View Mitch Smith's original article here. Posted by LST on March 22, 2012.
Excerpt:
A lawsuit alleging misleading recruitment by New York Law School was dismissed Wednesday …
A state judge, Melvin L. Schweitzer, rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that misleading statistics led them to overvalue their legal education, ruling that New York Law School framed its data accurately and that prospective law students are “sophisticated consumers” capable of analyzing that information. …
Among the issues in the New York case was whether employment and salary information for positions which don’t require a law degree should be included in statistics presented to students. The plaintiffs said they assumed the employment rates referred only to graduates working full-time in law, while the court ruled nothing in New York Law’s admissions materials said that was the case. The plaintiffs also suggested that the law school misled them by publishing statistics based on relatively small samples, never more than 30 percent. The court disagreed.
“The court does not view these post-graduate employment statistics to be misleading in a material way for a reasonable consumer acting reasonably,” the judge wrote. “As to the salary data being misleading because it allegedly was based on a ‘deliberately selected’ small sample of graduates, the relatively small percentage of responding students was disclosed whenever the salary data included the average salary statistic.” …
In its dismissal ruling, Schweitzer was critical of the plaintiffs, suggesting they should have known employment was not assured and that students at higher-ranked law schools tended to receive the best jobs. …
“In researching law school options, it also should have come as no surprise to these law school consumers that the most lucrative jobs often are associated with having attended a high ranking law school,” Schweitzer wrote. “It is also difficult for the court to conceive that somehow lost on these plaintiffs is the fact that a goodly number of law school graduates toil (perhaps part-time) in drudgery or have less than hugely successful careers.” …
Kyle McEntee, executive director of Law School Transparency, a policy organization working to reduce the cost of legal education, worries the court “missed the point.” While prospective law schools students are usually smart, McEntee said they don’t fit the court’s definition of a sophisticated consumer. That’s because the prevailing belief in this country is that a law degree prepares one for a lucrative career. Law School Transparency is not involved in the New York Law case or any other suits filed against law schools.
“This is not a sophisticated group, and though they tend to be very intelligent, for a long time [there's] been this culturally embedded view that law school is a ticket to financial security,” McEntee said. “It’s with this belief that prospective students read and interpret these employment statistics.”
Students at other law schools have made similar claims, and suits are pending at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and Thomas M. Cooley Law School. McEntee said the New York findings could be “instructive” in cases elsewhere, but that it shouldn’t determine the outcome of those suits because they are filed in different states with different laws.
If nothing else, he said, the attention given to the cases in New York and elsewhere have helped further the idea that students and their parents need to be more savvy consumers of legal education.
“They’ve brought the idea that schools aren’t being forthright to the front of discussion,” McEntee said. …
Schweitzer acknowledged problems in the current structure of the legal profession and stressed the need to provide students with “the most transparent data of the state of our profession that we can possibly assemble so that they can make the most informed decisions that affect their livelihoods.” He added that suits like the one they dismissed might stress the need for that frank assessment of future lawyers’ career prospects.
“If lawsuits such as this have done nothing else, they have served to focus the attention of all constituents on this current problem facing the legal profession,” Schweitzer wrote. “To the extent law schools are turning out too many graduates for the positions available, market forces will begin to correct themselves, hopefully in short order. But that does not itself excuse our collective responsibility to those who have been unfortunate enough to have been caught in the midst of the maelstrom.”
Related Stories:
- Above the Law: Breaking: Class Action Lawsuit Against NYLS Dismissed (March 21, 2012) (Original Story)
- NY Supreme Court: Dismissal Order