Why Misleading Law School Employment Stats Are, in Actuality, Fraudulent

In the comments to my "Persuading the 'Personal Responsibility' Crowd" thread a debate broke out about whether or not the law schools are committing fraud.  In my view the answer is a resounding Yes, in the context of actuality and not legality.  From a legal perspective it will depend on individual states' fraud statutes and case law, the specific facts at issue, etc.

In one of the comments to that thread, poster "Just Sayin" responded in part:

And no they aren't screwing people over by publishing false employment numbers. That's to be expected. More so we were all encouraged to go to law school by family members and the thought of being rich.

 To which I responded, Anonymously (being too lazy to log in):

In your view, should it be perfectly permissible for used car dealers to "rollback" the mileage on cars and then tell purchasers that the vehicles have much less mileage than they actually do? If a buyer purchases a vehicle with 60,000 actual miles on it but pays the price for a vehicle with 25,000 miles after relying on the odometer that showed 25,000 miles, is that the buyer's fault?

To which "Just Sayin" responded:

That analogy doesn't hold up. Sorry. When law schools say hey 95% of people with law degrees from our school gets a job. So when one buys X, there's a high possibility that you can do Y. They aren't selling you a future job, their product is a law school education. Whatever you pay, or whatever the market is saying, you will still get a law school education. Essentially, they can lie all they want about a future job, because that's not what they are selling. Its shady nonetheless, but fraud no.

Onto your analogy where a used car salesman sells you a car that they purposefully rolled back the meter. Pretty much they are selling you a crappy car, not the potential of X happening do to you buying the car. This is more equivalent to a law school promising you a great education but instead giving you crap..... actually this is true too.

Lastly, sooner or later, we have to stop lying to ourselves as to why we went to law school. We all were either talked into it by family, who said "wow you can argue well, you'll be a great lawyer some day" or by watching an endless number of law dramas. Really, no matter what the job numbers were, we weren't going to not go. We had to prove how smart we were, or to make their degrees worth something.

This brings us to the crux of the issue.  What exactly are the law schools selling?  Are the law schools at the very least guilty of fraudulent inducement?

I submit a resounding Yes in answer to the second question.  The law schools know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it when they publish their employment stats.  They publish this information because they know that students will look at it and use it as part of their decision making process.  They also know that the information is facially false and, on-the-surface, fraudulently misleading in spite of whatever qualifications they add.  They also know that their statistics will not stick out like a sore thumb because all of the other competing law schools are publishing similar stats with similar intent.  The law schools also know that the vast majority of the general populace knows nothing about the reality of the legal job market and that most of their prospective students are naive, feel that they have few other options for earning a respectable income, and have been indoctrinated with the notion that higher education, especially the attainment of a professional degree, guarantees earning a high income.  In other words, the law schools know that their prospective customers are already very much predisposed to believing and falling for their fraudulent employment statistics.  (This is not written with the intention of being a strict a legal analysis; just a discussion about actuality.)

Addressing the first question, what exactly are the law schools selling?  I think most reasonable people would agree that a vehicle's mileage is a property of the vehicle and that rolling back the odometer is an act of fraud.  So what exactly are students purchasing when they buy a legal education?  They are not merely purchasing a generic fungible legal education, but rather a legal education specifically from School X.  They are buying School X's legal education.  Likewise, an automobile purchaser is not merely buying a generic and fungible automobile, but a specific brand of automobile.  ("I bought a Lexus, not a Kia.")

So, what property is it, exactly, that fundamentally differentiates the legal education provided by School X from that of School Y in the context of a purchasing decision?  What makes one law school a Lexus and the other a Kia?  Could it be the library?  Get real.  Could it be the "quality of the education"?  That might play a role to an extent, but the vast majority of students have little information about that.  Could it be the location and environs?  That's certainly a large factor.  However, ultimately, the dispositive factor for students who attend for vocational reasons, is, "Will my chances of obtaining a good legal job be higher at School X than at School Y?"   

Thus, the product a given law school is selling is not merely a generic and fungible legal education.  Instead, a legal education's fundamental distinguishing characteristic is how the education and its school's graduates are valued by hiring decision makers in the legal and business community for upper middle class jobs that provide a career path.  This is not merely a minor characteristic such as a tree on the lawn in front of the law school building, a famous faculty member, or a book in the library.  Rather, how a school's legal education and graduates are valued by hiring partners is the essential, defining characteristic that distinguishes the legal education at School X from that at School Y.  A law school's published employment statistics are intended to provide information about how hiring decision makers in the legal and business community regard the quality of the education and its graduates!  They are not just for show.  They are not in brochures by accident.  They are published specifically with the intention of conveying that sort of information.  It is almost exactly analogous to a vehicle's odometer reading.  Therefore, the value given to a law school's education and its graduates by hiring decision makers is an essential, crucially integral, overwhelming part of the product a law school is selling.  It is not merely the paint job or radio on a motor vehicle, nor is it a vehicle's ill-defined reputation for quality or prestige of ownership.  Rather, the proper analogy is that it's the entire powertrain, cooling system, and chassis!  Just as the fundamental purpose for purchasing an automobile is transportation from point A to point B, the fundamental purpose of purchasing a legal education for the vast majority of law school graduates is to obtain secure lifelong upper middle class employment in the legal profession.

That is the real product.  That is what the law schools are selling, and that is why, in my opinion, they are engaging in outright fraud and not merely fraudulent inducement.  (This is my personal opinion and not a specific legal analysis.  Don't attempt to violate the First Amendment and try to sue me over my opinion, bro.)

Do students rely on these employment statistics?  Would they choose not to attend if they had complete employment information?  You betcha!  The published statistics, in spite of any qualifications they might have, are believable because all of the other law schools have similar statistics and they are implicitly sanctioned by the American Bar Association.  If the real statistics were published and prominently displayed and publicized, law school attendance would drop precipitously for the exact same reason that people aren't flooding into graduate schools for PhDs in Art History, Women's Studies, Philosophy, and the like.  Who in their right mind would risk going into $80,000-$200,000 worth of student loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy for less than a Roulette Wheel's chance of obtaining a return on investment?

I don't know if the plaintiffs in the law school lawsuits can win from a legal perspective.  I do know that we should win the moral argument.  In other words, it is pretty indubitable that duped law school graduates own the moral high ground.  Our movement needs to seize, secure, and maintain this moral high ground if we are ever to accomplish anything.

A Wealthy Banker's Tip for a Waitress: "Get a Real Job". Hoax?

The Huffington Post published an article that, if factual, provides a scathing indictment of some members of the top "1%".  Allegedly, a petty banker stiffed a waitress for a $135 meal, leaving a 1% tip of $1.33 with a circle around the printed word "tip" and an arrow pointing to "Get a real job."  Supposedly, the photo of the receipt was taken by the banker's employee and posted on his blog, Future Ex Banker.

The restaurant claims that they found their copy of the receipt and that the receipt (or photo) had been altered.  In the meantime, the blog has since mysteriously disappeared from Wordpress.  The Smoking Gun published an article with more information about the purported hoax.

So, what do you guys think?  Was this real or was it a hoax?  Was it Photoshopped?  Is the restaurant covering up this incident to please its wealthy clientele?  Could the supposed banker have threatened Wordpress and the restaurant?  Why would a well-paid employee be so stupid as to publicize his boss's embarrassing indiscretion knowing that it would probably result in an immediate termination if it were traced back to him?  If it were all a hoax, then someone took quite a risk knowing that the photo and blog post could be traced back to him.  (Somebody paid for that receipt with a credit card).  Maybe he found a discarded receipt and altered it.

I'd like to believe that it's real since it would reinforce my belief that many members of the wealthy elite are arrogant, vicious, and out-of-touch with the lower classes.  I don't know if it's real or not, but the story certainly isn't unbelievable and it's rather delicious.  It would be great if we could hear from the waitress, but I'm sure she won't be talking, at least not until she finds another job.

Addendum:  Here is a link to a news report video where you can see the restaurant's manager discussing the incident.  She seems pretty credible to me and upon taking a closer look at the photo, it does indeed appear as though the "1" is out of alignment.  According to her someone Photoshopped a "1" in front of the 33.54 on the bill and the server actually received a 20% tip.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

New Vocabulary Words to Combat the Sheeple's Unquestioned Acceptance of the Doctrine of Meritocracy

I am posting to publicize one seldom used term and to introduce a new term, two bullets that we can use in our war against the higher education scam.  Both of these concepts contradict the Doctrine of Meritocracy that Americans almost ubiquitously accept as an unquestioned axiom, probably because they were indoctrinated to believe it.  So, using and popularizing these terms will help us spread our cynicism.

The new term is "reciprocal proxy nepotism".  (A Google search does not return any hits, but perhaps another term exists.)  Reciprocal proxy nepotism is when two or more people at different companies bestow reciprocal favors for each other's relatives.

For example, suppose that Partner A and Partner B work at different businesses that have anti-nepotism policies.  Over lunch Partner A says to Partner B, "Boy, it sure is tough out there today for new graduates.  My Daughter A can't find a job in our field."  Partner B says, "My Son B can't find a job in the field either."  So Partner A agrees to hire (if he can) Son B and Partner B agrees to hire Daughter A.  Or maybe they just make very strong hiring recommendations at their firms.  The reciprocity might be unspoken and assumed, and it might also have a temporal separation.  An unspoken expectation might be, "I'll hire your niece this year, and I'm sure you'll return the favor for my son when he graduates two years from now."

I don't know how often these types of arrangements actually occur, but I wouldn't be surprised if they occurred frequently in tight, competitive job markets.  Such occurrences obviously contradict Meritocracy where people are supposed to obtain jobs and opportunities based on objective merit and not the circumstances of their birth and family connections.

The other intriguing term is "resume deflation".  Resume deflation is when a person crafts a resume that purposely omits what should be a valuable credential that shows that he possesses what should be an attractive character trait (educational attainment, intelligence, ambition, skill, professional experience, etc.) in the hopes of improving his candidacy for a job.  Sadly, resume deflation has become a sign of the wretchedness and perversity of our society and the times we live in and it isn't a secret, but few people have a formal term for it.

The concept of resume deflation contradicts the Doctrine of Meritocracy because, according to the doctrine, people should receive rewards for their positive character traits and hard work.  However, in reality many employers will discriminate against people who are overqualified or who are trained to work in other fields for various reasons, some of which may, as a practical matter, be understandable and legitimate from an employer's perspective.  This kind of discrimination reminds of a concept that novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand once introduced, a "hatred of the good for being the good". 

I came across "resume deflation" while listening to an NPR story, The Long, Winding Road Back from Unemployment.  I was intrigued and a Google search returned only 163 hits.  One of the hits was for an article at the Workplace Diva blog titled "Is Hiring Smart Applicants a Dumb Move?".  It's a short blog post that cites a study purporting to show that hiring overqualified applicants is often a good move.  I enjoyed this quote:

No employer wants to feel like a quick rest stop on the road to Careertown.

What most hiring managers and other employment decision-makers don't realize is that in today's post-apocalyptic world (in an economic sense), there may no longer be a "Careertown" for many people to go to and/or the road is fraught with huge and often insurmountable obstacles.  Jobs in many fields have been outsourced and/or many fields have contracted.  Also, many people who can objectively perform career jobs well may have been rendered unemployable in their fields simply by virtue of their having been unemployed or undermployed-and-involuntarily-out-of-field for a period of time.  Hiring managers are generally successful people, so it's difficult for them to understand just how bleak the job market is for many college and professional school graduates.

I hope that people will begin using and popularizing these new terms and that they will stick: reciprocal proxy nepotism and resume deflation.

Persuading the "Personal Responsibility" Crowd

While reading Professor Campos's most recent post, "The Message" and while ruminating over the negative comments received from non-JDs to many news articles about the law school scam, it occurred to me that we need to incorporate a core argument into our message (which probably won't be news to many of you).  I make mention of it all the time, but when we're dealing with the general public, it needs further emphasis.

We need to present a compelling argument that will help convince non-JDs of the "meritocracy/personal responsibility/free market" dogma persuasion (hereinafter known as the "Personal Responsibility Crowd") that the law school scam (and the higher education scam in general) is bad and worthy of opposing.  The Personal Responsibility Crowd objects to our message by reflexively responding, "Caveat Emptor!" in snide comments.  Their callousness and almost complete lack of empathy is an expression of the "I've got mine, Fuck You!" mentality.  In their eyes the higher education scam does not impact them.

However, the Personal Responsibility Crowd, which tends to be right-wing, is very concerned about an issue that ties in well with the law school and higher education scams: The Economy.  Thus, our message would probably be more compelling to them if we could convince the Personal Responsibility Crowd and the general populace that educating large excesses of people relative to the number of jobs available for college graduates damages the economy. This would hit the Personal Responsibility Crowd close to home.

Very simply, our economy, our well-being, and our prosperity suffer when resources (human time and effort, raw materials) are wasted on educating far more people than there are jobs available for them.  Instead of being wasted, those same resources could be better spent on goods and services that have actual value.  For example, those resources could be used to construct more roads or more houses or to provide better medical care.  This would result in an increase in our society's net wealth which would benefit everyone, including members of the Personal Responsibility Crowd.  Instead of being burdened by student loans used to pay for unneeded higher education, people could instead purchase more goods and services which would increase the amount of employment in fields where those goods and services are produced.  Also, presumably, one element of our nation's housing crisis is that unemployed and underemployed-out-of-field college graduates cannot afford to purchase houses; they already have student loan mortgages hanging over their heads.

A terse response to Caveat Emptor comments might be, "You guys don't realize how much damage all of this unneeded excess higher education is doing to our nation's economy.  This isn't merely about sob stories and personal responsibility.  It's about the economy, stupid!"

It's Tough Out There

While listening to yesterday's NPR Talk of the Nation discussion, Keeping Your Resume Out Of Online 'Oblivion', reporter Lauren Weber said that Starbucks receives 7.6 million job applications every year for about 65,000 openings.  That's about 117 applications for each job, and this is a low-wage job!  This isn't earth-shattering or particularly profound, and it's not really anything we didn't already know, but it does help illustrate just how tough the job market is out there, even for menial poverty-wage jobs.

Middle Finger Law:  In other news, if you're bored and want to listen to a short, entertaining NPR story about the legality of flipping the bird (the "impudent finger") to police officers, check this out: Flipping 'The Bird' Just Isn't Obscene Anymore, Law Professor Argues.  Perhaps this will create some more business for struggling solos.

ROBBINS: It is considered illegal in many jurisdictions, but there is a case from Oregon in 2010 in which a regular guy thought that he had an absolute First Amendment right to give the finger to police officers whenever he saw them. Not just if he was being ticketed.  Dozens, sometimes hundreds of times a day, whenever he would pass a police officer, he would give the finger.

And they brought him to court on this on disorderly conduct charges.  He ultimately won. He settled for $1,000, but in other jurisdictions in which the application of the disorderly conduct statute has been tested, there have been settlements for as high as $50,000.

Don't try this at home.  It's probably a YMMV sort of thing depending on your jurisdiction.

The World Needs Ditch Diggers -- Why It May be OK or Even Good If Some People Drop Out of High School

Recently, in his State of the Union address, President Obama suggested that every state should require high school attendance until age 18 (in the hopes of increasing high school graduation rates).

As a highly educated person, I cannot imagine why anyone in their right mind would want to drop out of high school.   Why would you want to fuck up your life like that?   However, I wonder, as a practical matter, from an economic standpoint, might it be OK or even good if a certain percentage of our society were composed of high school dropouts?   Also, are our politicians and other intellectuals fretting too much about the high school dropout problem?   (It's much easier for our politicians to pacify the masses with warm-and-fuzzy touchy-feely platitudes about solving the high school dropout problem than it is to actually fix our nation's economic problems.)

As difficult as it may be for us to accept, the sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of jobs that need to be done in this country do not require a college education.   In fact, a great many of those jobs do not require a high school diploma either or even the ability to read or to do math beyond an eighth grade level.   Those jobs are not glamorous nor desirable.   They are menial and low-paying, but they do need to be done.   Therefore, our nation needs people who will be content (or at least as non-discontented as humanly possible) to work those menial low-paying fast food, retail service, and lawn mowing jobs.   They may not be happy at those jobs and they might gripe about their poverty-wages, but at least they cannot legitimately expect much more and they won't (or shouldn't) feel that they have been screwed by society because they played by the rules and failed to obtain a return on their educational investments.

I like to say that if 100% of Americans went to college, then 100% of Americans would expect to have a solid middle class job when in reality only 10-15% of the jobs require or make real use of a college education, which means that the same percentage of the populace that currently works low-wage jobs that don't require a college education would end up working those very same jobs--but with student loan debt and legitimate feelings of anger, failure, entitlement, and tremendous disappointment.  Likewise high school graduates, vocational graduates, and technical school graduates might expect to be able to earn solid lower-middle or middle class jobs, too, such as skilled trades jobs and factory jobs, and if everyone graduated from high school then we might have more high school graduates than decent jobs available for them (which is already the case).

"The world needs ditch diggers," and it's better to have contented ditch diggers than angry ditch diggers who are ready to foment violent revolt and social upheaval.   So, as ridiculous as this may sound, it may be OK and even good that some people want to drop out of high school.   In that case, our politicians' (and the media's and educators' and almost all other intellectuals') concern about high school dropout rates may be overblown and thus boil down to consisting of touchy-feely platitudes.

That having been said, I don't think we should celebrate people dropping out of high school because in almost all cases it probably means that they are complete dumbasses who will end up imposing all sorts of negative costs on our society.   They are probably more likely to commit crimes, to pop out babies they cannot afford to care for like rabbits, and to end up on welfare, etc.   However, I don't see how bad students' barely graduating from high school or being socially promoted and waived through to graduation will change that.   Extra hours spent goofing off or sleeping in a classroom won't cure a low IQ or a self-destructive and/or sociopathic mindset and/or horrible parentage.   Living irrationally, making personally and societally destructive life choices, and being a dumbass isn't something that will be solved by a piece of paper that says "High School diploma".   Some people just have low IQs and no amount of class time spent on reading, writing, science, social studies, foreign language, Shakespeare, and arithmetic will change that.   It would be wonderful if Americans' minimum IQ were 90 or 95 and if no one had an irrational mindset, but sadly that's just not the case.

From an economic and Machiavellian standpoint, we need these people to work our nation's low-paying menial jobs and to feel as contented as possible.   The real problem (aside from not having enough solid middle class and lower-middle class jobs for everyone) is not that some people are dropping out of high school because if everyone graduated from high school then the same percentage of people who are currently working low-paying menial jobs would still be working those very same jobs.   The problem is that high school dropouts are also almost always complete dumbasses who will end up imposing all sorts of negative costs on our society.

Our politicians and intellectuals are right to be concerned about that problem, but it's not a problem that can be solved by a high school education, at least not by a traditional high school education.   To solve that problem (destructive consequences of a low IQ, irrationality, stupidity, and/or being a sociopath) to the extent that it is possible, we would need some sort of high school program or education camp that would indoctrinate high school dropouts with a religion of rules to live by.   "Don't get pregnant (or get someone pregnant)."   "Don't do drugs."   "Don't commit crimes."   Etc.   That sort of indoctrination in the hopes of countering the results of bad parentage probably wouldn't work anyway, but forcing high school dropouts to stay in high school won't solve that problem, either.

Our politicians and intellectuals are right to be barking about the social and economic problems caused by high school dropouts, but they're barking up the wrong tree.

NPR & Bloomberg TV Increase Publicity for the Law School Scam

I am pleased to announce that both NPR and Bloomberg News recently gave some coverage to the law school scam.

NPR's All Things Considered aired a four-and-a-half minute segment titled "Do Law Schools Cook Their Employment Numbers."  The story page also links to the Exposing the Law School Scam blog.

Bloomberg aired an interview with New York Times reporter David Segal titled "NY Times Reporter: Business of Law Schools Is 'Crazy'".  David Segal has done some great work reporting on the law school scam in the New York Times, though some people on JD Underground thought he may have pulled some or all of his punches on the TV interview.

Hopefully the media establishment will increase its reporting of the law school scam.   One impetus for the NPR story may be the class action lawsuits against a few of the law schools.   My wet dream is for 60 Minutes to air a hard-hitting piece that excoriates the law school industry and the ABA.   Perhaps Paul Campos could star in it.

Why Ending the Higher Education Scam Will Be Very Difficult.

DISCLAIMER: Honestly, I don't have anything new to say in this post, and to some of you it may sound like a broken record.  However, I haven't posted much since 2010, so I thought I'd post a comment that I just made on a thread at JD Underground forum.  The only potentially new content might be my point that our politicians need to maintain the higher education scam to help reinforce the notion (amongst the sheeple) that social mobility is very possible and that we live in a meritocracy where hard work is all people need to secure at least middle class status.  Admittedly, I wouldn't call this post a completely comprehensive explanation as to why ending the higher education scam will be so difficult, but the essential elements are contained below.

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The higher education scam is very deeply entrenched in this country for a couple reasons, which will make it difficult to end.

(1.) Many parties have interests in maintaining the scam--student loan companies, university administrators, faculty, and general college employees.

(2.) Our politicians have been successful in selling the promise of higher education to the masses. They need the higher education scam to continue so that they can distract the public.  It's easier to tell the sheeple that the solution to our nation's economic problems is more and better education than it is to say that we need to address foreign outsourcing, end mass immigration, and end the H-1B and L-1 visa programs.  This way, the sheeple won't riot.  The overwhelming majority of Americans really do believe that higher education guarantees economic and vocational success. They believe (and have been taught to believe) that if someone graduates and cannot find a job, it is their fault.  Heck, unemployed and underemployed college graduates (and their families) blame themselves too.  It's a beautiful scam, isn't it?  For our politicians, the nation's having to (quietly) pay for defaulted student loans is a small price to pay for a contented populace.

For example, Obama is concerned about high school dropouts, and he probably claims or seems to imply that everyone should go to college.  Nevermind the fact that if everyone graduated from high school and if everyone went to college no one would want to work the huge boatload of low-paying menial jobs that need to be done in this country.  At least high school dropouts who work fast food jobs don't have a legitimate reason to honestly feel that they deserve more.

(3.) The promise of higher education also pacifies the masses and prevents them from adopting the "Occupy Wall Street mentality".  Our politicians need to maintain the illusion that social mobility is very possible and that we live in a meritocracy where hard work is all people need to secure at least middle class status.  If the sheeple stop believing in that notion, they might rebel against the wealthy.  (They might even (gasp) go socialist and want to tax them at more than 15%.)

So, ending the higher education scam is a steep uphill battle.  In fact, the notion that too many people are going to college is completely foreign to the vast majority of the populace.  It's not even an issue. It isn't on anyone's radar.  The sheeple might be aware that student loans are a big problem for many people, but the notion that the reason so many people can't pay their student loans is because there simply aren't enough appropriate jobs for all of the graduates in most fields never occurs to them.  The other side of the ravine that needs to be logically bridged in order to connect those dots is too wide for most people.

ADDENDUM: In the JD Underground thread poster "tsmonk" made the point that many localities are supported by colleges and universities.  So, ending the higher education scam would not merely put many college administrators, faculty, and other employees out of work, but also people who work in other industries that depend on the colleges and students.

Of course, the end result of overeducating people is not a fiscal stimulus any more than starting a war or destroying perfectly useful buildings so that people can be employed rebuilding them is a fiscal stimulus.  In reality, no actual economic value is created and human effort that could have been spent producing goods and services with actual tangible value has been squandered.  Thus, maintaining excess colleges that sustain certain localities might look good on the short-term front-end, and a small amount of people may selfishly benefit from it.  However, long-term and in the almost invisible back-end it impoverishes our society.  That is to say, the aggregate benefit that might accrue to a small number of people is much smaller than the total aggregate harm done to our nation's well being.

New Video -- Why Colleges Are Opening New Law Schools and Joining the Scam

This afternoon I thought it might be fun to make a new Xtranormal video critiquing the education industry for opening more unneeded law schools which will increase the number of destroyed lives.  I pretty much winged it as I wrote the text, and I think it came out pretty well.  I hope people enjoy it.  It sure felt good to throw another rock at the law school industry and the ABA.

Here's the URL in case anyone wants to share it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tSiGME6fw8

Overeducated and Underemployed: Does That Make You a Philanthropist?

I know I haven't blogged for a long time, so maybe I'll get started again with a softball post. While listening to a YouTube video of Barbara Ehrenreich, I came across a great quote. I've contemplated this notion before, that the upper classes are living off the backs of the lower classes, but not in these terms:

"The real philanthropists in our society are the people who work for less than they can actually live on because they are giving of their time and their energy and their talents all the time so that people like you can be dressed well and fed cheaply and so on. They're giving to you."

Likewise, those who are overeducated and underemployed might arguably be philanthropists in that they could be providing additional value at the workplace over employees who meet the bare minimum requirements for the job. Also, it could be argued that they have essentially donated their money to colleges and universities if they are not obtaining a proper return on their investment.

You can find Ehrenreich's quote at around 5:00 in this YouTube video:

I hope to post about another great video of hers that resonates deeply with me soon.

Summarizing the Law School Scam--a comment I posted at the ABA Journal in response to an article.

Here is a comment that I posted at the ABA Journal in response to the article itself and to another poster's comment.

Zack, ABA Respond to Grassley Inquiry: Schools Aren't Misleading Scholarship Students

In response to Marcia's post, it's very possible that far fewer than 50% of all new law school graduates are able to find jobs in the legal profession. In fact, using the ABA's statistics for the number of new JDs minted every year and summing up the number produced over the past 40 year period and comparing that to the Bureau of Labor Statistics's number of people employed as lawyers, I have calculated that fewer than 54% of all JDs produced over the past 40 years work in the legal profession (at jobs of unknown quality, many of which may not provide compensation and actual after-tax wages commensurate with 7 years of college education and the costs of attending law school--solo practice, document review, "shitlaw", etc.). See:

Statistics suggest that only 53.8% of all lawyers are employed in the legal profession

I have also constructed a model and made some back-of-the-envelop calculations to show that the percentage of recent graduates who were able to find work in the legal profession may even be less than 30%. See:


Statistics may suggest that less than 30% of all new JDs were able to find work in the legal profession over the past 10 years.

The general public is unaware that a serious humanitarian crisis is occurring in the legal profession. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of recent law school graduates have been unable to find work in the legal profession while being burdened with often over $100,000 and in some cases even over $150,000 of law school loan debt (tuition + living expenses) without even considering undergraduate student loan debt. This debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Because the general public believes that all lawyers are rich, unemployed and underemployed-involuntarily-out-of-field lawyers look like huge losers to non-legal employers, and as a result they often have difficulty securing non-legal white collar employment because they are perceived as being overqualified, as being losers who couldn't make it in a profession where everyone is guaranteed to rake in gobs of money (as the general public believes), or as being a job flight risk (leaving as soon as one of those abundant $160,000/year entry-level jobs comes along).

In short, many new JDs' lives have been almost completely destroyed by JD overproduction. In my opinion, this sort of economic devastation--unemployment, underemployment, and the poverty brought on by non-dischargeable student loan debt amongst otherwise hard-working, ambitious, well-meaning, often highly intelligent young people is a national tragedy and humanitarian crisis. It is very probable that some of these poor souls, drowning a deep sea of despair, even commit suicide.

JD overproduction appears to have began in the 1970’s and has continued unabated through present times. See:

40 Years of Lawyer Overproduction, a Data Table, and 2 Charts

The ABA and the Federal Government need to address this crisis. I propose reducing the number of law schools or law school seats in this country by 75% until 95% of JD-holders can obtain work in the legal profession that provides remunerative compensation commensurate with the investment of time and money in becoming a JD.

The recent must-read New York Times article by David Segal (Law School Economics: Ka-Ching!) said that 49,700 law students matriculated according to the Law School Admission Council:

Law School Economics: Ka-Ching!

At that rate of production, we would have almost 2 MILLION (!!!) JDs who would be of working age in 40 years. If we cannot employ (as working lawyers) the (about) 1,467,000 JDs who graduated over the past 40 years, how the heck are we supposed to employ 2 million JDs? In fact if the amount of new JDs produced each year continues to increase as new law schools (university cash cows) continue to open, we may reach the 2 million mark sooner rather than later:

2 million attorneys?

2 million attorneys?  Not as far-fetched as it might seem

Hopefully Congress and the ABA will act to end this humanitarian crisis before more bright ambitious young people (who have been heavily and continuously indoctrinated with the propaganda that higher education and advanced degrees are a guarantor of economic and vocational success since early childhood and arguably confused by what may be misleading JD employment statistics published by the law schools) become unwitting victims of the "Law School Scam".

However, I truly doubt that it will happen absent federal government pressure. Reducing the number of law schools and law school seats would probably need to be done over law school stakeholders' dead bodies. That is to say, the "Law School Scam" is very lucrative and beneficial for the people who work in the law school industry ( at the expense of the poor law students and hundreds of thousands of preexisting JDs (who suffer from an influx of new JDs).

Those of us who are compassionate, conscientious people need to organize and unite so that we can compel Congress and the ABA to end this worsening humanitarian crisis by dramatically reducing the number of law schools and law school seats. Employment markets may be tight in all fields, but it is better to not have a law degree and law school debt and no legal job than it is to have a law degree and law school debt and no legal job.

Why Politicians and Intellectuals (perhaps unwittingly) Support the Higher Education Scam

I haven't had much time or inclination to post in the past three months, but I wrote a long post on the JD Underground forum and thought I'd turn it into a blog post.

Why is it that our nation's politicians and intellectuals (perhaps unwittingly) support the higher education scam by advocating higher education as a solution to our nation's employment problems?

Basically, the promise of higher education as a means of upward economic mobility serves a function similar to that of religion--it's a means of social control.  That is precisely why our politicians, intellectuals, and university elites love to advocate it so much.  Also, it is completely uncontroversial.  The upper classes are being confronted by an increasingly angry populace that feels that our nation's social structure is becoming akin to a caste system with a lack of upward (but not downward) economic class mobility.  If the masses began to believe that our society were structured against them and that it suffers from some sort of a gross unfairness, they could revolt like unruly Frenchmen protesting a proposal to raise the retirement age (or worse).

So, our politicians, intellectuals, business executives, and their media lackeys have been falling all over themselves to sell the promise of higher education to the masses as though it were an opiate.  This goes for practically all of our politicians on both sides of the aisle; this is non-partisan.  The implicit and sometimes explicit message is:

"Your unemployment and underemployment problems will be solved if you earn a college degree or obtain an advanced degree."

"The reason you're unemployed (or that your wages are low) is because you only have a high school education."

"Even though you have a bachelors degree, you're unemployed because your grades weren't high enough...or you don't have an advanced degree...or you didn't major in the right field but if you go back to school and major in a science-technology-engineering-math (STEM) field you're guaranteed to find a good solid middle class job."

Thus, unemployed and underemployed Americans will tend to blame themselves for not being educated enough, for not having been smart enough, for not having worked hard enough, or for not having networked hard enough rather than to blame the state of the American economy, our politicians, and the upper classes.  At least the masses won't blame our politicians as much as they otherwise might.  Also, many people really do believe all of that claptrap, especially older people (who entered the labor market in a very different time) and people who are currently happily employed.  Also, people who tend to support free market ideology, such as Libertarians, Republicans, and the TEA Party types are liable to buy into the propaganda because it is consistent with their faith in Meritocracy (work hard and take responsibility by preparing yourself through higher education and you will get the jobs and vocational success that you deserve).

I have been writing, for a long time, that it's much easier for politicians to say that we need more and better education than it is to actually address our real economic problems.  Advocating higher education is warm-and-fuzzy and touchy-feely.  What kind of a monster would oppose higher education?  In contrast, it's much more difficult to even merely acknowledge nation's our real economic problems--Global Labor Arbitrage and population explosion:

(1.)  We've sent millions of jobs including many college-education-requiring knowledge-based jobs to Mexico, India, and China (foreign outsourcing or offshoring).

(2.) We've also imported hundreds of thousands of foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas to displace Americans domestically from what are often college-education-requiring  knowledge-based jobs (often the ones people are supposed to retrain and re-educate for).

(3.) We've imported tens of millions of impoverished immigrants (legally and illegally) to displace working class Americans from their jobs and to drive down wages while also saddling ourselves with the costs of having to care for millions more poor people (health care for illegals, education for their kids, any associated criminal costs, etc.).

(4.) As a result of this mass immigration, we've suffered a population explosion. This means that we have fewer resources available per capita that can be used for consumption and economic growth, resulting in higher prices for those limited natural resources and a degradation of our environment (arable land, land around cities for housing, domestic oil supplies, freshwater, clean air, lumber, food, etc.).  See the must-watch video: Immigration by the Numbers (aka "Immigration Gumballs").

Who does Global Labor Arbitrage benefit?  The upper classes who own the businesses of course!   They're also the same people who purchased our politicians. As a result of this gigantic increase in the amount of available labor, business owners can keep larger percentages of workers' contributions to the act of wealth production for themselves as profits.  That is to say, the increase in the amount of labor relative to the amount of capital (jobs) serving the American market means that the price point where the supply and demand curves intersect must decrease.  Facial prices for some goods and services may also decrease, but the end result is that workers' compensation in terms of the amount of goods and services they can afford to purchase must decrease.  So, the Rich will get richer and the middle and lower classes will become poorer.

It's so much easier for a politician to say, "I propose to solve our economic problems by strengthening K-12 education, by increasing funding for college education, and by making college education more accessible," than it is to say, "I propose trade protectionism, an end to the work visa programs, and a moratorium on immigration."

Sadly, the sheeple just guzzle down this higher education message as though they were drinking Jonestown Kool-Aid.  Then, when they lose their jobs, fail to find jobs with their college degrees, or suffer wage and benefits cuts, they blame themselves for not having enough education.  Higher education also removes people from the labor market, decreasing the unemployment numbers.  (In the absence of a labor shortage, I think that college students should be counted as unemployed, or at lest some percentage should be counted as unemployed.)  Ultimately, the American people are themselves to blame for buying into this message, failing to understand what's really going on, and for electing our current politicians and for failing to drown all of them in the Potomac.

Will this higher education problem ever get resolved? As the force of Global Labor Arbitrage transforms our nation into a third world country and as student loans spiral out of control, eventually college graduates will end up defaulting in mass, making government-backed student loans untenable. Over a period of decades, the populace (many of whom will already be used to third world standards of living having emigrated from third world countries or being one generation removed) will become complacent about the "New Normal" and accept their impoverished standard of living, the student loans will disappear, and many colleges will shut down.

The United States may transform itself into a third world economy, but the Rich will enjoy large amounts of low-wage labor and our current politicians will have been able to successfully deflect a terrified populace's angry wrath.

Graduate from Law School and You Too Can Sign Up for Food Stamps!

According to a recent post by "SoDespondent" on the JD Underground forum, a Top 20 law school's career services office helped a 3L sign up for food stamps!  Considering how extremely over-glutted the legal profession is and how having a JD often makes you overqualified and unemployable for non-legal jobs, a great many law school graduates are going to need food stamps.

If you are a college graduate and you qualify for food stamps, I think you should take the food stamps without guilt.  Our government's policies and our society's support for those policies have resulted in huge oversupplies of college and law school graduates.  So, smugly employed taxpayers and our government should help pay the price for the unemployment and underemployment crisis confronting many college graduates.

Here are some excerpts from "So Despondent's" initial post titled, Confirmed By Prof: Career Services Helping Students Sign Up for Food Stamps:

By telling them that yes, in fact, career services IS HELPING CERTAIN 3Ls LEARN HOW TO APPLY FOR FOOD STAMPS (EBT). They tried to provide some context and explain that the student who approached his counselor about how he would live has $140,000 in debt and will be working for "almost no money" at a nonprofit. They are trying to paint this as an atypical case and billing it as "noble self-sacrificing law student goes into poverty in order to do good works at nonprofit." Students aren't buying it, neither was the prof.

But apparently the word is out, now. I wonder how many more 3Ls, now that it's been confirmed, will slink into career services in the next couple of weeks to see if they too are eligible? Just another day at a TTTop 20 law school!

 From a follow-up post in the same thread, also by "SoDespondent":

Well, I don't know how well it stuck, but from talking to other students tonight, apparently this is in response to students asking them to start providing information on medicaid and food aid.

The big question on my mind, is, which law school is it and how many other law schools are doing the same?  Maybe the law schools can start advertising about how their career services offices will help graduates apply for food stamps, welfare, public housing assistance, and Medicaid.

Dear ABA, it's all your fault!

Even Medical Tech Types Can't Find Entry-Level Jobs (the Higher Education Scam Continues)

I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room with my laptop where I have just stumbled across an industry journal for surgical technologists.  I don't know much about this field, so I quickly browsed through it and came across a short op-ed written by a newly-minted surgical tech lamenting the difficulty she is having finding an entry-level job.  This is interesting because according to current conventional wisdom, jobs in health care are supposed to be abundant.  (I'm under the impression that surgical techs assist surgeons in the operating room.)

The short article is titled, "In Search of that Perfect (Any) Job" by Sharon Goff, CST, published in the April 2011 edition of The Surgical Technologist.  She wrote that she is a mother in her forties who graduated with honors with an associates degree.  Here are three quotes:

Despite it all, I had no job.  As a matter of fact, only two girls out of my graduating class have gotten a job.

I have visited many online surgical technology forums and seen the disappointment and anger from techs all over the country experiencing the same thing.

I quit visiting the forums after that because they are too depressing.  Shattered dreams, mounting debt, many feeling lied to or manipulated by the schools they attended.

Presumably, thousands of unemployed and underemployed people have invested time and money retraining and re-educating for medical support fields.  It all sounds like another instance of for-profit (and even public) colleges raking in the dough by making false promises.

In the meantime, as Americans' aggregate student loan debt reaches record levels (daily?), the media and our government will continue to promote the higher education scam.  For example:  Ohio Universities Told to Develop 3-Year Degrees so that higher education is more accessible to people, allowing them to become "productive members of society" with solid middle class jobs.  Of course, our politicians and media commentators completely fail to realize that increasing the number of college graduates will not magically increase the number of middle class jobs, just the number of rightfully angry unemployed and underemployed people with student loan debt.

Even Law Students at a Top 10 Law School Are Suffering from Entry-Level Job Hunting Woes

Evidence that the legal profession is a severely glutted field and that going to law school may be a horrible investment continues to pile up.  The problem of JD overproduction has become so bad that even graduates at one of the nation's traditional Top 10 law schools are having difficulty securing decent entry-level employment.

According to a recent post at the Above the Law blog, students at the very prestigious University of Virginia School of Law have been airing out their frustrations recently.  One artistic student took a stack of rejection letters and constructed a rejection letter replica of one of the law school buildings.  Other students wore t-shirts saying, "Virginia Law $40,000 a year and No Job". (Follow the links to see the photos.)

OK, ABA, what now?  Will you guys continue to accredit more unneeded law schools?  What does it say when students at one of the top 5% of the nation's law schools are having difficulty securing entry-level legal employment?

Less Than Slavery: Unpaid Internships

A very depressing and poignant consequence of our nation's Education Arms Race and college graduate overproduction is employers' growing expectation that college graduates should slave away at unpaid internships.  This is like adding insult to injury.  It is no longer sufficient to invest four years in college and tens of thousands of dollars to prove that you are serious about working in a field and building a career.  Now you need to work for free.  In economic terms, people with college degrees and often advanced and professional degrees are now a dime-a-dozen and the base ability to perform white collar labor no longer has much value.

As people graduate into glutted fields, they seek out these unpaid internships in the desperate hopes of maintaining their employability and the value of their college degrees.  Sadly, many if not most interns will probably fail to find work in their fields.  It's easy to understand why people do it, and I don't blame them, but often they are just prolonging having to face reality while their hopes for middle class lives die slowly.  The competition for good internships has become so bad that various sources have reported that some people are even paying money to work for free!

I have always taken offense to this notion that college graduates should work for free.  They've paid their tuition, they've done their time, and they're ready to contribute.  Perhaps decades ago it wasn't so awful.  In the past, perhaps people were able to obtain career-building employment through internships, but today it seems like they are just providing free labor.  It's somewhat understandable that employers would prefer to hire people who are working for free as opposed to moping around at home unemployed.  Sadly, this social convention is victimizing hordes of unemployed and underemployed people. 

If unpaid internships no longer provide a high chance of obtaining career-building employment in your field, then they are worse than slavery.  At least slaves receive room and board.  Interns only receive pats on the head while they pile on credit card and student loan debt.  Modern day internships may thus be a form of neo-slavery imposed on unemployed and underemployed college graduates by our social conventions.  This is just another aspect of our nation's decreasing quality of life and transformation into a third world country.

EDIT: For clarification, I don't deny that it's better to be a free intern than to be a slave.  Slavery is a horrible thing and the suffering you might experience as an intern does not in any way compare to the suffering of being an actual slave.  However, from a strictly economic perspective, it seems to me that a slave receives more compensation.  That is not to say that it is good compensation or desirable compensation or that anyone would prefer to be an actual slave over an intern.  I'm just saying that unless an unpaid internship leads to an actual job, a slave, or at least most slaves, receive more compensation in the form of some sort of food and shelter.  My intention with this post was not to comment on slavery, but on unpaid internships.  I hope this additional paragraph clarifies the context of my post for people who might wish to take it out of context.

EDIT April 5, 2012: A recent article published in Esquire sheds some light on the statistics:

Once you're out of college, you'll have to intern.  Again, no choice.  The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we've forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is.  In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common.  According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience. 

Yup.  I knew it.  Previous generations didn't have to suffer working at free internships.  So, when know-it-all Baby Boomers tell you to work for free, almost all of them are telling you to do something that they themselves probably would have regarded as being beneath them or as extremely distasteful forty-five years ago.

BLS Projects a very optimistic 98,500 new jobs for lawyers. In that time I project a very conservative net increase of at least 189,442 new JDs.

In a comment to Friday's post, the author of the Law School Tuition Bubble blog pointed out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of jobs for lawyers will increase by 98,500 over the ten year period from 2008 to 2018.  (See the "Projections" data.)  Adjusting for lawyer retirements, what is the net increase in the number of lawyers produced over those ten years?

Let's use my standard assumption that a lawyer would want to practice or would end up practicing for 40 years.  (If someone graduated at age 25, he would earn their living working as a lawyer for 40 years before retiring at age 65.)  We have ABA data for the number of JDs produced between 1969 and 1978 (corresponding to JD production 40 years in the future from 2009 to 2018).  The net change in the number of JDs will be the difference between the number of JDs produced between 2009 and 2018 and the number produced from 1969 through 1978.

Year	New JDs
1969	16,733
1970	17,477
1971	17,006
1972	22,342
1973	27,756
1974	28,729
1975	29,961
1976	32,597
1977	33,640
1978	33,317

Unfortunately, we don't know how many new JDs will be minted between 2011 and 2018.  The only data I have in those regards is that 44,000 were produced in 2009.  Let's assume that 45,000 new JDs will be produced for each of the 9 years between 2010 and 2018.  (In reality, the number will probably be higher since the ABA continues accrediting new law schools.)

Years	Law School Grads	Law School Grads	Difference
2009 - 1969	44,000	16,733	27,267
2010 - 1970	45,000	17,477	27,523
2011 - 1971	45,000	17,006	27,994
2012 - 1972	45,000	22,342	22,658
2013 - 1973	45,000	27,756	17,244
2014 - 1974	45,000	28,729	16,271
2015 - 1975	45,000	29,961	15,039
2016 - 1976	45,000	32,597	12,403
2017 - 1977	45,000	33,640	11,360
2018 - 1978	45,000	33,317	11,683
Sum			189,442

So, for the BLS's projected 98,500 new lawyer jobs, the law schools and the ABA will produce a net increase of 189,442 new lawyers.  Assuming that these optimistic numbers are correct, only 52.0% of all new law school graduates will be able to find lawyer jobs.

I think that projection is very optimistic.  First, it assumes that the number of jobs for lawyers will actually increase.  Last week the ABA reported that the legal profession lost 2900 attorney jobs last month (when jobs in other sectors supposedly increased).  In the meantime legal process outsourcing is shipping lawyer jobs overseas and computers may become capable of basic document review.  Also, our nation's economy will probably continue to suffer from malaise, and as a general rule, less economic activity means fewer business transactions and less work for lawyers.  Moreover, historically the amount of new lawyer production increases over time.  In other words, in reality more than 45,000 new JDs will probably be produced each year while the increase in the number of jobs for lawyers will probably be smaller than 98,500, assuming that it increases at all.  Consequently, I suspect that the percentage of new graduates who are able to find entry-level law jobs will be much closer to the 29.1% and 27.35% figures I calculated previously.

Of course, in response, the ABA will probably continue to accredit new law schools and the law schools will probably continue to increase tuition and keep raking in the bucks.

Two Profound Articles. (That's Right JDs Rising Blog. It Is Very Much the ABA's and the Law Schools' Fault.)

I want to highlight two profound articles about the law school scam.  Other scambuster bloggers have posted about them.  I probably first became aware of these articles from reading the excellent Exposing the Law School Scam blog, but I want to mention them on my blog in the hopes of increasing publicity for these two pieces.

The first article is one of the best pieces I have ever read about the law school scam.  It was authored by Jason M. Dolin, Esq., a self-identified solo practitioner and adjunct law professor who sometimes teaches at a fourth tier toilet, Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio.  (It appears to have been presented at a conference.)  This article should be required reading for anyone who is considering the LSAT.

Opportunity Lost: How Law School Disappoints Law Students, The Public, and The Legal Profession  (This link is to a PDF.)

He begins by noting that almost all new lawyers are unprepared for the real-world practice of law and then points out that lawyer overproduction is a serious problem.

In my view there are two interconnected problems, both of which emanate from failings in the world of legal education. The first, is that law schools continue to produce large numbers of lawyers, flooding an already drowning market.  The second is, that having flooded the market, law schools have refused to teach new lawyers how to swim – how to practice.  Individually, the effects of either would be bad enough.  Together, however, the effects of these two shortcomings have had a tremendously damaging effect on law students, the legal profession, and most importantly, the public.

Later he goes on to say:

Driving a lot of the change in the world of law practice has been the glut of lawyers on the market; a glut fostered and even encouraged by the ABA and by law schools.  According to the American Bar Foundation, in 1951 there was one lawyer for every 695 Americans. Since then, in the year 2000 there was 1 lawyer for every 264 Americans.4 At that rate, in the year 2050 there will be 1 lawyer for every 100 Americans.  I think it is safe to say that, as a nation, the supply of lawyers long ago outstripped the demand for their services.  There are simply too many lawyers and too many law schools in the United States.  Given the oversupply of lawyers, if law schools were at all sensitive to market forces they would be shutting their doors or at least reducing their student headcount.  Instead, new law schools continue to open each year.

(Emphasis is mine.)

This is a profound admission coming from someone who sometimes teaches at a law school.  Note that I have calculated that the lawyer-to-population ratio is about 1 (accredited) JD for every 215 Americans based on ABA and Census Bureau stats, only counting JDs produced over the past 40 years.  (In previous posts I calculated what the lawyer-to-population ratio would be if the population and rate of lawyer production remained static for 40 years and concluded that over the past forty years the average of that figure would be about 1 JD for every 172 people.)

Here is another profound quote.  Here Dolin explains how JD overproduction is bad for consumers of legal services.  Prices decrease and access to a lawyer might increase, but at what cost?  He explains how it is actually a disservice to the public.  That's right, the ABA, in its seemingly ever incessant quest to increase new lawyer production (such as the publication of knowingly misleading stats about lawyer incomes) is doing a disservice to the public!  (The ABA article is misleading because the ABA very well knows (they would have to be retarded not to know) that they are a high-profile and presumably authoritative and reliable source of information, that prospective law students and their families might read it when deciding whether to go to law school, and that those income stats fail to account for the "incomes" or lack of income of unemployed and underemployed JDs.)

The overabundance of lawyers is not without consequence.  It is not benign.  It has hurt the practice and, more importantly, it has hurt the public.  This glut of lawyers has made competition for clients greater than it has ever been.  While the overabundance of lawyers may have the short term consumer benefit of depressing legal fees, there is more to competent lawyering than cost.  The low cost provider is not always the competent provider.  The oversupply has caused sometimes vicious and underhanded competition for clients.  When there are too many lawyers and not enough clients, there is a greater temptation for attorneys to over promise and, once the client has been landed, to overbill.  Stories of bill padding are legion.  The lack of business can encourage those on the margin to file frivolous lawsuits, built on little evidence, in the hope of a fast settlement.  Further, in a too-competitive market lawyers are tempted to handle cases that are beyond their competence or outside their area of expertise.  The results can be disastrous and the clients pay the price.

(Emphasis is mine.)

That is profound!  Consider the source.  The author is an adjunct law professor who seems to have presented this paper at a conference and who published it as a formal paper and not just a hot-headed scambuster blogger.  So, JD overproduction encourages potentially unethical behavior and exposes the public to incompetence or at least amateur work product!  Thus, the ABA and the law schools, rather than doing a service to American society, are, in essence, potentially exposing the public to unethical behavior and bad counsel!

A survey conducted for the State Bar of California in 1994 found that two thirds of the attorneys surveyed believed that lawyers “compromise their professionalism as a result of economic pressures.”[8]  Is it just coincidence that the increased loss of civility and professionalism coincides with the explosive growth of law schools? While you can’t blame the loss of professionalism entirely on the glut of lawyers, it is certainly a large contributing factor.[9]  The glut has turned lawyering almost entirely into a business, with an attendant loss of the professional values that once made lawyering a great and justifiably proud profession.

The result of all this is that law practice today is faster, more competitive, and more pressurized than ever before. Lawyers today face pressures and challenges unknown by those who practiced as recently as twenty or thirty years ago. Lawyers, many new but some old, struggle to survive in such a marketplace.  The temptation to cut ethical corners increases as it becomes more difficult to make a living.  According to former Chief Justice Rehnquist, “The greater the pressure of maximization of income, the more likely some sort of ethical difficulties will be encountered….”

So, why are the law schools continuing to pump out new JDs?  Why are they providing fraudulently misleading employment and income statistics?

Why then, given the glut of lawyers, do new law schools continue to open and existing law schools continue to graduate new lawyers in large numbers?  The answer, of course, is that by and large law schools make money.  Law schools and their affiliated universities have benefited handsomely from the increased number of those who desire law degrees and they continue to mint graduates in large numbers.  Whereas many, if not most, graduate programs are money losers for their universities, law schools are moneymakers and profit centers.

It's a great paper that succinctly excoriates the law schools and, by implication, the ABA that accredits them.

The other article is the famous recent New York Times piece, Is Law School a Losing Game.  The content is nothing new, and while this article may not be a scholarly paper like Dolin's, it is profound because it was featured in a preeminent newspaper, exposing millions of non-lawyers to the truth.  Many readers probably believed that becoming a lawyer was like purchasing a golden ticket to the gravy train.  This op-ed probably discouraged some pre-laws from fucking up their lives and it probably dampened parents' and families' enthusiasm for sending their kids to law school.

Here is one of the gems from near the beginning of the article.  Once again, the ABA is implicated as a promoter of the law school scam.

How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves.  “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”

IT is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways.  And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree.  Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed.  Stocking aisles at Home Depot?  You’re working, too.

(Emphasis is mine.)

The surveys themselves have a built-in bias.  As many deans acknowledge, the results are skewed because graduates with high-paying jobs are more likely to respond than people earning $9 an hour at Radio Shack.  (Those who don’t respond are basically invisible, aside from reducing the overall response rate of the survey.)

Here is a profound quote from Professor Henderson.  He has the cajones (and I assume tenure) to come out and identify, in public, the only real solution to the problem of JD overproduction:

Solving the J.D. overabundance problem, according to Professor Henderson, will have to involve one very drastic measure: a bunch of lower-tier law schools will need to close.  But nobody inside of the legal establishment, he predicts, has the stomach for that.  “Ultimately,” he says, “some public authority will have to step in because law schools and lawyers are incapable of policing themselves.”

(Emphasis is mine.)

I have been saying this since long before I started this blog.  The solution is not to increase the preparedness of new lawyers.  Practical skills training might make us feel better, but it won't address the real problem.  Rather, the only real solution is JD birth control.  Since the law schools have a financial interest in JD overproduction, some outside authority will need to step in.  Perhaps the student loan spigot will be shut off when the bubble bursts and impoverished unemployed and underemployed JDs begin defaulting on their law school student loans in mass or having their federal loans discharged by Income Based Repayment (IBR).  Humanitarian concerns probably won't end the law school scam.  Instead, economic practicalities might catch up to it, eventually.

Hopefully these two pieces are just the beginning of a tidal wave of information that will change the general public's perception of the value of law school and higher education.

For those of you who are wondering about the JDs Rising reference in the post title, here is a link to the post I was referring to: Dear Law School: It's all your fault.  Signed, recent grad.

EDIT: The ABA Journal just reported a story that is a great example of how JD overproduction can act as a disservice to the public and how it can encourage unethical behavior.  In this case an inexperienced (and probably desperate for business and income) lawyer defended a client in a murder trial, but was in over his head.  Also, according to the ABA Journal's report, it sounds like he may have even attempted to engage in something akin to witness tampering.

Mayhem in Madison

If you've been following the national news, then you've probably seen videos of the large teacher and state employee protests in Madison, Wisconsin.

The protesters are challenging the Republicans' and new governor Scott Walker's plan to end state employee unions' ability to engage in collective bargaining.  As I understand it, the Republicans are hoping to cut state employee's pay, health benefits, and pension benefits.  They claim that state employees receive higher compensation than workers in the private sector and that since Wisconsin has a large budget deficit, it can no longer afford generous benefits for state employees.  These claims are probably factual.

The proposed pay and benefit cuts might be justified, and they may make economic sense.  What does this foretell for the future of the American middle class?  How did our nation's economy devolve to this point?  Earlier today I heard a radio interview where a supporter of the new policy said that the problem is that state employees are receiving more compensation than people in the private sector.  I disagree.  I think the root cause of the problem is that our nation's economy and labor markets are depressed and have been trending downward for years resulting in compensation and job security inferior to that of state employees.  In other words, the problem is not that teachers and state employees are paid too much; the problem is labor market conditions that dictate low pay for everyone else.

Unfortunately, the proposed Wisconsin cuts are not the opening shot in a war against the American middle class.  Rather, it's just another salvo in a war that our politicians (on both sides of the aisle) and the wealthy elite have been waging against the lower classes for decades.  Presumably, Wisconsin's budget deficit is the product of a vicious circle of decreasing tax revenue and an increased demand for social welfare services (unemployment compensation, welfare, etc.).  Increased unemployment and underemployment decreases state tax revenues and increases the need for social welfare services.

As I pointed out in my last post, our nation's job markets have been racked by global labor arbitrage.  Over the past several decades our government's economic policies have displaced American workers and depressed their wages by sending millions of jobs (including many knowledge-based jobs) overseas, by importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers on H-1B and L-1 visas to displace college graduates, and by encouraging millions of poor immigrants to flood into the country, displacing lower class Americans from their jobs and putting downward pressure on their wages.  (Does your nation have unemployment and underemployment problems?  Do millions of people live in poverty?  Solution: import millions more poor people and send jobs overseas.  Brilliant!)

Thus, it was inevitable that Wisconsin and other states would eventually be forced to reduce compensation for teachers and state employees.  Public school teachers and other state employees could enjoy decent pay and generous health and pension benefits for only so long while the rest of the populace became increasingly impoverished.  It's easy to understand how taxpayers could resent state workers' job security, yearly raises, and generous benefits.  (Pension? Who the hell has a pension these days other than government employees and perhaps some unionized auto workers?)

What many people don't realize is that the unions they resent also benefit non-union workers in various ways.  It's regrettable that they are too ignorant to direct their ire at the real causes of our nation's and states' economic problems.  Instead, middle class Republican supporters and union busters are unwittingly cheering on the the demise of solid, secure middle class jobs in the name of fiscal responsibility and free market principles (which they hold in a manner akin to zealous belief in religious dogma).

Welcome to the plight of the American middle class, Wisconsin public school teachers and state workers.

Congress and the White House battle over the budget but won't fight the real war

What do you do when, as a result of widespread economic malaise, your nation's tax revenue can't keep pace with your nation's expenditures and states' and the populace's need for federal government spending (impoverished and unemployed Americans) has exploded?  Would you address the root cause of the problem--your nation's economic malaise, or would you address a symptom of the problem--an exploding federal budget deficit?

Congress and the White House have decided to valiantly address the budget deficit while completely failing to even acknowledge the existence of our nation's fundamental economic problems.  By squabbling over the budget, they can fool the sheeple and the Tea Partiers into thinking that they are hard at work.  However, in reality Congress and the White House are blithely distracting the American people from our nation's real problems.

Of course, Congress wouldn't consider increasing tax revenue by raising taxes on the rich, a class of purportedly downtrodden folks who are enjoying all of the increased riches that have come from alleged productivity gains and who seem to own increasing percentages of the nation's wealth.  They wouldn't dare consider tax increases because it would be like cutting off their noses to spite their faces.  Why would you want to bite the hands that feed you with campaign contributions?  Besides, Tea Party morons and Joe-the-Plumber types would regard that as an assault against everything America stands for even though higher taxes for the rich would be in their own rational economic self interest.  (I might be poor working stiff today, but I'm planning to own a business if I ever get my plumber's license!)

If the Republicans and Democrats really wanted to address our federal (and state) budget problems they could start by resurrecting our nation's comatose economy.

(1.) Over the past several decades our government has allowed millions of formerly middle class jobs to be sent overseas, which increased domestic unemployment and social welfare expenditures.

(2.) Then Congress allowed businesses to further depress wages and to displace Americans from often college-education-requiring, knowledge-based jobs (the ones Americans are supposed to retrain and reeducate for) by importing hundreds of thousands of foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas.  The resultant laid off, unemployed, underemployed, and student loan-ridden Americans also increased the need for domestic social welfare expenditures.

(3.) Then our government allowed corporations to further depress wages and displace Americans by allowing tens of millions of impoverished immigrants to enter the country (legally and illegally).  Aside from having to spend money on health care and education (Arizona, California, etc.) for imported poor people and their families, the government also needs to spend money on social welfare for resultant unemployed Americans and working poor Americans whose wages have been further depressed.

In other words, federal government policies have exposed the U.S. economy to an economic force called Global Labor Arbitrage.  In essence, our nation's economy and job market are being merged with the economies and job markets of billions of impoverished people in the third world (Mexico, India, China).  Anyone who understands basic economics knows that when you increase the supply of a good (such as the supply of labor) relative to a static demand (capital, jobs, the need for employees) that the price point (wages, purchasing power, standard of living) must decrease.  Basically, the U.S. standard of living is going to average out with that of the third world.  Lost middle class jobs are being replaced with poverty wage jobs.

What a brilliant economic policy!  Of course, it benefits the wealthy who own the businesses that can now purchase labor at much lower price points, allowing them to keep a larger percentage of the value of a worker's contribution to the act of wealth production.  Prices for goods and services haven't decreased in proportion with Americans' decreasing wages, so in a sense this is a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes to the rich.

Consequently, tax revenue is decreasing or at least failing to keep pace with the increasing need for social welfare (and warfare) expenditures.  In response, Congress and the White House want to balance the federal budget deficit without acknowledging our underlying economic problems.  Ever heard of a tariff?  Has the thought of completely eliminating the H-1B and L-1 visa programs crossed your pea-sized Tea Bagger minds?  How about a moratorium on immigration and deportation of all the illegals?  Traitorously, instead of addressing our nation's fundamental economic problems, our Congressmen are going to accept that the U.S. is now impoverished nation.

It gets even better!  Obama thinks that the solution is for Americans to go to college.  This way Americans will be prepared to fill the knowledge-based jobs that were sent overseas or taken by visa holders.  Selling education to the American sheeple assuages a panicked and terrified populace and tricks them into believing that they are unemployed and underemployed because they either don't have enough college degrees and/or just aren't good enough to compete for work. What's sad is that Americans are imbibing this message like Kool-Aid at Jonestown.

White House?  Congress?  Republicans?  Democrats?  Genius!