Dogs bark. Birds sing. Snakes bite. Lawyers sue.
Or is there more to it than that?
I’m referring to the series of class action lawsuits being brought against law schools claiming they systematically misled students/applicants about such presumably material things as very high post-graduation employment rates; the underlying cause of action is consumer fraud.
Adam Smith, Esq. is not about debating, much less taking a stand on or purporting to resolve, the merits of litigation, so this column is not about that. I’m sure every reader is more than competent to form their own opinion over who has the better argument.
For the record: Roughly, the plaintiffs contend that schools are cooking their post-employment numbers, claiming “sterling” placement rates of 90% or better, in an effort to attract students willing to pay [or borrow] roughly $45,000/year for three years. Similarly, the defense asserts something akin to what William Robinson, head of the ABA, told Reuters:
“It’s inconceivable to me that someone with a college education, or a graduate-level education, would not know before deciding to go to law school that the economy has declined over the last several years and that the job market out there is not as opportune as it might have been five, six, seven, eight years ago.”
The only additional observation I would offer is that last year 9,787 souls graduated from New York State-based law schools and the best estimate is that 2,100 new jobs requiring bar passage were generated that same year (27.5%, for those doing the math at home). But this isn’t about the merits.
My thrust is quite different: Don’t you have to marvel at the passion the plaintiffs’ lawyers are bringing to this?
New York Magazine profiles the three bringing these suits: David Anziska and Jesse Strauss, Manhattan-based lawyers in the early 30’s, “veterans of big corporate firms,” who are orchestrating the cases, and who were joined last fall by Frank Raimond (31), a six-year veteran of the New York City Law Department who resigned to join Anziska and Strauss in the cause.
What do they think of their odds? As Strauss puts it, “I think everyone is cheering for us, but not necessarily betting on us.”
What motivates them?
Raimond did have some second thoughts, such as the fact “that I wouldn’t have a job” and therefore might have trouble affording rent and food. But in late November, he waved good-bye to his colleagues at the city and settled into the lower-Broadway offices, alongside his new partners. “Honestly, I didn’t see I had a choice,” Raimond says. “How many times in life do you get a chance to work on something that you really see as a profound wrong, with other people who are as passionate about it as you are, with an outside shot of pulling it off?”
We can get jaded, or obsessed with our own worlds of who’s up and who’s down, so every once in awhile it’s refreshing, even inspiring, to stand back and enjoy the sight of people passionate about a cause and trying to use the law to (culturally exhausted bromide coming) “do good.”
Coming again from the outer reaches of your readership, I am struck by the similarity of one portion of the empirical conditions that underlie the issue: there are many, many more students entering graduate study in the field (mine is Earth sciences) with dreams of future accomplishments than can be accommodated by actual positions of the sort to which they aspire. The Deans worry a great deal about the reputations of their departments, and US News and World report compiles “rankings”. The faculty focus overwhelmingly on their own research work, seeing students primarily as extensions of their group’s research capacity. Because there are low relative returns toward professional advancement related to actual teaching, (numbers and “quality” of publications and value to the University of external research grants – on which the university charges 45+% overhead – are the critical elements), they are, of course, pleased when their good students get good job offers, but they put very little effort beyond a few phone calls into the process.
In research universities in science and engineering (just as for their fellow students in comparative literature or political science), students overwhelmingly model their professional development on that of their teachers. With the declining national investment in academic research (since the 1970’s, really), and the rising longevity of faculty, there are many fewer entry-level positions available at first-rate research universities, and even fewer tenured positions. The analogy of associate and partner positions in AmLaw 250 law firms is pretty fair. In addition, probably a lesser problem for law-school graduates, most of those high-end research opening are available to outstanding foreign students as well as to home-grown folk. The result is that on the ground there is a major mismatch between highly-trained new “professionals” and the number of opening available and projected to be available in the foreseeable future.
But there are two differences, perhaps. The first one, relevant to the litigation about which you write, is that very few graduate students in the sciences and engineering are paying anything out-of-pocket for their education. Overwhelmingly, they will be awarded either teaching or research assistantships, for which their tuition is waived and in return for part-time work they are paid a monthly stipend, typically somewhat above poverty-level needs for board, room, and local transportation. Foreign students are generally charged full rates, which ordinarily are paid by their government. The result is that although science and engineering students emerge from school without appreciable assets and dubious prospects, at least they do not owe $100,000+ in loans. Secondly, no graduate school of science or engineering that I know asserts or implies that there will be good to excellent prospects for academic job placement. The USN&WR “rankings” for graduate schools are derived from surveys of other academic specialists, not in any way on job placement.
Central to the difference is that graduate study in the arts and sciences and engineering is not taken by institutions, faculty, or students to be “professional” training. The goal of one’s studies is to complete a dissertation that will be a “contribution to knowledge.” This is seen as a worthy goal in and of itself, though many a young person finds herself aged 30, completing a second post-doctoral research term, and wondering when if ever they will move on to being a grown-up.