Do Pace Law School Dean David Yassky and Asst. Dean Jill Backer know that Pace's own salary survey data undermines their hype about JD Advantage?

For the graduating class of 2014, the average law school reported having placed 14.5% of law grads in jobs that are classified as JD Advantage, an all-time high for that category, with standout schools claiming to place over 30% of their graduating class in such jobs. However, we are still relatively uninformed as to the quality of JD Advantage jobs that all these law grads are (allegedly) landing.
 

According to the murky definition adopted by the ABA for employment survey purposes,  a job is JD Advantage if "the J.D. provide[s] a demonstrable advantage in obtaining or performing the job, but itself does not require bar passage or an active law license or involve practicing law."

Note the phrase: "obtaining or performing." That means a law school gets to classify a job as JD Advantage where it can assert that a legal education helps the grad do his or her job, even if it did not help the grad actually get his or her job. And even where a JD arguably provides a demonstrable advantage in obtaining the job, it may be the case that the grad could have obtained the same or greater advantage in some far less burdensome way-- say, depending on the job, through an industry-specific master’s degree, a CPA, or even a paralegal certificate.

You know, a used car dealer can peddle a decrepit old rattletrap for $150,000 and truthfully claim that the vehicle provides a demonstrable advantage over walking. What the dealer may not mention is that the same or greater advantage could have been acquired in other far less expensive ways.  

 

Notwithstanding the above, Pace Law’s Dean David Yassky and Jill Backer, its Assistant Dean of Career and Professional Development have made some strong claims as to the desirability of JD Advantage jobs:

*     "There are a lot of jobs in addition to traditional law firm associate jobs, where legal skills and law school training are immensely valuable. . .Jobs like compliance at banks or pharmaceutical companies, jobs at big accounting firms that deal with corporate transactions or investigations, those are jobs that call for traditional legal skills even though they don’t have ‘lawyer’ in the name of the job." – Dean David Yassky 

*     "We know that people doing the fundamental work that law schools train their students to do are needed more than ever, and will continue to be more needed. . . And we know that businesses must deal much more with regulation today than they did as recently as 10 years ago or more, which means they need more people with legal training to do that work than they did a decade ago or longer." -Dean David Yassky

*     "The real problem is one of perception because the J.D. advantage position is actually perceived as "less than" a J.D. required position. In my view, this is misguided, and in fact hurtful to the legal industry." - Asst. Dean Jill Backer 

*     "It is assumed that a J.D. required position is more prestigious and has a better salary level. However, for many law graduates entering positions in compliance, HR and entrepreneurial roles, this is not the case. . . .This line of thinking is sorely behind the entrepreneurial mindset of our current economy."- Asst. Dean Jill Backer

In response to Backer, Kyle McEntee, director of Law School Transparency, wrote a great post at the Law School Café challenging law schools to "show us your work" on JD Advantage. McEntee noted that: (1) NALP reports that the average JD Advantage salary is 25% less than the average salary for graduates in bar-required jobs: and (2) Pace reported 14 grads of the class of 2014 as either law firm paralegals or law firm administrators--and placed nine of them in the JD-Advantage category.

In addition to the points made by McEntee, there is actual salary data from Pace graduates that further undermines Yassky and Backer’s loud-mouthed hype. Pace did a salary survey of nine-month-out grads for its graduating classes in 2009 through 2012, and reported JD Advantage salary data for two of those years, 2009 and 2011.  For both of these years, the JD Advantage median was significantly less than the Bar Passage Required median ($7,000 less for the Class of 2009 and $5,000 less for the Class of 2011).

A.  Pace Class of 2009:








B.  Pace Class of 2011:

Now, granted, these salary surveys were severely flawed in that the sample size is very small --fewer than than one-fifth of JD Advantage job holders actually reported their salary.

Still, these are Pace’s own findings, based on data obtained by Pace career service employees from Pace graduates. And yet these findings, which are consistent with NALP’s as to the inferiority of entry-level JD Advantage jobs in terms of pay, are not acknowledged by Yassky and Backer as they tout a Pace legal education for its JD Advantage value.

Were Yassky and Backer aware of their school’s own salary survey results when they made the statements quoted above? I do not necessarily think that outrageous puffery combined with convenient unawareness of contradictory facts, including data obtained by one’s very own institution, establishes that the declarant is deliberately trying to mislead. However, it does seem suspiciously two-paced. Which may be unavoidable when one is shilling for a pace-of-shit law school.