From Will Meyerhofer, former Biglaw associate and current psychotherapist:
“If it was true supply and demand, #1 ranked Harvard and #100 ranked Hofstra wouldn't have the same tuition. But they do, the same as stupid Washington University, which is so stupid it's in Missouri. "It's underrated." Bite me. Are we saying that Hofstra's worth the same money as Harvard? That people would pay anything to go to Hofstra? No, they don't have to pay anything to go to Hofstra. That's the point.
You cannot, on the one hand, say you want to lower the number of students while on the other hand incentivizing them to go. But you're not incentivizing the students, are you? It's a wealth transfer to universities. That's why you want to directly limit the number of schools while keeping the payments to the rest of them intact. More for you. And if you have to throw Mr. Wallerstein under the bus to hide this truth, well, sacrifices have to be made.”
http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2011/01/harperdeception.html
Steven J. Harper, adjunct professor at Northwestern University School of Law, also came out in support of David Segal’s article.
“Last Sunday, The New York Times asked: Are law schools deceiving prospective students into incurring huge debt for degrees that aren't worth it?
Of course they are. U.S. News & World Report is an aider and abettor. As the market for new lawyers shrinks, a key statistic in the magazine's infamous rankings is "graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation."
Any job qualifies--from joining Cravath to waiting tables. According to The New York Times, the most recent average for all law schools is 93 percent. If gaming the system to produce that number doesn't cause students to ignore the U.S. News' rankings altogether, nothing will.” [Emphasis mine]
He goes on to state:
“The glut of law school applicants, as well as graduates seeking big-firm jobs to repay their loans, leaves law school administrators and firm managers with no economic incentive to change their ways. The profession needs visionaries who are willing to resist perpetuating the world in which debt-laden graduates are becoming the twenty-first century equivalent of indentured servants.” [Emphasis mine]
Again, this came from a member of a law school faculty - not from a bitter scam-blogger.
Check out this article from John M. Dolin, adjunct professor at Capital University Law School. The piece is entitled, “Opportunity Lost: How Law School Disappoints Law Students, the Public, and the Legal Profession.” His conclusion:
“But it is now time, long past due, to face the truth about legal education and, more importantly, to do something about it. The truth is that we are not building competent lawyers. The truth is that the current system is out of date and only held in place by a self-perpetuating, entrenched professorate. The truth is that we have the knowledge and the means to build a better, more competent lawyer. The truth is that we can do a much better job. We know the truth about legal education. The important question for the future of legal education and our profession is, do we have the will?” [Emphasis mine]
http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=6945bcc9-1e12-4ea1-8edf-aec6405d27c1
Jerome Kowalski, law firm management consultant, published the following, back in September 2010:
"And, indeed, if you have reached this point in this note, in the unlikely event you haven’t already come to other obvious conclusions, here they are: (a) law schools must stop behaving like the beauty schools of 1990 and (b) law schools should make full, fair and candid disclosure to every law school applicant (before they even remit the application fee) and have each applicant sign a document that he or she has read the disclosures and understands them.”
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/06/wake-up-fellow-law-professors-to.html
Brian Tamahana, professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, put himself on the line back on June 13, 2010 – by supporting these scam-blogs.
“The law graduates posting on these sites know the score. They know that law schools pad their employment figures—96% employed—by counting as “employed” any job at all, legal or non-legal, including part time jobs, including unemployed graduates hired by the school as research assistants (or by excluding unemployed graduates “not currently seeking” a job, or by excluding graduates who do not supply employment information). They know that the gaudy salary numbers advertised on the career services page—“average starting salary $125,000 private full time employment”—are actually calculated based upon only about 25% of the graduating class (although you can’t easily figure this out from the information provided by the schools).”
Back on September 2, 2009, Dan Slater, former litigator, wrote that there are too many schools producing far too many lawyers.
“If it means shrinking classes, don’t count on it. Limiting education is un-American, not to mention anticapitalist, even if many law schools appear to profit from what may charitably be called an inefficient distribution of market information.
Take, for instance, the employment statistics posted on the Web sites of three low-ranked law schools in New York City, the country’s biggest market for legal employment. All three advertise that 45 to 60 percent of their 2008 graduates who reported salary information are making a median salary of $150,000 to $160,000.”
On November 13, 2009, the Wall Street Journal wrote this article on the economic research paper by Herwig Schlunk, law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School:
“This essay treats a legal education as an investment, and asks the question of whether, based on known costs and expected benefits, such investment should be undertaken. The inquiry will necessarily differ from one potential law student to another. But for three posited “typical students,” the investment is shown to be a bad one.”
The job market is so bad that even the former editor-in-chief of the Chicago-Kent Law Review cannot find employment. But we need more law schools, right?!?!
