Brutally fine article in the New York Times business section today on merit scholarships used at law schools to entice 1Ls. The 1ls receive scholarships to persuade them to come, and goose the schools’ LSAT and GPA rankings for US News and Report purposes – but then wind up losing the scholarship at the end of the first year because they are conditioned on meeting a certain GPA.
(Update: TaxProf Blog has a useful article excerpt, and has also posted the SSRN abstract of Professor Jerry Organ’s article, cited in the NYT article. Also, look at Law School Transparency’s discussion and proposed standard for law school disclosure.)
(Another Update: I had never heard of “section stacking” until I read these comments. Is it common among law schools?)
Doesn’t sound so bad? Perhaps the school has an imposed mean, or an imposed curve – as many do for the first year class – and perhaps the required GPA is at the mean, but the school has given more than half the class scholarships. Or perhaps the required GPA is 3.0 and the imposed mean is 2.8 and the number of scholarships is again relatively high.
Once you’re in for the first year, the scholarship is enough to entice you in, but not enough to allow you to forgo loans for a significant chunk. You lose the scholarship, and feel like you have to finish out the three years even though it requires borrowing the whole cost for the other two years. (Note: this is not as irrational as some commenters have suggested, if you had to borrow money for uncovered costs in the first year; saying, cut your losses and get out now, assumes that one has a lot more information about one’s uncertain prospects of employment as a lawyer than you necessarily do).
Meanwhile, in addition to goosing the front end LSAT and GPA, the students so enticed raise the first-time bar passage rate for the school at the other end. The school has obtained benefits with certainty; the students have undertaken an uncertain wager with little information upfront, and little certainty at the other end. The information needed to figure out what that generous looking offer means is not really available – particularly how many other students have been awarded the same deal. Even if one believes that this is a pure disclosure problem, the realities of how schools provide (or not) information raises many questions about transparency that would provide useable information to both buyer and seller of legal education.
It is easy to say, buyer beware, and gosh, those would-be law students sure are stupid and don’t read or understand the fine print, if they had any idea how to find it and assuming the school provides it. It’s even easier to say, stupid English or religious studies or whatever humanities major who can’t figure out the basics of something like a school awarding more scholarships than can fit above the median. We can go on to the systemic behavioral irrationalities that are exploited by the schools. Viz., it is indeed the case the humanities and social science majors tend to have undergraduate GPAs that look pretty stellar by comparison to science and engineering students; naturally they assume that they won’t be far out of that ballpark in law school.
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Commenters, please skip any sneers about law students who can’t figure out the basics. The real problem here is with the schools that in any ordinary sense conceal basic consumer information or bury it under an avalanche of love and group hugs. Update: Thanks – comments are worth reading. Orin Kerr challenges some of the assumptions in the article with some hypos. There is some interesting push-back.
For my part, I think I would like to ask commenters to address what the model form of disclosure would look like – what information should ideally be available, easily available, and in what form – to ensure well informed buyers and sellers. (Byomtov in the comments offers a useful proposal for disclosure.)
And what would disclosure look like be if one were treating this as the kind of informed, plain language disclosure that we believe should be the ideal to create efficient decisions in consumer credit, things like the APR, etc.? After all, in some of the most important aspects, this whole process – including the acceptance of a scholarship with its special conditions that make it part price discount, part embedded wager – is consumer credit on a very large scale for individuals. I would think that the disclosure process should take seriously the special features of this particular type of consumer debt – large amounts, uncertain ability to repay, little or no credit risk review by lender, lack of discharge in bankruptcy, etc.
(Update: The article features a new article on SSRN by Professor Jerry Organ. I’ve skimmed it quickly and it is well worth a read.)
Luke says:
The only contribution I can make is that the merit-based scholarship I got was not contingent on my maintaining any GPA.
However, if it were, I probably would have had the hubris to think that there’s no way I wouldn’t be in the top-whatever.
May 1, 2011, 12:04 amZiz says:
The schools should be praised for not baldly lying as many seem to do with their employment and salary statistics.
Excluding for-profit and online schools, does anyone know whether other schools routinely misrepresent so much to their prospective students?
May 1, 2011, 12:06 amSimon P. says:
While I don’t think that this practice is, shall we say, commendable, I’m having trouble finding the libertarian hook for complaint. Law schools are upfront on the conditions, aren’t they? Maintain this GPA, keep this money. If you think to ask about how the grade curve works, they (probably) would tell you the truth. If you think to ask whether a significant portion of the initial recipients of the merit-based aid retain it after the first year, they (probably) would tell you that, too.
I don’t think law students who take the deal are stupid or underinformed; they make a reasonable guess as to where they’d end up and, in a number of cases, they’re wrong. But that’s the deal they cut, isn’t it? They assume that someone else will be the sucker. Turns out it’s them. It happens. At any rate, they get a good discount on their first year. Better than nothing, right?
I mean, compare to payday lending or other sorts of lending that, we’re told on this website, provide a useful and important source of credit for lower-income individuals. These kinds of services also exploit a kind of behavioral “irrationality,” don’t they? People who take out payday loan don’t necessarily think of their interest rates in annual terms and likely believe that they won’t get buried under a rotating debt load (“I’ll catch up with the next paycheck”). There might be fees or charges that stick them that they didn’t know about, but I’m sure one of the regular VCers would argue that they are “rationally ignorant” about such “hidden” charges.
Yeah, there’s a lot about the law school and broader legal-education market (LSAT and bar exam prep, anyone?) that’s seedy and weaselly. But what are a bunch of libertarians going to do about it?
May 1, 2011, 12:31 amOrin Kerr says:
Let’s assume a school has a 3.2 average GPA. It awards a merit scholarship, and the school says that the student only keeps the scholarship if the student maintains a 3.0 GPA. Assume that the students aren’t told that the average GPA is a 3.2, which (say) 70% of the class maintains. I’m curious, is that misleading?
I ask because the bad thing that Golden Gate seems to do is hide the fact that its curve is so low. If a school uses a GPA cut off that is well below the average for the school, I don’t quite see what is so offensive about using a GPA cut-off for merit scholarships.
May 1, 2011, 12:50 amRockfish says:
I have two thoughts. First, if the alternative two a scholarship for zero years is a scholarship for one year – that is not so bad.
Second, there are a lot of lawyers, maybe this function should serve to weed out those who shouldn’t be in law school. You mention that many people feel they should finish b/c they are already one year in. Many careers take several years to weed people out, why not law? Law has virtually no process for thinning out the number who enter law school, maybe this should be it.
For example, think of minor leage baseball players who are paid a large signing bonus to play. They play for a few years, limit other career options, then flame out. I guess it is a little different b/c they are getting paid in the meantime, but it is a rough analogy.
May 1, 2011, 12:55 amOrin Kerr says:
While I’m at it, consider three hypothetical students at Law School X, which has a 3.2 average GPA.
Student 1 gets a merit scholarship because he has a very high LSAT score, and he is told that he needs to maintain a 3.0 to keep the merit scholarship. He earns a 2.9 GPA, well below average for the school, and he loses the merit scholarship.
Student 2 gets a merit scholarship because he has a very high LSAT score, and he is told that he needs to maintain a 3.0 to keep the merit scholarship. He earns a 3.1 GPA, slightly below average for the school. But it’s good enough to keep the merit scholarship, so he keeps it.
Student 3 does not get a merit scholarship because she didn’t do very well on her LSATs. However, she kicks ass on her law school exams and gets a 3.9 GPA in her first year. She is at or very near the top of the class. After her first year, she seeks a merit scholarship. However, she is told she cannot get one, because the merit scholarship money went to Student 1 and Student 2thanks to their high LSATs — and to Student 2 for his second year, because he earned a 3.1 GPA.
The NYT article focuses a lot on Student 1, and how tough it is for him. But as between 1, 2, and 3, don’t you feel that Student 3 is the one who really has a valid complaint? Student 3 is at the top of her class, while the other students got “merit scholarship” money and were in the bottom half of the class. All things being equal, I feel more for Student 3 than Student 1.
May 1, 2011, 12:58 amsloopl3 says:
As a recipient of a merit scholarship (and having managed to keep it) I have to say the school was very upfront about the conditions, including what the average GPA cutoffs are for 1Ls. I’d be more curious in knowing how many students receive the scholarships. The cutoff is typically around the top 25% in terms of class rank, but I’d venture to say that more than 25% of the students receive the scholarships (meaning some are bound to lose it, even if only those receiving them made up the top 25%). Our school, however, lets you keep half the scholarship $$ as long as you stay above a 2nd GPA cutoff which is usually around the 50% rank.
May 1, 2011, 1:53 amkevin says:
I agree. But that’s probably because I’m student 3.
May 1, 2011, 1:55 amLB says:
I am, too, but what is the point of the scholarship? Surely no student “deserves” the scholarship. As I see it, the primary goal of a scholarship is to entice a prospective student to attend (and perhaps to remain). Unless student 3 will transfer out, the biggest risk to the school seems to be disgruntled students. Because there are not many student 3s, that is not as significant of a risk as the actual existence of other disgruntled students who complain that the administration (at whatever school) invests too little in the bottom 60-70% of the class.
May 1, 2011, 2:22 amSouth Texas Law Prof says:
I keep saying at my school that we should have a financial penalty for students who earn low GPA’s – like an extra $100 per credit hour for each point below a 2.6 – to incentivize the slacker students and to recoup the disproportionate institutional costs they impose on everyone else. Performing poorly in law school imposes real externalities on the institution, and indirectly, on everyone in the institution.
I think the scholarships are FINE – they’re the other way of achieving the same result (the nicer way, I suppose). It’s easy for profs at Ivy League schools to disparage the attempts of lower-ranked law schools to improve their standing.
May 1, 2011, 2:33 amMatt says:
But wouldn’t that only work in the absence of a curve?
May 1, 2011, 2:43 amHamlet says:
I think the thrust of this whole discussion is precisely that–the schools are not forthright about the relationship between the cutoff and the grade curve, and the resulting conclusion about the likelihood of maintaining a scholarship. Yes, the affected students are to a large extent falling prey to their own assumptions. But the behavior of the schools appears calculated to induce a false understanding on the part of the student, regarding the actual probability that they will maintain the scholarship for three years. If it doesn’t induce the misunderstanding, it at least knowingly allows it to persist. That is the behavior of schools that’s being objected to here, not the mere existence of cutoffs. The situation would be very different if students were pointedly informed that X% of the scholarships are retained for the second and third years.
As to your second post–yes, in some objective sense of fairness, student 3 deserves the money the most (accepting the premise that money is for “merit”). But the complaint here has to do with the expectations created in student 1. Student 3 agreed to begin law school with no expectation of merit-based aid, and so this argument doesn’t apply to him.
May 1, 2011, 2:59 amJames Darling says:
My law school’s merit scholarships are based on rank, not GPA: you have to end each year in the top half of the class to keep it if you have one. Additionally, after the first year students who did not have a merit scholarship but were in the top quarter or so (I forget the exact percentage) receive one covering about half the cost of tuition going forward.
It seems to me this scheme addresses the basic fairness problems addressed in the article. Students are on notice that keeping their scholarships won’t be a walk in the park, and those students are likely to know the average undergraduate GPA and LSAT score of the previous class of students so they have something to compare themselves to. My only complaint is that students are unaware going in how many of their peers have scholarships.
May 1, 2011, 3:07 amlawstudent says:
I’m currently a law student. Unfortunately, merit scholarships have become a way for schools to game US News at the expense of students. My school requires a student to be in the top 15% to maintain their scholarship. But the school places all the scholarship kids in one section (5 sections total). The school does give a scholarship to those who finish in the top 15% for subsequent years, but it is much less than a lot of the merit scholarships awarded to incoming students.
May 1, 2011, 3:57 amOne student finished number one, but only got a third of what a student ranked much lower got.
ad-absurdum says:
Public schools in the University of California certainly do. I’m a graduating 3L at one now that truly convinced me that a vast majority of the top of the class get amazing giant firm jobs, paying at least $120k a year starting. Though I’ve now realized a giant firm isn’t where I’d want to be, the statistics given to me pre-enrollment led me to believe that I’d still make much more than I’m expecting to after graduation. And I’m lucky to have lined up a job after graduation.
May 1, 2011, 5:48 amI wasn’t lied to regarding a scholarship or tuition. Well, the tuition hiked due to state budget concerns in the last year, but I can’t blame the school for not predicting that in 2008. Still, even though I want to practice law, I’m not sure that I would have chosen the same path if I had truly informed consent 3 years ago.
Hoya Lawya says:
If you’re going to law school because you received a scholarship, then you lose the scholarship and decide to finish out of a sense of obligation (not because it’s what you want to do and where you want to be), you shouldn’t have gone to law school in the first place. I turned down a scholarship at another school to go to Georgetown, gambling on the employment statistics and the greater opportunities that theoretically come from being a graduate of the “top 15.” (It isn’t panning out and I have some regrets.)
I don’t think standardized testing is bad per se; in fact, I think it can be valuable and can provide at least some indication of intelligence or capability. To be honest, people who complain the most about the meaninglessness of such testing are the ones who don’t do well. (I’m not suggesting it is the SOLE indicator of intelligence or potential for success.) So I don’t quarrel with schools enticing those with higher LSAT scores.
What I don’t like is the enforced curve. Professors have told me (and I believe them) that at a school like Georgetown, most of the students are quite intelligent and write solid exams. The difference between the A and the B may be only a few points. In this economy, however, your GPA is crucial.
On the opposite end of attracting too many kids with scholarships because their LSATs are through the roof, Georgetown will admit students to the evening program who juuuusssst make the cut in the numbers pool. If one enters the evening program, one may transfer to the day program, take classes one summer and graduate in three years. What happens is that about 60% of the evening program students are biding their time, waiting to break into the day program. The other students are there because they are a little older and they have jobs/spouses/kids. So those of us with full-time jobs were forced to compete on the same playing field as kids with no employment who could study all day. Evening program students are not eligible for grants and so fork over (or, more frequently, borrow) the full amount. It’s like they line us all up at the starting line and we have to run the same distance, and then they strap 20 pound ankle weights on the students who work. THIS, in my mind, is the greatest scam they have going. The evening program is a huge cash-cow and sets up well-meaning, brilliant students who are purposefully in the evening program to fail.
May 1, 2011, 7:39 amRoger Sweeny says:
What’s the libertarian hook? To me, it’s that if something like this were being done by a for-profit corporation, the vast majority of law professors would consider it morally wrong. However, since it’s their business, and since it indirectly pays their salaries, they don’t give a flying f***.
(Perhaps, riffing off ad-absurdum’s post immediately above, this will begin a campaign by law professors to close down half the law schools. There just aren’t anywhere near enough jobs–and won’t be for as long as the eye can see–to make the monetary expenditure pay off for at least half the students. But I won’t hold my breath.)
May 1, 2011, 8:43 amAlan Gunn says:
One of the law schools I taught at gave non-need-based scholarships to admitted applicants with particularly low LSATs and GPAs. I don’t believe it took them away if they did better than expected, however.
May 1, 2011, 8:44 amloki13 says:
First, while I usually agree with Prof. Kerr, I think his hypo is a bit misleading in this case- most of the egregious abuses (IMO) do not occur at schools that set GPAs below the average (or median) for their class, so his hypo not only does little to illuminate the discussion, it actually obfuscates it.
I remember in my experience, having attained a very high LSAT (this was some time ago) I was deluged with offers from what are informally called “T4″ schools. These came with some unbelievable scholarship offers — conditioned with GPA requirements. Of course, I had no way of knowing how to evaluate these offers.
I ended up choosing a much less lucrative package at a more highly regarded school and performing incredibly well there (which would be the student three example). I later heard from many peers that chose the lucrative offers from the *ahem* degree mills and were unable to keep up, despite best efforts.
Why is this? Expectations (grade inflation today, so an announcement of GPA cutoffs of 3.0 or 3.2 seems easy to people accustomed to getting 4.0s their entire life). Prospect of free money. All sorts of reasons.
I do think there is something very wrong about some of these schools praying on (often) recent college students naivete regarding many things, including the job market. To hand out more places than the grade curve would allow you to honor (not even including the non-schoalrship students!) is not just wrong, it encourages an atmosphere of distrust and enmity among the students- which is a shame, because, often at these schools, the stakes end up being so low (which is the topic of another post).
Anyway, my two cents. I think if most people are being honest, they can think of a few schools that seem to exist only to make money (not that this is a bad thing!), and if they manage to get someone to pass the bar here and there- hey, bonus!
[OK COMMENTS: Loki13, my "hypo" is real, though: It is describing GW Law School, the school where I teach, which is specifically mentioned in the article as one of the schools that allegedly engages in this practice. GW's curve is about a 3.2, and according to the story, it uses a cutoff of 3.0 for students to keep merit scholarships. If you think it is misleading and obfuscating to make GW's practice part of the story, then I would think you would criticize the NYT, not me, for making GW's practice part of the story.]
May 1, 2011, 8:47 amDNL says:
Law schools typically do what they can to hide the bag, at least when dealing with admissions etc. The most egregious are the classic, intentional misrepresentations regarding post-graduation employment statistics. Combine them with this scholarship scam and it’s downright scary for a victim. Take this (fictitious, but “based on a true story”) example of stats as reported:
* 75% are employed at graduation. 95% are employed nine months after graduation.
* About 20% choose a non-legal career, a testament to the flexibility that comes with a JD.
* Of the other 80%, about two-thirds enter private practice, while the other third chooses public service. Public service careers can begin, for example, in district attorneys offices, public interest organizations, and of course, judicial clerkships.
* The median first year salary for a graduate who joins a private practice law firm is $130,000.
A would-be student could very easily conclude that he or she — wanting to go into private practice — would have no problem landing a $115,000 job at worst a few months after the bar exam. That, combined with a “hey, they think I’m special” scholarship is a recipe for utter disaster.
So, where are the flaws?
Some are visible:
* The use of “choose” instead of “end up with” or the equivalent suggest that the young graduate is in control of his or her destiny, which is at best (especially in this economy) only partially true.
* Assuming you see through that, the layered percentages are another obfuscation technique. 95% are employed, of which 80% practice law, of which “about two-thirds” (but really, 60%) go into private practice. That’s 45.6% — less than half of all graduates!
* “Median” salary isn’t “average.” And “joins a private practice law firm” doesn’t include those who can’t find work and hang a shingle (which admittedly is rare).
And then there are the invisible flaws:
* The “average” salary is $110k.
* While 98% of graduates reported whether they had found employment, only 80% reported their salaries. And “reported” is also misleading, because those who enter NALP firms have their info reported for them. So the “average” salary is too high. Let’s say it’s closer to $95,000.
* The salary breakdown for law firms is bimodal, so “average” and “median” are mostly inappropriate anyway.
The truth: 25% of graduates make $145,000. 75% make, on average, $60,000.
But again, that’s obfuscated. The pitch is that if you come to our school — and we’ll let you do it for free! — you’re going to be making $100k++ soon after you graduate.
Scary stuff.
May 1, 2011, 8:50 amdearieme says:
“You lose the scholarship, and feel like you have to finish out the three years”: why? You’ve had a year’s legal training and you’ve had a scholarship to boast about on your CV. Moreover you’ve learned that the law, or at least Law School, isn’t for you. Count your lucky stars and move on.
May 1, 2011, 9:04 amN says:
Cuts both ways. If a for profit company did this, then the average libertarian/conservative would be just peachy with it. They’d say that the law student should have been aware, and the policy is actually beneficial in some way. See, i.e. cell phone contracts, credit card agreements, website terms of service, software click through.
May 1, 2011, 9:20 amexs says:
Be sure to read Law School Transparency’s take on the article and this subject at http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/2011/04/proposing-a-new-standard-to-require-scholarship-retention-information
May 1, 2011, 9:38 amA Reader says:
One thing that was discussed a lot back when I was applying to law school was schools that stuck all their merit scholarship recipients in the same 1L section (framing it as an “Honors” section or something) – since they were all curved together, it was statistically impossible for most of them to keep their scholarships. I notice this wasn’t mentioned in the NYT article – is it an urban legend or are there schools that really do this?
May 1, 2011, 9:44 amRandy says:
“Law has virtually no process for thinning out the number who enter law school, maybe this should be it.”
Perhaps, but I doubt any law school is going to kick out a paying customer after the first or second year.
Texas Prof: “I keep saying at my school that we should have a financial penalty for students who earn low GPA’s — like an extra $100 per credit hour for each point below a 2.6 — to incentivize the slacker students and to recoup the disproportionate institutional costs they impose on everyone else.”
What costs do they impose on everyone else?
If you wanted a truly merit based system, you would tie tuition directly to grades or class ranking. No.1 gets free tuition, and the bottom of the class guy has to work double shifts at pizza delivery.
May 1, 2011, 9:44 amDoug Berman says:
In my view, this concern about merit scholarships is just the tip of a huge iceberg concerning the economics and competitive realities of modern law school education. And this iceberg concerns not just issues driven by the relative high cost of higher education and the incentives created by US News rankings, but also the problem with a standard modern law school model in which the vast majority of law school teach only “national” law and do not encourage or even really enable students to effectively specialize in particular legal sub-fields.
In light of the recent NFL draft, let me suggest a metaphor in which we imagine colleges not only competing for all best high-school athletes (whether they played football or other sports), and then having a specialized “football school” that required these best athletes to learn/play/get graded based on their performance at every football position so that, when they will finish their college careers, the NFL will learn only that certain elite high-school athletes ended 4 years of football school as A players while others ended up B players and a few ended up C players.
If such a football training operated like this, we’d likely see lots elite high-school athletes eager for NFL experience/riches gravitating to top football college programs (which already happens now), and then we’d see the NFL teams, unable to draft based on specialized talent, drafting all the A-graded players and then the B-graded players and even the C-graded players from elite programs likely welln before the A-graded players from the less renown programs.
As we play out this metaphor, we’d surely see elite (and near elite) college football training programs compete in lots of intense ways to become an elite program so that their A and B and C graded players get NFL opportunities (and that fact itself would be a selling point) and so on.
The point of all this is to suggest that the legal training and legal hiring market is somewhat dysfunctional because law school merely recruit and seek to enhance merely “raw legal talent” rather than recruit and seek to enhance abilities to be diversely effective lawyers serving different societal needs.
The problem, of course, is that history, tradition and the challenges of legal specialization early in legal training all foster the “raw legal talent” approach to legal education recruitment and training. But, in my law professor experienced view, this basic reality is the source of most ills in the current legal education and legal services marketplace.
May 1, 2011, 9:50 amDjDiverDan says:
Even entering law students should know the meaning of the phrase “Caveat Emptor”. If they don’t, let this be their first lesson in legal vocabulary.
May 1, 2011, 9:59 amJD says:
I think Student 3 may be in the best situation of all, at least at T2 and T3 schools.
Student 1 is certainly worse off, having lost his or her scholarship. Student 2 is no worse off financially, but likely has crippled his or her job prospects and journal opportunities.
Student 3, however, is no worse off financially, and is likely better off in terms of law review, summer jobs, fellowships, and transferring to a better school. I don’t feel too bad for Student 3.
May 1, 2011, 10:14 amaeolius says:
From a non-lawyer.
May 1, 2011, 10:36 amThere are tons of graduate students who would be thrilled to get a tuition reduction of one-third
(one of three years free), a good shot at a professional license and no dissertation.
But alas most are burdened with huge loans.
I look at it like homesteading. You bust your butt for the first years making a go of it (paying off loans)to enjoy better living later.
What I would love to see is a loan reduction per year of public practice.
And to balance that out a hefty surcharge for those who go into corporate law :)
loki13 says:
If this were the case, I would have no problem with it.
I think there are two separate issues- one is that (some) schools give more scholarships than there will be spaces available. IOW, they *know* that X% of them will not be renewed. It would be like a basketball team offering 30 scholarships, with the best 10 players getting renewed. Everyone can be busting their butts off, and still some will end up with the short end of the stick.
The second is that (some) schools are offering the illusion of a better living later. Many of their graduates will not end up in good jobs, and many will not even end up practicing. They are accepting this debt for no good reason.
People should be able to make mistakes. I just wish they were fully-informed mistakes.
May 1, 2011, 10:46 amemdfl says:
I’m still wrapping my head around the idea that a whole school grades on a curve. What that sounds like to me is that the school can make or break any student any time by simply changing the curve.
May 1, 2011, 10:54 amAdmittedly my school time was long ago, (mid to late ’60′s), but IIRC there was no such thing as a grade curve in the classes. Grades were posted and your final was determined by how well you had done that semester, not what the school needed to do to make itself look good or to dump scholorship students.
I gues it really was a different country.
Roger Sweeny says:
“N” is absolutely right that, “If a for profit company did this, then the average libertarian/conservative would be just peachy with it.”
And I’m sure some would say, “‘Caveat emptor’ (let the buyer beware) applies when you know the company selling you something is trying to make money. But when the company is given special legal status because it is supposed to be behaving in the public interest, the company has an obligation not to mislead its potential customers.”
I think this is a powerful argument. People have their bs detectors set on high when they consider cell phone plans. They are much more credulous when it comes to schools.
Many people in academia, and on the left, seem to honestly hold a polar opposite view: even when for-profits and non-profits do what looks on the surface to be similar, since non-profits are the good guys, it can’t really be bad when they do it.
May 1, 2011, 11:00 amSimon P. says:
I’m not sure I feel much sympathy for Orin’s third student (I’ll call him the “Overachiever”). As someone else has pointed out, the Overachiever has better journal and job prospects, not to mention transfer possibilities. Do they deserve a less expensive education, as well? I don’t see why.
Orin’s Overachiever is an emotionally appealing example, but I think it’s misleading. Why do law schools give out scholarships? The rather commonly-understood rationale has to do with several considerations, including (1) improving the LSAT/GPA mix of its incoming classes, (2) tinkering with the demographic composition of its incoming classes, and (3) improving the bar passage rate of its future graduating classes. The only advantage they would seem to gain from offering scholarship money to the Overachiever derives from convincing the Overachiever not to transfer after the first year and so convincing the Overachiever to spend more on tuition (if not full price). But the fact that second-year scholarships are a rarity, if they are given at all, seems to suggest that this advantage is not that great or perhaps that it is basically counter-balanced by full-price-paying transfers that law schools use to fill the spots left by the Overachiever when he transfers out. So it doesn’t seem that law schools have anything to gain by helping the Overachiever out and, indeed, are best-served by doing as little as they can to convince him to stay. Do we expect law schools to act against their own interests to aid the Overachiever?
And what claim to our sympathy does the Overachiever have, anyway? If my experience in law school serves was typical, then the first year of law school is pedagogically empty and serves more to select people who have already come to law school with the skills they need to succeed than to nurture those skills in people who are willing and eager to learn but don’t have the right background. Moreover, the kids who do best in law school are the ones who put in the mind-numbing work of accommodating themselves to their professors’ expectations – by taking practice exams, by developing and studying outlines of the lectures, etc. Which isn’t to say that they don’t deserve some recognition for their efforts, but it does, to my mind, tend to undermine any argument you might make in favor of shifting student tuition and fees to subsidize them. If I put as much effort into preparing for class as the Overachiever, if I attended as many classes and participated as eagerly in class conversations as he did, but if he ultimately outperformed me on the exam because he spent the last three weeks of the term locked in the library taking practice exams and honing his outline, what academic argument is there for saying that my tuition money ought to support his future career? What happens to a law school body where such an approach to the material is the only one that is incentivized?
Personally, I think that law school money is better spent on need-based scholarships and subsidizing public interest work by students at the school and graduates. As the system currently operates, the Overachiever is naturally incentivized to spend his second and third years volunteering his efforts to the production of the school’s legal publications and nurturing his clerkship prospects. This seems like a poor use of the Overachiever’s talents (if indeed he has any). Why don’t law schools focus on giving their students incentives to become good lawyers, rather than carbon copies of their professors?
May 1, 2011, 11:25 amA. Zarkov says:
Religion used to be the biggest racket in America. That’s all changed. Today it’s education. Recently Nature (yes that Nature) ran an article on the worldwide glut of PhDs: The PhD Factory. In the U.S. we have a surplus of virtually everything– lawyers, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, computer scientists, chemists etc. The glut is of course even worse in the liberal arts. This graph shows that college tuition is increasing much faster than the CPI, median family income, and even medical care. How can that be? Easy. Student loans. Just as easy borrowing lead to the housing bubble, student loans have helped inflate a huge bubble in student enrollment and tuition.
The law school racket is just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger education racket. Yet Obama tells us we need more student loans, more college enrollments– he wants virtually everyone to attend college. The whole question of what all these graduates are going to do with their degrees seems to have avoided serious scrutiny. Why does one need a college degree of any kind to be a “telemarketer,” argot for someone who makes junk phone calls. One of the clerks (himself an ex-physicist) at a local Trader Joe’s told me his daughter, a recent Amherst graduate, went to a job fair only to find that hundreds of new graduates were lined up for a telemarketing position.
We need fewer student loans given out not more. Especially to places like Harvard and Yale who have huge endowments and don’t even need to charge any tuition at all.
May 1, 2011, 11:30 amByomtov says:
Isn’t the whole issue here disclosure? There is a huge asymmetry of information.
Why shouldn’t the school say something like,
“You must maintain a 3.2 GPA,”
and then disclose:
1. Median GPA, and the percentage of scholarship and non-scholarship students who are at 3.2 or higher.
2. Median GPA of scholarship students.
3. Estimated rank of the incoming student among all students and scholarship recipients based on LSAT and undergraduate grades – possibly a projected GPA.
4. Hence, an estimate of the probability the student will keep the scholarship.
Whether the minimum is easy or hard to reach is not the issue. The information is.
Incidentally, a worse, IMO, example of this practice occurs in major college athletic programs, where athletes may lose scholarships for inadequate performance on the field. That can be a much bigger loss to the athlete, who may well have been able to maintain a scholarship elsewhere, than the loss of the law school scholarship.
May 1, 2011, 11:33 amRoger Sweeny says:
Byomtov,
Yes.
May 1, 2011, 11:39 amRandy says:
Zarkov: “Religion used to be the biggest racket in America. That’s all changed. Today it’s education.”
Spot on. In fact, there is an article in today’s NY Times Book Review reveiwing a book by Professor X (who chose not to use his real name due to the criticism he received) who wrote about how difficult it is to educate people who are uneducatable, the low regard colleges have for adjunct professors and yet who rely upon them to a huge degree, and so on.
I’m all for education, and more for those who want and need it. But that doesn’t mean education is for everyone. The Phds who line up for telemarketing jobs might have been better off going to a trade school to learn how to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter. There is plenty of work for those who have a skill that others do not, and god knows how hard it is to find an honest car repairman.
So, yes, I think that we should be making it far more difficult to get into law school than it is currently, and scholarships are not needed at all. Or, if they are, they should be tied to public interest work.
But lures to make the school look better? I don’t see the value in that except to the school and the few lucky recipients. It seems a high cost for dubious benefits.
May 1, 2011, 11:53 amElliot says:
It appears from what I have read on this blog over the years that a prospective student should trust statements from a law school as much as he trusts statements from a used car dealer. There have been continuing accusations here of the schools misleading prospects, yet I have seen very few defenses of the schools.
In terms of the scholarship? Due diligence.
May 1, 2011, 12:01 pmOrin Kerr says:
Simon P,
I spend about six weeks every year grading exams, and your impression about whether law school grades reflect anything of value is quite different from mine. But even if you were right, law school grades are much more meaningful than LSAT scores, which is what the merit scholarships are based on (and which are designed, after all, as a test to be predictive of law school grades).
May 1, 2011, 12:43 pmSimon P. says:
I don’t know that I ever said anything about “whether law school grades reflect anything.” It seems that I quite clearly believe that they do – they reflect the effort a student has put into accommodating themselves to his professor’s expectations.
“Meaningful,” in what way? All a law school grade tells me is that the student receiving it produced an exam that was more or less within the professor’s expectations than other students’ exams were. Similarly, an LSAT score tells me whether its recipient spent more or less time preparing for the exam. The tests measure different skills, but ultimately their signaling effect – or “meaning” – is the same.
I mean, if someone did poorly on your Crim Pro exam, would you conclude that they would make a poor criminal lawyer? What do you think the grades you assign mean?
May 1, 2011, 1:00 pmArthur Kirkland says:
Law schools are following the path that churches, physicians and others have paved, squandering respect and the benefit of the doubt for cash.
The New York Times, meanwhile, continues to demonstrate its leadership in an invaluable and altruistic field of public service.
I have donated cash to my law school before; I have not done so recently. Revelation of this scheme decreases the likelihood I will resume, while strengthening my belief that a subscription to the New York Times is money well spent that should probably qualify for a tax deduction in a system that rewards donations to churches and exempts medical centers from taxation.
May 1, 2011, 1:10 pmA. Zarkov says:
Do we really need law schools at all, except to provide jobs for law professors? What’s the matter with an apprentice system? Why not let the law firms train the new lawyers? You join a firm and do a work-study program for (say) 5 years and then take the Bar exam? This way the student actually earns money while learning instead of going deeply into debt. With such a system we would not need government supported law schools thereby saving the taxpayers money as well. A law firm surely knows the skills its staff needs.
What about legal scholarship? We could do that with student-free academies. Their work could then be judged on its own. They could also provide narrowly based continuing education for practicing lawyers. Using the Internet would further reduce costs. In short let’s get rid of this money sucking behemoths that we don’t need and hurts people with false promises. Ralph Nader where are you? Whoops I forgot he’s not really for the consumer.
May 1, 2011, 1:25 pmrb1971 says:
Not to go OT, but there is another potential issue with so-called “merit” scholarships at some top law schools, which is that they are sometimes awarded for issues other than merit. I was told by the dean of my school when I was a 2L that although certain scholarships were advertised as being solely merit-based (undergrad GPA and/or LSAT scores), in fact the school took race, economic background, etc. into account. Although I am in favor of scholarships based on those factors in general – and especially economic background – I am even more in favor of full and complete disclosure, which is the tie-in to the original post.
Since I had a friend in the admissions department (still friends 15 years later), I told her about this, and she told me that her experience going to law school admissions conferences indicated that this practice was relatively wide-spread, at least among schools outside T1. (Also, I had a personal stake in this since when you look at undergrad GPA and LSAT scores I was one of the top couple of folks at my school. But I would have been offended by the lack of disclosure in any event.) Fifteen years later, having been relatively successful financially in the practice of law, I’ve only recently paid off my student loans. And whenever I get fundraising alumni info from my school, which is pretty often, it goes right into the circular file.
May 1, 2011, 1:52 pmOrin Kerr says:
Simon P,
I have only graded my own exams, so I can only know about what I look for. Every professor is slightly different, I suppose. But I grade for lawyerly skill: My goal in grading is to assess how good a lawyer that student will be based on their answers to the legal questions I have posed. The A student has demonstrated strong skills of legal analysis, while the C student has demonstrated poor skills of legal analysis.
Of course, a 3-hour exam, like any single piece of legal writing, is just a snap shot: A student might have a good day or a bad one. Plus, a person might have strong skills of legal analysis but be a poor lawyer in the real world, or have poor skills of legal analysis but succeed as a lawyer. But my goal in grading is to tell employers how strong are the skills of legal analysis of the person they are considering hiring.
You have obviously had different experiences: I’m curious, could you tell us a bit about them?
May 1, 2011, 2:04 pmjustaguy says:
I doubt that we have a glut of engineers, physicists and other hard-core scientists. However, the free market view might be that the salary and job opportunities for each profession show how much of a glut exists for each. As the pool of students who can complete the rigorous engineering or physics curriculum is somewhat limited for a U.S. collegiate education, I look forward to the day when there are too many engineers and their starting and/or career salaries are as low as that for lawyers and other liberal arts students.
Law school had a very good racket going before the 2008 legal meltdown — 10,000 biglaw jobs lost in last three years. Be at the top of the law school class (top 20 or so law schools and reasonable grades for being in the top 10-15% of all graduating lawyers)and make significant money at big law. Law schools are trying to adjust to the now greatly lowered expectations of their new incoming sources of income, I mean their new students.
BTW, I am a engineer who is a 2007 Georgetown Law graduate, and no longer working in biglaw.
May 1, 2011, 2:12 pmZiz says:
In other words, hold them accountable for knowledge they have yet to receive. That seems pretty reprehensible to me.
May 1, 2011, 3:12 pmOrin Kerr says:
Ziz:
Ziz, when do you think most people learn the principle of “caveat emptor”? Is your view that this is a topic only learned in law school, and if so, in what class is it taught?
May 1, 2011, 3:19 pmStash says:
Byomtov has the disclosures that should be made.
I don’t see this issue as being much different from the issues being discussed regarding the for-profit education industry which heavily recruits students without regard to likelihood of success to feed at the student loan trough through non-disclosure and high pressure sales.
However, in both cases, I strongly disagree with those who favor throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Without merit scholarships and loan assistance we constrict upward mobility in this country, which at least I think of as an integral part of our society and “Americanism” in general. I do not think we want to return to the days where “elite” schools were clubby enclaves of upper-class twits getting their “Gentleman’s C” on the way to a mapped out career. (Just a little hyperbole; don’t get all riled).
In other words, I agree that “too many” students may be enrolling in law and other schools, but disagree that this means that student assistance of all kinds are the only culprit and should be abolished.
Bad information creates inefficient markets. As law and other schools are seeking quality students, there is no reason why they should be foreclosed from providing financial incentives for sought after students. But: make the disclosures. Hopefully, after the wider exposure of these practices they will be harder to maintain. Competition would make one expect that some schools can now gain a competitive advantage by providing non-contingent scholarship offers.
May 1, 2011, 3:20 pmZiz says:
For those chastising the students with cries of “caveat emptor,” I’m having trouble understanding what your point is. Are you criticizing the students for not doing enough work? Are you defending the law schools?
I find the principle almost entirely irrelevant to the issue the NY Times article raises. The issue is whether schools should behave as they do, not whether they have a right to do so or whether a claim will lie against them.
May 1, 2011, 3:23 pmScott Fruehwald says:
Aren’t law schools and law professors supposed to be setting examples of professionalism. What example does this set for future lawyers?
May 1, 2011, 3:28 pmPE says:
justaguy,
As one who teaches engineering at a top-ranked US school, and is licensed both as an engineer and attorney, I can attest that a large portion of our engineering graduates – undergrad and grad, including many strong students – are struggling to find employment right now. I understand this is far worse at mid-ranked engineering schools. And as I went to a mid-ranked law school for my JD (because I wanted an inexpensive and evening route), I can also attest to the utter unemployability of the majority of law graduates of my alma matter. I’m just lucky that I wasn’t doing it to actually enter the profession, but I remain appalled at the deception they engage in regarding employability (which has been well documented by commenters on other related threads).
May 1, 2011, 3:36 pmOrin Kerr says:
Scott,
When you say “this,” what do you mean? Do you mean merit scholarships? Trying to boost the schools’ U.S. News rankings? GPA cutoffs for merit scholarships? I’m not sure what you have in mind.
May 1, 2011, 3:38 pmZiz says:
I don’t think most people from the general population ever learn it. Of the smaller set of people who do learn it, I imagine a some portion of them hear it uttered as a bit of rhetorical flair in the closing moment of consumer protection segments of TV news programs. So, no, it’s not a topic only covered in law school. But, to answer your question about law school, I recall that it was mentioned in my contracts and property classes as well as an upper level commercial real estate class.
But I don’t see this as an issue of whether law schools would be able to defend themselves from a hypothetical statutory or common law fraud action. I see this as an issue of ethics. Students typically see themselves in a cooperative, not an adversarial, relationship with prospective schools. I find it unethical — particularly for a more sophisticated and knowledgeable party — to take advantage of that framing mismatch to the detriment of the other.
There are two main ways we can fix this. First, schools can start behaving better. This is the low cost solution. All the school has to do is put the pertinent information on a website and have the offer letter refer to it.
Second, we can change the sort of relationship students believe they have with schools. We can let students know that schools do not have their best interests in mind, that the relationship is not a cooperative one, and that the students should be suspicious of everything the school does. That puts the burden of discovery on the less knowledgeable and less sophisticated party. It increases the social costs. And, at a more basic level, it’s inimical to pleasant relationships with others.
I’m fairly confident we’ll end up with something a lot more like the second option than the first, and we’ll be worse off for it.
May 1, 2011, 3:48 pmElliot says:
To what extent are merit scholarships funded from the tuition of non-scholarship students? I have read many horror stories here about huge debt graduating law students have accumulated. How much of that is so others could graduate without debt? Or with significantly less debt?
May 1, 2011, 3:54 pmneurodoc says:
neurodoc doesn’t see why the loss of a scholarship should be “a much bigger loss to the athlete, who may well have been able to mainatin a scholarship elsewhere, than the loss of of the law school scholarship,” when the law school student who loses it at one school might also have been able maintain it another. But then neurodoc thinks that there is no justification for athletic scholarships. Drop the “amateur” pretense and pay athletes commensurate with how much they bring the school in increased revenue, including donations. If that doesn’t work as well for the NFL and the NBA as the current way of doing business (and it is business!), then let them establish farm systems to develop talent. Few of those athletes who do go on to the major leagues were making much of a contribution as undergrads to the educational mission which is supposedly the raison d’etre for the schools’ existences.
May 1, 2011, 3:55 pmOrin Kerr says:
Ziz,
I agree that law schools should not trick students: If the schools are imposing limits on financial aid that students reasonably don’t understand, they should stop doing that. If that’s your only argument, we don’t disagree.
May 1, 2011, 4:00 pmOrin Kerr says:
(Oh, and Ziz, I should add that the to the extent you’re worried about law schools having a more adversarial relationship with students, then it’s worth noting that this would just be a return to the historical norm: Law schools have not traditionally been friendly places.)
May 1, 2011, 4:02 pmStash says:
I know I had heard of it well before law school. But it would certainly show up in Business Regulation and quite possibly Contracts. It remains as a useful warning, but died as a guiding doctrine the day “implied warranties” were invented, if not the day people decided fraud went beyond the pale. Now we are just arguing about how far those doctrines should be extended.
May 1, 2011, 4:07 pmTwenty Two says:
One thing the article does not address, which is apparently rampant at lower-tier law schools that entice large numbers of 1Ls with conditional scholarships is “section stacking.” This practice consists of lumping many, or perhaps most, scholarship recipients into the same 1L section, thus forcing quite a few to lose their scholarships (by operation of the curve). Any proper disclosure model would allow 1Ls to know about this practice if it was used.
May 1, 2011, 5:07 pmTwenty Two says:
I was student 3. I had below-average “numbers” when applying to law schools, but finished first in my class. And I do not feel hard done by, because I had all of the information necessary to make an informed decision regarding where to go to school. I could have chosen a lower-ranked school with a significant scholarship, or the “top 14″ one I ended up attending. The relative risks and rewards were mostly known to me ex ante (although more employment data would have helped).
And, although merit aid would have been nice after my unexpected, but delightful 1L performance, I received a different kind of reward: my choice of basically any law firm that came to campus, and eventually, a huge amount of institutional support when applying for clerkships. A reduced loan total would be nice, but those benefits are probably just as valuable — maybe even moreso.
With students 1 and 2 in your hypo, neither could have made a truly informed ex ante decision about whether the scholarship was a good idea without information on how the curve operated. A primary factor into their law school attendance decision — cost of attendance — simply was not knowable.
May 1, 2011, 5:14 pmSimon P. says:
And I don’t imagine other law professors would characterize what they’re doing when they grade exams any differently.
But you’re thinking about it from the wrong perspective. If I’m in your class, for example, and I want to do well on your exam, and you say, “What I look for is skilled legal analysis,” how do you think I’m going to determine what that is? Do you suppose that there is just some book in the library on “Skilled Legal Analysis”? Maybe I could read “Getting to Maybe”?
No – what I’m going to do is I’m going to try to figure out what you think “skilled legal analysis” looks like, and try to emulate that. I’ll do that by going to the exam banks, preparing and comparing available outlines, attending class and paying attention, and so on. And I’ll do that for all of my different professors, because I won’t necessarily know what they think will count, either, without doing that kind of work. In other words, I’m going to have to teach myself to each professor’s test – and this is doubly true when you consider that the curve is going to be set by people doing the exact same thing.
And more – you describe the performance on a three-hour exam as a “snapshot” of an individual’s legal analytical skills, but it’s even less than that. You’re testing your students’ legal analytical skills in an artificial, stressful situation that requires a whole skill set that has very little to do with actual legal analysis. This is especially true if you make use of issue-spotting races, where not all of the issues can be adequately addressed in the time allotted – you’re asking them to engage in a legal analysis that could easily qualify as “malpractice” if engaged in by any practicing lawyer.
So I think you’re kind of over-estimating and mischaracterizing what you think you’re signaling to future employers of your students. All you’re doing – all you really can do – is telling them whether any given student met with your expectations for that timed exam. Perpetuating the idea that your datum somehow directly correlates to something called “legal analytical skill” and that future employers will understand your grade as correlating to such just encourages your students to spend even more time taking stale exams and scouring model answers.
Which, whatever – I guess that’s how law students end up learning “legal analysis,” isn’t it?
I took a number of courses in law school, with grades that ended up all over the map. I spent a lot of time trying to understand why.
Generally, my preparation for the classes was the same – I would spend a lot of time during the term reading assigned materials as well as any supplementary materials that I thought might deepen my understanding of the subject; come exam time I would think a bit about the exam, prepare an outline, but I wouldn’t take practice exams or otherwise obsess over the exam banks. I just couldn’t stomach it.
There was some variance in how much effort I put into my classes, as well as some variance in the amount of enthusiasm I had for the subjects. I took classes with tough professors and classes with easy professors; I took classes with eager clerkship-gunners and classes with slackers. But there didn’t seem to be any correlation between how well I ended up doing in each class and any of these factors.
I eventually noticed that there were two major factors that seemed to correlate with my performance throughout my law school career. The first factor was the professor’s style of teaching. Did the professor have a definite narrative he or she wanted to stick to, or did the professor go out of his or her way to elicit alternative points of view? I tended to do better in classes where my attempts to reframe issues or pursue undiscussed lines of argument in class didn’t meet with eye rolls from the professors (which is only a slight exaggeration).
The second factor was whether the professor had an established exam bank. I got some excellent grades from classes where the professor had never given an exam on that subject before or where the professor, for whatever reason, just didn’t have an exam bank. I did worse in classes where study materials were widely available.
Taken together with all of my exam post-mortems, it became clear to me that my underwhelming performance in some classes had a lot to do with (1) failing to attend to the professor’s chosen analytical framework or style of legal reasoning and (2) failing to put in the end-of-term work spending time actually taking practice exams and reading model answers. Both of these realizations have led me to describe the law school evaluation process as I have.
May 1, 2011, 5:22 pmTwenty Two says:
I should add that the “section stacking” notion throws some of the discussion of curves above into doubt. An example may help illustrate why this is so:
Assume that there are two schools, “A Law School” (ALS) and “B Law School” (BLS). Both extend 10 100% merit scholarships to incoming 1Ls, each with a 3.0 minimum GPA stipulation. Both ALS and BLS have 3.0 curves, and both have a 1L class made up of 4 sections, 10 students in each. ALS puts all 10 scholarship recipients into one section, while BLS distributes them evenly across the 4 sections.
As the example shows, even though the curve is identical at the two schools, the chance of losing one’s scholarship varies massively from the ALS model to the BLS model. Admittedly, the example above simplifies things somewhat compared with the operation of actual law schools. But I do not think it is wrong to say that many tier 3 and 4 law schools basically implement the system used by ALS above.
May 1, 2011, 5:23 pmA. Zarkov says:
Unfortunately there is. The supply is simply larger than the demand. Go to report I linked to– The PhD Factory– and go to page 3. Look at the supply graphs and the unemployment graphs. Sure it might be a lot more difficult to get physics degree than history, but it’s demand that counts, and that demand is not there to soak up the ever increasing supply generated by the university system. This system pays no mind to the future welfare of the students it admits. The law schools are not alone.
May 1, 2011, 5:36 pmOrin Kerr says:
Simon P, it seems to me that your complaint about what law students must do to get a good grades also describes what lawyers must do to win a case. But in any event, we each think we know more than the other on this topic, and we’re each relying on personal experience, so perhaps we should just agree to disagree.
May 1, 2011, 6:20 pmScott Fruehwald says:
I mean playing tricks to boost their U. S. News rank. If law schools are going to use students in the way described in the article, does this teach them to be honest when they become lawyers?
May 1, 2011, 6:38 pmnick056 says:
Simon P, I read your comments with interest. When you’re completing an exam, what’s the best way to appeal to your professor’s intellect? Wouldn’t it entail discovering his expectations of skilled legal analysis?
And if appealing to your professor’s intellect isn’t a worthwhile way to try to learn, aren’t you just too cool for school?
May 1, 2011, 7:45 pmSimon P. says:
Yes, lawyers must learn to apply a broad range of selected cases to baroque fact patterns within extremely narrow time constraints, producing written products that will satisfy the expectations of idiosyncratic jurists with limited practical experience apart from the occasional appellate case that they might take on to get their name out there. And most lawyers are primarily concerned with “winning cases” and not, uh, negotiating deals or settlements. I don’t know any major law firms that build their business on the latter kind of activity.
May 1, 2011, 8:21 pmSimon P. says:
I don’t object that law school exams require such an appeal. I am objecting that law schools give students every incentive to focus solely on the exam and preparing to make that appeal, often with little, if any, actual instruction on how best to do so. My view is that law students should (1) focus more on learning the content of the law than on learning to jump through their professors’ chosen “hoops”, (2) be instructed on performing legal analysis in a more productive, less self-directed way, and (3) have more opportunities for direct evaluation of their knowledge and their legal reasoning skills.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here.
May 1, 2011, 8:33 pmpublic_defender says:
I don’t see how law schools could implement Professor Berman’s ideas about specialization. Too many law students don’t even know why they’re in law school, and asking them to specialize that early is a waste. If you combine law school subject specialization with an increased focus on local law, you’d be pigeon holing law students much, much earlier in their career. The pigeon hole that seemed right to that 1L might be a dead end only a few years later.
Law school is pretty much the only shot that lawyers have to learn a broad understanding of the law. We have a career to go to specialized CLE’s and to research law relevant to what we are doing. In my practice, corporate law is relevant to organizational responsibility. Contract law is essential to understanding pleas. Civil procedure is the backbone of all procedures, and it is essential to actions like writs and declaratory judgment suits. Commercial paper is essential to many white collar cases. Understand how many other areas of the law works helps us make analogies to other bodies of case law that can help us help our clients.
Going to his football analogy, to be a good running back, you need to understand how the defensive and offensive lines work in order to get through holes. You need to understand how the quarterback works because that’s where you get the ball. You need to understand how receivers work because sometimes you have to block. There are more and better examples, but you have to know how the other players do their jobs to do yours.
Maybe I’m just ranting because I can barely keep on top of the details of changes to local law in my practice area. But asking 2L’s to do that seems pointless to me.
May 1, 2011, 10:33 pmneurodoc says:
What about the notion of “education for education’s sake,” does that have any meaning where law school is concerned, or do law schools provide what in essence amounts to vocational training?
If someone graduating college, not started on anything yet, were offered a free or close to free (except for the opportunity cost) first year of law school, might they do it because the first year is a mentally challenging experience and it provides an initiation into the study of law, even if they weren’t committed to continuing for the full 3 years, unless it was going to continue as a free or close to free ride for the last two years?
May 1, 2011, 11:37 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
I still don’t get what’s wrong with any of this in the first place — the school is not making any false representations — but I particularly object to this formulation. These are not high school students applying to college. These are college graduates — adults — applying to law school. If you can’t figure out the possible risks without being hit over the head with disclaimers, you’re not fit to be a lawyer anyway.
(But if you’re the sort of person who thinks this represents an unfair taking advantage of other people, you’re fit to be a trial lawyer.)
May 2, 2011, 4:20 amneurodoc says:
Libertarians want less government regulation and fewer laws, but they don’t scoff at the notion of ethics that aren’t imposed by regulation or law, do they? We can disapprove of that which may not amount to doesn’t rise to fraud, but doesn’t comport with high ethical standards we expect of institutions like law schools, can’t we? Just not “making any false representations” sets the ethical bar rather low for a law school, don’t you think?
[BTW, neurodoc would like to continue that conversation about Sorell v IMS in that recent thread, if you care to go back to it.]
May 2, 2011, 10:11 amneurodoc says:
neurodoc would like to hear more about “stacking” sections. Is that a common practice? What rationale/justification, if any, can be advanced in support of it. neurodoc had just assumed, perhaps naively, that the assignment to sections was a more or less random thing.
May 2, 2011, 10:15 amneurodoc says:
neurodoc would like to hear more about “stacking” sections. Is that a common practice? What rationale/justification, if any, can be advanced in support of it? neurodoc had just assumed, perhaps naively, that the assignment to sections was a more or less random thing.
May 2, 2011, 10:18 amMario says:
The libertarian objection is in the government-backed loans that monkey with a pure market-based approach to who gets a J.D. Caveat emptor is not working here because of government interference with the market. The whole shell-game all schools play is predicated on these loans and the banks’ willingness to give them. Lenders would act very differently if the government did not intervene on these loans.
We have lenders giving tremendous amounts of money to young people who are not making intelligent decisions. That can only happen because the government secures the loans. Take away that security and the whole game is very different. This is the market reason for too many J.D.s and “too many schools.” There’s the libertarian rub, anyhow.
On the other hand, obliterating the loans and having a purely socioeconomic, class-based gateway to a J.D. isn’t exactly an attractive alternative.
May 2, 2011, 10:54 amMario says:
Simon, your analysis is strong and I agree. I believe too many courses rely on “hiding the ball” to create an artificial distribution of grades.
Because the instructors score on a pre-supposed distribution curve, the instructors believe their methods are consistent and successful. Their pre-suppositions are always confirmed. But they are not necessarily measuring what they think they are measuring at all. Because there is no data-driven peer-review for their methods or instruments, and because instructors (generally) do not study or value best methods and practices for improving their assessments, these instructors are totally in the dark as to widely recognized best methods and practice in education.
A J.D. does not confer a skill in designing proper assessments, in teaching, in managing, or in being an entrepreneur—but there is a general assumption that it does.
May 2, 2011, 11:08 amGordo says:
I was the recipient of such a scholarship. The GPA required was the 50% mark of the grading curve at my school. I was able to meet that standard for my four years (I was in an evening program) at the school.
If I had not been able to meet the 50% standard after my first year, I would have seriously considered dropping out of law school instead of continuing and going into greater debt. If you can’t meet the median grade mark as a lawyer at a mid-level law school like the one I attended, perhaps you weren’t meant to be a lawyer.
May 2, 2011, 12:20 pm1635 says:
This article emphasizes the risk of attending a lower-ranked school on full scholarship. However, there is also risk in instead attending the higher-ranked school and going in to substantial debt from the first day of 1L. In the latter situation, the student would be going into substantial debt from the very beginning, without any idea of how he/she would perform or whether he/she would want to continue after an initial exposure to law and law school. And that substantial debt burden from the very beginning could add considerable stress to the student and therefore negatively affect his/her grade performance.
May 2, 2011, 12:32 pmThis article suggests I should be resentful that my alma mater (U of Houston) offered me a full ride (and thus, in the logic of this article, attempted to “scam” me). To the contrary, I am incredibly grateful. Yes, I worked hard to keep it for years 2 and 3, but I believe that one of the reasons I was able to focus and do well was that I didn’t have the spectre of debt hanging over me FROM DAY ONE (as would have been the case if I had chosen one of the higher-ranked schools i had been admitted to.)
David M. Nieporent says:
Certainly. I did not intend to argue otherwise. I just don’t see here that they’re doing anything unethical. (Contrast that with their phony post-graduation employment statistics, where I do think they are, including by manipulating those statistics with pretend make-work jobs.)
I don’t have an objection, but I’m not sure there’s much else to add; I would urge you –if you still feel that you don’t see a 1st amendment issue at all — to read the Second Circuit’s opinion (which I linked to). You may still disagree with the court after reading it, but at least you should be able to see at that point what the issue is.
May 2, 2011, 2:14 pmwbb says:
As far as being upfront about finances (scholarship or no) how about also letting prospectives know how much more money a student is going to have to spend to take BarBri (and pay living expenses while studying) after 3 years of tuition still leaves you unprepared for the bar. That number should be in the financial aid handbook somewhere.
The exam debate: It’s great that Orin Kerr personally looks for “lawyerly skill” on his exams, but when half the law school exams I took were multiple choice, it’s hard to believe that was meant to prepare me for real life practice. But one final vs. multiple exams a semester/the curve/exam structure is an entirely different debate to be having.
I’m also surprised at the lack of concern over section stacking. I knew almost nothing about law school going in, and I still knew to ask that question at orientations. Not that the schools or tour guides would ever cough up the truth.
May 2, 2011, 2:33 pmtheobromophile says:
I was not quite the rock star that Student 3 was in the hypo, but did very well (academic honour fraternity in law school, Latin honours upon graduation), and realised at one point that my grades were better than at least 2/3ds of the people with merit scholarships.
If merit scholarships went to retaining good law students instead of just attracting people with high undergraduate grades, perhaps I would have gotten a scholarship. Perhaps fewer merit scholarships would mean lower tuition for those who are not on scholarship (as the law school needs to pull in a certain amount of money every year).
The question, then, is why the school is giving out the merit scholarships. If it’s for past achievements that benefit the school, such as a high undergraduate GPA and a good LSAT score, then it makes sense to renew it each year with minimal conditions. If it is for academic excellence, above and beyond what is expected of students coming into that school, then it makes sense to make the renewal contingent upon maintaining those standards during law school. It would be akin to the way in which some colleges rescind offers of admission given to students who slack during their senior year – a “This is not who we thought you were” rebuke.
May 2, 2011, 3:49 pm1635 says:
@theobromophile: “The question, then, is why the school is giving out the merit scholarships.”
May 2, 2011, 5:25 pmI’d like to suggest that part of the answer is that the school has an interest in creating financially and academically successful alums who then will reflect well on the school and, at least partially out of a sense of gratitude to the school, support it financially with alumni donations. The incentive to keep above-average grades for years 2 and 3 makes perfect sense in this context. In my case, the fact that my law school gave me a full ride makes a very loyal and grateful alum. I know it sounds corny, but it’s true. And the carrot-and-stick approach of the contingent award for years 2 and 3 incentivized my academic success, and that in turn contributed to that first (NLJ250) job and subsequent career and financial success of the type that the school likes to point to to its potential applicants, and that gives me the financial wherewithal to donate $$$ from time to time. And who in the new applicant pool is most likely to become that alum later on? Those with the creds to otherwise go to a higher-ranked law school.
Yes, some don’t do well and so lose their scholarships, and will be unhappy. But a law school’s long term financial success depends on having the smartest of its students end up as happy, successful, and loyal alums. So if a school really is engaging in a deliberate bait-and-switch for significant numbers of its students, then it is a self-defeating strategy for the school.
neurodoc says:
“Unethical” may be too categoric, so perhaps “ethically suspect” or “warrants scrutiny.” The problem is where to draw the line, but when there is more than one questionable practice, then there is less room for doubt about the whole enterprise. I hadn’t heard of “stacking” before (and still wait to be told how that can be rationalized/justified), and you bring up the manipulation of post-graduation employment statistics, as well as other schemes focused on gaming the rankings as opposed to improving the product.
[
Forgive me I haven't the time at present to read all the may be pertain. I gather, though, one to challenge to the VT is that it is "selective" in its restrictions on aggregating the data, allowing it to "researchers," but not to those who would use it for marketing purposes. If they were to say that no one could purchase from pharmacists/pharmacists the data with either the doctor's name and/or the patient's name included, except as each party agreed to have their names included by opting-in (not out!) once a year, then why any "speech" concerns? It would be about ownership of the to be aggregated data, and there is no reason to regard that as property of the P/P which must be allowed to see it so as to fill the prescription, which is a matter between physician and patient. Anyway, go back to the other thread, if you will, and tell me whether you don't think the statute could be revised easily enough to withstand any challenge on constitutional grounds.]
May 2, 2011, 9:15 pmDarwinian says:
I think the task of handicapping one’s chances is a bit harder than it might appear at first look. To say, for example, that a school has a 3.2 overall average means less than one might think at first glance; what counts for keeping the scholarship after first year is the first year median (the median, because you really care how many people you have to beat out, not whether a few off the charts students move the average up or down). I think it’s at least possible, and probably pretty common, for the first year curve to be lower than the three year curve. For example, the school where I taught as a VAP had a fairly strict curve for the first year, but the administration didn’t seem to care much after that. It’s impossible to impose a curve on seminars or small lecture classes, for example, and upper year courses offer that possibility in a way first year does not. I believe there were students who through careful course selection increased their GPAs in later years without actually seeming to get any better as students. I bet that at that school, especially taking into account that some of the higher performing first year students transferred to higher ranked schools, the second and third year median grades of the remaining students were higher on average than their first year grades. Looking at the overall three year average might give a student a misleading sense of the challenge involved in keeping the scholarship after the first year.
I think the key on this is disclosure. It gets pretty hard to run the numbers based on the curve; what would be easy is to disclose what percentage of scholarship recipients have lost their grants over, say, the previous five years.
May 3, 2011, 7:35 amSammy Finkelman says:
And this is a much more serious mistake than taking out credit card debt, which will not get that high by age 21, because the credit limits start out relatively low, and which is dischargeable in bankruptcy, yet Congress saw no problem with this. Of course had they done that, they’d stop a lot of college attendance cold or force a complete revisal of what is paid for.
You could police this whole thing a bit by not allowing colleges to get paid for courses if the student failed the course (except then you’d get people given good grades even more than now) and also not letting students be liable for paying a good fraction of the tuition if they did not collect the degree (or perhaps did not report more than X number of dollars on their tax returns).
May 3, 2011, 1:17 pmCatherine Deane says:
Law Schools are corporations and they are a microcosm of U.S. Society. Buyer beware.
I once saw a sign that said Free Cake Fridays, it was at a place my friend worked at. When I went inside to pick her up on a Friday evening, I found out that the “Free Cake” was only “Free” if you buy another cake at full price. I argued that that wasn’t really free and that their advertising was misleading. They sneered at me and said that anyone coming in expecting free cake was stupid. To them it was obvious that there would be some catch.
If U.S. law continues to allow Law Schools (again large corporations) to advertise Free Cake, then they will continue to use whatever means necessary to get student tuition into the law school coffers.
May 7, 2011, 3:03 pm