While we’ve done our share of coverage on the plight of the law school grad drowning in debt, it’s worth mentioning the piece in The New York Times, “Is Law School a Losing Game?” that has garnered much attention.
The major take-away from the article is the issue of transparency and law schools’ continual manipulation of data to preserve or improve their rankings: “Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think of law schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it…. They are also cash cows.”
The article later expounds on the rankings bias, such that, “Even students with open eyes, though, will have a hard time sleuthing through the U.S. News rankings. They are based entirely on unaudited surveys conducted by each law school, using questions devised by the American Bar Association and the National Association for Law Placement. Given the stakes and given that the figures are not double-checked by an impartial body, each school faces exactly the sort of potential conflict of interest lawyers are trained to howl about.”
While the ABA and U.S. News may eventually come around and transform the system, in the meantime law school applicants should open their eyes to the potential futures awaiting them. Brian Leiter points out that the NYT article “omits any real discussion of the different prospects available to students depending on the reputation of the school.” In other words, a law grad’s career prospects are not totally random and depend on many factors, including his school’s standing and how he fared there.
Kevin Carey takes this idea further in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He faults the NYT piece for likening the law school system to a lottery system. According to Carey, law schools are more akin to a tournament with different stages: getting into a good school, working very hard, and even taking a job on the side to help pay the bills. The final stage is attaining a good job after law school. Carey doesn’t see law school as a gamble if the students are committed to working hard and achieving their goals.
However, as Carey notes, “The morality of tournaments is more complicated to judge. The worst offenders are probably those who open up new bottom-tier law schools and charge top-tier prices. Students there have lost the game pretty much before it begins. And just because law schools can induce legions of young students to borrow tens of thousands of dollars for tuition doesn’t mean they ought to.”
In the end, while the whole law school and especially ranking system needs a makeover, it is up to the students and future students, as well, to do their research and know what they’re getting themselves into. Perhaps with all this attention on the issue, they will begin to consider their futures with their eyes wide open.
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Read the full article: Everyone’s Suddenly Concerned About Law School Debt
