Scambloggers Weren't Making Stuff Up, After All

Hard to believe, but it's true!

In a Gallup poll of over 4,000 American adults who earned a postgraduate degree between 2000 and 2015, just 23 percent of law school graduates said that their education was worth the cost and only 20 percent said that their schooling prepared them well for post-grad life...

"While both medical and law degrees are expensive, law degree holders may be less likely to say their degree was worth the cost because of the weak job market for those with a law degree in recent years," hypothesizes Gallup.

Well, it's a hard-knock life for the average law graduate, yes, but surely law school prepped these graduates for the road ahead...

Another reason that law school graduates have such a negative view of their education is their relationships — or lack thereof — with their professors. Just 24 percent of J.D. holders felt that their professors cared about them as a person and only 19 percent said they had a collegiate mentor who encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams.

These negative experiences were not consistent across other types of graduate students.

I'm sure career services has something more positive to add...

Law school admissions and career counselor Laura Hosid says students should consider the job market, their career goals and their ability to get into a top-tier program before they take the law school plunge.

"Yes, technically you can do anything with a law degree," she tells CNBC Make It. "But that doesn't mean you should."

Wait, what?  That's just scamblog crazy-talk!  What happened to public service?  Or JD-Advantage?  I thought law was all models and bottles!  Or so the deans said...!  Wait, let me dig back through the hundreds of posts here on OTLSS, I *know* they said it somewhere...

Never-mind folks, it looks like there has been a stunning reversal in the law school market.  Apparently the scambloggers were wrong all along, but it is only as of 2018 that there is vocal discontent among graduates and law schools are now counseling restraint against taking the plunge.  No one could have seen this coming, not even a bunch of debt-burdened, bar-licensed malcontents, I guess.

0Ls, pay heed.  Let this be fair warning.

Law School Applicants Update 2018

A quick update:  we are 12 weeks into the new application cycle, and according to LSAC applications are up approximately 10% from last year.  When you look at the data closely and compare "Week X" last year to "Week X" this year, however, it is closer to 1-2% by my review.  In fact, Week 12 is falling on essentially the same value for last year and for 2014 prior.  It is still not clear how LSAC is doing their supposed apples-to-apples comparison, but that will remain a mystery, I guess.

Because I am a self-professed data wonk, I also noticed that the applicant data tends to follow a very particularized curve very well, better than the polynomial functions I used previously (the logistic function, for anyone who is interested).  For example, when you look at 2017, it's pretty easy to get a near 1.0 r-squared value for "goodness of fit," and this makes experiential sense - applicant count starts off, accelerates for a while, and then tapers off later in the cycle.

The only reason this matters, in my book, is that I like to look at the rate of change of applicants in each cycle.  In my opinion, this is a proxy for "applicant enthusiasm", and is a better indicator that percent change from year to year.  If the rate of change spikes quickly and is sustained ("Applicant Velocity"), you get a high applicant count at the end of the cycle. (e.g. 2012).  If the rate of change is slow and lethargic (e.g. 2016), then people aren't applying in droves and the law schools are keeping the application window open longer to get the trickle of applicants to get up to prior-year levels.

I've included a prediction for 2018 based on the data so far, and it looks as though 2018 is basically shaping up to be 2017 all over again.  How this is 10% higher than last year is still not apparent, but "enthusiasm" seems to be back at 2014 levels.  We haven't seen 2011-2013 levels of applicants, or applicant rates, for several years now.  One can only hope that most people are getting the message, and only those who really, really, really, want to got to law school are doing so.  Anything to help correct the legal graduates market has to be a good thing, except perhaps for the law schools themselves.

"Values" explain why law schools are still lobbying to eliminate the reporting distinction between actual jobs and law school-funded make-work.

Last year, the ABA decided to eliminate a significant feature of the annual recent graduate employment survey--namely the requirement that any school-funded position must be classified as "Employed – Law School/University Funded" rather than as "Employed – Bar Passage Required." 

Disgracefully, the ABA made its decision without providing an opportunity for notice and comment. In response to fierce criticism, the ABA subsequently postponed implementation of this change pending further discussion. In so doing, the ABA issued a hilariously brazen memo explaining that it had dispensed with its customary rulemaking procedures in good faith anticipation of "universal or near universal acclamation. . . as to both process and substance." 

Why consult the public in advance when you are sure that the public will approve anything you cram down its throat, all the more enthusiastically in that it comes as a complete surprise? Yes, this is the same ABA that purports to tutor the world in rule of law.  

Unfortunately, the proposal to merge the categories of "employed" and "employed/ law school funded" is far from dead. Indeed, it was the main item on the agenda of the ABA Section on Legal Education council meeting, which was held from February 8th through 10th in San Antonio. In anticipation of the meeting, 187 law professors signed a letter to the ABA in support of the proposal. William Treanor, long-time Dean of Georgetown Law, felt so strongly about the matter that he submitted his own letter. To quote from these delightful missives:

"The exclusion of school-funded public interest fellowships from the calculation of full-time, long term, bar passage required employment has had the direct and immediate effect of harming our students who aspire to careers in public interest law. The current reporting format punishes law schools by treating their year-long fellowships differently from other year-long opportunities, such as clerkships, and incentivizes decreased school support for such fellowships. . . . Why would the bar seek to chill schools who seek to encourage students to pursue public service? Why close off avenues to public service when the state courts, judges, and bar leaders urge that we redouble our efforts to provide legal representation to those who cannot afford it? The spirit of the current reporting format is directly contrary to the values that we, as legal educators, seek to instill in our students." -- signed by 187 values-instilling lawprofs.

* * * 

"An argument I often hear for distinguishing law-school funded positions from others is transparency. This argument is at odds with reality. Far from being a negative, our public interest fellowships are a selling point to prospective students. . . . We tout our partner fellows because they reflect our law center’s social justice mission and because students find them attractive. . .Far from hiding our program, we celebrate it. . . . Treating law-school funded public interest fellowships differently than other legal positions devalues public service and sends a signal to prospective law students that public interest fellowships are not as good as other types of positions. Such treatment undermines our profession’s core commitment to justice."  -- William Treanor, Dean and Executive Vice President, Georgetown Law School. 

These letters constitute discouraging evidence that law schools intend to chip away at transparency protections by aggressively lobbying an accomodating-to-the-point-of-regulatory-captured ABA.

A law school-funded position is a highly artificial creation in that it is supported by tuition money already paid by the recipient, a compensation structure more akin to a partial refund than to a salary or even a run-of-the-mill grant. So a clear distinction ought to be made between these make-work programs and real jobs.

I do not doubt that the many law professors who signed the first letter instill values as generously as mosquitos instill mosquito bites, but it is still a shame that they are so eager to conceal or obfuscate highly relevant information about employment outcomes from the very idealistic young people who have paid huge sums of money to prepare for a career in public service. It may be presumptuous to challenge law faculty in their expert domain of "values," but I seem to recall from kindergarten that honesty is a pretty important value. 

Interestingly, the ABA Law Student Division Council opposes changing the reporting requirement. These selfish souls are clearly in dire need of innovative remedial values instruction from their law professors. 

The professors complain that the reporting format unjustly "punish[es]" law schools that are seeking to do the right thing in offering fellowships. But the punishment, such as it is,  merely consists of preventing law schools from claiming unearned success in their placement stats or conveying a false impression of what the public sector/public interest job market is really like. (See e.g. Yale Law School Career Development webpage, updated Sept., 2017: "Getting a permanent public interest job is more challenging than getting a large firm job").

The related disincentivization argument advanced by the academics is especially galling in its hypocrisy. It is similar to some wealthy brute arguing that he would be disincentivized or chilled from throwing a few conscience-easing scraps to his victims if the public, including intended or potential future victims, were clearly informed about the number of persons in need of such charity.  

Maybe worse is Treanor's point that his school serves transparency by "celebrat[ing]" school-funded fellowships in promotional and recruitment material, making it unnecessary and counterproductive to tabulate these fellowships separately from actual jobs. Treanor  boasts in his faculty bio that he has been formally designated a "Champion" by the National Law Journal because of his commitment to the "core values" or the legal profession. One might have hoped that a values champion-- I mean Champion-- such as Treanor would have acknowledged the difference between public relations and transparency. 

But I suppose that simply looking at cold columns and rows of segmented data muffles the celebratory "signal" that law schools wish to transmit, the same deceptive signal that predators often convey to their prey. 

A Game of Law Reviews

The candidates review their chances of being published in Braavos Law Review - what will the Essos News & World Report rankings show?  Stay tuned...!

 

 

I was not on law review - I didn't even try to write-on. 

"Why of course, that is why you are a scamblogging los3r rather than a models-and-bottles LawProf, yo," I hear some say. 

In some respects I'm guilty as charged, though that is not the point.  I agree that research and scholarly writing is the bread-and-butter of academia, and is the work product that hopefully drives other changes and advances in society. 

 

I did have to do a legal writing class in lieu of being on law review - I don't recall what it was about that much, but I remember thinking "hey, I did a decent job."  We also had to do a presentation based on our work, not unlike a seminar.  At the end, my legal writing professor complemented me on my work product, and said those oh-so-fateful words with twinkles in her eyes while looking off to the far horizon, as if a golden opportunity had just materialized:

 

"You should try to get this published!!!" 

 

Really?  I mean, thanks, I appreciate what you are trying to say and all, but come on.  This is not a barn-burner, nor is it introducing some supremely novel idea.  I was a law STUDENT, after all, at the time.  And this is not some sense of false-humility...the legal world will roll on, with or without my grand contribution.  I mean, really.

 

But then I recalled - what else do the majority of LawProfs do besides "teach?"  Publish.  Riiight...that is what it is all about.  Raises, promotions, preftige - all of it - based on how much you write, who blesses it, and how widely read it is, who invites you to speak about it, etc. etc. etc.

 

Yep, not my kind of game.  Major advances in a field do not come with production-line regularity on a semi-yearly basis, at least in my book.  But then again, my prior experience was in the engineering world, where you may only publish something after years and years of research, experimentation, and analysis. 

 

The real-world counterpart to LawProfs would be folks like Michael Cicchini, who is a full-time practicing attorney who also enjoys academic writing on the side.  His interest in law reviews comes down to the nuts-and-bolts of practice, and I find his view illuminating:

University of Kentucky Law Professor and filmmaker extraordinaire Brian L. Frye asserts that legal scholarship does not contribute to the cost of legal education

It is a relief to know that the cinematic arts are flourishing at law schools, along with the finest doctrinal instruction this side of a Gilbert’s outline and highly useful and enlightening scholarship that bears no causal relationship whatsoever to rising levels of student indebtedness.

One of the legal academy’s great auteur-scholars is University of Kentucky Law Professor Brian L. Frye. According to an endnote to one of his recent articles: "Brian L. Frye is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. His scholarship focuses on intellectual property, charity law, and art law. He is also an essayist and artist of no particular distinction." And the self-effacing professor does not even mention his two one-year post-law school judicial clerkships or the 27 months he spent as a junior associate with Sullivan & Cromwell before becoming a law professor.

Frye may modestly downplay the quality of his work, as per his so-charming humblebrag, but not his fans at OTLSS. True, we can only anticipate the delights of his forthcoming article: The Athlete’s Two Bodies: Reflections on the Ontology of Celebrity. But cinephiles everywhere can celebrate the completed films that he has conceived, directed, and starred in. These include such works as Brian Frye Fails to Masturbate and Striptease. In an article in the Chicago Reader, a film nerd provides the following description of these paradigm-subverting avant garde masterpieces.

"The two-minute Brian Frye Fails to Masturbate shows the filmmaker fully clothed, sitting in a chair fidgeting, seemingly unsure what to do with his hands. Inspired by the joke that student performance artists just get up in front of the audience and masturbate, this film in one sense merely illustrates the stereotype: Frye makes his body the subject. But because he appears not to know how to sit and where to look, and because the film is not obviously artful (it's a single take not particularly well framed), his body becomes the locus of instability rather than a fetishized object. . .

Striptease might have been titled "Brian Frye Fails to Strip." We see Frye disrobe, but when he gets to his white undershorts, the roll ends in white flare-outs. There's also something strange about his movements, especially when he drops his shirt — because in fact he ran the camera in reverse while putting his clothes on."     

It is galling that the hoi polloi persist in trooping to the multiplex to watch Star Wars, Episode Whatever, when gems like Brian Frye Fails to Masturbate remain comparatively obscure. At the very least, a minimally decent society will not fail to lubricate a genius like Brian Frye with an undemanding academic job and a $123,628 annual public sector salary, the better to facilitate his scholarly, as well as his artistic, ejaculations. Which is precisely what a young public defender failed to understand, in a January 15, 2018 exchange on Twitter, when she rudely interrupted Frye's effusion of self-love with the less-than-enticing imagery of her $250,000 law school debt load.

Professor Frye explains to the insolent tweeter that legal scholarship bears no relationship whatsoever to law student debt, making the knock down point that he gets paid whether he writes or doesn't write. (A few quibbles about that below). Anyway, here is the Twitter exchange in all its naked glory: [N. I want to add that I do not know the identity of "Essential Employee." I stumbled on the exchange while researching another post]

But wait, Professor Frye, or shall I call you Mr. Pro Boner?: Isn’t "engaging in scholarship" a major reason why the ABA mandates that the majority of law school coursework be taught by full-time law professors instead of far more affordable part-time adjuncts who, you know, actually practice law? (See ABA Standards 403(a) and 404(a)(3)). Isn’t this requirement fiercely defended against proposed modifications by law professor lobbying organizations? Don’t lawprofs routinely receive five-figure "summer research stipends" to top off their six-figure salaries, money expressly provided to encourage scholarship? Isn’t tenure in the legal academy strongly linked to scholarly production, as opposed to service and teaching? And don’t all these things add significantly to the cost of a legal education?

These would be my questions– pardon me, my non sequiturs– though I would never presume to match wits with somebody clever enough to deceive the world into thinking he is doing a striptease when he is really just running the camera in reverse while getting dressed.

Actually, the thing that most troubles me is that Professor Frye has become so absorbed in legal scholarship this past year that he may be neglecting his filmmaking. While I doubt that he or anyone can rise to the level of Brian Frye Fails to Masturbate, I would like to suggest some exciting film concepts inspired by his Twitter exchange with the public defender and the title of his greatest masterpiece: Brian Frye Fails to Take Moral Responsibility; Brian Frye Fails to Argue Persuasively; Brian Frye Fails to Treat a Public Defender with Respect; and Brian Frye Fails to Pretend that he is not a Smug and Pretentious Entitled Narcissist.

See, for these films, he would not even have to run the camera in reverse.

University of Richmond Law Dean (and AALS President) Wendy Perdue asserts that the ABA-mandated employment survey hurts law students

According to the University of Richmond Law School's last five annual ABA-mandated 10-months-out employment surveys (2012-2016), the school has not once succeeded in placing as many as 100 graduates in full-time law jobs in a single year, even though the size of its graduating class has ranged from 145 to 159.

What accounts for persistently lackluster employment results at Richmond Law and elsewhere? Conventional thinkers keep citing a highly saturated legal job market and deteriorating admissions standards at  law schools. However, University of Richmond Law Dean and Association of American Law Schools (AALS) President Wendy Perdue has shrewdly identified an alternate culprit-- namely, the employment survey itself.

Think about it in terms of misdirected talent and lack of trust. Say that a law school employs a hotshot career services counselor. The counselor could be and should be using her mighty skills to conduct a virtuoso mock job interview for this 3L or to craft the perfect cover letter for that 3L, which in cumulative effect would send employment outcomes zooming high enough to knock Santa out of his sleigh. But instead the counselor must devote long hours to unproductive administrative drudgery in compliance with a burdensome ABA employment survey protocol. 

Imagine acquiring a cat for the express purpose of catching mice and then some bureaucrat comes along and insists that the cat spend two-thirds of her time between mid-January and mid-March documenting her past mousing results.

In a February 27, 2017 blogpost entitled "Ides of March," Dean Perdue provides the following explanation:

". . . But finding out where every graduate is employed is only half the job – the other half is documentation. Schools are expected to be meticulous because their records may be audited. So suppose a student tells the career office that she is employed at a particular firm, then what? If the information came by email, the email must be uploaded to the student’s file. If the information was communicated orally, the staff person must document that conversation and put that in the file. Suppose the graduate provides the employer’s name but not the address of the firm: The career office must have someone go to the web, find the address, take a screen shot that shows the address, and upload that to the student’s file. 

All of this takes a lot of time and staff resources. Between mid-January and mid-March, one of our full time career counselors spends about two-thirds of her time on data collection and reporting. This is for a graduating class of about 150. The time she spends on data and reporting is time she will not spend with our students and graduates helping them identify job opportunities, reviewing their resumes and cover letters, or preparing them for their interviews 

Of course, prospective students care about employment outcomes and should have reliable information about this. But the level of detail and documentation far exceeds the level of detail we must provide about any other aspect of our operation, and it is time to restore some balance."

A few skeptical points and questions from a typically balance-deficient scamblogger:

1. According to the University of Richmond's most recent available IRS Form 990, for fiscal year 2014, Dean Perdue's annual compensation is $412,401, an impressive take even by law dean standards. Could a pittance from Perdue's enormous pay package be re-allocated for the purpose of hiring a two-month temp to assist the Richmond Law Career Services office in its record keeping? With this additional administrative support, the beautifully-crafted cover letters could keep flowing, even during survey season. 

2. Consider the linked ABA protocol for conducting the employment survey as well as the ABA's answers to "frequently asked questions" concerning the protocol. What specific requirements of "detail" or "documentation" would Dean Perdue like to eliminate in her quest to "restore some balance"? And what exactly are the two quantities being balanced here? Reliable information versus scamming hype? Does Dean Perdue believe that too much of either is a bad thing, but that a harmonious balance should be achieved?  

3. Isn’t it alarming that a law dean finds it objectionable that she and her staff are "expected to be meticulous" in advancing claims about recent graduate employment? I mean, how many lawprofs have written articles righteously embracing their responsibility to cultivate professional values and behaviors in law students, or to guide law students towards a proper inter-disciplinary-informed appreciation of social justice? Shouldn't a law school model, as well as teach, ethical conduct? I wonder if Dean Perdue is similarly critical of a lawyer's professional obligation to be meticulous in, for instance, billing clients or in making factual representations in court.  

4. Will Dean Perdue, as President of the AALS, use her organization's considerable influence with the ABA to lobby for a weaker employment auditing regime or at least weaker enforcement?

5. If Dean Perdue is truly concerned with finding jobs for Richmond law grads, perhaps she should consider reducing class size to around 100, the approximate annual demand for Richmond law graduates, or actually a bit higher. Because otherwise one may reasonably suspect that Dean Perdue's criticism of the employment survey is not actually motivated by concern for the job prospects of her students, but by opposition to transparency and accountability, i.e. by scam.

From a scamblog perspective, there are indeed significant defects in the ABA's oversight of the employment survey and in the survey itself, but these defects are indicative of laxity rather than severity.

This blog has criticized the ABA for randomly auditing only 10 schools per year. This blog has criticized the ABA audit protocol for allowing law schools to submit "incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading" employment files for up to 5% of graduates even with a generous cooked-in "presumption" that each file is not deficient. This blog has criticized the ABA for refusing to name the five schools out of the ten randomly audited last year that violated the audit protocol by submitting an excessive number of deficient employment files (and even the two schools out of the ten audited that were found to engage in deceptive practices). This blog has criticized the ABA for declaring that a more comprehensive audit of these five law schools (or shall I say scofflaw schools?) to be discretionary rather than mandatory, in apparent defiance of its own protocol.

But the President of the Association of American Law Schools thinks that the ABA employment survey is too burdensome for law schools, a dispiriting hint that the weak reforms that have been implemented by the ABA may come under renewed attack.  

Using the LSAT as a Predictor for Bar-Passage Rates, so as to Not Throw Eager Students into the Abyss

Recently, David Frakt asked the question again about LSAT scores being indicative of bar-passage rates in his post on the Infilaw Schools, and it reminded me of the kerfluffle that has occurred between various scamdeans on the one hand and the National Council of Bar Examiners not so long ago.

 

To recap: for scamdeans and other interested persons desperate to justify their existence, it's wrong to deny opportunities to law students, especially URMs, just based on an entrance test.  For the NCBE, a few intellectually-honest law profs, and even the ABA (if you read their often-not-enforced regulations, at least), it's wrong to allow students to pay $200k over three years to only pull the rug out at the end because they are unable to get their bar license.

 

At the core of the debate is the question as to whether or not (1) the LSAT actually predicts success on the bar exam, and (2) whether there is enough data to say so one way or the other.  While I am no Professor of Statistics by any means, it doesn't take much work, either, to come up with answers of (1) a qualified yes, and (2) a qualified yes.  This is based on three years of bar passage data for 200+ law schools that has been complied by Law School Transparency - which translates to approximately 600 data points.  The results are below:

Given the correlation of 0.51, there is arguably a trend here. To start off, the question of LSAT predictability is more complicated than a simple function box, and no one has ever seriously claimed otherwise.  This, after all, makes practical, experiential sense - the idea that only one variable (median LSAT) is the only factor that influences outcome (first-time bar passage percentage) is an oversimplification. However, to say that there is no correlation whatsoever and the LSAT should be thrown out is also self-serving Cartel-dishonesty, and takes us back to the feuds between the establishment deans and the NCBE over what this data means in the first place. Obviously, several factors would logically and likely apply here to give a better predictor for bar-exam performance, but what those factors are, and how to quantify them, are an ongoing matter of debate.