You are currently browsing the archives for Deborah J. Merritt.
The Third Year
April 1st, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Paul D. Carrington, Professor and former Dean of Duke Law School, has given us permission to post this thoughtful essay about the third year of law school. As a long-time member of the Texas bar, he responds to a recent “President’s Opinion” in the Texas Bar Journal:
In the March issue of the Texas Bar Journal, President Files expressed opposition to the proposal presently being advanced in New York to allow students to take that state’s bar exam and enter practice after two years in law school. President Files mistakenly supposes that the third year is indispensable to professional competence.
Making law study a three-year deal was not an idea advanced as a means of improving the quality of legal services delivered to prospective clients. The three-year degree was fashioned at Harvard in 1870 to impress other citizens with the social status of those holding Harvard Law degrees. Many of the students at Harvard at that time looked at the curriculum and left without a degree. Who needs a year-long, six-credit course on Bills and Notes?
Harvard itself understood that great lawyering does not require prolonged formal education. It awarded an honorary Ph.D. to Thomas Cooley to celebrate his great career in the law. Cooley never took a single class in law school, or even in college. He had a year of elementary school and a year in a law office before he moved to Michigan at the age of nineteen and hung out his shingle. He soon moved on to be the clerk to the Michigan Supreme Court, then to be its Chief Justice, then the founding dean of the University of Michigan Law School, then the author of the leading works in the nation on constitutional law and on torts, the president of the American Bar Association, and the designer and founding chair of the Interstate Commerce Commission regulating the nation’s railroads. It was possible for young Cooley to “read the law” and become perhaps the best lawyer in America.
It was still an option to read the law when I entered the profession in Texas in 1955. The applicant who scored the highest grade on the bar exam that I took that year had never attended law school. He had spent some years in a law office. And in three days he wrote coherent legal opinions on twenty-seven diverse problem cases. But he had not paid law school tuition. Had he chosen to attend the University of Texas Law School in 1952-1955, it would have cost him fifty dollars a year for tuition. I went to Harvard and paid six hundred dollars a year. That was enough to pay the modest salaries of the small band of law professors numerous enough to conduct big classes for three years.
In the 20th century, the organized bar first took up the cause of requiring three years of study. The motivating concern was not the competence of the lawyers providing legal services. The aim was to elevate, or at least protect, the status of the legal profession: if medical students were all required to stay for four years, lawyers seeking elevated status needed to stay for three. Benjamin Cardozo and Henry Stimson, two of the wisest and best 20th century lawyers, looked at what their third year schoolmates were doing, sneered at the waste of time, and went on to take the New York Bar Examination and become famous for their good professional judgment. Many and perhaps a majority of other early 20th century American lawyers attended two-year programs of law study in the numerous night schools.
The requirement of three years of formal study became common among the fifty states in the second half of the 20th century. But it is not universal. Thus, many California lawyers are graduates of two-year programs provided by the many night schools still functioning in that state. Reliance is placed on a very rigorous licensing examination to assure a reasonable measure of professional competence. There is no evidence that California lawyers are less competent or provide poorer professional service than Texas lawyers.
Requiring three years of formal study made more sense in 1963 than it does in 2013. The difference is the drastically elevated price of higher education and the resulting indebtedness borne by many students who aspire to be good lawyers. The price of all higher education in the United States increased mightily as a secondary consequence of the 1965 federal law guaranteeing the repayment of loans to students. In real dollars, taking account of inflation, the price of higher education is now about five times what it was when that law was enacted. The money is spent on elevated academic salaries, extended administrative services, and reduced ratios of students to teachers at all levels. “Higher” education keeps getting higher and higher in price.
As a result of this elevation of the real price of legal education, the requirement of three years is increasingly discriminatory. It is the offspring of working class families who often leave law school with substantial debts that they cannot repay from their earnings as rookie lawyers. For many, their prospective careers are ruined.
If the Texas Bar Association wishes to remain open to members who come from impecunious families, it, too, must face the reality that the third year of law school is unnecessary to assure the professional competence of its members. And also, if the Association wishes to assure impecunious clients of access to competent legal services, it needs to relax the requirement of prolonged formal education. I urge the Bar and the Supreme Court to address the issues promptly.
Core Faculty
March 24th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
The tenured and tenure-track professors form the core of a law school faculty. At most of our schools, those faculty teach doctrinal courses and seminars; they also devote considerable time to research. Over the years, we have added clinical and legal writing professors to our faculties, but they rarely are part of the core. These writing and clinical professors are paid less, usually lack tenure, and bear fewer expectations for scholarly research. They may vote on curricular matters; they may even chair committees and perform significant administrative work for the school. Their lack of tenure and lower status, however, make them more cautious about their votes and the opinions they voice. They know that they are outside of the core.
I would flip this structure. If I were starting a law school, I would hire experienced legal writing and clinical professors as the core tenure-track faculty. At existing schools, I would move as quickly as possible to that structure. Why? The legal writing and clinical professors are the ones who know best how to teach what we claim to teach in law schools: how to think like a lawyer.
Legal writing professors have analyzed the components of thinking like a lawyer, developed the vocabulary for explaining that process to students, and created hundreds of well designed exercises. Where does a student really learn how to analyze and synthesize cases? In a class of 75-120 students, where the professor calls on one student at a time for 150-200 minutes a week, offers little individualized feedback, requires no written product until the final exam, and tests students on issue-spotting during a 3-4 hour exam? Or in a class of 18-20 students, where the professor offers a sequence of assignments designed specifically to teach analysis, synthesis, and other critical reasoning skills; provides frequent individualized feedback; requires several written assignments; and grades students on their ability to produce well reasoned analyses of a problem that requires research, analysis, and synthesis of new cases and statutes?
The traditional law school classroom, with its case method and socratic questioning, is better than pure lecture at teaching critical reasoning. But it is still a woefully inefficient and ineffective process of teaching students how to read cases and statutes, how to synthesize those materials, and how to apply them to the facts of novel problems. During the last thirty years, our legal writing programs have developed at a remarkable rate. They now surpass other first-year courses in their ability to teach critical thinking. If you want a professor who knows how to teach legal analysis to first-year students, and who has studied the pedagogy of teaching those skills, then choose a legal writing professor.
The same is true of clinical professors in the upper level. These professors know how to build on the reasoning skills that students developed in the first year. They don’t greet students with the same casebook/socratic method of instruction. Whatever its merits in the first year, that style offers diminishing returns in the upper level and bears little relationship to how practicing lawyers learn new areas of law. Clinical professors are accustomed to helping students identify unfamiliar areas of law that may affect their clients, research those issues (using an appropriate combination of secondary sources, cases, and statutes), and think critically about the sources in connection with a particular case. They are also experienced at the other types of critical thinking (fact analysis, separating wheat from chaff in client or witness interviews, problem solving, etc) that students should encounter before graduation.
If we want a tenured law faculty that focuses on teaching students how to “think like a lawyer,” then legal writing and clinical professors fit the bill. I would put them at the core.
These professors could also teach doctrinal courses. Currently, we swamp legal writing professors with too many students. If each taught a section of 18-20 students, the professor could teach two legal writing courses (one each semester) plus a large section of a doctrinal first-year course. These professors would bring their pedagogic skills to those doctrinal courses, enhancing the teaching of analysis and reasoning throughout the first-year curriculum.
Similarly, a clinical professor could supervise a clinic each semester and also teach a doctrinal course one semester. Many clinicians already do that; their ongoing practices keep them up-to-date in many areas. A school could hire additional tenure-track faculty to teach other doctrinal courses, although I would encourage each of those professors to teach at least one writing, clinical, or simulation course: that is where we really teach students how to “think like a lawyer,” whether that thinking requires close reading of a case closely or thoughtful questioning of a client.
What about research? I’ve taught doctrinal, legal writing, and clinical courses during my almost thirty years in teaching. A course load of two reasonably sized writing courses and one doctrinal course allows plenty of time for scholarship. For a clinician, the balance is somewhat closer; it depends somewhat on the nature of the clinic and the clients’ demands. Many clinicians, however, have already shown their ability to combine clinical teaching with scholarship–as have writing professors. The strongest barriers to scholarly work by these professors, I believe, are the second class status we currently afford them, together with the constant suggestion that they’re not capable of excellent scholarship.
There is room for many types of teaching and scholarship on law faculties. Our biggest error, perpetuated at most law schools, has been keeping legal writing and clinical courses at the periphery of the curriculum and faculty. If we move those professors and their courses to the core, where they belong at any institution devoted to teaching students to think like lawyers, we would solve many of the pedagogic problems plaguing law schools today. We could teach doctrine and new “practice ready” skills, while improving the ways we teach traditional methods of thinking like a lawyer.
We could also solve some of our budget problems. Legal writing and clinical professors typically earn half of what tenured doctrinal professors bring home. What if we split the difference? If we paid all professors a salary between the one currently offered legal writing/clinical faculty and the scale used for tenured doctrinal faculty, we could moderate faculty salaries to where they were a generation ago. Those salaries would still exceed wages paid to professors in other disciplines and, I predict, would be more than enough to attract and retain talented professors in the academy.
Accrued Interest
March 22nd, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Earlier this week, a student forwarded an email that he received from his federal loan servicer. After a perky “Hi,” the email reminded the student that interest accrues every day on unsubsidized educational loans. The email then spelled out his personal liability: He’s accruing $21.79 per day in interest. As he studies for his final law school exams, celebrates on graduation day, studies for the bar, and searches for a job, interest will accrue seven days a week. By November 1, when he hopes to have received good news of bar admission and obtained a job, he’ll owe another $4,881 for his law school education–just from interest accrued after today.
This student’s experience is not unusual. In fact, the interest gathering daily on his loan is lower than the interest accrued by many students. This student is an in-state resident at a public law school, and he received a three-year partial scholarship. During his first two years of law school, Congress subsidized some of his loans (meaning that interest did not accrue). Congress revoked that benefit for professional students last July, so 1Ls and 2Ls are gathering more interest than this 3L did. The interest does not compound until six months after graduation, but it accrues every day.
Paying jobs have declined during law school, and many students feel pressure to complete unpaid internships during the summer and academic term. Those factors, combined with rising tuition and living expenses, push law school loans ever higher. The interest rates on those loans, furthermore, are steep: 6.8% for the first $20,500 borrowed each academic year and 7.9% on anything above that amount. At those rates, daily interest charges mount quickly.
ABA and media reports about “average law school debt” don’t include this accrued interest. Law schools report only the amounts that their students borrow, not the full debt at graduation. The accruing interest falls through the gap because schools process only the initial loans, they do not handle interest charges or debt collection. This unfortunate circumstance means that both the borrowers and the schools may overlook the interest gathering daily.
Concern about that neglect seems to have motivated the email my correspondent received. The loan servicer wanted him to remember that interest was accruing daily on his loan, and that he could save money by paying the interest now. But how is a borrower supposed to pay interest while still collecting the loan? Should he borrow additional funds to service the interest? If funds were available at a lower interest rate, he would have tapped them before the student loan. The message suggests that students are partying with their money rather than studying for finals, worrying about the bar exam, and searching for jobs. For a law student, this type of message just ratchets up the anxiety.
I think it would be better to send these messages to law faculty. Imagine opening an email that read: “Hi! 185 of the third-year students in your law school have loans supporting their education. We want to remind you that these loans accrue interest daily. At your school, the average amount of daily interest is $21.79 per student. That’s $4,031 in interest accruing daily in your third-year classrooms. Accrued interest between now and graduation will exceed $200,000 for your class. Between now and August 1, when these students finish the bar, the collective total will be just over $536,000. That doesn’t include principal or interest accrued earlier in law school. Have a nice day.”
The messages, of course, could be customized by school. Average accrued interest and number of indebted students would vary. For some schools, the numbers would be lower. For many, especially large private schools, they would be much higher.
None of that accrued interest will come to law schools. Nor will it benefit the clients our graduates hope to serve. Interest payments support the work of loan servicers, including the profits they realize. They also compensate the government for the lost use of the loan money, forgiven loans, and defaulted loans. What a waste of our graduates’ assets. Our costly education programs require our students, not only to pay our hefty fees, but to shoulder high-rate interest that accrues daily.
It’s sobering to think how much interest accrues on student loans during each day that we teach, hand out exams, grade, or watch our students claim their diplomas.
Summer Research Grants
March 20th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
A survey of law faculty salaries, conducted by the Society of American Law Teachers, suggests that the overwhelming majority of law schools offer summer stipends to at least some faculty. The reported stipends range from a low of $5,000 to a high of $25,000. Notably, those reports do not include any of the schools with the most highly compensated faculty; you won’t find the summer salaries for schools like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU, the University of Chicago, or Stanford on this list.
These summer stipends supplement salaries that already rank among the highest in the academy. They are also quite unusual in the academy; other university faculty do not receive summer research grants with the ease or regularity that law faculty do. Professors in other disciplines usually apply for outside grants if they want summer support. More often, they do without: they devote their summers to research even though they technically are unpaid during that time.
Why do law faculty need so much financial encouragement to produce research? Why aren’t we encouraging our faculty to seek outside grants if they want that summer support? Summer research grants are wonderful bonuses, but they shouldn’t be necessary to encourage research. People join the academy to research and teach, so that’s what we should do.
A first step in reducing the cost of legal education would be to eliminate summer research grants for full professors. We could continue to award grants to junior faculty, who are seeking tenure and may bear their own student debts. For full professors, summer research grants seem like a luxury we can give up to help both our students and our institutions.
First 2012 Employment Postings
March 18th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Kudos to the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas for posting employment information about its Class of 2012. I look forward to other schools following suit.
What’s the Financial Value of a Law Degree?
March 18th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Last year, the columnist Shawn O’Connor offered some provocative calculations about the financial value of a law degree. Drawing upon a study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, O’Connor claimed that a financial investment in a law degree “is likely to produce at least a 10x return” over the graduate’s career.
O’Connor has a personal interest in encouraging students to apply to law school; he is the founder and CEO of a company that offers test prep and admissions counseling to prospective law students. That fact alone should make readers wary of O’Connor’s claims. Several legal educators, however, have asked me to comment on O’Connor’s calculations, so let’s take a close look.
Bad Math
O’Connor gets off on the wrong foot by making a basic arithmetic error. He subtracts $2.3 million from $4.03 million to get $2 million–instead of the actual difference of $1.73 million. This is much more than a rounding error; it significantly affects O’Connor’s claim that investing in a law degree “is likely to produce at least a 10x return.” The sloppy math should further increase any reader’s skepticism.
Degrees and Occupations
A more fundamental problem with O’Connor’s analysis is that he compares the financial payoff for a degree (the BA) with the payoff for an occupation (lawyering). The Georgetown report repeatedly stresses the difference between those two categories: earnings vary by both occupation and educational level. A significant number of law graduates don’t practice law. Indeed, saturation of the legal market is pushing increasing numbers of graduates into other careers. Given that, one can’t estimate the value of a degree by looking at just one of the occupations pursued by degree holders.
The Georgetown study, in fact, suggests that a professional degree provides little financial return compared to a master’s degree in some job categories. Managers with a master’s degree average $3.76 million in lifetime earnings, grossing almost as much as managers with professional degrees (who average $3.87 million) Similarly, an accountant with a master’s degree averages $3.03 million in lifetime earnings, not far below the $3.20 million expected by an accountant with a professional degree. For an elementary or middle school teacher, a master’s degree offers average lifetime earnings of $2.16 million while a professional degree yields just $2.29 million.
These comparisons suggest that a JD does not pay off financially for many law graduates who fail to practice law. O’Connor computes the cost of a law degree as $285,000, which includes three years of foregone income. In each of the comparisons cited above, the lifetime earnings differential is considerably smaller than O’Connor’s cost of a law degree. The law degree, furthermore, must be purchased today–while any earnings bonus occurs over a lifetime.
A master’s degree, of course, also requires financial investment. But many professionals earn master’s degrees while working full-time, avoiding the heavy costs of foregone income. Most master’s degrees also cost considerably less than a JD, due to lower tuition and a shorter time frame. Using O’Connor’s own calculations, law school is a bad financial bet for graduates who go into business, accounting, primary school teaching–and, most likely, other fields outside of law. A master’s degree will lead to equal or better financial success in those occupations.
If Not Law, Then What?
O’Connor assumes that a student who eschews law school will not attend any other graduate program, settling for the average lifetime earnings of a college graduate. Students who can secure law school admission, however, are not average college graduates. If they opt against law school, they are likely to pursue other types of graduate education. Even if they leave higher education with just a BA, they are unlikely to be average wage earners in that group. The same talents that bought them admission to law school will pay off in the workplace.
The Georgetown report shows that 17.2% of workers with only a BA earn more than professional degree holders. The professional category in that comparison, moreover, includes doctors–who earn considerably more than lawyers. If we looked just at lawyers, closer to 25% of college graduates (with no further education) would earn more than the average lawyer over a lifetime. Similarly, 24.2% of master’s degree holders earn more than the average professional (again including both doctors and lawyers in the latter category).
The top quarter of PhD holders also earn considerably more than the average lawyer. According to the Georgetown report, those PhD’s average $4.7 million while the average lawyer earns just $4.03 million. With lower tuition and fellowship support, doctoral students usually pay less than JD students–further enhancing their financial advantage.
The Value of Money
Even the middle-of-the-pack college graduate, who obtains no further education, can obtain better financial returns than the average lawyer. All she has to do is invest the money she would have spent on law school in a conservative mutual fund, such as a stock index fund. Then she can work at her BA job while watching her nest egg grow. O’Connor and the Georgetown report both use 40 years to calculate lifetime income, and 40 years is a long time for an investment to grow.
Even at just 6% interest, a college grad’s investment of $285,000 (the cost of law school as calculated by O’Connor) will grow over 40 years to more than $2.9 million. That’s considerably more than the $1.76 million lifetime bonus the lawyer will secure. Indeed, as long as the BA grad secures at least a 4.7% interest rate–easily achievable over 40 years–she’ll beat the lawyer’s return on the law degree.
What about lower priced law schools? A student might pay just $20,000 a year with a scholarship to a public school. Adding that $60,000 to three years of lost salary ($135,000 in O’Connor’s calculations) yields a cost of just $195,000 for a law degree. Again, however, the college graduate who invests that money in a mutual fund will easily beat the $1.76 million bonus earned by a lawyer. $195,000 invested for 40 years at just 6% interest will yield a little over $2 million as the college graduate’s bonus. (O’Connor omits any discussion of taxes in his calculations, so I do as well. Both salaries and investment income are taxed, at a variety of rates, so it is not clear how taxes would affect the comparisons.)
Most college graduates, of course, don’t have money sitting around to invest. They borrow money for law school, hoping that the financial return will pay off their debt plus more. This reality, however, doesn’t improve the financial comparison. Let’s assume that we have two college graduates, one who goes directly into the workforce and the other who borrows money for law school. To simplify the comparison, let’s eliminate living expenses; we’ll assume that they each have the same living expenses, paid for three years by their parents.
Again using O’Connor’s figures, the grad who enters the workforce will earn $135,000 over three years. Since her parents are paying her living expenses, she’ll invest all of that salary in a mutual fund. If she realizes a return of 6.5%, she’ll have $1.67 million after 40 years–plus, of course, her earnings during those 40 years as a college graduate.
The grad who attends law school, on the other hand, will borrow at least $60,000–the money needed for three years of discounted tuition at a state law school. She won’t need to borrow any money for living expenses in this comparison, because her parents are paying those. This hypothetical law student is borrowing less than $20,500 per year, so she’ll benefit from the lowest interest rate for graduate student loans (6.8%). If she’s able to repay her loan within 10 years of graduation, an optimistic scenario, she’ll pay about $32,500 in total interest (including the interest that accumulated during law school). Assuming this law school graduate works 40 full-time years as a lawyer, her financial bonus is $1.67 million (her $1.76 million premium for working as a lawyer minus her tuition and interest payments). Even with very favorable assumptions on tuition and repayment rates, the lawyer will fare no better financially than the college graduate.
Both graduates in this comparison face some risks. The college graduate, for example, might not obtain 6.5% interest on her investment. The law graduate, however, faces equal or greater risk. If she is unable to find work as a lawyer, takes time off to care for family, or suffers any months of unemployment, her earnings premium will fall. The college graduate’s mutual fund will grow regardless of her employment history.
Past, Present, and Future
No one knows what today’s law graduates will earn over their lifetimes. O’Connor, like the authors of the Georgetown report, can only try to predict the future from the past. To do that, the Georgetown authors looked at workers in different age cohorts. They collected data on the wages that lawyers (and other workers) of different ages earned between 2007 and 2009.
Each of those age cohorts started practicing at different times. The 25-year-old lawyers in the Georgetown study started practicing law after 2005. The 64-year-old ones started practicing as early as 1967. It is very unlikely that a legal career spanning the years 1967 through 2007, widely recognized as boom years for the American legal profession, will look the same as one reaching from 2005 through 2045–much less from 2016 through 2056 (the projected career span for students who will enter law school this fall). Projecting one generation’s financial success from a very different generation’s experience demands caution.
The Georgetown report, in fact, includes an ominous note on this point. The authors acknowledge that their data show salaries for professionals climbing steeply from age 25 through 40, then leveling off for the rest of the working lifespan. That pattern could suggest that professionals work hard early in their careers to build their earning potential, reaping their greatest financial returns after age 40. But it could also mean that the professionals who were over 40 in 2007-2009, those who began their careers before 1995, are riding a wave of high return on their professional degrees–while those who graduated later are doing less well. Without more longitudinal data, we can’t distinguish these explanations.
Conclusion
O’Connor’s calculations offer little reassurance that investing in law school promises high financial rewards. On the contrary, a closer look at the math suggests that law degrees are overpriced compared to their likely financial pay-off. If we want people to continue serving as lawyers, we need to reduce the cost of law school. Senior lawyers today undoubtedly benefited financially from their legal education; they averaged $1.76 million more in lifetime earnings than their college graduate peers, and they paid very low rates for law school.
The calculation for today’s law students is very different. High tuition, the need to withdraw for three years from the workplace, and uncertain job outcomes make law school a relatively poor financial investment. It’s time to shift that balance.
2012 Employment Data
March 15th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Consumer advocates have criticized law schools, not only for posting misleading employment data, but for disclosing those figures too slowly. The ABA acted to remedy both of those problems. Its revised Standard 509 and accompanying worksheet require schools to publish specific employment outcomes “on the school’s website each year by March 31” for “persons who graduated with a J.D. degree between September 1 two calendar years prior and August 31 one calendar year prior.” That’s legalese for: nine-month employment outcomes for the Class of 2012 must appear on websites by the end of this month.
There’s no reason for schools to neglect that deadline. They already have the 2012 outcomes, which are tabulated as of February 15. They’ve had another month to compile the figures, which are due in the NALP office by next Monday, March 18. Most important, prospective students need that information. As applicants weigh the offers extended to them, and decide whether to attend law school, they should know the job outcomes for the students who graduated ten months ago–not just for the ones who graduated twenty-two months ago.
I have great sympathy for Career Services staff, who feel that they operate under a blizzard of deadlines. First NALP wants this, then US News wants that, and now the ABA wants a somewhat different set of numbers by yet another deadline. Permeating all of that, deans and faculty want them to !!get jobs for graduates by February 15!! Sometimes the dates and reports seem more important than the jobs and graduates themselves.
But this ABA deadline is the most essential one: publishing updated information to prospective students is crucial. That shouldn’t be simply the task of Career Services staff; it should be the first website priority for the school as a whole.
Every accredited law school will update its website multiple times between now and March 31. With admitted students weighing offers, there will be plenty of upbeat news items about alumni accomplishments, faculty awards, and other achievements. That’s as it should be. But let’s make sure that the 2012 employment data appear as well. They’re the first website priority.
I welcome notifications of schools that have already complied with the ABA rule and posted their 2012 job data.
The Illinois State Bar Association Speaks
March 14th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
The Illinois State Bar Association’s Special Committee on the Impact of Law School Debt has issued a final Report with a striking set of recommendations. The Bar Association’s Board of Governors endorsed the Report and Recommendations on March 8; the Association’s full assembly will vote on them in June.
The full Report deserves study by all legal educators, as well as practitioners who care about the future of the profession and legal education. The committee compellingly describes the plight of graduates burdened with high debt, as well as the challenges that debt causes for employers and clients. The Report then explores the companion problem, that graduates are poorly prepared for the jobs available to them. Here are just a few of the committee’s many recommendation:
1. The federal government should cap loans available to law students.
2. The government should also impose outcome-based requirements for schools to maintain loan eligibility. A school, for example, would lose its loan eligibility if more than 35% of its graduates failed to reduce their loan principal by at least $1 during a given period.
3. Congress should make private educational loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, using the pre-2005 definition of “financial hardship.”
4. The ABA should modify accreditation standards to expand the credits that students may earn through distance education.
5. The ABA should require schools to gather and report more information about job outcomes, including outcomes over the course of their graduates’ legal careers. The latter requirement would not involve tracking all graduates, but could rely upon sampling.
6. Law schools should focus on practice-oriented courses and teach fewer “exotic” courses. They should also teach law office management.
7. Law schools should include judges and practitioners on faculty hiring and tenure committees. “Practicing judges and lawyers,” the Report suggests, “can provide unique insight into the candidate’s skills as a practitioner and will ensure that the law school hires faculty who are best able to educate law students for practice.”
8. State supreme courts should find ways to reduce the cost of gaining bar admission. Courts should consider allowing third-year law students to take the bar exam, as Arizona has done. They should also consider Wisconsin’s model of granting a “diploma privilege” to graduates of in-state schools who obtain a specified GPA and complete designated courses.
9. Bar Association members should assist pre-law advisers in giving debt and career counseling to students interested in attending law school.
10. Bar Associations should also work with law schools to develop apprenticeship programs that could start during the third year of law school.
The Report contains many other recommendations, as well as fuller discussion of the rationales for each proposal. John E. Thies, President of the Illinois State Bar Association, created the Special Committee that produced the Report.
Deluged by Debt
March 13th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
As Brian Tamanaha writes at Balkinization, law school debt levels continue their relentless climb. The latest figures from US News show that, among 2012 graduates, the average amount borrowed for law school exceeded $150,000 at six law schools. Only one of those schools (Northwestern) ranks among the top fifteen law schools; one other (American) ranks 56th. The other four (Thomas Jefferson, California Western, Phoenix, and New York Law School) lie in the unranked fourth tier.
As Brian’s post shows, the job outcomes at five of these schools (all but Northwestern) are dismal. Less than 40% of the students at these schools obtained full-time jobs that required bar admission and would last at least one year. Even at Northwestern, only 77% of the class met that mark. How can all of the graduates with part-time, temporary, or non-lawyering jobs possibly pay off more than $150,000 in debt–plus all of the accrued interest on that debt? What calculations can justify attending most law schools at that debt-to-outcome ratio?
The problem, of course, reaches far beyond these six schools. They are at the top of the debt ladder, but most other law schools are close behind. 123 law schools, well over half of the 193 listed schools, reported average amounts borrowed that exceeded $100,000. Even Irvine law school’s first graduates, who paid no tuition for their three years of law school, reported debt. More than two-thirds (68%) of Irvine’s initial class incurred debt, borrowing an average of $49,602 for their “free” law school ride. Remarkably, that figure gave Irvine the second lowest average debt load among the 193 law schools.
When students borrow almost $50,000 to attend law school, even without paying tuition, we have to re-think the way we structure legal education.
US News and Employment Outcomes
March 12th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Over the last two years, pressure has mounted for more transparent information about the jobs that law school graduates obtain. US News traditionally used very coarse measures of employment, most recently focusing on the percentage of graduates who reported any type of job nine months after graduation. Those nine-month employment rates included part-time jobs, temporary positions, and employment with little relationship to a law degree. A part-time sales clerk at Macy’s was just as “employed” as a law firm associate on the partnership track.
This measure allowed law schools to claim very high employment rates, both in the US News tables and in their own promotional materials. The dazzling nine-month percentages–97%, 98%, 99%!–implied that law school was still a sure road to secure, professional, and well paid employment. Applicants had to seek other information, often buried in complex websites, to understand how many of those “employed” graduates were working in part-time, short-term jobs–sometimes funded by the law schools themselves.
We’ve made progress over the last year. Law School Transparency led the way by publishing more detailed job information about every ABA-accredited law school. The ABA followed suit by requesting more nuanced information from law schools and publishing that data. The ABA also revised its accreditation standards to insist that law schools disclose more complete information to students. But still, those tables in US News, with all of those high employment rates, were very, very appealing.
Today US News joined the push for more accurate employment information. The 2014 rankings include a new measure of employment outcomes. US News now weights jobs according to whether they are JD-related, part-time or full-time, and short-term or long-term. The online magazine is not disclosing the full formula, but notes that “[f]ull weight was given for graduates who had a full-time job lasting at least a year where bar passage was required or a J.D. degree was an advantage.” At the other end of the spectrum, “[t]he lowest weight applied to jobs categorized as both part-time and short-term.”
Perhaps most important, US News has published for each law school the percentage of its 2011 graduates who obtained jobs falling into the first category–jobs that were full-time, long-term, and related to the JD. Those percentages are available, free of charge, for all law school applicants to ponder.
The results aren’t pretty. At the top eight schools, more than 90% of graduates are still finding full-time, long-term jobs that use their law degrees. Some of those jobs may not justify the cost of attendance, and we might still wonder about some of the graduates who didn’t obtain full-time, long-term, law-related work within nine months of graduation. But law-related employment rates of 90% or more might justify three years of expensive, intensive professional education.
Outside the elite eight, however, job outcomes plummet sharply. Berkeley and Michigan, two premiere public schools, tie for ninth place in the new ranking. Yet only 82.6% and 85.8% of their graduates, respectively, found full-time, long-term employment for which the JD conferred an advantage. Conversely, by nine months after graduation, 14-17% of their graduates were still marking time in part-time, short-term, or non-legal positions. Those aren’t outcomes for which students should pay top tuition dollars.
Further down the list, the outcomes are even more bleak. Minnesota and Washington University in St. Louis round out the top twenty law schools with a tie for nineteenth place. Yet nine months after graduation, only two thirds (66.3% and 66.6%) of the graduates from these schools were working in long-term, full-time jobs related to the JD. A full third of each class failed to achieve employment that used their expensive and hard-won degrees.
The percentages vary after that, climbing as high as 88.0% (for George Washington) and falling as low as 23.6% (Whittier). Over the next few days, bloggers will analyze the factors that contributed to higher employment rates (school-funded positions, geography, a large percentage of JD Advantage jobs) and those that produced lower outcomes. No amount of analysis, however, can conceal the overall pattern. No school outside the top eight placed more than 90% of its graduates in full-time, long-term, law-related work. Only 13 schools, including that top eight, exceeded the 85% mark. And only 34 schools, out of the 195 supplying employment information, managed to place as many as three-quarters of their graduates in a full-time, long-term, law-related job within nine months of graduation.
The new employment measure devised by US News is far from perfect. Its greatest flaw lies in equating all “JD Advantage” jobs with positions requiring bar admission. Statistics gathered by NALP show that law graduates are far less satisfied with JD Advantage jobs than with ones requiring a law license. Among 2011 graduates, 46.8% of those in JD Advantage jobs were still seeking other employment; just 16.5% of those in bar-admission-required jobs were doing so. Those statistics appear only in NALP’s Jobs and JDs book, and they do not distinguish full-time, long-term jobs from part-time, short-term ones, but I will ask NALP if they can provide more information on those distinctions.
Even more worrisome, I don’t believe that any organization audits the claims that graduates and law schools make about which jobs carry the “JD Advantage” tag. NALP counts the jobs reported in that category but, apparently, does not ask schools to identify the positions that count as “JD Advantage.” Nor, to my knowledge, does the ABA or US News. Does a job as a court assignment clerk count as a “JD Advantage” position? What about a job as a middle school social studies teacher? Or one as a bail agent, debt collector, or police officer? I can imagine a JD assisting workers in any of these fields–but the jobs are ones that the majority of job holders perform quite well without the training or expense of a JD.
These are issues that we need to address very soon, both for purposes of the US News ranking scheme and with respect to the information that law schools provide their applicants. But for now, the generous definition of “employed,” which includes any job carrying the “JD Advantage” label, makes the outcomes reported by US News especially troubling. Even allowing for a very liberal definition of law-related jobs, even including all of those “alternative” careers that schools have touted, law schools are leaving a remarkably large percentage of their graduates without jobs that use their degrees. Short-term and part-time jobs are not good outcomes for students who have spent over $100,000–often borrowed at high interest rates–for a legal education. Neither are jobs unrelated to the JD, ones for which schools don’t even dare claim a “JD advantage.”
Prospective students and law schools need to take note of these outcomes and take them seriously to heart. If we can’t provide even solid “JD Advantage” jobs to a substantial number of our graduates, then the value of our degree is in serious question.
About Law School Cafe
Cafe Manager & Co-Moderator
Deborah J. Merritt
Cafe Designer & Co-Moderator
Kyle McEntee
Law School Cafe is a resource for anyone interested in changes in legal education and the legal profession.
Around the Cafe
Subscribe
Categories
Recent Comments
- on Scholarship Advice
- on ExamSoft: New Evidence from NCBE
- on COVID-19 and the Bar Exam
- on Women Law Students: Still Not Equal
- on Ranking Academic Impact
Recent Posts
- The Bot Takes a Bow
- Fundamental Legal Concepts and Principles
- Lay Down the Law
- The Bot Updates the Bar Exam
- GPT-4 Beats the Bar Exam
Monthly Archives
Participate
Have something you think our audience would like to hear about? Interested in writing one or more guest posts? Send an email to the cafe manager at merritt52@gmail.com. We are interested in publishing posts from practitioners, students, faculty, and industry professionals.