education models aren’t necessarily better either. New doctors may have practical experience, but they pay even more in tuition than lawyers do, and they sit out of the workforce for a minimum of eight years of formal training (gotta learn how those tyrosine kinases work I guess) while other countries train doctors at the undergraduate level. I think the anecdote of Ben Bernanke’s son’s $400,000 of medical school debt is quite telling.

It also occurs to that the mal-trained lawyer argument also contradicts the versatile juris doctor, but that’s not the Task Force’s problem.

The report concludes that the third year of law school should look different than it does now, with more emphasis on practical training: “The task force recommends that the MBA encourage Bay State law schools to reinvent the third year so as to provide greater opportunities for law students to gain practical legal experience and expand opportunities to hone their legal writing skills, beyond that offered through traditional first year legal writing programs,” the report reads.

…And after the reinvented third year, graduates will be just as underemployed as if they’d studied nothing but “Law and …” courses, not that I don’t like those, but supply does not create demand, unless you’re sitting on the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Task Force on Law Schools.

The Verdict Is in on the Lottery, Why not Law School?

Jenn Ladd, “Law School Letdown,” the Baltimore Sun.

The article isn’t bad, but the tagline is:

“With a hefty price tag and a shrinking number of jobs, is law school worth all the effort? The verdict is still out.”

The Sun, though, is in sort of a bind. Often local newspapers will only consider their state’s law schools’ plights. Sure, Maryland has only two law schools, both public, but adjacent D.C. has six, nearby Virginia has several, and Pennsylvania does as well. Sure the local schools probably have a leg up in posting grads in government positions, e.g. prosecutors and public defenders, but in the private sector, the two schools’ grads have to compete with the swarms that Georgetown releases into the wild each year.

Still, the two schools’ charge a lot less, but the article finds that the students magically graduate with six figures of debt, much more than triple the tuition. In fact their grads are around the national average, which might be due to Grad PLUS loans generous extension to full living expenses.

This prompts the question: Is the verdict still out?

Nope, it’s in. The only people I endorse going to law school are those who’ve worked in the field already, have minimal opportunity costs (e.g. they’re working part-time anyway), and are offered a full tuition waiver. That’s it. No one else should go. That doesn’t mean there won’t be some people who come out ahead without a scholarship, or that somewhere in the seats of today’s law schools are future legendary jurists, but it does mean that ex ante, those legendary jurists are better off not taking the risks.

The reality is that law schools have no idea what the medium-term value of a law degree is. When they do, there’s nothing stopping them from providing self-serving information. Take LawProf’s recent post on NYLS, which despite winning a dismissal of the lawsuit filed against it still gallingly implied that its graduates did better four years after graduation. The bottleneck argument and the versatile J.D. are alive and well, but note that nothing in the new 509 Standard precludes a law school from doing this. They can publish damning evidence of where their graduates are nine months out and then cover it up with a biased sample of what slightly older grads are doing. Hopefully fewer people will believe them anyway, but it’s another hurdle for informing applicants. As for very long-term data, we can suspect that a third of 1970s grads from non-elite law schools had left the profession. It’s probably significantly higher today.

Since the odds are so bad, why not view law school as the lottery and treat it as such? Perhaps it wouldn’t be as interesting to read about.