View Libby A. Nelson's original article here. Posted by LST on January 05, 2012.
Excerpt:
When the Association of American Law Schools gathers in Washington today for a three-day conference, many big and timely issues will be up for discussion. Presentations will address the financial crisis, the mortgage crisis, the legal fallout of the BP oil spill and, perhaps inevitably, Occupy Wall Street.
But relatively few sessions address a crisis making headlines that falls much closer to home for faculty and administrators from the association’s more than 160 member schools: the increasingly prominent questions about transparency, job placement rates and “value” in American legal education, and the attendant concern that law schools could be next (after the “vocational” and for-profit programs subject to the U.S. government’s new “gainful employment” rules) in line for federal scrutiny and regulation. …
Still, few presentations appear to address a central, rising concern in the past year: the amount of debt that law school students accumulate, and their difficulty finding jobs as lawyers to help them pay it off. Legal hiring has contracted during the recession, but the number of students attending law school has not diminished. The central complaint has been that law schools provide insufficient or even misleading data on students’ employment outcomes, failing to separate full-time and part-time work or not taking into account whether graduates are using their degrees. …
Among observers, there are concerns that this could lead to “gainful employment” rules for law schools. Two senators, Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, and Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, have requested information on law school data. The next step could be hearings, such as those held in the Education Committee on for-profit education.
But few sessions at the law school conference reflect this concern. In descriptions that run for pages, none mention student debt or employment outcomes. Only a very few address the changes in legal education, focusing instead on changes in the profession and long-term challenges for law schools (such as those related to alumni giving).
“It really makes you wonder how serious they are, how introspective they’re actually being,” said Kyle McEntee, the executive director of Law School Transparency, a new nonprofit group that urges law schools to release better figures on job placement and other student outcomes.
Those sessions that do focus on changing law schools seem to be “tinkering,” McEntee said. “The one critical question is how can we reduce the cost of educating lawyers.” …
[Susan Westerberg] Prager and Linda Jellum, the association’s associate director, also said the conference will take a broader view of the issues than just the questions surrounding transparency and job placement.
“We’re looking at our profession from a much longer-term perspective and how are we going to best equip our students, and that involves a number of various things,” Jellum said. “We’re interested, but we don’t see it in such a narrow aspect.”
LST's Take:
Neither do we, Ms. Prager. The lack of law school transparency is indicative of great problems, and these problems will be impossible to ignore much longer.