THE CHARLOTTE SCHOOL OF LAW AND A WHISTLEBLOWER

The latest developments at the Charlotte School of Law are the culmination of regulatory capture. The last significant ABA task force addressing the crisis in legal education kicked the can down the road, as did all of its predecessors. That came as no surprise because the head of the task force was Dennis W. Archer. He also chaired the national policy board of InfiLaw, a consortium of Charlotte and two other marginal for-profit law schools owned by venture capitalists.

The Persistent Problem

Without the ability to exploit vulnerable prospective law students willing to incur six-figure law school debt in return for limited prospects of meaningful JD-required jobs, the InfiLaw schools—Charlotte, Arizona Summit, and Florida Coastal School of Law—probably would have gone out of business long ago. It’s a safe bet that InfiLaw’s owners would not send their kids to any of them.

Only recently did the ABA take steps to revoke Charlotte’s accreditation. The school lost access to student loan money, and now its doors are closed. In March 2017, the ABA put Arizona Summit on probation for reasons that included a 25 percent bar exam passage rate for its July 2016 graduates taking the test for the first time. Florida Coastal’s 2016 graduates are faring so poorly in the job market that its end may be in sight: only 36 percent of graduates obtained full-time long-term JD-required jobs. Meanwhile, Florida Coastal grads have the distinction of obtaining degrees from a school that is among the leaders in law school debt: almost $160,000. Arizona Summit’s grads are right up there with them.

For years, InfiLaw has been a poster child for a persistent problem, but it’s not the only offender. Ten years after the Great Recession decimated the demand for new law school graduates, the ABA has ignored a perverse incentive system arising from a dysfunctional market. Specifically, marginal law schools lack accountability for their graduates’ poor job prospects. Those schools live on student loans—which is to say that they would die without them. But once students make their tuition payments, their schools have no skin in the game.

Even Archer’s task force report acknowledged that 25 percent of law schools derive at least 88 percent of their revenues from tuition. The overriding goal becomes maximizing revenues by filling classroom seats with tuition-paying bodies. At most marginal schools, that has meant lowering admission standards–an action that later reflects itself in declining bar passage rates for graduates. The result: unemployed law school graduates are burdened with enormous non-dischargeable debt for degrees of dubious value.

What Will It Take?

Perhaps a Charlotte whistleblower will bring change to a profession that has shown a consistent unwillingness to police itself. The allegations from former Charlotte School of Law Professor Barbara Bernier, who filed suit in June 2016 under the False Claims Act, prompted a federal investigation. She alleges that the school defrauded taxpayers of more than $285 million over a five-year period. According to the suit, Charlotte used dubious tactics to shore up the school’s performance numbers, protect its accreditation, and keep federal student loan dollars flowing.

Bernier claims that admissions officers had quotas of students they had to accept to keep their jobs. She alleges that over a six-year period beginning in 2010, 1,355 substandard students were enrolled, resulting in improper government payments to the school totaling $285 million. She asserts that the school discouraged some students from taking the bar exam because it thought they were likely to fail. Even so, the school’s pass rate has dropped steadily and its February 2017 results were the worst in the state: 25 percent. For those repeating the exam, the February 2017 news was worse: 18 percent passed.

How could this happen? A better question is, why wouldn’t it? Bernier’s allegations are consistent with revenue-maximizing behavior that the current law school business model incentivizes without regard to graduates’ outcomes.

“At Charlotte, there was constant talk of investors — referring to the school’s owners,” the Charlotte School of Law whistleblower professor told The New York Times, “and the focus was on the number of students. They were bringing them in and setting them up and then failing them out.”

InfiLaw has until Oct. 20 to file a formal answer to the complaint. Perhaps someday its owners and those who run other marginal law schools across the country will answer to their students who leave such institutions with big debt and limited JD-required job prospects. Every year, the ranks of those alumni grow.

STUDENT LOANS AND BETSY DeVOS

Into the teeth of the student loan crisis walked Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. She’s already making it worse.

The problem goes far beyond DeVos’ embarrassing ignorance on display at her confirmation hearing, Her main qualification for Trump’s cabinet appears to have been her status as a Republican billionaire-donor. She knows nothing about basic educational policy, the decades-old Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, fraud by for-profit colleges and graduate schools exploiting students, or any other subject about which an aspiring Secretary of Education should have at least some rudimentary knowledge.

Why DeVos?

None of DeVos’ shortcomings kept Trump Party senators from confirming her. With an expertise in lobbying, she pushed Michigan money away from public education and into charter schools that had little or no accountability for their dismal performance. And Michigan now leads all states in the number of charter schools operated for a profit.

For law students, DeVos’ actions in Michigan are more than just a troubling analogy. In an earlier post, I wrote about Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, which has a marginal law school. His newest assignment is leading Trump’s task force on deregulating higher education. Most law schools — especially those whose graduates have the toughest time finding meaningful JD-required jobs — love the idea of deregulating an already dysfunctional market that props them up.

Law School Winners

If marginal schools had to operate in a completely competitive market, many would have closed their doors long ago. As they lowered admission standards and admitted students who produced declining bar passage rates, federal student loan dollars have kept them afloat. Trump embraces deregulation as a panacea. But that’s because, as with so many things, he lacks an understanding of how the absence of regulation would make the currently dysfunctional market in legal education even worse.

Only federal student loans keep the worst law schools in business. Educational debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and federal guarantees add another layer of protection for schools that don’t deserve it. Meanwhile, schools themselves have no accountability for their students’ poor bar passage rates or dismal employment prospects.

The Obama administration had been making life more difficult for schools that exploit students and leave them deeply in debt from which many will never recover. Specifically, schools that grossly underperformed for their students faced the prospect of losing eligibility for the federal student loan program. Charlotte Law School felt that heat directly.

The Other Shoes Dropped

Less than a week after Falwell’s task force appointment, Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate confirmed Devos as Secretary of Education. Immediately, she chose advisers:

— Robert S. Eitel, an attorney, is on unpaid leave of absence from his job as a top lawyer for Bridgepoint Education, Inc., a for-profit college operator whose stock is up 40 percent since November 9. Bridgepoint faces multiple government investigations, including one that ended in a $30 million settlement with the federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau over deceptive student lending.

— Until July 2016, Taylor Hansen was a lobbyist for the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the largest trade group of for-profit colleges. In June 2016, his mission was to eliminate the government’s “gainful employment” rule, which can cost a school federal funding if too many of its recent graduates fail to repay their student loans. But then Hansen became a DeVos adviser and a member of the Education Department’s “beachhead” team — a group of temporary employees that doesn’t require Senate approval. On March 6, the Department announced a three-month delay in deadlines associated with the gainful employment rule.

On March 14, ProPublica reported on Hansen’s unseemly status. On March 20, Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent the ProPublica article with a letter to DeVos asking for an explanation. Hansen resigned the same day.

Bottom line: If you’re counting on help in dealing with the worsening student loan crisis, count the Trump administration out.

JERRY FALWELL JR.’S NEW ASSIGNMENT

Since his inauguration, Donald Trump has dominated news cycles with chaos. It was easy to miss his new task force charged with deregulating higher education. The leader is Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of Liberty University.

“The goal is to pare it back and give colleges and their accrediting agencies more leeway in governing their affairs,” said Falwell, an evangelical leader with a law degree.

Heaven help us all.

Liberty University

Falwell’s father founded Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. It thrives on federal student loan and grant dollars — $347 million for undergraduates alone in 2015, according to The New York Times. Liberty’s nominal student loan default rate within three years of graduation is nine percent. But only 38 percent of Liberty borrowers are paying down at least one dollar on their student loan principal amounts within three years of leaving the school. The Times also reports that six years after entering college, 41 percent of Liberty students earn less than $25,000 a year. That’s about what a typical 25-year-old with only a high school diploma earns.

For years, law schools have been the leading edge of this crisis. Falwell’s Liberty University has one of those, too. Tuition is $32,000 a year. Twenty percent of first-year students entering in 2014 left for academic reasons. Of 61 students who graduated in 2015, only half got full-time long-term jobs requiring a J.D. —  including one graduate who went to work for Liberty. There was some relatively good news: the average debt load for Liberty’s class of 2015 students who borrowed for law school was $68,000 — a lot lower than the $112,000 average for all law schools.

Reversal of Fortune 

Any progress that the Obama administration made to increase accountability in higher education seems destined for Trump’s dustbin. The Department of Education had put heat on schools that were exploiting students who incurred enormous educational debt for degrees of dubious value. Last summer, one of the department’s advisory committees took the American Bar Association to task for allowing law schools to run such scams. In November, the ABA put Charlotte Law School on probation while the school tried to work out its problems. In December, Charlotte lost its eligibility for federal student loans and its death spiral accelerated.

At long last, someone noticed that federal money was allowing bottom-feeder law schools to stay in business. But the legal profession’s accrediting agency – the types of organizations that Falwell says he wants to vest with greater decision-making power – hadn’t pulled the trigger on Charlotte. The DOE had.

President Obama also moved the vast majority of student lending from the private sector to the federal government. The expectation is that Trump will move it back. Since the election, the stock prices of private student lenders and loan servicing companies have soared. They’re a good bet. Federal guarantees protect lenders; borrowers can’t discharge educational debt in bankruptcy.

The end result is that marginal schools still have no financial skin in the game. They keep filling classrooms with students who borrow huge sums for degrees that aren’t worth it. Income-based repayment programs may provide some relief, but eventually someone will figure out that the U.S. Treasury will wind up footing that bill, which could become a very big number. When loan forgiveness programs shrink or disappear, an entire generation will live — and, in many cases, die — with educational debt incurred to pay the big salaries of people like Jerry Falwell, Jr.

How much damage could Falwell’s task force do? Plenty. The ABA is institutionally incapable of cracking down on law schools that should have closed long ago or never opened at all. Watch out for this: If the federal student loan spigot reopens for Charlotte Law School, there’s no bottom in sight.

What Would Jesus Do?

Jerry Falwell, Jr. was an anchor of Trump’s evangelical constituency. As president of Liberty, he earns $900,000 a year. In fact, Falwell said Trump offered him the Secretary of Education position that DeVos now occupies, but he turned it down. Trump wanted a four-to-six year commitment; Falwell reportedly said he couldn’t afford to work at a cabinet-level job for more than two years.

As Falwell and others like him prosper, their students suffer. Now that Falwell is in charge of deregulating higher education, Trump’s victory speech after winning the Nevada primary last year takes on new meaning: “We won the evangelicals… We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

I suspect Jerry Falwell, Jr. loves the poorly educated, too. When it comes to selling a dubious degree from a marginal school, they’re especially inviting targets.

THE ABA IS RAISING THE WRONG BAR

“[W]hen we look at these low performing schools, you guys are doing absolutely nothing.”

So said a member of the Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity last June. I wrote about the painful session in August. The question on the table was whether the American Bar Association should lose its power to accredit law schools. The ABA leaders on the receiving end of that stinging rebuke had expected routine approval. What they got instead was a three-hour thrashing.

Disaster Avoided

The ABA beat back the committee’s recommendation of a 12-month suspension of its accreditation power. Even worse, it learned nothing from the episode. That became apparent in October, when the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar recommended a rule change that it thought was monumental. It’s actually far too little coming far too late.

The new rule would require at least a 75 percent of a law school’s graduates to pass a state bar exam within two years of receiving their degrees. The current standard requires a 75 percent pass rate within five years. Since 2000, only four law schools have faced difficulty under the current standard, and all were restored to full accreditation.

Looming Disaster Remains

The Department of Education’s heat directed at schools taking advantage of their students could cool significantly under President Trump, who recently paid $25 million to settle former students’ fraud claims against Trump University. The troubling law school backstory is a less dramatic variation on the same theme.

Plummeting national bar passage rates coupled with growing student debt for degrees of dubious value are the culmination of a dysfunctional market in legal education. That dysfunction is taking a cruel toll on a generation vulnerable to exploitation by elders who know better. Sooner or later, we’ll all pay the price.

The ABA’s latest misfire toward a remedy misses the key point: even passing the bar doesn’t mean getting a law job. Within 10 months of graduation, fewer than 60 percent of 2015 graduates obtained full-time long-term employment requiring bar passage. Compared to the class of 2014, the number of such positions declined by 10 percent (from 26,248 to 23,687). The total number of 2015 graduates: 40,000.

Students attending marginal schools bear the greatest burden. Their schools use a business model that relies on federal student loan dollars to fill classrooms. Because schools have no accountability for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes, they are free to dip ever deeper into the well of unqualified applicants. Prospective employers have noticed.

Disaster For Many Students

The ABA’s persistent refusal to confront the employment rate problem brought the Department of Education into the picture. At the June hearing, committee members posed tough questions that ABA Managing Director Barry Currier had a tougher time answering. As some marginal schools received huge federal dollars, the committee noted, the vast majority of their graduates couldn’t get law jobs.

Now the ABA proposes tinkering at the edges. Even at that, based on the outrage generated from some inside the professorial ranks, you’d think it was trying to do something truly revolutionary. Some educators complained that shortening the 75 percent bar passage rate period from five years to two would discourage schools from admitting minority candidates, thereby leading to a less diverse profession.

That’s a non sequitur. If an additional three years after graduation is needed for some graduates to pass the bar, whatever they’re learning during that post-graduate period can’t be coming from their former classrooms. And, of course, nothing in the ABA proposal solves the employment problem.

Disaster Rewards a Few

As educators rely on student debt to keep their law schools operating, they’re getting paid, regardless of how their graduates fare in the job market. That frames the issue with which the ABA should be grappling but continues to dismiss: Marginal law schools are unable place most of their graduates in full-time long-term bar passage-required jobs.

Solving that problem requires schools to have financial skin in the game. Here’s one suggestion: tie the availability of a student’s federal loan dollars to a law school’s employment outcomes. That would create accountability that no dean or administrator currently possesses. And they sure don’t want it.

The ABA is institutionally incapable of embracing the change required to create a functional market in legal education. Vested interests are too embedded. The clout of the marginal schools is too great.

For example, the head of the ABA’s last “task force” on the challenges of financing legal education was also serving as the chairman of the national policy board of the Infilaw consortium of for-profit law schools, including the Charlotte School of Law. In fact, Dennis W. Archer still chairs the Infilaw national policy board. On November 15, Charlotte was the subject of a rare event: the ABA placed the school on probation because of its admissions practices. The ABA also ordered public disclosure of its bar passage rates.

But the ABA didn’t address the bigger problem with Charlotte that afflicts students at similar schools: dismal full-time long-term bar-passage required employment rates. Charlotte’s rate for the class of 2015 was 26 percent — down from 38 percent in 2012. Here’s the real kicker: from 2011 to 2015, the number of graduates at Charlotte increased from 97 to 456.

Growing supply in response to shrinking demand. That’s what happens when the people running law schools view students as revenue streams for which the schools will never have any financial accountability. The federal government backs the loans; educational debt survives personal bankruptcy; many in a generation of young would-be attorneys begin adulthood in a deep, six-figure financial hole.

Perhaps President-elect Trump will identify with the plight of the student-victims of this continuing disaster. Where would he be today if he had not been able to discharge his business loans through a string of bankruptcy filings? Not in the White House, that’s for sure.

INDIANA TECH: ANOTHER COSTLY LESSON IGNORED

I’ll have more to say about the election, but not today. Instead, let’s take a closer look at a story that got lost in the shuffle of presidential politics. It deserves more attention than it received.

Back in 2013, when Indiana Tech opened the state’s fifth law school, I wrote that the decision was the latest example of pervasive legal market dysfunction. As the number of applicants declined, marginal schools increasingly were admitting students who wouldn’t be able to pass the bar, much less get decent jobs requiring a JD. Schools such as Indiana Tech were continuing to inflate the growing lawyer bubble, which was also the title of my 2013 book. (Proving that some things never change, it came out in paperback earlier this year.)

The central contributor to that bubble remains in place. Specifically, the federal student loan program absolves marginal law schools of accountability for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes, while encouraging administrators to fill classrooms with tuition-paying bodies. The results are predictable: lower admission standards, lower bar passage rates, and burgeoning law student debt for degrees of dubious value from marginal schools.

Victims of a Doomed Experiment

Indiana Tech’s inaugural class of first-year students began their studies in August 2013. Two years later, the school failed in its first attempt to get ABA accreditation. Further proving the ABA’s failure to address the continuing crisis in legal education, it granted Indiana Tech provisional accreditation earlier this year. The school graduated its first twelve students in 2016; only one passed the bar exam. Another passed on appeal, and a third passed the bar in another state.

On October 31, 2016, the school’s 71 students received an unwelcome Halloween surprise. The board of trustees announced its unanimous vote to close forever on June 30, 2017.

Indiana Tech President Arthur Snyder’s statement said, “[F]or the foreseeable future, the law school will not be able to attract students in sufficient numbers for the school to remain viable.”

Here’s the thing. President Snyder’s observation was equally true in 2011 — when the school completed its feasibility study and announced the decision to move forward. But rather than confront obvious facts about the demand for legal education that were apparent to everyone else, President Snyder insisted in 2013:

“We have given this decision careful research and consideration, and we believe we can develop a school that will attract and retain talented individuals who will contribute to our region’s economic development.”

Thanks to President Snyder and Indiana Tech’s board of trustees, those individuals — students and faculty — now face a tough and uncertain road.

Seeking Answers

What could have motivated such an obviously bad decision to open a new law school in the teeth of a lawyer glut? The answer is pretty simple. Snyder is a business guy. He has an MBA in strategic management from Wilmington University and a doctorate in education (innovation and leadership) from Wilmington University. Before joining the academic world, he spent more than 20 years in the telecommunications industry, rising to the position of vice president for the Data Systems Division of AT&T.

For someone focused on a bottom line approach to running higher education, adding a law school probably seemed like a no-brainer. In a 2011 interview for the National Law Journal, Snyder explained his strategy. Noting that about half of Indiana residents who attended ABA-approved law schools were doing so out of state, he said, “There are potential students who desire a law school education who cannot get that education in this area….”

Capturing that segment of the market was a strange premise upon which to build the case for a new law school. Which Indiana students admitted to established out-of-state schools did he expect to jump to an unaccredited newcomer?

The Real Play For Dollars

Like most law schools that should have closed their doors long ago, Indiana Tech’s business strategy sought to exploit market dysfunction. If the school could attract a sufficient number of aspiring attorneys to Fort Wayne, student loan dollars for tuition would take care of everything else, including a spiffy new building:

“The Indiana Tech Law School contains eight state-of-the-art classrooms, a courtroom, several learning and relaxation spaces for students including lounges and an outdoors patio, a three-story library, and everything else our students need to make their time here a successful and rewarding experience.”

Would graduates obtain decent full-time long-term jobs requiring the Indiana Tech JD degrees costing them close to $100,000? That would never become President Snyder’s problem.

The Opposite of Leadership

After the ABA denied Indiana Tech provisional accreditation in 2015, the handwriting was on the wall. But Snyder doubled down on a bad bet. The school tried to bolster admissions with a loss leader: a one-year tuition scholarship to students who enrolled in the fall of 2015. Anyone who took that deal is now twisting in the wind.

Indiana Tech reportedly lost $20 million. But its failed business strategy, followed by gimmicks that could never save it, produced dozens of real-life human victims whose damage is immeasurable. Those people don’t count in calculating Indiana Tech’s profit-and-loss statement. Except as conduits for federal student loan dollars, it’s fair to ask if they ever counted at all.

In his 2011 interview about the then-planned new law school, President Snyder suggested that Indiana Tech law school could be the first to offer a joint JD and master in science degree in leadership. He thought it would be an especially good fit because the university already has several programs in leadership.

Sometimes the most important learning in life comes from careful observation of negative role models. Speaking of negative role models, as I said at the beginning, I’ll have more to say about the election results in the days and weeks to come.

THE ABA’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

It’s a mere formality. Every five years, the Department of Education renews the ABA’s power to accredit law schools. The June 2016 session before a DOE advisory committee (NACIQI) was supposed to be just another step in the rubber-stamping process. The NACIQI staff had recommended approval. The committee’s three-day session contemplated action on a dozen other accrediting bodies, ranging from the American Psychological Association to the American Theological Schools. Sandwiched between acupuncture and health education, the agenda contemplated an hour for the ABA.

What could go wrong?

For starters, committee members grilled the ABA’s representatives for an entire afternoon.

Questions About Law Student Debt?

First up for the ABA was the chair of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Arizona Supreme Court Justice Rebecca White Berch. A committee member asked how the ABA assessed schools based on the interrelationship between student debt, bar passage rate, and graduate placement rates. Justice Berch said the ABA was looking “for a bar passing rate of 75 percent…. [W]as that part of your question?”

Actually, that was just a proposal set for an ABA Section hearing on August 6, but it wasn’t what the NACIQI had in mind.

NACIQI Member: “Sorry, no. I think my question also went to concern related to debt that students incurred while in law school and relationship of that to placement.”

ABA Managing Director Barry Currier tried to field that one:

“With respect to debt, we have been following a disclosure model for a number of years now and a lot of information is disclosed… [W]e collect information about student borrowing, but it is currently not part of the consumer information that schools are required to post with us… [T]here is no standard about how much debt is too much debt at this point in time.”

Let the squirming begin.

“So it may be,” Currier continued, “that as evidence mounts that students don’t shop very effectively and that as uncapped student loans are available, that we need to be more paternalistic, if you will, or more — we may need to make more information required and adopt standards around how much debt is too much debt.”

Placement Rates?

NACIQI: “What would be an appropriate placement rate for a law school?”

Currier: “Well our standards do not require any specific employment…[W]e don’t have a specific standard that a school must achieve in terms of placement.”

…

NACIQI: “But you are the ones who identified that legal education is very expensive… And if they can’t find a job it wrecks their lives.”

…

NACIQI: “[Y]ou can tell a lot from some of these low performing schools. And a school that sticks out to me is Whittier Law School in California… [T]he enrollment has dropped 51 percent since 2010, yet tuition has increased 31 percent since 2008.”

He wasn’t finished.

“Over 105 million dollars of Title IV funding has gone into this school. All the while, one in four graduates of this law school has obtained a full-time attorney job within nine months… Appalachian School of Law, University of LaVerne, Golden Gate, all have abysmal placement rates… [S]o I guess my question is specifically related to these low performing institutions: what are you guys doing?”

Then he answered his own question:

“[W]hen we look at these low performing schools, you guys are doing absolutely nothing.”

Can We Talk About Something Else?

Justice Berch’s attempt to change the subject was unavailing.

NACIQI: “We are talking about student debt, right, so — I guess you are not answering my question, and so I would like for us to stay on that… I just want to make sure we are talking about what is your responsibility and your response to these lower performing schools. I mean, have they been put on probation? That’s my first question.”

Justice Berch: You make a valid point. The answer is — has anyone yet been put on probation? No…”

…

NACIQI: “How many institutions have you denied accreditation to for low pass rates?

Justice Berch: For low pass rates alone, none.”

…

NACIQI: “Over the past five years how many institutions have you withdrawn your accreditation from?”

Currier: “Zero, zero.”

You Think The ABA Can’t Do The Job?

During the NACIQI’s discussion on the motion to recommend renewal of the ABA’s accreditation power, one member put the problem bluntly:

“I am troubled that the ABA just simply isn’t independent enough for this responsibility… I find it very difficult to think that they are going to be objective enough to continue to carry out this responsibility. And I reluctantly conclude that the ABA is not the appropriate accreditor for our law schools…[T]he crushing debt load on thousands and thousands of students is too serious for us… And I think the debt load is not going to get better if we say yes to this motion.”

Another member added: “I think that objectivity is important as you go through this process, so I would think an independent body that does not have the conflict of interest that the ABA has.”

It’s Worse Than They Thought

The NACIQI didn’t consider a recent illustration of the ABA’s independence problems. Former ABA President Dennis Archer is chairman of the national policy board of Infilaw — a consortium of three for-profit law schools. At those schools — Arizona Summit, Florida Coastal, and the Charlotte School of Law — students graduate with six-figure debt and dismal prospects for a meaningful job requiring bar passage. (Full-time long-term JD-required job placement rate ten months after 2015 graduation: Arizona Summit — 40 percent; Florida Coastal — 39 percent; Charlotte — 26 percent.)

On November 18, 2013, Archer and Infilaw’s chief executive officer co-signed a seven-page tour de force warning the DOE about the perils of applying the “Gainful Employment Rule” to “proprietary law schools and first professional degree schools in general.” The letter (on Infilaw stationery) argued, among other things, that the proposed rule was unnecessary because the ABA — as an accrediting body — ensures that InfiLaw “must offer an education that will help students achieve their goals.”

Six months later, Archer became chairman of the ABA’s Task Force on the Financing Legal Education. A year later — June 2015 — the Task Force acknowledged that 25 percent of law schools obtain at least 88 percent of their revenues from tuition. But it refused to recommend an obvious remedy: financial penalties for schools where students incur massive law school debt in exchange for dismal long-term JD-required job prospects.

The Task Force’s recommendations were embarrassingly inadequate, but the ABA House of Delegates accepted them.

One More Chance?

The ABA’s culture of self-interest and insularity has now created a bigger mess. Some NACIQI members favored the “nuclear” option: recommending denial of the ABA’s accrediting authority altogether. The committee opted to send a “clear message” through less draconian means.

The final recommendation was to give the ABA a 12-month period during which it would have no power to accredit new law schools. Thereafter, the ABA would report its progress in addressing the committee’s concerns, including the massive debt that students are incurring at law schools with poor JD-required placement rates.

As one member put it, “It is great to collect data, but they don’t have any standard on placement. What’s the point of collecting data if you can’t…use the data to help the students and protect the students…”

Another member summarized the committee’s view of the ABA: “This feels like an Agency that is out of step with a crisis in its profession, out of step with the changes in higher ed, and out of step with the plight of the students that are going through the law schools.”

The day of reckoning may not be at hand, but it’s getting closer.

LAW SCHOOLS AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

On June 17, Noam Scheiber’s article, “An Expensive Law Degree and No Place to Use It,” appeared in The New York Times. He focused on individual human tragedies resulting from the legal education bubble.

Four days later, Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon countered with his Times column, “Law School Still a Solid Investment, Despite Pay Discrepancies.” Notwithstanding the title, he’s moving in Scheiber’s direction.

Learning from Mistakes

Professor Solomon’s prior ventures into legal education haven’t gone particularly well. In November 2014, he wrote “[T]he decline in enrollment could lead to a shortage of lawyers five years from now.” Highlighting Thomas Jefferson School of Law as one of the marginal schools fighting to remain alive, Solomon suggested, “It may be tempting to shut them in these difficult times, but it can cost tens of millions to open a new one. Better to invest and cut back on expenses for a while and see what happens.”

Consistent with his area of expertise — financial and securities regulation — Professor Solomon was relying on the market to work. But in legal education, it never gets a chance. Bankruptcy laws and the federal student loan program insulate law schools from accountability for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes.

Waiting to “see what happens” became a triumph of hope over reality. For the Thomas Jefferson class of 2013, the full-time long-term JD-required employment rate nine months after graduation was 29 percent. For the class of 2014, it was 30 percent. Even with an additional month for the class of 2015 to find jobs, the ten-month FTLT-JD-required employment rate was 24 percent. But the school did win that nagging fraud case brought by a recent graduate.

In April 2015, Solomon’s column on legal education and the profession was so riddled with errors that I climbed out of a hospital bed to write a responsive post culminating in this question, “Whatever happened to The New York Times fact-checker?”

Almost There

With all of that carnage in the rearview mirror, Professor Solomon’s June 21 article assumes a more moderate tone. Most importantly, he acknowledges the different legal education markets that exist for new graduates: “[I]t is clear that it is harder out there for the lower-tier law schools and their graduates.”

Noting that some big firms announced starting salary increases to $180,000 for the class of 2016, he cautions, “Only the lucky 17 percent of graduates earn salaries this high. To be in this group, you needed to go to a top 10 school or graduate in the higher ranks of the top quartile of law schools. Things are harder for every other law graduate.”

Solomon also accepts the bimodal distribution of starting salaries that results from the different markets for law graduates: “[W]hile 17 percent of graduates earned median salary of $160,000 in 2014, about half had a median starting salary of $40,000 to $65,000.”

The article could and should have ended with this: “Either way, it is clear that it is harder out there for lower-tier law schools and their graduates.”

In Defense of Fellow Professors?

Four days before Solomon’s article, Noam Scheiber’s Times piece profiled once-hopeful students at Valparaiso University School of Law. They’d incurred massive debt for a JD degree, but couldn’t find jobs requiring one. Scheiber also quoted a professor who recently headed the school’s admissions committee: “If we could go back, I think we should have erred a little more on the side of turning people down.”

Immediately after the publication of Scheiber’s article, social media took over when a law professor complained in an open letter to Scheiber: “Have you seen this line of peer-reviewed research, which estimates the boost to earning from a law degree including the substantial proportion of law graduates who do not practice law?”

The cited “line of peer-reviewed research” consisted of one study, co-authored by that professor in 2013. When Scheiber invited the professor to identify any factual errors in his article, the professor provided six alleged mistakes. For anyone interested in diving into those weeds, Scheiber posted the six items and his response on his Facebook page, including this:

“It’s not worth reviewing the controversy about your work on law graduate earnings here, since the criticisms are well-established. But suffice it to say, I think it’s strange to respond to a claim that the economic prospects of people graduating after the recession have fundamentally changed relative to those who graduated before the recession with a study that only includes people who graduated prior to 2009.”

(UPDATE: On Friday, June 24, the professor responded to Scheiber’s response.)

Among the many other criticisms to which Scheiber refers is the 2013 study’s failure to consider differences among law schools in their graduates’ incomes. In other words, it ignored the actual law school markets.

Nearing the Finish Line

Professor Solomon’s latest article centers on the importance of recognizing those different markets. But he still cites the 2013 study for the proposition that “most law students earned a premium of hundreds of thousands of dollars over what they would have earned had they not gone to law school, even taking into account the debt they accrue.”

Even so, Solomon’s slow walk away from the 2013 study improves on his April 2015 column. There, he relied on it to suggest that an “acceleration in compensation results in a premium of $1 million for lawyers over their lifetime compared with those who did not go to law school.” Now he’s down to “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for “most law students.”

Professor Solomon teaches at a top school, UC-Berkeley. He knows that plenty of students at other schools have a tough road ahead. Solomon no longer refers to an overly broad $1 million lifetime premium. He has also added a qualifier (“most law students” — meaning a mere 51 percent) — to whatever he thinks the study proves about the economic benefit of a JD. In other words, he has rendered the 2013 study meaningless to anyone considering law school today.

So why does Professor Solomon continue to cite the study at all? Better not to ask. Accept progress wherever you find it.

 

ABOUT THAT LAWYER SHORTAGE…

Facts are stubborn things — almost as stubborn as persistent academic predictions that boom times for attorneys are just around the corner.

Back in 2013, Professor Ted Seto at Loyola Law School-Los Angeles observed, “Unless something truly extraordinary has happened to non-cyclical demand, a degrees-awarded-per-capita analysis suggests that beginning in fall 2015 and intensifying into 2016 employers are likely to experience an undersupply of law grads, provided that the economic recovery continues.”

In November 2014 after the Bureau of Labor Statistics proposed a new and deeply flawed methodology for measuring attorney employment, Professor Seto weighed in again: “If the new BLS projections are accurate, we should see demand and supply in relative equilibrium in 2015 and a significant excess of demand over supply beginning in 2016.” His school’s full-time long-term bar passage employment rate for the class of 2015 was 62 percent — slightly better than the overall mean and median for all law schools, which are just under 60 percent.

Likewise in 2014, Professor Rene Reich-Graefe at Western New England University School of Law used what he described as “hard data” to argue, “[C]urrent and future law students are standing at the threshold of the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country.” The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics published his dubious analysis leading to that prediction. Within ten months of graduation, only 43 percent of 2015 graduates from Professor Reich-Graefe’s school found full-time long-term jobs requiring bar passage.

Fact-sayers v. Self-interested Soothsayers

To his credit, Professor Jerry Organ at the University of St. Thomas School of Law has been fearless in challenging the relentless optimism of his academic colleagues. And he does it with the most persuasive of lawyerly approaches: using facts and evidence.

Analyzing the ABA’s recently released law school employment reports for all fully-accredited law schools, Professor Organ notes that the number of graduates dropped in 2015. But for the second straight year, so did the number of full-time long-term jobs requiring bar passage.

Professor Organ offers a number of explanations for this result: declining bar passage rates; regional factors that reduced hiring in Texas and elsewhere; the impact of technology. But whatever the reasons, he suggests, “[T]his employment outcomes data provides a cautionary tale.”

Proceeding Without Caution

“The fact that the employment market for law school graduates appears to have stagnated and even declined to some extent over the last two years,” Professor Organ continues, “may mean that risk averse potential law school applicants who focus on post-graduate employment opportunities when assessing whether to invest in a legal education may remain skittish about applying, such that this year’s good news on the applicant front may be somewhat short-lived.”

The “good news on the applicant front” to which Professor Organ refers is his projection that applications for the fall 2016 entering class are on track to increase for the first time since 2010. But he offers a cautionary note there as well. Law schools at the upper end “will see more enrollment growth and profile stability in comparison with law schools further down the rankings continuum.”

Perilous Predictions

Some prognostications are safer than others. Here’s mine: Faculty and administration at weak law schools will continue using the overall decline in the number of all applicants to persist in their misleading sales pitches that now is a “Great Time to Go to Any Law School.” They will discourage inquiry into more relevant facts.

But here they are: At the 90th percentile of all 204 ABA-accredited law schools, the full-time long-term bar passage-required employment rate for 2015 graduates was just under 80 percent. At the 75th percentile, it was 67 percent. But at the 25th percentile, it was 49 percent. And at the 10th percentile, it was only 39 percent.

It will always be a great time to go to some law schools. It will never be a great time to go to others.

WARM BODIES

Colleges have entered a game that law schools have been playing for years. According to a recent New York Times front page headline, “Colleges Seek Warm Bodies From Overseas.” The title of the online version was equally pointed: “Recruiting Students Overseas to Fill Seats, Not to Meet Standards.”

For years, law schools have been dropping standards to fill classrooms. Marginal schools have been the worst offenders, and the profession is now paying the price in declining bar passage rates. But even among top schools, a more subtle and profitable technique has pervaded law school business plans for years: expanding LLM programs.

The Numbers

From 2006 to 2013, the number of law students enrolled in non-JD programs increased by almost 50 percent — to more than 11,000. Leading the way are LLM programs that now exist at more than 150 law schools. And students from foreign countries are flocking to them.

What began decades ago as a noble effort to encourage international cultural diversity has become a cynical method of revenue generation. The Times article focuses on colleges that use foreign recruiters. But its money quotes apply to law schools:

“[T]he underlying motivation for the university…is to get warm bodies in the door.”

“It is ethically wrong to bring students to the university and let them believe they can be successful when we have nothing in place to make sure they’re successful.”

“[C]olleges began to look at foreign students, who pay full tuition, as their financial salvation.”

Need Money?

Warm bodies. Graduate outcomes that aren’t the schools’ problem. Students who pay full tuition. If you’re running a law school as a business, the solution to declining revenues from a JD program becomes three letters: LLM.

Professor George Edwards at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law explains:

“I would like to think that U.S. law schools are creating LLM programs or expanding existing programs primarily for altruistic reasons…The reality is that law schools are businesses, and to stay afloat they must generate revenue to pay law school expenses, such as faculty salaries. Law school revenues primarily come from tuition revenues, and revenues are down due to fewer U.S. students enrolling in the degree programs for the basic U.S. law degree, the JD.”

“U.S. law schools have been seeking ways to make up for lost revenue,” Professor Edwards continues. “One way is to create or expand enrollment for international LLM students who may not have the same worries that are driving JD enrollment downwards.”

And so, he concludes,

“The desire to increase law school revenue has triggered a proliferation of new LLM programs and triggered the expansion of existing LLM programs.”

So What’s the Problem?

What exactly should a law school’s mission be? Some deans are unwilling to ask the question because they fear honest answers: revenue generation, short-term profits, and maximizing U.S. News rankings. Moving away from those safe harbors risks reorienting the profession toward what it was when they decided to become lawyers.

An institution’s mission statement should be the starting point for every decision its leaders make. Law schools are no exception. From the faculty hired to students admitted to programs offered, clear goals produce coherent behavior. But at law schools throughout the country, discussions about objectives — what they are and what they should be — aren’t happening.

Restating platitudes is easy. Developing a statement of principles to govern conduct is a challenge. Requiring consistent action in accordance with those principles creates accountability.

For centuries, the legal profession has occupied a transcendent role in the preservation of civilization. Law schools have been the custodians of that tradition. To retain that stature, the people who run them should view their responsibilities as something more than managing just another business. If they don’t, their schools will become exactly that.

THE REAL STORY OF THE NEW YORK PRIMARY

It was a “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment.

Shortly after the polls closed on primary election night in New York, CNN made a bold prediction. Its exit polling showed Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders locked in a tight Democratic primary race. Clinton’s win would be close, Wolf Blitzer said: 52 percent to 48 percent.

Less than an hour later, that prediction was as laughable as the famous November 3, 1948 Chicago Tribune headline announcing that voters had elected Thomas E. Dewey President of the United States.

Statistically, the CNN call was far worse. In the end, Truman beat Dewey 49 to 45 percent. Clinton won New York — 58 to 42 percent.

When the News is News

One interesting aspect of the CNN mistake is how quickly it disappeared from public sight. That’s because all major media outlets use exit polling to predict results as soon as they can. First-predictors are the first to attract viewers. There’s no incentive for any of them to throw mud on a process that they all use as a marketing gimmick.

Another aspect is the paucity of discussion over what went wrong at CNN. I don’t know the answer, but this article isn’t about that. It’s about the real lesson of the episode: The use of statistics can be a perilous exercise.

Law Schools

Data are important. It’s certainly wise to look at past results in weighing future decisions. But it’s also important to cut through the noise — and separate valid data from hype.

For example, if less than one-third of a particular law school’s recent graduates are finding full-time long-term jobs requiring a JD, prospective students are wise to consider carefully whether to attend that school. But it becomes more difficult when some law professor argues that the average value of a legal degree over the lifetime of all graduates is, say, a million dollars.

It’s even more challenging when law deans and professors repeat the trope as if it were sacrosanct with a universal application every new JD degree-holder from every school. And it sure doesn’t help when schools with dismal full-time long-term JD employment outcomes tout, “Now is the Time to Fulfill Your Dream of Becoming a Lawyer.”

Law Firms

Likewise, based on their unaudited assessments, leaders of big law firms confess that only about half of their lateral hires over the past five years have been breakeven at best. And that not-so-successful rate has been declining.

Law firms are prudent to consider carefully that data before pursuing aggressive lateral hiring as a growth strategy. But it becomes more difficult when managing partners seek to preside over expanding empires. And it doesn’t help when law firm management consultants keep overselling the strategy as the only means of survival.

Data should drive decisions. But the CNN misfire is a cautionary tale about the limits of statistical analysis. Sometimes numbers don’t tell the whole story. Sometimes they point people in the wrong direction. And sometimes they’re just plain wrong.

LSAT v. GRE – RHETORIC v. REALITY

[NOTE: The trade paperback edition of my book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis (Basic Books, 2016) — complete with an extensive new AFTERWORD — is now available at Amazon.]

The Wall Street Journal reports that the University of Arizona College of Law has begun accepting GRE scores in lieu of LSATs. Two other schools — the University of Hawaii and Wake Forest — are performing validation studies to determine whether they, too, should make the move to GREs.

At Arizona, Dean Marc Miller said, “This isn’t an effort to declare war on anybody. This is an effort to fundamentally change legal education and the legal profession.”

To “fundamentally change legal education and the legal profession,” accepting GRE scores instead of LSATs seems like a misfire. Beyond the rhetoric is a reality that might reveal what else could be going on.

The GRE Is Easier

According to the executive director of prelaw programs at Kaplan Test Prep, Jeff Thomas, “The GRE is regarded as the easier test. The entirety of the LSAT was meant to mimic the law-school experience, while the GRE was not created for that particular purpose.”

But the fact that the GRE is easier doesn’t explain why some law schools want to use it. Self-interest and U.S. News rankings might.

LSATs Are Telling a Sad Story 

As LSAT scores of entering classes have dropped at many schools, so have bar passage rates. According to the University of Arizona School of Law’s ABA Reports, its median LSAT for matriculants in 2012 was 161. For 2015, it was 160. That’s not much of a decline, but at the 25th percentile, the LSAT score went from 159 to 155.

According to the school’s website, in July 2013, 92 percent of first-time test takers passed the Arizona bar exam. In July 2015, the passage rate was 84 percent.

The GRE Isn’t the LSAT

Such trends suggest another possible reason for allowing students to substitute the GRE for the LSAT: It buys law schools time and complicates prelaw student decision-making. At many schools, year-over-year LSAT score comparisons have documented the willingness of many deans to accept marginal students. The easiest way to stop such time series analyses is to make that test optional.

The GRE will be a new data point. Until schools report those scores for two or three years, it won’t reveal trends in admitted student qualifications. That will deflect attention away from the “declining quality of admitted students” narrative that has become pervasive. Never mind that the narrative is pervasive because, based on LSATs and undergraduate GPAs for matriculants at many schools, it’s true. (Between 2012 and 2015, the University of Arizona School of Law’s undergraduate GPA for matriculants dropped at all three measuring points — the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles, according to its ABA reports for those years.)

The Heavy Hand of U.S. News rankings

In addition to confusing the story on the declining quality of applicants, law schools have another reason to accept the GRE. Applicants will take both exams and pick the better result for law school consumption. It’s analogous to the current ABA rule allowing schools to use only a student’s highest LSAT score.

Prelaw students who do badly on the LSAT will submit the GRE score instead. The ongoing self-selection of poor LSAT scores away from the applicant pool will increase the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile LSAT values for the scores that remain. Until all schools adopt the GRE option, it will help the U.S. News rankings of the schools that do it.

There’s precedent for such behavior. Most high school students take the SAT and the ACT. Where a college allows either score, students submit the higher one.

Look Beyond the Rhetoric

Trends at the two other schools mentioned in the WSJ article might be relevant to all of this. At the University of Hawaii, compare the 2012 and 2015 ABA forms reporting LSATs for matriculants:

75th percentile: 2012 – 160; 2015 – 158

50th percentile: 2012 – 158; 2015 – 154

25th percentile: 2012 – 154; 2015 – 151

Likewise, at Wake Forest the results are:

75th percentile: 2012 – 165; 2015 – 162

50th percentile: 2012 – 163; 2015 – 161

25th percentile: 2012 – 159; 2015 – 157

At this point, the appropriate legal phrase is res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself.

The ABA is planning to determine independently whether the GRE meets its accreditation requirement allowing schools to use the LSAT or another “valid and reliable” test when making admissions decisions. The profession’s leading organization is likely to approve the switch. That’s because doing so will perpetuate what has become the ABA’s central mission in legal education: protecting many law schools from scrutiny and meaningful accountability.

That’s about as far as you can get from trying “to fundamentally change legal education and the legal profession.”

 

ANOTHER SHOT AT STUDENT LOAN DEBT

A recent Department of Education initiative has not attracted the public attention that it deserves. But it could have important implications for the federal loans that fuel higher education, including law schools. The Department seeks to create a framework for dealing with the thousands of students who recently filed “defense of repayment” claims.

The Wall Street Journal’s recent summary of the program could strike fear in the hearts of many law school deans and university administrators:

“In the past six months, 7,500 borrowers owing approximately $164 million have applied to have their student debt expunged under an obscure federal law that had been applied in only three instances before last year. The law forgives debt for borrowers who prove their schools used illegal tactics to recruit them, such as lying about their graduates’ earnings.”

But it could get even worse for the schools, as the Journal explains:

“Last week, the department began a months-long negotiation with representatives, schools and lenders to set clear rules, including when the department can go after institutions to claw back tuition money funded by student loans.”

Will the Department’s latest effort to impose meaningful accountability on institutions of higher education fare any better than predecessor techniques that have failed? There have been too many of those.

Lawsuits Haven’t Worked

Law schools have become poster children for the accountability problem and ineffectual efforts to solve it. In 2012 some recent alumni sued their law schools, but they didn’t get very far. The vast majority of courts threw out claims that the schools had misrepresented graduates’ employment opportunities. The winners on motions to dismiss or summary judgment included Thomas M. Cooley (now Western Michigan University Cooley School of Law), Florida Coastal, New York Law School (not to be confused with NYU), DePaul, IIT Chicago-Kent, and John Marshall (Chicago), among others.

Judge Melvin Schweitzer’s March 21, 2012 ruling in favor or New York Law School set a tone that other courts followed: Prospective students “seriously considering law school are a sophisticated subset of education consumers…” In other words, they should have known better. That might be true today, but at the time Judge Schweitzer wrote his opinion, he was wrong. So were the courts who followed his rationale to reach similar results. At a minimum, there were serious factual disputes concerning his conclusory assessment of an entire cohort of prelaw students.

In particular, the plaintiffs in the New York Law School case graduated between 2005 and 2010. Back in 2002 through 2007 — when those undergraduates were contemplating law school — NYLS claimed a 90 to 92 percent employment rate for its most recent graduating classes. But that stratospheric number resulted only because all law schools counted any job for purposes of classifying a graduate as “employed.” A part-time worker in a temporary non-JD-required position counted the same as an assistant U.S. attorney or a first-year associate in a big firm. Only after 2011 did the ABA finally require schools to provide meaningful data about their recent graduates’ actual employment results.

A notable exception to the dismissal of the cases against the law schools was one of the first-filed actions, Alaburda v. Thomas Jefferson School of Law, which is set for trial in March 2016. In that case, Judge Joel Pressman correctly found that a jury should decide the clearly disputed issues of fact. He got it right, but he’s an outlier.

The ABA and the AALS Haven’t Helped

Anyone expecting the profession to put its own house in order continues to wait. The changes requiring greater law school transparency in employment outcomes came about only because the public outcry became overwhelming and Congress threatened to involve itself. When political opposites such as Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) agree to gang up on you, it’s time to wake up.

Since then, the organization has returned to form as a model of regulatory capture. Twice in the last four years, it has punted on the problem of marginal law schools that survive on student loan debt. School that would have closed long ago if forced to operate in a real market continue to exist only because the legal education market is dysfunctional. That is, the suppliers — law schools — have no accountability for their product — far too many graduates who are unable to obtain full-time long-term JD-required employment after incurring the six-figure debt for their degrees.

And while we’re on the subject of regulatory capture, the current president of the AALS has now declared that there is no crisis in legal education. Her interview produced an article titled, “As Law Professors Convene, New Leader Looks to Unite the Profession.” Why all law schools should unite to protect marginal bottom-feeders exploiting the next generation of students remains a question that no one in the academic world is willing to ask, much less answer.

Now Comes the Fun Part

Ignoring problems does not make them go away. As the profession refuses to acknowledge a bad situation, it loses the opportunity to influence the discussion. Which takes us to the recent Department of Education activity relating to criteria for applying the burgeoning volume of “defense of repayment” applications.

Special interests are likely to resist meaningful change. From institutions of higher education to debt collectors who have made student loan debt collection a multi-billion dollar business, lobbyists will swamp the process. Still, attention seems assured for marginal schools exploiting a dysfunctional market. That’s a good thing.

As the disinfecting qualities of sunlight intensify, someday the ABA and the AALS may realize that an old adage is apt: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Perhaps another round of bipartisan congressional interest will help them see the light.

THE CRISIS IN LEGAL EDUCATION IS OVER!

[NOTE: The trade paperback edition of my book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis (Basic Books) — complete with an extensive new AFTERWORD — will be released on March 8, 2016. That’s just in time to put in proper perspective the latest annual rankings from U.S. News & World Report (law schools in mid-March) and Am Law (big firms on May 1). The paperback is now available for pre-order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Now on to today’s post…]

Wishful thinking is never a sound strategy for success.

“I don’t see legal education as being in crisis at all,” said Kellye Testy, the new president of the Association of American Law Schools and dean of the University of Washington Law School. She made the observation on January 5, 2016 — the eve of the nation’s largest gathering of law professors.

Perhaps her declaration made attendees more comfortable. Unfortunately, it’s not true.

The Trend! The Trend!

Law deans and professors cite the dramatic declines in applicants since 2010 as proof of law school market self-correction. Dean Testy echoed that approach: “I think there is a steadying out now after quite a crash in the number of students our schools are admitting….”

Two points about that comment. First, the decline in the number of applicants since 2010 is real, but that year may not be the best baseline from which to measure the significance of the drop in subsequent years. From 2005 to 2008, the number of applicants was already declining — from 99,000 to 83,000. But the Great Recession reversed that downward trend — moving the number back up to 88,000 by 2010 as many undergraduates viewed law school as a place to wait for three years while the economy improved.

Viewed over the entire decade that began in 2005, the “drop” since 2010 was from a temporarily inflated level. If the roughly four percent annual reduction that occurred from 2005 to 2008 had continued without interruption to 2014, the result would have been about 65,000 applicants for the fall of 2014, compared to the actual number of 56,000. That difference of 9,000 applicants doesn’t look like a “crash.”

A More Troubling Trend

Second and more importantly, many law schools solved their reduced applicant pool problem by increasing admission rates. Overall, law schools admitted almost 80 percent of applicants for the fall of 2014. Compare that to 2005 when the admission rate was only 59 percent.

During the same period, the number of applicants dropped by 40,000, but the number of admissions declined by only 12,000. Countering the impact of fewer applicants to keep tuition revenues flowing meant lowering admission standards. The ripple effects are now showing up in declining bar passage rates for first-time takers.

Student Enlightenment Interrupted

Transparency has given students access to data that should produce wiser decisions. Until the current application cycle, better information was contributing to the recent decline in the number of law school applicants. But the relentless promotional efforts of law school faculty and administrators may be interrupting that trend. Compared to last year, the number of applicants is up.

But law schools aren’t solely to blame. Responsibility for persistently dubious decisions also rests on those making them. A December 22 article in The Wall Street Journal, “U.S. Helps Shaky Colleges Cope with Bad Student Loans,“ includes this unfortunate example:

“Anthony C. Johns, 32 years old, regrets accumulating $40,000 in debt while attending Texas College, a private college in Tyler. He says he graduated in 2007 with an English degree but couldn’t land a full-time job.

“‘I think I applied for everything on CareerBuilder from teaching to banking,’ says Mr. Johns, who has defaulted on his Texas College loans. ‘Default was very embarrassing.’ Since then, he has enrolled in law school and borrowed $30,000 to pay for his first year.'”

The emphasis is mine.

The Biggest Problems Remain

According to LinkedIn, someone named Anthony C. Johns graduated from Texas College in 2007 and is currently a student at the Charlotte School of Law. That’s one of the Infilaw consortium of three for-profit law schools — Charlotte, Arizona Summit, and Florida Coastal. Owned by private equity interests, the Infilaw schools — like many others — survive only because unrestricted federal student loans come with no mechanism that holds schools accountable for graduates’ poor employment outcomes.

Ten months after graduation, Charlotte School of Law’s full-time long-term bar passage-required placement rate for 2014 graduates was 34 percent. The average law school loan debt of its 2014 graduates was $140,000. If Anthony Johns regretted accumulating $40,000 in college debt, wait until he’s taken a retrospective look at law school.

You Be The Judge

Perhaps Dean Testy is right and there is no crisis in legal education. Or perhaps it depends on the definition of crisis and how to measure it. When a problem gets personal, it feels different.

Since 2011 when the ABA first required law schools to report the types of employment their graduates obtained, over 40 percent of all graduates have been unable to find full-time long-term employment requiring bar passage within ten months of receiving their degrees.

Now let’s make those numbers a bit more personal. Saddled with six-figure law school debt, many recent law graduates might consider crisis exactly the right word to describe their situation. Where you stand depends on where you sit.

MIZZOU FOOTBALL LESSONS

The legal profession could learn something from the events culminating in Tim Wolfe’s resignation as president of the University of Missouri system. So could all of higher education. But those lessons have little to do with race.

Who is Tim Wolfe?

He’s a businessman.

Wolfe’s family moved to the Columbia, Missouri area when he was in fourth grade. For 30 years, his father was a communications professor at the University of Missouri. Wolfe quarterbacked his high school football team to a state championship. He earned an undergraduate degree from MU in personnel management.

After college, Wolfe became a sales rep for IBM where he worked his way up to vice president and general manager of its global distribution center. After 20 years at IBM, he became executive vice president of a consulting services company. From there, he moved to software maker Novell Americas, where he was president when another company acquired Novell and left him unemployed.

In December 2011, the University of Missouri’s board of curators announced Wolfe’s selection as its 23rd president. His base salary was $459,000.

What Happened? For a While, Not Much

As recently as August 2014, the board of curators thought that Wolfe’s performance had earned him a contract extension from February 2015 through June 2018. A year later, his troubles began.

On September 12, the president of the Missouri Student Association posted a Facebook item about vile racist slurs he’d received. By October 10, a group calling itself Concerned Student 1950 (the year Mizzou first admitted black students) staged a homecoming parade protest. On October 20, the group issued eight demands, including the ouster of Wolfe.

Exactly what he did to make such a shortlist is far from clear. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal put some blame on his proposal to close the university’s respected press as a cost saving measure. But he withdrew that proposal after hearing from objectors.

The Times and the Journal also implied that Wolfe was responsible for canceling health insurance for graduate students. But that situation is more complicated. As the graduate studies office announced in August, new Affordable Care Act requirements prevented the university from paying those premiums. Instead, the university would provide a one-time stipend to all qualified graduate students. Under the ACA, the university said, it was unable to link the stipend to health insurance or to ask whether recipients needed or planned to purchase a policy. Failure to implement the new IRS regulations would have resulted in fines of $100 per student.

Was It Race?

After a swastika with feces appeared in a campus bathroom on October 24, Concerned Student 1950 met with Wolfe personally. Three days later, one of the protest organizers announced a hunger strike. On November 6, a student posted a video in which protesters asked Wolfe to define systematic oppression.

“I’ll give you an answer, and I’m sure it will be a wrong answer,” he said. “Systematic oppression is because you don’t believe that you have the equal opportunity for success.”

“Did you just blame us for systematic oppression, Tim Wolfe?” shouted a protester. “Did you just blame black students?”

Wolfe’s insensitive comments were unfortunate. But they’re not the sort of thing that costs a university president his job. And they didn’t cost Wolfe his — until the football team weighed in.

And Then…

On Saturday, November 7, the entire Mizzou football team — 84 scholarship players and their coaches — proclaimed unanimous solidarity with the protest movement. Within 36 hours, Wolfe resigned.

Like many universities, the University of Missouri created the monster that can devour it. College football is big business, especially in the Southeastern Conference. The average SEC head football coach makes almost $4 million a year. President Wolfe’s base salary was about one-tenth of what the school pays coach Gary Pinkel. Throughout the country, college football generates enormous revenues that pay for coaches, athletic scholarships, and stunning athletic facilities.

Whether and to what extent this circle of riches makes its way back to support a school’s principal mission — educating young people — isn’t clear. Earlier this year during its dispute over whether college players could unionize, Northwestern University claimed that, considered as a whole with other sports that football subsidized, the athletic programs were money-losers for the school. On November 7, Northwestern broke ground on a new $260 million athletic facility.

Pocketbook Threat

The tipping point for Wolfe came when the football team — with a mediocre record of four wins and five losses — said it would boycott its November 14 game against BYU. That game alone would have cost the university $1 million. But the potential impact could be far greater if the team fails to win the two more games needed to qualify for a postseason bowl appearance.

Now we come to the lesson for big law firms. The internal gap between the highest and lowest paid equity partners at most firms is enormous and growing. Likewise, the frenzy to recruit lateral rainmakers continues unabated. Those trends have produced a “don’t-get-me-angry” group that is analogous to what many college football teams have become. A handful of individuals exerts disproportionate influence over an entire institution, but the resulting culture affects everyone.

Football Cognitive Dissonance

Society is conflicted about football. Every weekend, millions of people watch college games. I’m among them. Our behavior creates market demand that gives college football an outsized influence over higher education.

At the same time, we’ve become uncomfortable with some of the adverse individual consequences that the market doesn’t consider, such as lifelong brain damage from concussions. Economists call these externalities. It’s one reason that half of Americans don’t want their sons playing tackle football. When things get personal, they’re somehow different.

Big Law Cognitive Dissonance

Likewise, most law firm managing partners admit that recruiting high-powered rainmakers doesn’t usually improve their firms’ financial performance. Independent studies confirm that lateral hiring is dubious strategy. Yet the lateral frenzy continues as newly hired partners parachute into the top ranks of many firms.

Unfortunately, short-run disappointment with the financial impact of a lateral hire is the least of the problems associated with aggressive inorganic growth. The strategy can destroy a firm’s cohesion, impair its sense of professional mission, and increase its vulnerability to financial shocks. In the resulting environment, everyone in the institution suffers.

Living through the financial and cultural consequences of lateral hiring failures could have prompted law firm leaders to rethink their strategic plans. But that hasn’t happened. After all, such a reversal would require leaders to overcome their confirmation bias, transcend hubris, and admit mistakes. That’s less likely than a major university relegating football to its proper place in the institution’s broader educational mission.

By the way, Mizzou may also offer a lesson to some law school deans: make friends with your university’s football coach.

LEGAL EDUCATION’S STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

The recent New York Times editorial on the law student debt crisis didn’t attack all law schools as “scams.” Rather, along with Law School Transparency’s recent report, it exposed a soft underbelly. But in defending the bad behavior of others, many law professors and deans are doing themselves, their schools, and the profession a great disservice.

It’s a puzzling situation.

In my 30-year career as a litigator at Kirkland & Ellis, I encountered plenty of bad lawyers. I regarded them as embarrassments to the profession. But I didn’t defend their misconduct. Good doctors don’t tolerate bad ones. Gifted teachers have no patience for incompetent colleagues.

The Opposite of Leadership 

Yet the top officers of the Association of American Law Schools sent a letter to the Times editor that began:

“The New York Times fails to make its case on law school debt.”

AALS president Blake Morant (dean of George Washington University Law School), president-elect Kellye Testy (dean of the University of Washington School of Law), and executive director Judith Areen (professor and former dean at Georgetown Law and former AALS president) then explained why all is well.

If those AALS leaders speak for the organization, a lot of law deans should consider leaving it. Rather than serving the best interests of most law schools, publicly defending the bottom-feeders — while saying “no” to every proposal without offering alternatives — undermines credibility and marginalizes otherwise important voices in the reform process.

Using a Poster Child to Make a Point

The Times editorial looked at Florida Coastal, about which certain facts are incontrovertible: low admission standards; dismal first-time bar passage rates; average debt approaching $163,000 for the 93 percent of its 2014 graduates with law school loans; poor JD-employment prospects (ten months after graduation, only 35 percent of the school’s 2014 class had full-time long-term jobs requiring bar passage).

Florida Coastal isn’t alone among those exploiting law school moral hazard. Without any accountability for the fate of their graduates, many schools feed on non-dischargeable federal loans and the dysfunctional market that has allowed them to survive.

Predictable Outrage from a Inside the Bubble

In June, Scott DeVito became Florida Coastal’s new dean. In an interview about his strategic plans, he said, ““We’re going to have to build more on the parking garage because people will want to go here.”

Predictably, DeVito pushed back hard against the Times’s op-ed. (The newspaper published only a portion of his two-page letter.) He boasts that his school’s first-time bar passage rate was 75 percent in February 2015 — third best of the state’s 11 law schools. That’s true.

But the February session typically includes only 50 to 60 Florida Coastal first-time test-takers annually. DeVito doesn’t mention more recent results from the July 2015 administration, which usually includes 200 to 300 Florida Coastal grads each year: 59.3 percent first-time bar passage rate — eighth out of eleven Florida law schools.

From 2010 to 2014, the school’s July results were:

2010: 78.8% (7th out of 11)

2011: 74.6% (8th)

2012: 75.2% (9th)

2013: 67.4% (10th)

2014: 58.0% (10th)

Who among America’s law school deans is willing to defend that performance record? Their professional organization, the AALS, seems to be.

Facts Get in the Way

DeVito acknowledges that his students’ law school debt is high, but says that’s because, as a for-profit school, “taxpayers are not paying for our students’ education.” That’s a remarkable statement. Florida Coastal and every other law school receives the current system’s inherent government subsidies: non-dischargeable federal student loans, income-based repayment (IBR), and loan forgiveness programs.

Likewise, DeVito asserts that Florida Coastal students “repay their loans,” citing the school’s low default rate. The AALS letter makes the same point: “[M]ost law students…are able to repay and do. The graduate student default rate is 7 percent versus 22 percent for undergrads.”

That argument is disingenuous. The absence of a default doesn’t mean a graduate is repaying the loan or that the day of reckoning for deferred or IBR-forgiven debt will never arrive for students and taxpayers. In fact, it’s inconsistent to assert that law students “repay their loans” while also touting the benefits of IBR and loan forgiveness because students in those programs will never have to repay their loans in full. (And they still won’t be in default!)

Not Defaulting Is Not the Same as Repaying

A recent Department of Education report on colleges highlights the extent to which the absence of default is not equivalent to repayment. There’s no similar compilation for law schools, but an April 2015 Federal Reserve Bank of New York Report on Student Loan Borrowing and Repayment trends generally notes that while only 11% of all educational loan borrowers are in default, “46% of borrowers are current in their loans but are not in repayment. Only 37% of borrowers are current on their loan and actively paying down.” (Emphasis supplied)

As the New York Fed reports, the worsening repayment rate is exacerbating the long-term debt problem for students and taxpayers: “The lower overall repayment rate [compared to earlier years] helps explain the steady growth in aggregate student debt, now at nearly 1.2 trillion dollars.”

Righting Wrongs?

Finally, DeVito takes a noble turn, claiming that it “takes a for-profit entity to right a wrong — in this case the lack of diversity in law schools.”

In “Diversity as a Law School Survival Strategy,” St. Louis University School of Law Professor Aaron N. Taylor explains that marginal schools with the worst graduate employment outcomes have become diversity leaders: “[T]he trend of stratification may only serve to intensify racial and ethnic differences in career paths and trajectories.”

Rather than righting a wrong, it looks more like two wrongs not making a right.

A Few Profiles in Courage

To their credit, Professors William Henderson (Indiana University Maurer School of Law) and David Barnhizer (Cleveland-Marshall College of Law), among others, have embraced the Times’s message that Brian Tamanaha (Washington University School of Law) offered years ago: The current system is broken. Recognize it; accept it; help to lead the quest for meaningful reform.

Likewise, Loyola School of Law (Chicago) Dean David Yellen worries about schools that are “enrolling large numbers of students whose academic credentials suggest that they are likely to struggle gaining admission to the bar… [T]he basic point is an important one that legal education must address.”

The Real Enemy

DeVito’s effort to spin away Florida Coastal’s problems is understandable. Properly implemented, school-specific financial accountability for employment outcomes would put maximum pressure on the weakest law schools. Frankly, the demise of even a single marginal law school would come as a welcome relief. Since the Great Recession we’ve added law schools, not eliminated them.

That’s why most law schools and their mouthpiece, the AALS, should side with Dean Yellen and Professors Henderson, Barnhizer, Tamanaha, and others urging meaningful reform. To test that hypothesis, try this:

The next time someone says that introducing financial accountability for individual schools would be a bad idea, ask why.

The next time someone says that respectable law schools serving their students and the profession should not distance themselves from marginal players that could never survive in a functioning market for legal education, ask why not.

The next time someone says that a united front against change is imperative, ask who the real enemy is.

Then offer a mirror.

GAME-CHANGER?

Almost overnight, a persistently sad situation finally has many legal educators squirming. And rightly so.

The problem has been years in the making, as has been the profession’s unwillingness to address it. Federal funding mechanisms have combined with lack of accountability and non-dischargeability in bankruptcy to block the effective operation of market forces in legal education. Well-intentioned policies have gone terribly awry; they actually encourage misbehavior among many law school deans.

As law student debt soared into six-figures, calls for change produced the equivalent of catcalls from the “voice of the profession” — the ABA. Its latest Task Force report on the subject should embarrass anyone associated with it, including the House of Delegates that approved it. As the profession’s echo chamber convinced itself that all was well, hope for meaningful change was leaving the building.

But as it did four years ago, The New York Times has now aimed its spotlight on one of the profession’s dirtiest secrets.

The Paper of Record Speaks

In January 2011, The New York Times’ David Segal wrote a series that exposed the cynical gamesmanship whereby law schools inflated their recent graduates’ employment statistics. Through the deepening Great Recession, the profession still generated 90-plus percent employment rates for recent graduates. How? By counting every short-term, part-time, and non-JD-related job as if it were a position that any law graduate would want. Part-time greeters at Wal-mart, temporary baristas at Starbucks, and associates at Cravath were all the same in the eyes of that metric: employed.

The ugly truth surprised many prospective law students, but not the ABA, which had approved the schools’ misleading reporting methods. It turned out that within nine months of graduation, only about half of all new J.D.-degree holders were obtaining full-time long-term (defined as lasting a year) jobs that required bar passage. Within two years of the Times’ expose’, the ABA succumbed to public embarrassment and required law schools to detail their employment outcomes.

And It Speaks Again…

The overall full-time long-term JD-required employment rate has barely budged since the new age of transparency began, but law school tuition and resulting student debt have outpaced inflation. As applications to law school plummeted, many deans responded by increasing acceptance rates to keep student loan revenues flowing.

So now the focus has shifted from full disclosure to flawed funding, and the Times has entered the field of battle:

— On August 25, it published my op-ed on the law school debt crisis and the ABA”s feeble response. It went viral.

— On October 24, the Times’ lead editorial was “The Law Student Debt Crisis.” It, too, went viral.

— On October 26, the first page of the Times’ business section completed the trifecta with “Study Cites Lower Standards in Law School Admissions.” The article discusses Law School Transparency’s report documenting that bottom-feeder schools are exploiting unqualified applicants.

And Still the Naysayers Resist…

Previous posts discussed two letters-to-the-editor responding to my August 25 Times piece — one from a law professor at Texas A&M; the other from Northeastern’s dean. There’s no need to review them here. The latest Times’ editorial is generating similarly defensive vitriol from some law professors and deans who are determined to defend the indefensible.

For example, Professor Frank Pasquale at the University of Maryland School of Law (where the full-time long-term JD-required employment rate for 2014 graduates was 57 percent) fears that the Times’ October 24 op-ed will accelerate privatization:

“Private lenders are sure to be pleased by the editorial,” Pasquale writes at Balkanization. “Law school loans are lucrative for them because of extremely low student loan default rates for law school borrowers… The stage is now set for a bootlegger/baptist coalition: as prohibitionists cut off the flow of federal loans, private lenders line up to take their place.”

But The Naysayers Are Wrong…

Pasquale offers a clever turn of phrase, but his premise is incorrect. The widespread use of deferral and income-based repayment programs means that the default rate is not the most meaningful measure of whether a loan will be repaid. Actual repayment rates are. Depending on the school, repayment rates can be pathetic.

Professor Bill Henderson at Indiana University Maurer School of Law doesn’t share Pasquale’s confidence that private lenders would step into any breach that the loss of federal funds created. Henderson also notes, correctly, that private loans don’t come with deferral and IBR options that have kept nominal default rates low as non-repayment rates have surged:

“[P]rivate lenders would need to be confident that loans would be repaid. That likelihood is going to vary by law school and by law student, raising the cost of lending.”

Precisely correct. As I’ve suggested previously, tying the availability of law school loans to school-specific employment outcomes could allow the market begin exercising its long-denied power to correct the situation. It could also mean big trouble for marginal schools.

How About Holistic?

Pasquale also chides the Times for its narrow-minded approach: “[T]he paper’s biased view of higher education in general is inflecting its take on law schools. We can only hope that policymakers take a more holistic approach.”

How about a holistic approach that permitted educational debtors to discharge their private loans in bankruptcy? In that case, Pasquale’s “stage” would no longer be “set for a bootlegger/baptist coalition” whereby “prohibitionists cut off the flow of federal loans [and] private lenders line up to take their place.” Private lenders wouldn’t rush to make fully dischargeable loans to students seeking to attend marginal schools that offered little prospect of employment generating sufficient income to repay them.

How About A Constructive Suggestion?

Policymakers could revise the federal loan program to tie student funding at a school to that school’s employment outcomes for recent graduates. In fact, it could do that while preserving deferral and IBR programs. Add dischargeability of educational debt in bankruptcy and you have the beginnings of a holistic recipe for hope.

In that respect, Professor Henderson notes: “I have faith that my legal colleagues would do a masterful job solving the problems of higher education.”

Based on the profession’s track record to date, I fear that my friend’s sentiment reflects a triumph of hope over reality. But his key message is right on target: If the profession does not put its own house in order soon, someone else will.

Marginal law schools exploiting market dysfunction may have triggered the current round of scrutiny, but outside interveners will not limit their systemic fixes to the bottom feeders. Deniers of the ongoing crisis can persist in their positions, or they can propose solutions, as I have.

The Times has pulled a loose thread on the entire legal education establishment’s sweater.

LEARNING FOUR LESSONS FROM FAILURE

On October 2, 2015, Northwestern University ended a six-year experiment — the two-year accelerated JD. Dean Daniel B. Rodriguez deserves credit for pulling the plug. Now comes the important part: learning the right lessons from failure.

Lesson #1: Beware of Public Relations Hype

With much fanfare in June 2008, Dean Rodriguez’s predecessor, David Van Zandt, released a document outlining his new long-range strategic vision: “Plan 2008: Preparing Great Leaders for a Changing World.” The centerpiece was an accelerated JD program whereby the school jammed three academic years of ABA-required curriculum into two calendar years.

Van Zandt worked tirelessly to sell the program. From local talk show appearances to speeches at law schools, he never let up. But one of his stated goals should have generated concern. Even as the market for lawyers plummeted, his keynote address at a February 2009 Southwestern Law Review symposium explained that he hoped to “tap a different population of students to expand our pool of potential applicants.” In particular, he wanted to “reach those who were planning on going to MBA programs.”

In other words, he offered a prescription for what the profession needed least: more law students who had been on their way to business school until the prospect of a Northwestern accelerated JD appeared.

Lesson #2: Dig Deeper

A program that “accelerated” a student through law school in two years instead of three sounded like an unambiguously good idea. But beyond the superficial appeal were troubling realities.

Students in the program started with a Web-based course even before they arrived on campus. In May, they began full-time study. In the fall, they joined first-year students in the traditional three-year program while also adding an extra course. For anyone on the two-year accelerated path, an already precious commodity — time during the first year to integrate experiences while contemplating one’s place in a diverse, challenging and changing profession — disappeared.

Even worse, Northwestern missed an opportunity. Total tuition for the two-year program was the same as that for the three-year degree. Accelerated students just paid more in tuition each semester. According to Van Zandt, students still benefitted financially because they could enter the job market sooner. Never mind how dismal that market remained.

Lesson #3: Ignore the Spin 

Many deans claim to be remaking their schools in ways that respond to the current crisis in legal education. For the sake of the profession, let’s hope that’s true. (But see Lesson #1 above.)

Even so, cramming three years of legal education into two was never particularly creative or innovative. For example, Southwestern Law School started its accelerated JD program in 1974. (Southwestern also has dismal full-time long-term JD-required employment rates for recent graduates.)

After leaving the deanship to become president of the New School in 2010, Van Zandt continued his defense of the Northwestern AJD in an online July 25, 2011 New York Times op-ed. In the process, he earned one of my “Unfortunate Comment Awards.” That was four years ago.

Lesson #4: Beware of Motivated Reasoning

Van Zandt spoke often about the importance of markets and market-based decisions. But it took six years (and a new dean) before Northwestern responded to what the markets were telling it about the AJD. As Dean Rodriguez announced on October 2, the program failed to achieve its aspirational target of 40 AJD students per year (Van Zandt had hoped eventually to enroll 65 AJD students annually):

“[D]ealing with this smaller program,” he said, “has impacted our ability to serve the objectives and needs of all our law students.”

As schools pursue various efforts to reduce the cost and improve the content of legal education, perhaps they’ll learn one more lesson: Don’t wait years to admit a mistake.

MORE ON MY NY TIMES OP-ED

Professor Milan Markovic (Texas A&M) and Dean Jeremy Paul (Northeastern) responded to my recent post analyzing their letters to the New York Times about my Times op-ed.

On September 17, The American Lawyer published Dean Paul’s response (and my reply) here: http://www.americanlawyer.com/home/id=1202737553089/Is-Legal-Education-in-Crisis-A-Dean-Responds?mcode=1202617075486&curindex=0

On September 10, the Tax Prof Blog summary of my earlier post prompted Professor Markovic’s response (and my reply), here: http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/09/more-on-the-ny-times-op-ed-too-many-law-students-too-few-legal-jobs.html

The Tax Prof Blog entry also included a comment from someone identifying himself as Gary Lucas. A person with that name also teaches at Texas A&M. I replied to that one, too.

At this point, I’m content to invoke the legal principle of res ipsa loquitur (“the thing speaks for itself”) and let readers decide this one.

 

NY TIMES OP-ED FOLLOW UP

My August 25 Op-Ed in The New York Times went viral. It became number one on the Times’ “most-emailed” list. It rose to the top-five in “most viewed,” “most shared on Facebook,” and “most tweeted.” Within hours of publication, it generated more than 600 comments.

It also produced letters to the editor, three of which the Times chose to publish on September 2. Two are from law professors whose responses reveal why the current crisis in legal education is so intractable.

Letter #1

Milan Markovic is an associate professor of law at Texas A&M. He argues that current law students will soon have better job prospects because there are fewer of them:

“Not all of these students will graduate and pass the bar, but those who do will face much less competition for legal jobs even if the economy fails to improve.”

Professor Markovic perpetuates the sloppy analysis infecting virtually all academic discussion about law student debt and the crisis in legal education. In particular, his macroeconomic prediction about the fate of future graduates ignores a crucial fact: job opportunities vary dramatically according to school.

A 2018 graduate from Professor Markovic’s school — Texas A&M — will not have employment prospects comparable to students at top schools that regularly place more than 90 percent of their new graduates in full-time long-term bar passage-required positions. In that key category, Texas A&M’s employment rate for 2014 graduates was 52 percent.

Likewise, only three Texas A&M graduates in the class of 2014 began their careers at firms where attorney compensation is highest (that is, firms with more than 100 lawyers). Like the JD-required employment rate, big firm placement is another indicia of a school’s relevant market. That’s not a value judgment; it’s just true.

In fact, Professor Markovic is a living example of the distinct legal education submarkets. In 2006, he graduated from the Georgetown Law Center, which placed 281 of its class of 2014 graduates — more than Texas A&M’s entire 232-member class — in firms of more than 100 lawyers. Before Professor Markovic began teaching in 2010, he spent four years as an associate in two big law firms — Sidley Austin and Baker & Hostetler.

Let’s Run the Experiment

Professor Markovic objects to introducing law school accountability for employment outcomes. He argues that any reduction in federal funding “will not lead to less demand for law school or other graduate programs. Rather, students will turn to the private loan market, and private lenders will be only too happy to lend because graduate school loans — and particularly those allocated to law students and medical students — have historically been very profitable.”

Let’s run that experiment. But first, let’s create something resembling a functional market for legal education. Start by adopting my proposed sliding scale of federal loan guarantees based on each individual law school’s employment outcomes. In such a system, a school’s poor job prospects would mean a reduced loan guarantee amount for its students. Then implement one more change to the present regime: make law school debt dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Will private lenders be “only too happy” to make six-figure loans to students at any marginal law school, including places where fewer than half of graduates are finding jobs requiring a JD? Let a real market decide.

Letter #2

Professor Jeremy Paul is dean at Northeastern University School of Law. His letter to the Times editor notes correctly that many Americans cannot afford legal services and analogizes the situation to doctors.

“No one would say we had an oversupply of medical students if millions of Americans resorted to self-medication and treatment because they could not pay for a doctor,” he writes.

One commenter to Tax Prof Blog countered Professor Paul’s analogy with this one: “How can anyone say there are too many restaurants when there are still so many starving and malnourished people in the world? That’s how 12-year-olds think, not lawyers, which I’ve heard is law school’s reason for being.”

For the indigent needing legal services, there are not enough lawyers. But that’s because our society isn’t willing to pay for them. Based on the funding trends for the Legal Services Corporation and the federal government’s current obsession with austerity, the future in that respect is bleak. Compared to 1985, Congressional appropriations to the LSC are down 50 percent (in constant 2013 dollars).

Other than complain about the government’s failure to make the universal right to counsel in civil cases a priority, I can’t do anything about that problem. Neither can Professor Paul. But politicians’ reluctance to fund legal aid positions does not justify burdening today’s graduates with enormous educational debt for a JD that won’t lead to a paid position requiring that degree.

Experiments with Other People’s Student Loan Money

Professor Paul also observes that some law schools and bar associations are launching “incubator programs aimed at helping law graduates to serve clients of modest means.” That’s true. I was on the committee that developed such a program with the Chicago Bar Foundation. Will they result in more solo practitioners who, over the long-term, can squeeze out a living and a satisfying legal career? No one knows. But the participants in those programs are a drop in the bucket compared to the vast numbers of law graduates annually who can’t find JD-required jobs.

Like Professor Markovic, Dean Paul knows there’s no unitary legal education market. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1981. For Northeastern Law School — where he has been dean since 2012 — the full-time long-term bar passage-required employment rate for the class of 2014 was 53 percent.

Completing the Circle

Professor Paul’s final observation is that “studies show that a law degree remains a sound investment…”

Which takes us back to the pervasive and persistent academic canard that aggregate data matter to individual decisions about attending particular schools. What study tracks outcomes by individual law school to “show that a law degree remains a sound investment” for graduates of every school?

No such study exists. But for those determined to resist necessary change in the broken system for funding legal education, magical thinking combines with confirmation bias to trump reality every time. Federal student loan subsidies unrelated to student outcomes encourage otherwise thoughtful legal academics to become unabashed salespeople.

Think of it as your tax dollar at work.

Would Professor Markovic and Dean Paul — among many others who similarly ignore the crisis in legal education — counsel their own children to attend a marginal law school that, upon graduation, assured them of six-figure debt but offered only dismal JD-required employment prospects? It probably depends on how they feel about their kids.

MY OP-ED IN THE NY TIMES — AND A KINDLE BOOK PROMOTION

My August 25, 2015 New York Times op-ed on law student debt, law school moral hazard, and the dysfunctional legal education market appears here: “Too Many Law Students, Too Few Legal Jobs.”

In the winter 2015 issue of the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review, I published a specific proposal for creating a law school accountability: “Bankruptcy and Bad Behavior – The Real Moral Hazard: Law Schools Exploiting Market Dysfunction.” 

Additionally, Amazon is running a promotion for my novel. From August 25 through August 29, you can download the Kindle version of The Partnership – A Novel.

 

 

THE ABA AT WORK — NOT!

Recently, I suggested that the ABA House of Delegates reject the June 17 Report of the Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education. The Task Force was supposed to tackle the crisis of massive student loan debt that is subsidizing marginal law schools. Its Report not only fails to fulfill that mission, but also ignores the central problem of a dysfunctional legal education market. As a consequence, it offers superficial recommendations that will accomplish little.

Doomed from the Start; Flawed at the Finish

As I observed when the ABA announced the creation of the Task Force in May 2014, no one should have reasonably expected its chairman, Dennis Archer — who is also chairman of the national policy board for Infilaw — to point his group in the direction of true market-based reform that would jeopardize revenues at marginal law schools. After all, Infilaw is a private equity-owned consortium of three for-profit law schools with dismal full-time long-term JD-required employment outcomes: Arizona Summit, Charlotte, and Florida Coastal.

On August 4, the ABA House of Delegates gave the Task Force Report a rubber stamp of approval by adopting five “Resolutions.” Only two are even operative; the remaining three now go the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. Together, they constitute an abdication of the ABA’s role in an important national discussion.

The Details

Let’s start with the two resolutions that don’t require additional action by the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. We’ll call them “urging” and “encouraging,” which means they are essentially toothless.

One asks the ABA to “urge all participants in the student loan business and process, including law schools, to develop and publish easily understood versions of the terms of various loan and repayment programs.”

The other asks the ABA to “encourage law schools to be innovative in developing ways to balance responsible curricula, cost effectiveness, and new revenue streams.”

On to Another Committee…

The remaining three resolutions “encourage” another ABA Committee to adopt equally ineffective measures: “enhanced financial counseling for students (prospective and current) on student loans and repayment programs,” “return to collecting expenditure, revenue, and financial aid data annually for each law school,” and “make public the information on legal education it currently maintains and information it collects going forward.”

It took the Task Force more than a year to come up with its recommendations. Expect another year or more to pass before the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar acts on the Task Force’s “encouragement.” If the Council takes up these issues, expect law schools to fight major battles resisting disclosure of their financial affairs. But it doesn’t really matter what the Council does or how long it takes because none of the recommendations will make a difference to the core problem: lack of individual law school-specific financial accountability for graduates’ poor employment outcomes.

One More Thing

On July 29, NPR’s Marketplace ran a brief report on the larger crisis in legal education. In his NPR interview, Dennis Archer defended his Task Force’s Report, saying, “People make choices about their lives. And they make choices every day.”

In the current dysfunctional financing regime that his Task Force refused to confront, law schools make choices, too. However, once students pay their tuition bills, law schools have no financial accountability for what happens next. Stated differently, the weakest law schools have the freedom to make the bad choice of maximizing enrollments, tuition revenues, and student debt, even if most of their graduates have dismal JD-required job prospects upon graduation.

The ABA makes choices, too. In the ongoing debate concerning one of the nation’s most pressing issues, it has chosen to remain silent. The next generation of potential ABA members is taking notice.

NPR’S MARKETPLACE REPORT

I was interviewed for this brief NPR Marketplace Report airing Wednesday, July 29, 2015: “Should Law Schools Pay If Students Don’t Get Jobs?”

Listen all the way to the end, when Dennis Archer, chairman of the ABA’s Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education, offers his defense of the Task Force’s non-response to the current crisis resulting from a dysfunctional system.

DEAR ABA…

Dear ABA (especially members of the House of Delegates to the upcoming annual meeting in Chicago):

For years, America’s dysfunctional system of financing legal education has produced too many lawyers for too few jobs — and too many law graduates with too much educational debt. A year ago, the ABA created yet another Task Force to consider the problem. The June 17, 2015 Final Report on the Financing of Legal Education embodies the failure of that Task Force’s mission. It now goes to the House of Delegates for approval.

If the Delegates are interested in rehabilitating the ABA’s credibility and restoring public confidence in the profession on an issue of critical importance to the country, they could take this simple step: reject the Task Force Report. That’s right. Rather than giving the typical rubber stamp of approval amid flowery speeches thanking Task Force members for their time and effort in generating a hollow ABA statement summarizing the obvious, the House of Delegates could just say no.

Round One

Some observers had hoped that the ABA’s previous Task Force on the Future of Legal Education might tackle the daunting issues responsible for our dysfunctional legal education market. After all, the ABA’s leaders promised that the 2012 Task Force would make “recommendations to the American Bar Association on how law schools, the ABA, and other groups and organizations can take concrete steps to address issues concerning the economics of legal education and its delivery.”

To its credit, the 2012 Task Force put its toe in those waters, observing that the “system of lending distances law schools from market considerations and it supports pricing practices that do not well serve either the public or private value in legal education.”

Let’s state the problem more bluntly: Marginal law schools are relying on exploding student debt to produce revenue streams that keep them alive. They get away with it because federal student loans come without school-specific accountability for graduates’ dismal employment outcomes. Schools have no financial skin in the game.

But the 2012 Task Force didn’t go beyond identifying the problem because, it said, “The time and resources available to the Task Force have made it impractical to develop a structure of equitable and effective solutions.”

Round Two

So in May 2014, then-ABA president James R. Silkenat announced the creation of a new Task Force — one specifically devoted to the Financing of Legal Education. It was supposed to pick up where the 2012 Task Force had stalled. It was going to “conduct a comprehensive study of the complex economic and political issues involved and produce sound recommendations to inform policymakers throughout the legal community.”

The 2014-2015 Task Force Report recites that 25 percent of law schools obtain at least 88 percent of their total revenues from tuition and that the average for all law school is 69 percent. It also reports that higher tuition has produced more student debt, even as job prospects for graduates of marginal schools have languished.

Since 2006 alone, average student debt has increased by 25 percent (private schools) and 34 percent (public schools) in inflation-adjusted dollars. Average student debt at graduation from private law schools in 2013 was $127,000; for public schools it was $88,000. Meanwhile, only about half of new law graduates are obtaining full-time long-term jobs requiring a JD.

But the new Task Force didn’t pursue this obvious market dysfunction. Instead, its Final Report offers superficial fixes: better debt counseling for students, better disclosure forms from the Department of Education, more dissemination of how schools spend their money, and continued experimentation with law curriculum. They ignore the core financial accountability problem, rather than confronting and addressing it.

Insularity and Self-Interest

The chairman of the 2014-2015 Task Force was Dennis W. Archer, former mayor of Detroit, former Michigan Supreme Court justice, and past president of the ABA. Did the ABA think no one would notice that Archer also chairs of the national policy board of Infilaw — a private equity-owned consortium of three for-profit law schools — Arizona Summit, Charlotte, and Florida Coastal.

The Infilaw schools feed on the market dysfunction that the current system for funding legal education creates. The job market for law graduates from schools such as Infilaw’s remains dismal. But even in the face of their graduates’ poor full-time long-term JD-required employment results, Infilaw’s schools increased enrollment and have become leaders in creating debt for their students.

Archer wasn’t the only problematic appointment to the 2014-2015 Task Force. Another member, Christopher Chapman, is president and CEO of Access Group — the collective voice of 197 ABA-accredited law schools.

According to the Access Group’s website, “During the course of our 30+ year existence, we became a leading provider of affordable student loans for aspiring professionals in law, medicine, dentistry, health, business, and other disciplines. As such, we served as a national originator, holder and servicer of federally guaranteed and private, credit-based loans, funding more than $18 billion of education loans since 2001.”

Enough said.

Forfeiting The Right To Be Heard

The fact that, as one 2014-2015 Task Force witness said, legal education may be the “canary in the coal mine” on issues relating to student debt and financing higher education generally is no excuse for the profession to refrain from offering potential solutions.

For that reason, at its upcoming August 3-4 meeting in Chicago, the ABA House of Delegates could reject the Task Force Report. It could then reconstitute the Task Force membership with individuals willing to deliver the tough message that the profession needs. It could direct the newly constituted group to develop meaningful proposals that tie law student loan availability to individual law school outcomes. My recent article in the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review, “Bankruptcy and Bad Behavior,” offers one idea that would force law schools to put some financial skin in the game; others have suggested plans warranting serious consideration.

The ABA describes its mission as “committed to doing what only a national association of attorneys can do: serving our members, improving the legal profession, eliminating bias and enhancing diversity, and advancing the rule of law throughout the United States and around the world.”

In a single vote rejecting the 2014-2015 Task Force Report on the Financing of Legal Education, the House of Delegates could match those lofty words with action.

On this vitally important issue, the ABA leadership has caused many attorneys and the general public to become cynical about the organization’s motives. The House of Delegates has a unique opportunity to prove that the ABA is not just the vehicle whereby an insular, self-interested group seeks to preserve the present at the expense of the future. The House of Delegates can be part of the solution, or it can remain part of the problem.

Which path will it choose? The whole legal world is watching.

WHEN SUPPORTING A CAUSE UNDERMINES IT

Lee Siegel and The New York Times probably thought they were aiding a vital cause when the Times published Siegel’s June 6 op-ed, “Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans.” The underlying issue is important. Many of today’s young people bear the burden of huge educational debt in an economy that has not afforded the kinds of opportunities available to their baby-boomer parents, including Siegel.

Here’s the problem: Siegel did more harm than good. He made himself a poster child for the kind of moral hazard that first led policymakers to render student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy more than 40 years ago. It was a mistake then, and it’s a mistake now. But Siegel is exactly the wrong spokesperson for the issue.

Lee Siegel’s Pitch

According to his op-ed, Siegel financed his education with student loans, the first of which he obtained 40 years ago. But when his family’s financial hardship left him unable to pay the full cost of tuition at “a private liberal arts college,” he “transferred to a state college in New Jersey, closer to home.” Eventually, he defaulted on his student loans.

“Years later,” he writes, “I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.”

He urges others to follow his example: default.

Who is Lee Siegel?

Here’s what Siegel and the Times didn’t reveal.

Notwithstanding his transfer to a New Jersey state college, he obtained three degrees from Columbia University — a B.A., an M.A., and a master’s of philosophy. According to the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau website, he’s “an acclaimed social and cultural critic.” The mere fact that he appears on that site means that you should expect to pay big bucks for the privilege of hearing him speak. He has written four books and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

In other words, he has an elite education that led to a lucrative career. He is exactly the wrong person to be the face of the student loan crisis — which is very real.

The Problem with Siegel’s Support

Siegel has now made himself a powerful anecdote for those on the wrong side of the fight for reform in financing higher education. Forty years ago, similar ammunition — anecdotes about individuals exploiting moral hazard — led to bad policy when student debt first became non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

In the early years of the student loan program, the Department of Health, Education & Welfare brought a supposed “loophole” to the attention of the 1973 Congressional Commission on Bankruptcy Laws. Concerned about tarnishing the image of the new program, the Department didn’t want new college graduates embarking on lucrative careers to default on loans that had made their education possible

But there was no hard, numerical evidence suggesting a serious problem. Rather, media hype over a few news reports of “deadbeat” student debtors took on a life of their own. In 1976, Congress yielded to public hysteria and made student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy unless a borrower had been in default for at least five years or could prove “undue hardship.”

In 1990, it extended the default period to seven years. In 1997, the Bankruptcy Reform Commission still had found no evidence supporting claims of systemic abuse, but Congress decided nevertheless that only “undue hardship” would make educational debt dischargeable. That placed it in the same category as child support, alimony, court restitution orders, criminal fines, and certain taxes. In 2005, it extended non-dischargeability to private loans as well.

The Enduring Power of a Big Lie

Unfortunately, the anecdotes and unsubstantiated lore about supposed abuses that led to the current rule persist to this day. In a lead editorial on July 25, 2012, The Wall Street Journal perpetuated the falsehood that “[a]fter a surge in former students declaring bankruptcy to avoid repaying their loans, Congress acted to protect lenders beginning in 1977.” 

There was no such surge. It was “more myth and media hype” than reality. Now, Siegel has provided fuel for a new round of obfuscation to displace facts.

“Thirty years after getting my last [student loan],” Siegel writes, “the Department of Education is still pursuing the unpaid balance.” I hope they catch him.

NOTE: The special ebook sale of my first book, Crossing Hoffa – A Teamster’s Story continues: http://discussions.mnhs.org/10000books/true-crime-e-book-sale/. It’s the true crime saga of my father’s two-year tangle with Jimmy Hoffa from 1959 to 1961.

The Chicago Tribune honored it as one of the “Best Books of the Year.” You can get it at Amazon, bn.com, Google, iTunes, and Kobo.

ON THE COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL BLUE SKY BLOG…

The Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog is now running my article, “Law School Moral Hazard and Flawed Public Policy”

Here’s the link: http://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2015/05/28/law-school-moral-hazard-and-flawed-public-policy/

LAW SCHOOL MORAL HAZARD

My article in the Winter 2015 issue of the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review, “Bankruptcy and Bad Behavior — The Real Moral Hazard: Law Schools Exploiting Market Dysfunction,” is now available on the Social Science Research Network. (Free download)

Here’s a teaser.

Loose talk about “the market for law school graduates” and related optimism about future employment prospects for entering students lack analytical rigor. That’s because the job market for new law school graduates is not a single market at all. Rather, graduate employment opportunities vary tremendously across distinct law school submarkets. But tuition and resulting law student debt often bear little relationship to graduates’ employment outcomes.

Current federal policies, including unlimited educational loans that are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, ignore these differences in law school submarkets and confound the operation of a true market. Those policies allow many law schools to exploit the resulting moral hazard, namely, the absence of accountability for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes.

I propose a solution that will make many law school deans, admissions officers, and faculty squirm — as they should.

A NEW YORK TIMES COLUMN MISFIRES

My unwelcome diagnosis and resulting detour into our dysfunctional medical system diverted my attention from scrutinizing commentators who make dubious assertions about the current state of the legal profession.

Well, I’m back for this one. At first, I thought that Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon’s article in the April 1 edition of the New York Times, “Despite Forecasts of Doom, Signs of Life in the Legal Industry,” was an April Fool’s joke. But the expected punch line at the end of his essay never appeared.

To keep this post a manageable length, here’s a list of points that Solomon got wrong in his enthusiastic account of why the legal industry is on the rise. As a professor of law at Berkeley, he should know better.

1. “The top global law firms ranked in the annual AmLaw 100 survey experienced a 4.3 percent increase in revenue in 2013 and a 5.4 percent increase in profit.”

That’s true. But it doesn’t support his argument that new law graduates will face a rosy job market. Increased revenue and profits do not translate into increased hiring of new associates. In most big firms, profit increases are the result of headcount reductions at the equity partner level – which have been accelerating for years.

2. “Bigger firms are hiring.”

Sure, but nowhere near the numbers prior to Great Recession levels. More importantly, big firms comprise only about 15 percent of the profession and hire almost exclusively from the very top law schools. Meanwhile, overall employment in the legal services sector is still tens of thousands of jobs below its 2007 high. Even as recently December 2014, the number of legal services jobs had fallen from the end of 2013.

3. “Above the Law, a website for lawyers, recently reported a rising trend for lateral moves for lawyers in New York.”

Apples and oranges. The lateral partner hiring market — another big law firm phenomenon that has nothing to do with most lawyers — is completely irrelevant to job prospects for new entry-level law school graduates. Even during the depths of the Great Recession, the former was hot. The latter continues to languish.

4. “Last year, 93.2 percent of the 645 students of the Georgetown Law class of 2013 were employed.”

That number includes: 83 law school-funded positions, 12 part-time and/or short-term jobs, and 51 jobs not requiring a JD. Georgetown’s full-time, long-term, non-law school-funded JD-required employment rate for 2013 graduates was 72.4 percent – and Georgetown is a top law school. The overall average for all law schools was 56 percent.

5. “[Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre found that a JD degree] results in a premium of $1 million for lawyers over their lifetime compared with those who did not go to law school.”

Simkovic acknowledges that their calculated median after-tax, after-tuition lifetime JD premium is $330,000. More fundamentally, the flaws in this study are well known to anyone who has followed that debate over the past two years. See, e.g., Matt Leichter’s two-part post beginning at https://lawschooltuitionbubble.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/economic-value-paper-a-mistrial-at-best/, or the summary of my reservations about the study here: https://thelawyerbubble.com/2013/09/03/once-more-on-the-million-dollar-jd-degree/. Most significantly, it ignores the fact that the market for law school graduates is really two markets — not unitary. Graduates from top schools have far better prospects than others. But the study admittedly takes no account of such differences.

6. “[The American Bar Foundation’s After the JD] study found that as of 2012, lawyers had high levels of job satisfaction and employment as well as high salaries.”

It also found that by 2012, 24 percent of the 3,000 graduates still responding to the study questionnaire are no longer practicing law. The study’s single class of 2013 originally included more than 5,000 — so no one knows what the non-respondents are doing.

“These are the golden age graduates,” said American Bar Foundation faculty fellow Ronit Dinovitzer [one of the study’s authors], “and even among the golden age graduates, 24 percent are not practicing law.”

7.  “Law schools have tremendous survival tendencies. I have a bet with Jordan Weissmann at Slate that not a single law school will close.”

Yes. Those “survival tendencies” are called unlimited federal student loans for which law schools have no accountability with respect to their students employment outcomes. If Solomon wins that bet, it will be because a dysfunctional market keeps alive schools that should have closed long ago.

Whatever happened to the News York Times fact-checker?

2015: THE YEAR THAT THE LAW SCHOOL CRISIS ENDED (OR NOT) — CONCLUSION

My prior two installments in this series predicted that in 2015 many deans and law professors would declare the crisis in legal education over. In particular, two changes that have nothing to do with the actual demand for lawyers — one from the ABA and one from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — could fuel false optimism about the job environment for new law graduates.

Realistic projections about the future should start with a clear-eyed vision of the present. To assist in that endeavor, the Georgetown Law Center for the Study of the Legal Profession and Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor recently released their always useful annual “Report on the State of the Legal Market.”

The Importance of the Report

The Report does not reach every segment of the profession. For example, government lawyers, legal aid societies, in-house legal staffs, and sole practitioners are among several groups that the Georgetown/Peer Monitor survey does not include. But it samples a sufficiently broad range of firms to capture important overall trends. In particular, it compiles results from 149 law firms, including 51 from the Am Law 100, 46 from the Am Law 2nd 100, and 52 others. It includes Big Law, but it also includes a slice of not-so-big law.

The principal audience for the Georgetown/Peer Monitor Report is law firm leaders. The Report’s advice is sound and, to my regular readers, familiar. Rethink business models away from reliance on internally destructive short-term metrics (billable hours, fee growth, leverage). Focus on the client’s return on investment rather than the law firm’s. Don’t expect a reprise of equity partner profit increases that occurred from 2004 through 2007 (cumulative rate of 25.6 percent). Beware of disrupters threatening the market power that many firms have enjoyed over some legal services.

For years, law firm leaders have heard these and similar cautions. For years, most leaders have been ignoring them. For example, last year at this time, the Georgetown/Peer Monitor Report urged law firm leaders to shun a “growth for growth’s sake” strategy. Given the frenzy of big firm merger and lateral partner acquisition activity that dominated 2014, that message fell on deaf ears.

The Demand for Lawyers

The 2015 Report’s analysis of business demand for law firm services is relevant to any new law graduate seeking to enter that job market. Some law schools might prefer the magical thought that aggregate population studies (or dubious changes in BLS methodology projecting future lawyer employment) should assure all graduates from all law schools of a rewarding JD-required career. But that’s a big mistake for the schools and their students.

For legal jobs that are still the most difficult to obtain — employment in law firms — the news is sobering. While demand growth for the year ending in November 2014 was “a clear improvement over last year (when demand growth was negative), it does not represent a significant improvement in the overall pattern for the past five years.”

In other words, the economy has recovered, but the law firm job market remains challenging. “Indeed,” the Report continues, “since the collapse in demand in 2009 (when growth hit a negative 5.1 percent level), demand growth in the market has remained essentially flat to slightly negative.”

Past As Prologue?

The Report notes that business spending on legal services from 2004 to 2014 grew from about $159.4 billion to $168.7 billion — “a modest improvement over a ten-year period. But if expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars, the same spending fell from $159.4 to $118.3 billion, a precipitous drop of 25.8 percent.”

What does that mean for future law graduates? The Report resists taking sides in the ongoing debate over whether the demand for law firm services generally will rebound to anything approaching pre-recession levels. It doesn’t have to because, the Report concludes, “it is increasingly clear that the buying habits of business clients have shifted in a couple of significant ways that have adversely impacted the demand for law firm services.”

One of the two shifts that the Report identifies doesn’t necessarily mean less employment for lawyers generally. Specifically, companies are moving work from outside counsel to in-house legal staffs. That should not produce a net reduction in lawyer jobs, unless in-house lawyers become more productive than their outside law firm counterparts.

The second trend is bad news for law graduates: “[T]here has also been a clear — though still somewhat modest — shift of work by business clients to non-law firm vendors.” In 2012, non-law firm vendors accounted for 3.9 percent of legal department budgets; it grew to 7.1 percent in 2014.

Beware of Optimistic Projections

The Georgetown/Peer Monitor Report is a reminder that the recent past can provide important clues about what lies ahead. For lawyers seeking to work in firms serving corporate clients, it sure doesn’t look like a lawyer shortage is imminent.

So what will be the real-life source of added demand sufficient to create market equilibrium, much less a true lawyer shortage? Anyone predicting such a surge has an obligation to answer that question. As the Report suggests, general claims about population growth or the “ebb and flow” of the business cycle won’t cut it. Along with the rest of the economy, the profession has suffered through the 2008-2009 “ebb.” The economy has returned to “flow” — but the overall demand for lawyers hasn’t.

Here are two more suggestions for those predicting a big upswing from recent trends in the demand for attorneys. Limit yourselves to the segment of the population that can actually afford to hire a lawyer and is likely to do so. Then take a close look at individual law school employment results to identify the graduates whom clients actually want to hire.

2015: THE YEAR THAT THE LAW SCHOOL CRISIS ENDED (OR NOT) — PART II

Part I of this series addressed the ABA rule change that will allow 2014 law graduates until March 15 — an extra month from prior years — to find jobs before their schools have to report those graduates’ employment results to the ABA (and U.S. News). That change will almost certainly produce higher overall employment rates. But relying on any alleged trend that results solely from an underlying change in the rules of the game — such as extending the reporting period from nine months to ten — would be a mistake.

This post considers a second rule change. It comes from the U.S. Department of Labor, and it’s a whopper.

The Government Makes Things Worse

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently adopted a new statistical methodology for projecting the nation’s legal employment needs. Just about everyone agrees that, by any measure and for many years, the economy has been producing far more new lawyers than JD-required jobs. But the new BLS methodology declares that any oversupply of attorneys has evaporated. In fact, applying the new methodology retroactively to previous years would lead to the conclusion that the obvious glut of new lawyers never existed at all!

Using its earlier methodology, the Bureau has been revising downward its predictions of new lawyer jobs. In 2008, it projected a net additional 98,500 legal jobs through 2018. In 2012, it dropped that number to 73,600 through 2022. Taking into account retirements, deaths, and other attrition, the BLS separately projected that the profession could absorb about 20,000 new graduates annually for the next ten years. Most knowledgeable observers of the changing market for new lawyers have concurred with that ballpark assessment. Unfortunately, schools have been producing about twice that number (40,000).

Remarkably, the BLS’s new approach more than doubles the number of anticipated new legal jobs over the next 10 years. Rather than annual absorption of about 20,000 new lawyers through 2022, the Bureau now projects room for more than 41,000 a year. Overnight, demand caught up with what had been a chronic oversupply of attorneys.

In Defiance Of Sound Statistical Analysis And Common Sense

There are numerous technical and analytical flaws in the BLS’s new methodology. (See, e.g., Matt Leichter’s recent post, “2016 Grads Shouldn’t Take Comfort in New Jobs Projection Approach.”) Beyond those are common sense tests that the new methodology fails. For example, since 2011 the ABA-required data have revealed a persistent FTLT JD-required employment rate of 55 percent for new graduates. That’s not far from the projections that the BLS’s old methodology produced for a long time.

The BLS’s new approach amounts to saying that, somehow, all of those unemployed graduates must have been finding law jobs after all. As the old joke goes, endless digging in a roomful of manure was worth the effort; there was indeed a pony to be found – with the help of a little regression analysis.

Another common sense test considers actual employment numbers. For example, legal sector employment (including non-lawyers) through December 2014 was 1.133 million — about the same as a year ago and down more than 40,000 from 2006. Although the economy generally has recovered from the Great Recession, total employment in the legal sector is still far below pre-recession levels. If the BLS’s proposed approach were valid, it would suggest a remarkable attrition rate, raise serious questions about the state of the profession, and cause many prelaw students to wonder whether law school was the right choice.

The Bad Beat Goes On

Meanwhile, weak law schools that will benefit most from the ABA and BLS changes remain unaccountable for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes as they lower admission standards to fill classrooms. Median law school debt at graduation currently exceeds $120,000, and some of the schools with the worst employment outcomes burden students with the highest levels of debt. But there’s no financial risk to those schools because the federal government backs the loans and they’re not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

The escape hatch is small. If income-based repayment programs survive austerity demands of the Republican-controlled Congress – a big if – then students who persevere through 20 years of IBR will get a large tax bill because forgiven debt will count as income to them in the year it’s forgiven. The shortfall between the amount IBR students actually pay and the amount they owe will come from the federal purse.

Voila! The Crisis Is Over

Sometime in 2015, the synergy between the new ABA-rules allowing law schools to report 10-month employment data (discussed in Part I of this series) and the new BLS methodology projecting 41,000 new lawyer jobs annually will produce a law school chorus declaring that the crisis in legal education is over, at least in a macroeconomic sense. Indeed, the hype has already begun. Discussing the new BLS approach, Loyola University – Los Angeles School of Law professor Ted Seto observed: “If the new BLS projections are accurate, we should see demand and supply in relative equilibrium in 2015 and a significant excess of demand over supply beginning in 2016.”

The operative word is “if.” As noted in Part I, Seto’s similarly conditional prediction in 2013 didn’t come to pass. Meanwhile, only about half of his school’s 2013 graduating class secured full-time long-term JD-required employment within nine months of receiving their degrees. Average law school debt for the 82 percent of Loyola-LA law graduates who incurred debt was $141,765 — placing it 22nd (of 183) among schools whose students graduate with the most law school debt.

Here’s the real kicker. The vast disparity in individual law school employment outcomes makes broad macroeconomic declarations about opportunities for law graduates disingenuous anyway. It’s no surprise that the loudest voices come from schools where many graduates have great difficulty find any JD-required job.

But even at the macro level, anyone concerned about the fate of marginal law students, exploding student debt, or the future of a noble profession should look beyond any distracting noise about the supposed end of the legal education crisis. At least for now, the real question should be whether anything has really changed — other than the rules of the game.

2015: THE YEAR THAT THE LAW SCHOOL CRISIS ENDED (OR NOT) — PART I

Remember that you read it here first: In 2015, many law school deans and professors will declare that the law school crisis is over. After five years of handwringing, relatively minor curriculum changes at most schools, and no improvement whatsoever in the mechanism for funding legal education, the storm has passed. All is well. What a relief.

The building blocks for this house of cards start with first-year law school enrollment that is now below 38,000 – a level not seen since the mid-1970s when there were 53 fewer law schools. The recent drop in the absolute number of future attorneys seems impressive, but without the context of the demand for lawyers, it’s meaningless in assessing proximity to market equilibrium, which remains far away.

The Search for Demand

To boost the projected demand side of the equation, the rhetoric of illusory equilibrium often turns to the “degrees-awarded-per-capita” argument that Professor Ted Seto of Loyola Law School – Los Angeles floated in June 2013. His premise: “Demand for legal services…probably increases as population increases.”

“Unless something truly extraordinary has happened to non-cyclical demand,” Seto continued, “a degrees-awarded-per-capita analysis suggests that beginning in fall 2015 and intensifying into 2016 employers are likely to experience an undersupply of law grads, provided that the economic recovery continues.”

If only wishing could make it so. The economic recovery did, indeed, continue, but the hoped for increase in attorney demand was nowhere to be found. When Seto posted his analysis, total legal services employment (including non-lawyers) at the end of May 2013 was 1,133,800. At the end of November 2014, it was 1,133,700.

Follow That Dream

Professor Rene Reich-Graefe of Western New England University School of Law relied on a similar per capita approach (among other dubious arguments) to assert that today’s students are about to enter “the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country.” His students sure hope he’s right. Only 49 out of 133 members of the Western New England Law class of 2013 — 37 percent — obtained full-time long-term JD-required jobs within nine months of graduation.

It’s easy to hypothesize that population growth should increase the demand for everything, including attorneys. But it’s more precise to say that population growth is relevant to the demand for attorneys only insofar as such growth occurs among those who can actually afford a lawyer. (The degrees-per-capita argument also ignores the profound ways that technological change has reduced the demand for lawyers across many segments of the profession.)

The ABA and the U. S. Department of Labor’s Bureau Labor Statistics have added two new factors that will feed false optimism in 2015. This post considers the ABA’s unfortunate action. Part II will cover the BLS’s contribution to continuing confusion.

The ABA Misfires Again

Since it began requiring law schools to report detailed employment outcomes for their most recent graduates, the overall full-time long-term JD-required employment rate has hovered around 55 percent (excluding law school-funded jobs). For a long time, the cutoff date for schools to report their most recent graduates’ employment status to the ABA (and U.S. News) has been February 15 following the year of graduation.

Starting with the class of 2014, law schools will get an additional month during which their graduates can try to find jobs before schools have to report class-wide employment results. When the employment status cutoff date moves from February 15 to March 15, the reported FTLT JD-required employment rate will go up. Comparisons with prior year outcomes (nine months after graduation) will be disingenuous, but law deans and professors touting an upswing in the legal job market will make them. Market equilibrium, they will proclaim, has made its way to legal education.

The stated reason for the ABA change was that the February 15 cutoff had an unfair impact on schools whose graduates took the bar exam in states reporting results late in the fall, especially New York and California. Schools in those states, the argument went, suffered lower employment rates solely because their graduates couldn’t secure jobs until they had passed the bar. Another month would help their job numbers.

In July 2013, Professor Deborah Merritt offered powerful objections to the ABA’s proposed change: The evidence does not support the principal reason for the change; moving the cutoff date would impair the ability to make yearly comparisons at a time when the profession is undergoing dramatic transformation; prospective students would not have the most recent employment information as they decide where to send their tuition deposits in April; the change would further diminish public trust in law schools and the ABA. The new March 15 cutoff passed by a 10-to-9 vote.

Watch For Obfuscation

In a few months when the new 10-month employment figures for the class of 2014 show “improvement” over the prior year’s nine-month results, think apples-to-oranges as you contemplate whose interests the ABA is really serving. Consider, too, whether any macroeconomic projections of attorney demand are even probative when there is a huge variation in employment opportunities across law schools.

At 33 law schools (including Western New England School of Law), fewer than 40 percent of 2013 graduates found full-time long-term employment requiring a JD. At most of those schools, the vast majority of students incurred staggering six-figure debt for their degrees. (At Western New England, it was $120,677 for the class of 2013.)

In the some corners of the profession, federal student loan dollars are subsidizing an ugly business.