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This op/ed is available in today’s NY Post. Read it online here.

Do law schools defraud students?

New York Law School and two other law schools are staring down the barrel of consumer-fraud class-action lawsuits. Attorneys representing recent graduates plan to soon add at least 15 more schools, including five in New York, to the list.

As the economy flounders and a jobs crisis looms for many employment sectors, law-school graduates are taking to the courts because they don’t have jobs.

It’s the economy, stupid? If only that were the whole story. The suits center on how law schools recruit students: Many encourage consumers to believe a law degree is their “magic ticket” to financial security.

The complaints accuse schools of misrepresenting job-placement statistics and violating state consumer-protection laws. They allege that schools provide information designed to mislead, deceive and prompt consumers into attending programs they’d otherwise have avoided.

In other words, these suits are about showing law schools that they don’t get more leeway than other industries in advertising the value of their services.
The shoddy-stats problem long predates the recession. Many laws schools have consistently advertised employment rates of 90 percent or more — numbers that count bar-tending jobs along with ones that actually require a law degree.

The American Bar Association accredits these schools, but doesn’t regulate how they advertise starting salaries. So schools can trumpet their graduates’ “median” starting salary of $160,000 on the basis of just 15 percent of the class.

And none of this is disclosed to the consumer.

Shouldn’t these graduates have known better than to rely on six-figure salaries and near-perfect employment rates as reason to apply to law school? Perhaps. But schools know from experience that applicants are optimistic — that consumers will believe inflated statistics that comport with those magic-ticket expectations. That a law school would be less than forthright simply does not register on people’s radars.

And despite general misgivings about lawyers, eager young college grads meet encouragement every step of the way. Ask an elementary-school child’s parents whether they want their kid to go to law school someday and you begin to understand what makes law school so compelling.

This doesn’t paint prospective law students or their families in an enviable light. They are a product of a prestige-obsessed culture caught in an unwise investment decision. But sympathy isn’t needed for legal redress. Schools have failed to follow very basic rules for advertising their services. And now they could find themselves on the hook for millions of dollars.

These problems affect more than just the legal profession. This year, ABA-approved law schools will get at least $4 billion in taxpayer support, thanks to the government’s decision in 2010 to directly lend to students. But when graduates can’t find jobs that allow full loan repayment, they either default or sign up for hardship programs. The taxpayers are on the hook for the lost interest income and unpaid loan principal.

These lawsuits and the fraudulent behavior they target are both symptomatic of greater structural problems with legal education. Tuition has far outpaced inflation, and it’s not clear whether law schools can figure out how to function if they must reduce the cost of obtaining a law degree.

Whether tuition drops because consumers finally receive the real employment statistics, or because the government stops lending essentially unlimited amounts of money to students, schools will need to either reimagine the kind of education they provide or close down.

In all of this mess, one thing is for sure: Continued pressure from lawsuits, Congress and other reform advocates will push law schools to honestly evaluate the American legal-education model. And reimagining a broken model will take a lot more than simply getting people their day in court.

Kyle McEntee is executive director of Law School Transparency (lawschooltransparency.com), a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for reform in legal education. Patrick J. Lynch is the group’s policy director and an environmental attorney in Santiago, Chile.

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer has once again reached out to the ABA to express concern about the ABA Section of Legal Education’s regulatory failings. This is the third letter from Senator Boxer. The first and second letters, addressed to immediate past ABA President Stephen Zack, both called for the ABA to shore up its oversight responsibilities as it pertains to the provision and verification of consumer information provided by law schools to prospective law students. This letter (full text below), sent to current ABA President William T. (Bill) Robinson III, follows the same themes, though it specifically criticizes the Section’s decision not to require law schools to disclose their legal employment rates for the Class of 2010. It remains clear that the Senator’s interest in law school transparency is not fleeting, but rather the product of genuine concern and disbelief that law schools habitually provide misleading employment information and that the Section of Legal Education is not doing enough to curb institutional misbehavior.

This letter comes in the wake of an editorial we wrote in the National Law Journal. We criticized the Section’s proposed changes to the annual questionnaire because they did not require law schools to disclose their legal employment rates for the Class of 2010.

On Sept. 23, the Section’s Questionnaire Committee will finalize the 2011 questionnaire, which asks about the class of 2010. Additional reforms are slated for 2012. If nothing changes, the section will collect fewer job characteristics data than it has collected in prior years. Apparently, whether a job requires bar passage or only prefers a J.D., or whether a job is full- or part-time, are now too obscure to define without many more meetings.

After the Sept. 23 meeting, nothing changed. In fact, during the meeting certain committee members actually proposed additional ways to count graduate outcomes as desirable, including counting unemployed graduates as employed so long as they had declined a legal offer. While other committee members refuted this attempt to favor law schools over graduates, this sort of protectionism runs counter to basic notions of consumer protection and has no place in the regulation of our country’s law schools.

The 2011 questionnaire, which will no longer ask whether a job is legal in nature, is now active and due at the end of this month. While we believe that Senator Boxer’s letter will eventually force the schools to provide the Class of 2010 legal employment rates at each law school, it should not take congressional hand-holding to get the Section to require such basic consumer information.

As Senator Boxer points out in her letter:

In a year when a number of lawsuits alleging consumer protection law violations have been filed against ABA law schools, when major newspapers have devoted thousands of words to problems with law school reporting practices, and when two United States Senators have encouraged significant changes to your policies, it is surprising that the ABA is resorting to half measures instead of tackling a major problem head on.

The letter also follows an announcement yesterday that two law firms are planning to file class action lawsuits against 15 additional ABA-approved law schools. Taken together, the events of this week may indicate that the Section of Legal Education has less time than it thinks to start turning things around.

• Senator Boxer to ABA 6 Oct 2011

We advise all of our readers to take a look at Professor Jerry Organ’s latest piece on the need for auditing law school admission data. His concerns come in the wake of the scandal at the University of Illinois College of Law, where the school has admitted to a pattern of fraud over the last few years. Villanova admitted a similar pattern in January.

As Professor Organ explains:

[T]his behavior is problematic because it not only misleads prospective law students and others regarding the law schools in question, it also erodes the ability of law schools generally to instill in their graduates a professional identity reflecting the highest ethical standards.

Something must be done about this. We have continually reiterated that the Law School Admissions Council would be the cheapest method of ensuring accurate admissions data. All ABA-approved law schools are members. Representatives of LSAC have said that LSAC is not interested in auditing admissions data, despite presently having the capabilities to do so.

A number of pre-law advisors raised this issue with the LSAC at the Pre-Law Advisors National Council Board meeting in March of this year. At that point, however, the LSAC representative expressed no interest in having the LSAC serve as an auditing check on law schools, noting that the LSAC is a membership organization and that any such action would require the consent of the member law schools. Daniel Bernstine, the President of the LSAC, recently was quoted in a National Law Journal article: “That’s just not something we have done historically, and I don’t see why we would. We are not in the reporting business. We don’t distinguish between our [law school] members.”

Despite President Bernstine’s protestations to the contrary, LSAC is in the reporting business. It reports annually the aggregated results of those who take the LSAT and jointly with the ABA publishes the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to law schools, in which the inaccurate data from Villanova and Illinois was reported for the last few years. It also issues a variety of reports to law schools and to pre-law advisors.

Professor Organ has created a survey to gain input on how to best deal with admissions data integrity. You can complete this survey here or by filling it out below.

We will report the results of the survey when Professor Organ makes them available.

Originally published in the National Law Journal.

Critics calling for law school reform are rousing an old discussion about problems with legal education. Recently, their focus has been on the provision of misleading job placement statistics. People are tired of law schools’ dishonest tactics, a sentiment that grows as the number of examples of fraud and corruption increases. Furthermore, they are beginning to understand the negative externalities caused by students unwisely choosing to attend law school, both to the legal profession and elsewhere.

The main problem with the employment information stems from the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which includes any job in its basic employment rate. Law schools truthfully advertise rates above 90% because they report employment data according to the section’s standard. Nevertheless, these advertisements mislead prospective law students when coupled with two popular yet distorted consumer beliefs: that lawyering is a lucrative profession and that the rates reflect legal jobs.

Law schools are aware of these distortions, but they have no pecuniary incentive to tear down the information asymmetry that protects the legal employment rate. Ever the optimists, prospective law students do not discover the realities of a school’s job placement until too late. Until recently, structural problems with employment information have been the profession’s dirty little secret.

The number of affected graduates has grown during the past few years, but the problem is not unique to the post-2009 job market. Since the turn of the century, just two-thirds of all ABA-approved law school graduates obtained jobs requiring bar passage within nine months of graduation. Neither the ABA-Law Schools Admissions Council Official Guide to ABA Approved Law Schools nor the vast majority of law school advertising materials inform consumers about this reality. Meanwhile, tuition and graduate debt are on the rise, salaries are deflating and the legal market is increasingly more saturated. Calls for consumer protection, even if logically independent of these additional facts, are common sense for a profession with high ethical standards.

In response to public pressure, the section asserted that it would pass reforms to reduce the provision of misleading employment information. This would have prevented consumers from being led to believe that the basic employment rate was the legal employment rate. Instead, the section is taking steps that ensure that next year’s applicants will actually have even less information. The section reasons that this is a transition year, more information will be available in the future, and that the short-term loss of information quality is worth the section reasserting its accreditation authority. This reasoning is accompanied by a misplaced concern for whether the definitions used to categorize job data are adequately defined. In finalizing these steps, the section is breaching its responsibilities to the profession.

For years, the section has had the ability to share how many graduates were finding full-time legal positions from individual law schools. The section collects these data in its annual questionnaire, which asks schools to report each graduate’s employment status (employed, unemployed, pursuing another degree), employer type (law firm, government etc.), and other job characteristics such as whether a job requires bar passage or is full time.

One might ask why the section has never published job characteristics data in the Official Guide, or why law schools rarely share this information in their own materials. These are important questions. But the more pressing question is why the section is trying so hard to come up with justifications for not publishing the data for next year’s incoming class.

On Sept. 23, the section’s questionnaire committee will finalize the 2011 questionnaire, which asks about the class of 2010. Additional reforms are slated for 2012. If nothing changes, the section will collect fewer job characteristics data than it has collected in prior years. Apparently, whether a job requires bar passage or only prefers a J.D., or whether a job is full- or part-time, are now too obscure to define without many more meetings. These definitions have been developed by the National Association for Law Placement and have been integrated into the questionnaire for many years. While not perfect, the definitions adequately meet consumer needs. Changes will always be necessary to reflect law school practices and market shifts, but feigning lack of consensus over commonly accepted terms should trouble even the most optimistic observer.

It is odd that, under the auspice of improving information, the section is actively reducing the amount of useful information available this year. This move will have ramifications beyond the questionnaire. Among the schools that report these important statistics on their Web sites and to U.S. News & World Report, some will jump at the chance not to share how well (or how poorly) the class of 2010 fared in finding legal jobs. These schools can hold up the section’s misplaced skepticism as their justification. Prospective law students deserve more from the law schools, but they can’t get it just by asking nicely.

If the section is truly interested in fulfilling its obligations to the legal profession and as an accrediting agency, it needs to consider whether a do-nothing policy is the appropriate course of action given the events of the past two years. The stakes are too high for the section to hide behind imagined concerns and continue to let law schools pull the wool over prospective law students’ eyes.

Professor David Hoffman, from Temple Law School, asked us ten questions about Law School Transparency. (We learned to count from the Big 10, so we answered eleven.) He has posted our answers and some commentary over at Concurring Opinions.

Table of Contents

1. What’s the mission of LST? What are its main projects?
2. Do you regret going to law school? Why or why not?
3. Have you thought about the cost of the kind of transparency you think ought to be the norm?
4. Do law schools owe a different duty to potential students than do business schools, medical schools, dental schools, engineering schools, or plain vanilla PhD programs? If so, why? If not, have you looked at those entity’s data practices?
5. We often tell our students that a JD is a credential that strengthens marketability even for those students who don’t become lawyers. How can we best account for within-job career advancement in our statistics? For non-lawyer jobs that are satisfying? That is: not all non-law jobs are awful! How should we describe them?
6. Why haven’t your proposals been adopted by law schools? Why haven’t consumers actually demanded the kind of disclosures you’d like to see?
7. What is the most & least transparent law school with respect to job-outcome data? With respect to cost-tuition data?
8. Have you thought at all about how tuition and lawyer salaries might be affected by more openness about prices and outcomes?
9. What is one easy thing that law schools could do that would make the world better?
10. What is one hard thing that law schools could do that would make the world better?
11. Do you have any closing thoughts?

Answers

1. What’s the mission of LST? What are its main projects?

Law School Transparency is a Tennessee non-profit dedicated to encouraging and facilitating the transparent flow of consumer information. We are aiming to do more than just eliminate the provision of misleading information. We want prospectives to have the opportunity to make an informed decision to attend law school. Each project we’ve undertaken centers on this premise. Specifically, this means improving consumer information, increasing access to that information, and especially helping prospectives understand and use the available consumer information during their decision process.

The main problems with the current employment information can basically be boiled down to the current reporting standards, which count any job as employed. This is not inherently misleading and is to be expected when the common view is that a law degree opens up many doors. At the same time, tuition has risen and salaries and job opportunities at the top end have overshadowed the realities of what practicing law is like. Advertising materials put out by the law schools overemphasize these “top” jobs while declining to share information about the rest of a graduating class. What we have seen is really a combination of two distorted beliefs: the traditional belief that lawyering is a lucrative profession and the reasonable belief that jobs achieved post-law school are legal jobs. Law schools are also aware of these distortions, lending to an information asymmetry which schools have very few incentives to correct. In short, we have a recipe for trouble.
(more…)

Over the last few years, the range of voices in support of more law school transparency has grown as more members of the legal profession become aware of what is going on. We have seen U.S. Senators, state bar presidents, judges, and practitioners asking more from legal educators. However, law school faculty have been by and large missing from public discussion, despite the fact that from their ranks come nearly every law school dean, a majority of committee members within the Section of Legal Education, and many of the policies that have gotten us into this mess. Although there have been a few notable exceptions, including Bill Henderson, Andrew Morriss, and Brian Tamanaha, the absence of faculty involvement is part of the reason the Section of Legal Education has been resistant to fulfill its duty to adequately inform prospective law students.

As a potential captured organization, the Section needs to hear if there are faculty who object to educating students who chose law school on an uninformed basis. Thankfully, people are starting to wake up and look more pointedly at taking proactive measures, both for ethical reasons and out of a desire to preserve and perhaps reimagine legal education as the discussion continues to evolve.

To this end, Law School Transparency has partnered with Professor Paul Campos to expand the consensus among the legal profession into the ranks of law school faculty. Professor Campos posted the following letter on his legal education blog:

We, the undersigned, believe it is imperative that all law schools provide prospective law school students with information that will allow them to accurately assess their prospects for finding appropriate employment within the legal profession upon graduation from the schools they are considering attending. We therefore call upon the American Bar Association to require all schools it has accredited to release clear, accurate, and reasonably comprehensive information regarding graduate employment, by for example implementing the proposals outlined in Part III of the Law School Transparency Project’s white paper “A Way Forward: Transparency at U.S. Law Schools” (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528862.), so that prospective students may obtain adequate information regarding their likely future employment prospects.

This letter is aimed at anybody with a stake in prospective law students making an informed decision. This includes law school faculty, members of the profession, students, and even American taxpayers.

If you would like to sign this letter, please send an email to lawschoolpetition@gmail.com with your name, law school name and graduation year (if applicable), and institutional affiliation (also if applicable). In the alternative, visit the LST Petition page to sign the petition through Facebook.

Coverage:
Above the Law
WSJ Law Blog
Prawfs Blawg

As we discussed Wednesday, the relationship between the ABA Section of Legal Education and NALP has been rocky over the last week. Members from both organizations made statements to the press and bystanders asked whether this would be the end of NALP. Concerned with that possibility, we sent a letter to the Section and to NALP urging the two to compromise.

Now, the ABA Journal reports that NALP and the Section of Legal Education have decided to cooperate:

On Friday, both groups spoke of their long history of collaboration on data collection and production, particularly on employment and placement figures, according to Hulett “Bucky” Askew, the ABA’s consultant on legal education. Both NALP and the council spoke of the desire to continue to work together moving forward.

Although Askew did not confirm whether an agreement had been met on the methodology the section would use to collect data directly from the schools, a prior point of contention for NALP, he did say that the two groups will continue to meet and discuss ways to address the needs of all parties.

This is reassuring news for the Section of Legal Education, NALP, prospective law students, and the legal profession as a whole. We will monitor the situation closely and report on the compromise when more details are known.

• LST Letter to Section of Legal Education and NALP

On July 27th, after over a year of assessing different methods of improving transparency, the ABA Section of Legal Education announced important changes to its plan for collecting employment data. In a memorandum sent to all law school deans and career services officers, Bucky Askew (Consultant on Legal Education) and Dean Art Gaudio (Chair of the Questionnaire Committee) revealed that the Section would begin collecting graduate-level employment data from the law schools, as opposed to merely collecting data in the aggregate (such as the percent of a class employed in a job or the percent who passed the bar). The memorandum is attached to this post below. Once finalized, the Section of Legal Education would become responsible for collecting hundreds of thousands of data points each year, a task which has historically been undertaken by NALP.

Currently, the Section of Legal Education does not collect granular employment data from law schools. Instead, schools must only report very basic information about the entire graduating class on the annual questionnaire (read more here), a practice which has permitted widespread misunderstandings about the nature of the entry-level hiring market. NALP, on the other hand, annually administers its own detailed survey to gather data about individual graduates.

Despite the voluntary nature of reporting these data to NALP, an overwhelming percentage of ABA-approved law schools (192 out of 199) take the time to do so. From this sizable dataset, NALP cleanses the data for discrepancies, generates private reports for each school to assess its own performance, and creates general reports about the state of entry-level legal hiring. Schools then have the option of using the private NALP-generated reports to respond to the U.S. News survey and ABA Annual Questionnaire. Schools can (but don’t) choose to release these reports to members of the public, specifically to prospective law students. NALP does not release any school-specific information due to agreements it has with its member schools.

As we reported in June, the Section of Legal Education has already made important strides, in its adoption of a new policy that will increase the amount of information available about each school’s entire graduating class. We said:

[T]his solution will provide prospectives a more thorough and accurate window into the placement opportunities at various law schools. However, we do not think this solution goes far enough with consideration to our goal of helping prospective law students find the schools that best meet their individual career objectives. The adopted solution does not provide enough graduate-level detail for those seeking to make a meaningful connection between the post-graduate outcomes for a given school’s graduates and the job characteristics, including salary, required credentials, and location. It is still too difficult to connect these dots.

While the Section of Legal Education has not decided to share the graduate-level data with consumers, a finalized policy would indicate that the Section understands the importance of the underlying data, not only for understanding the aggregate information schools report, but for enabling auditing and safeguarding against fraud.

Section officials are aware that LST supports the Section in its decision to collect graduate-level data from the law schools. The Section has failed to adequately regulate law schools on certain issues for too long, and this will contribute to the Section fulfilling its regulatory function. Accreditation is at its core a matter of consumer protection and the rules governing accreditation accordingly need to be sufficiently robust to protect consumers. The Section owes this duty to the profession and to those who wish to enter it. It is not in the profession’s or prospective students’ interest to have anybody misled or ripped off.

NALP’s Concerns

In a letter to Mr. Askew and Dean Gaudio, NALP’s executive director, Jim Leipold, expressed in no uncertain terms his anger over the Section of Legal Education decision to begin collecting graduate-level employment data in this manner.

We object to this action on several grounds, including the fact it will actually lead to LESS transparency and information about the entry-level legal employment market and not more, and the fact that it is an action that is contrary to all of the public conversations about this issue that have taken place among the ABA, NALP, the law schools, and the public over the last year and a half.

. . .

One of the chief harms caused by this action is that it will require a dual reporting burden by the law schools, who now will be asked to report individual student record level employment data to both the ABA and NALP.

. . .

Worst, we fear, is that if schools are required to separately report employment outcomes to the ABA, there is a great risk that many of them will no longer report their data to NALP. This will inevitably lead to the reduction in the amount of information we have about the entry-level legal employment process, and will have the long-term effect of producing less transparency about the legal job market and not more.

These are important concerns. NALP has provided useful information about the entry-level legal market for 37 years, and there is certainly risk that some schools will stop reporting to NALP due to the dual burden. Such big-picture analyses of the health of the legal industry are useful for schools and employers trying to gauge larger trends in hiring shifts, but they cannot be expected to replace the work of an accrediting agency. If the Section of Legal Education is finally deciding to fulfill its accreditation responsibilities fully, this decision should be given a certain level of deference. In other words, if only one group receives the underlying data, it should be the accrediting body and not the third-party relying on voluntary reporting (which itself is enhanced by privacy agreements that make the data inaccessible to those who need it).

However, this is a false dichotomy. There is no need for the ABA Section of Legal Education and NALP to clash; the two can co-exist seamlessly. NALP collects an enormous number of data each year and not only is the process well thought out, but the definitions are useful, coherent, and authoritative. NALP also already collects almost all of the data the Section can reasonably desire to collect itself. In the interim minor differences will exist, such as conflicting definitions of what jobs qualify as short-term employment, but there is little reason to believe that NALP would not be willing to negotiate the terms if the two groups reached a mutually beneficial understanding. However, this requires reopening the discussion and mending the relationship with NALP quickly so that the annual questionnaire may go out at the end of this month.

LST’s Suggestion

Recognizing the important and historically complimentary roles of both the Section of Legal Education and NALP, we believe that a compromise in the collection of employment data is both achievable and desirable. Our suggestions for reaching such a compromise utilize the following premises:
- That the Section of Legal Education actually does wish to collect employment data at graduate-level detail.
- That it is important for the Section of Legal Education to fulfill its accreditation obligations, which encompass the collection of employment data at graduate-level detail, so as to limit fraud and enable auditing where such auditing is shown to be necessary.
- That NALP already collects these data and more.
- That at least some law schools will not participate in NALP’s survey under the Section’s proposed changes, because they believe doing so would be too costly.
- That if fewer law schools participate in NALP’s voluntary survey, it will damage NALP’s ability to provide systemic employment information to schools, the legal profession, and prospective law students.
- That, if in the end only one of the Section of Legal Education and NALP can collect employment data, it should be the Section of Legal Education.
- That both the Section of Legal Education and the ABA should respect and value NALP’s longstanding service to the profession and engage in dialogue with NALP’s leadership.
- That, if possible, NALP’s function should be preserved.
- That the Section of Legal Education can fulfill its accreditation responsibilities by using the questions and definitions NALP has fashioned over the years, and does not need to reinvent the wheel.

It’s important to remember what the real fight has been about when discussing law school transparency: the optimal level of information. Schools already collect enough data to more than adequately inform prospective law students. Yet, these data remain private and inaccessible to those who genuinely need quality information. As such, the success of any reforms hinges on the quality of information that follows after schools report data. But this is not the controversy before us today. This is a clash over who can collect and access the underlying data.

As we said above, this clash is unnecessary. The Section of Legal Education and NALP need to work together, not deride each other in the press and behind closed doors. NALP should communicate a willingness to cede the final say on post-graduation outcome surveys, and in exchange continue to gain access to the data.

The simplest (and also cheapest) way to achieve this is for NALP and Section of Legal Education to use the same survey. Under this model, NALP would use the Section of Legal Education’s survey that happens to be based on NALP’s survey. Each year, NALP and the Section can discuss changes, but the Section would have the final say. This does not constitute outsourcing a regulatory function to NALP, something the Council of the Section of Legal Education legitimately fears doing, but it does recognize and utilize NALP’s great work over the past 37 years. NALP’s role would diminish only as far as the Section does not defer to its institutional expertise in making changes to the survey.

The Section has the power to put NALP out of the employment statistics business, and it should not wield this power irresponsibly. But it should also not forget that it has a responsibility to the profession and to those who wish to enter into it, and that some of this responsibility can be shouldered by NALP without outsourcing its regulatory function. Adopting NALP’s survey and inviting NALP to help change it in the future is the right thing to do given the obvious pressure to better regulate law schools. There would still be details to work out. For instance, the Section would need to invest significant resources into technology (especially to ensure that NALP and the Section do not end up with different data) and staff. Similarly, NALP would need to share its wisdom and processes for cleansing the employment data.

This is an important problem that needs to be solved immediately. NALP contributes a great deal to the legal profession, and the Section wants to enhance its own contribution. Through this particular compromise, the two groups can maximize contribution and continue a long-standing relationship.

• Memorandum to Law Schools on New Policy

Senator Chuck Grassley, the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, recently sent a letter to Stephen Zack, President of the American Bar Association. The letter focuses on a recent accreditation review of the ABA Section of Legal Education conducted by the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), which found numerous problems with the Section in its Department of Education-delegated regulatory capacity. While many of the problems are technical and easy to correct, NACIQI members were frustrated with the level of noncompliance and a few were vocal with their concerns.

Senator Grassley’s Letter

Senator Grassley’s letter contains a list of questions regarding whether and how the ABA regulates certain aspects of J.D. programs, intimating that the ABA needs “stronger oversight controls.” The Senator inquired into the collection and disclosure of scholarship retention rates (which recently gained public awareness), the collection and disclosure of loan default rates, ABA programs dedicated to educating consumers about debt repayment, and disciplinary proceedings against individual law schools.

But perhaps most interesting is the line of questioning concerning whether the ABA “track[s] the professional background of its committee membership” for “committees related to the accreditation of law schools.” Qualifying committees include not only the Accreditation Committee but also the Standards Review Committee and the Questionnaire Committee, both of whom are actively involved in redesigning how law schools collect and report employment data about graduates. It also includes the supervisory Council of the Section of Legal Education, which must vote to approve or reject committee proposals before they become enforceable.

These committees and the Council consist primarily of law school academics, deans, former deans, university presidents, and legal counsel who have been employed or are currently employed by law schools or universities. Some of these designations skirt conflict of interest rules even though they still indicate involvement in the law school model.

The ABA submitted its responses to Senator soon afterwards, one from Mr. Zack and another from the ABA Section of Legal Education. As both the letter and the responses indicate, we are seeing the reemergence of an old discussion about the professional backgrounds of ABA committee members and their role in the adaptation and development of legal education. This is a decades-long discussion about the nature of legal education and the arguably protectionist image of its accrediting body. With two U.S. senators now turning the public’s eye on these issues, Mr. Zack and the ABA cannot be comfortable with the level of congressional scrutiny regarding the Section of Legal Education and its various committees.

U.S. v. American Bar Association, 1995

As The Legal Dollar points out, committee membership rules were established following a 1995 settlement between the ABA Section of Legal Education and the Department of Justice. The rules aim to limit the number of committee members who can be directly employed by a law school at the time they serve on the committee. The Legal Dollar offers some interesting commentary as to why the Section of Legal Education has not complied with the spirit of the settlement.

We won’t repeat that discussion here. Rather, we call attention to two passages from the DoJ’s Competitive Impact Statement that we believe add context to the Section’s response to Senator Grassley:

The Complaint also alleges that the ABA allowed its law school accreditation process to be captured by those with a direct interest in its outcome. Consequently, rather than setting minimum standards for law school quality and thus providing valuable information to consumers, the legitimate purposes of accreditation, the ABA at times acted as a guild that protected the interests of professional law school personnel.

. . .

Legal educators, including current and former law school deans, faculty, and librarians, control and dominate the ABA’s law school accreditation process. Approximately 90% of the Section of Legal Education’s members are legal educators.… All current members of the Standards Review Committee and a majority of the current members of the Accreditation Committee are legal educators.

The Department of Justice thus drew two important distinctions regarding the accreditation of law schools in making its complaint. The first distinction is between the goals of a legitimate accrediting agency and the goals of a captured one: providing consumers with valuable information about the quality of a law school (the legitimate goal in this instance), vs. protecting the interests of law school faculty and staff. The second distinction is between the types of committee member employment that lend themselves to the existence of a captured agency and the types that do not. It’s important to note that the “legal educators” whom the DoJ accused of capturing the Section of Legal Education back in 1995 included former law school deans and faculty. The final consent decree also included law school staff but excluded former employees and university employees from the set of “captured” employment. As we argue below, these distinctions cause the Section’s committees to possess an appearance of impropriety, although whether actual impropriety exists is up for debate.

Prior to the consent decree, the Department of Justice noted that a majority of the Accreditation Committee were current or former legal educators. Seventeen years later, we still have a majority of current and former legal educators running the show. The 2010-2011 Accreditation Committee is comprised of 19 members. In the Section’s response to Senator Grassley, the Section breaks down committee membership as consisting of nine academics (law school professors or deans), five practicing lawyers, three public members, one judge, and one university president. Under the strict terms of the settlement decree, this does not violate the rule against having a majority of academics serving on any particular committee.

In reality, more than half of the members labeled as something other than “academics” have a direct interest in the present law school education model. For starters, four members have been associated with university systems that contain affiliated law schools (two as general counsels, one as vice chancellor, and one as a university president). Universities play an important role in law school finances, driving up the costs of attendance by depending on law school tuition dollars to fund other programs within the system. Additionally, two of the other non-academics are former law school deans. Perhaps former deans aren’t collecting a paycheck from one of the schools they are now regulating, but one would be naive to assume these accomplished leaders within the academy have severed all ties and allegiances. When nearly 80% of a regulatory committee consists of people who built their careers within a law school or an affiliated university, it is no surprise to see people questioning the committee’s independence.

While Senator Grassley has not yet explained why he is so interested in examining the professional background of committee members, it’s reasonable to assume his concern deals with agency capture by “those with a direct interest” in the accreditation process. His entrance into the debate has put an interesting twist on the breaking trust relationship between law schools and their students, their graduates, and the profession, something we’ve pointed out before.

The Breaking Trust Relationship

We do not dispute that some faculty members involved in accreditation are dedicated proponents of reform. LST has acknowledged the Section of Legal Education’s important prioritization of law school transparency over the last year, and we are supportive of the individuals who have dedicated so much time attempting to resolve some of the most pressing issues. But as the public debate about education continues to unfold, law schools cannot and should not be viewed separately from their role as the gateway into the legal profession.

In this role, both the schools and the ABA Section of Legal Education are failing in their responsibilities. Schools have a duty to adequately inform potential consumers about the value of a degree program. And the Section of Legal Education has a duty to reform legal education when the schools it accredits do not meet the needs of the profession. As the Department of Justice made clear in its antitrust suit nearly two decades ago, the purpose of an accreditation committee is to protect consumers by ensuring a level of quality. Necessary to this protection is determining how to measure the quality of a program, which is intrinsically linked to the outcomes of its graduates in the entry-level job market (for reasons we have discussed before). Those involved in law school accreditation must be more diverse in their backgrounds, particularly as the academy’s constituents do not have more than a nominal amount of experience in legal practice.

Next Up: Improving Legal Education

Senator Grassley may call for the legal profession to play a different role in regulating law schools directly. Further investigation could lead to structural reforms in how the Section of Legal Education operates. This prompts an interesting question: what’s the appropriate mix of professional backgrounds for people serving on these committees?

For starters, more consumer representation is critical. The consumer group includes not only prospective and current students, but also employers who hire or would like to hire recent graduates. The Section of Legal Education currently allows for only one member of the Council to be a Law Student Division Member. No other student representatives serve on any of the other committees. How can one consumer representative be enough to ensure fair play, given that the majority of the accusations levied against law schools deal with how they are misleading and defrauding students? A better mix might therefore mandate greater student (or perhaps recent graduate) membership to protect the rights and needs of consumers.

Second, to the extent that law school employees continue to serve minority roles on these committees, we should consider drawing a distinction between classroom-focused academics and the people who develop and provide practical skills and job placement assistance. This latter group might include career services officers, bridge-to-practice administrators, adjuncts who spend the majority of their careers in actual practice, and clinical professors. A regulatory agency charged with overseeing institutions should have experience in all aspects of how those institutions work, and traditional classroom instruction and scholarship are only two aspects of a legal education. Further, these aspects are increasingly being called into question. Law schools offer a host of professional services designed to prepare students for actual practice or assist them in finding a job, for which a measure of quality necessarily includes providing the consumer with information about results. Even where faculty do play a role in developing these services (most often while serving as dean), they do not generally know how the results of those services are advertised to prospective law students.

Finally, the inclusion of more practitioners with relevant experience would inject new leadership into the Section of Legal Education. To accomplish this goal, the ABA should revisit whether its ethical and professional leadership requires a shift in how it oversees legal education. ABA members play an active role in many aspects of the profession, in ways that could be directed to the benefit of current and prospective students. Attorneys who understand the legal hiring market for new graduates can (and at some schools already do) offer guidance in fixing the educational model to be more apprenticeship-based. These fixes should be taking place at the accrediting level, not just within individual schools. Regulators experienced in handling consumer protection claims are well-situated to take a closer look at reviewing admissions brochures and determining whether schools are misleading applicants. Enforcement of the standards will only improve as committee membership includes more attorneys who are familiar with traditional consumer fraud claims. And judges and state bar leaders who enforce professional rules of conduct, particularly rules concerning advertising and ethical communications about a lawyer’s services, would be keen to review law school behavior in the same way they review how attorneys solicit clients.

We believe this last point is timely. A lawyer who makes a false or misleading communication about their services is subject to discipline not only because of the harm they can cause to clients but also for the manner in which their actions are perceived to extend to all lawyers, which reflects poorly on the profession and limits access to justice. Were we to examine law school advertising with the same concern for the damage schools are doing in the eyes of the public, we might see very different results coming out of the enforcement arm of the Section of Legal Education. Judging by the significant number of attorneys who have contacted LST to express their support for (and interest in) improving legal education in the U.S, we think there are many people out there who are both qualified and interested in serving on these committees.

A Call For a New MacCrate Report?

For Mr. Zack’s part, having the ABA take on a greater role in reforming legal education is not a new concept. One of the foremost contributors to legal education reform in the last twenty years is none other than former ABA President Robert MacCrate, who was later instrumental in creating the MacCrate Report and now serves as Senior Counsel at Sullivan & Cromwell. (Mr. MacCrate is being honored for his work at this week’s NYSBA reception in Toronto, scheduled to coincide with the ABA’s annual meeting.)

Is it time for another MacCrate Report, one that again grounds itself in consumer rights and the needs of the profession? Such a report could address many important issues: committee membership within the Section of Legal Education; the perceived lack of enforcement; and the advisability of developing new accreditation rules that prioritize cost reductions and efficiency, with an eye toward enabling law schools to reimagine the educational and professional services they offer. Many a law school dean has argued against rules that increase operating costs and prohibit flexibility in the educational model. Most problematic is the notion that while classroom instruction may be uniform across accredited programs and thus have about the same value, the quality of professional services and the job opportunities for students swing widely without a corresponding change in tuition. As Kimber Russell (formerly of Shilling Me Softly) explained:

The ABA accreditation standards require all law schools to operate, essentially, as “luxury models” despite the fact that students from lower-ranked schools have almost invariably never had the same opportunities afforded to graduates of the vaunted Top 14 schools as ranked by USNWR. What this means is that even the lowest-ranked ABA-accredited school with the very worst reputation will still cost most students the same in tuition as the Ivy League institutions.

The Standards Review Committee is already engaged in “outcome-based reform,” but much more will need to be addressed in the coming months.

In Closing

If U.S. senators are concerned that professional ties are limiting the Section’s ability to regulate law schools nearly two decades after the Department of Justice filed suit, perhaps the ABA and the Section of Legal Education should be worried about what’s on the horizon. We expect that Senator Grassley will respond to the ABA and the Section of Legal Education with continued pressure, and that he and his colleagues will continue to shape the debate on law school transparency.

• Senator Grassley's Letter to the ABA
• Section of Legal Education's Response
• ABA President Steven Zack's Response

The ABA Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar completed an enormous step this morning towards helping prospective law students make informed decisions. The Council, which is the sole accrediting body for U.S. law schools, unanimously approved the Questionnaire Committee’s recommended procedures for the improved collection and sharing of employment data. The recommendation is based on last December’s Questionnaire Committee hearing, at which interested parties, including LST’s executive director, presented on the issue of consumer information transparency.

You can review the now-approved recommendation here (pages 22–28), although the vote added two caveats to the recommendation. Under the new policy, for at least one year, the ABA will work with NALP to leverage NALP’s present collection, cleansing, and distribution practices, subject to the ABA and NALP reaching a contractual agreement concerning confidentiality. Working with NALP this year will allow the ABA to avoid unnecessary costs, divergent information, and confusion.

Several Council members were concerned, however, about using a third party—NALP—as part of the Council’s regulatory oversight, thus desire to reach an appropriate contractual arrangement with NALP. Bryan O’Keefe, the Law Student Divison’s student representative to the Council, clarified that these logistical concerns will not hold up publishing the improved data in the upcoming year.

The Council agreed that these issues will not prevent improving data disclosure in the next questionnaire. In the long-term, the Council wishes to exert direct control over the process, either through hiring its own staff or selecting a third-party vendor through a RFP (request for proposal).

The New Disclosure Policy

Caveat One: The Council’s Executive Committee will work with the Questionnaire Committee to reach an appropriate contractual agreement with NALP.
Caveat Two: The Council will begin work as soon as possible to directly collect the relevant data, either through increased staff or an outside vendor.

Job Data

Schools are required to report:

Employment Status (100% of the class will be accounted for with these categories)
Job Credentials: employed in a job requiring bar passage, in a job for which a JD is preferred, in another professional job, in a non-professional job, or in a job of unknown type.
Non-Employed Status: pursuing a graduate degree; unemployed – not seeking or unemployed – seeking; and status unknown.

Employer Type (100% of the class will be accounted for with these categories)
Law Firms: various sizes based on total attorneys at the firm globally (8 total + an unknown category).
Other Employers: business and industry; government; public interest; judicial clerkships; academia; and employer type unknown.

Employment location:
United States: the three states where the most graduates are employed and number employed in each.
International: the number of graduates employed internationally.

Schools will also report data, where applicable, about whether the jobs are full-time/part-time and long-term/short-term, as well as indicate the number of jobs that are funded by the law school or university.

Salary Data

In addition to the placement data, the ABA/LSAC Official Guide will publish state-specific salary information based on graduates reporting from all law schools. According to Questionnaire Committee, only providing school-specific salary data provides “limited and perhaps confusing information” to applicants.

As the Committee also correctly points out, school-specific data is less representative than the state-specific datasets. Moreover, when only ~50% of graduates report a salary, granular categories like “Employed in a Law Firm of 2-10 Attorneys” are unlikely to have sufficient school-specific data to warrant sharing. (This is a flaw we identified with the 509 Subcommittee’s proposal.)

According to Mr. O’Keefe:

By using aggregate data, students will be able to have a more accurate picture of possible salaries.

When you combine the job data and the salary data, applicants will be able to discern the exact job prospects of an individual school, and using the aggregate salary data, develop a solid idea of what that job prospect makes in any given state. The employment location variable will allow students to assess where those graduates end up working— in essence, you will be able to tell where you are most likely geographically to end up getting that job and making that salary.

We agree that this solution will provide prospectives a more thorough and accurate window into the placement opportunities at various law schools. However, we do not think this solution goes far enough with consideration to our goal of helping prospective law students find the schools that best meet their individual career objectives. The adopted solution does not provide enough graduate-level detail for those seeking to make a meaningful connection between the post-graduate outcomes for a given school’s graduates and the job characteristics, including salary, required credentials, and location. It is still too difficult to connect these dots. Nevertheless, it is a monumental improvement that should be celebrated.

Auditing

The Questionnaire Committee also indicates that it will develop ideas for how to improve the accuracy of the data entered by law school graduates and staff.

[A]s an example of a possible response, the ABA might require that annually or at the time of the sabbatical site visit there be random audits of placement data submitted in the annual surveys. If performed at the time of the site visit, these audits might be “informal” and performed by a member of the site team. We have serious concerns, however, with the ability of a site team member to perform this function in the context of a site visit.

We share these concerns. Site team members do not typically have auditing expertise and usually only collect facts from and about the law school. Mechanically, the site team likely would only examine the data collected by the law school to compare to what the school has reported. This creates an echo chamber, duplicates NALP’s data cleansing (which aims to catch mistakes), and would therefore provide only a marginal return on investment. Villanova-style lying would still be too easy to achieve, although even a single set of third-party eyes might deter schools.

An alternative might be to require schools, on a random basis, to provide a more “formal” audit performed by a CPA firm of their placement survey responses. These random audits could be performed annually or at the time of the site visit. Obviously, this would involve greater expense and we would have to look at ways that the expense could be minimized and distributed among law schools, whether they are audited or not. Finally, there may be other methods of performing such an audit, or an alternative to it; we will consider them also.

As is clear from these suggestions, the idea that all law schools should be subject to yearly auditing is not on the table. It seems unnecessary to us because we do not believe the problem lies with falsified data, but misleading information. An effective alternative, which we’ve already shared with the ABA committees, would be to use the LST Proposal. Through sufficient disaggregation, individual graduates could verify how the school reported their outcomes from behind a veil of anonymity provided by the proposal’s structure. This provides a nearly zero-cost alternative that would deter law schools from fabricating outcomes. Upon an accusation of foul play, the school would tender its source (the survey) and the graduate its evidence of misrepresentation.

Going Forward

The Questionnaire Committee operated with a clear mission:

Our objective in selecting, obtaining, and providing [employment] data are several-fold: (1) to provide correct and complete data (a) to law school applicants to assist them in making decisions on whether to go to law school and, if so, which law school to attend, and (b) to current law students and recent graduates to assist them in making job decisions; and (2) to obtain and provide this information in a way that will require the least amount of additional, unnecessary effort by law schools, particularly in their career services offices.

This echoes LST’s mission and objectives. It’s important that the ABA continues to prioritize law school transparency as legal education continues to change over the next decade.

We look forward to the Questionnaire Committee and Council optimizing the annual questionnaire over the next few years with these objectives in mind because there is still a need for more improvement. Elsewhere within the Section of Legal Education, the Standards Review Committee, operating with similar objectives, continues its work on Standard 509. Together, these approved and prospective changes are a great start.

The last two months have seen two notable actions concerning oversight of the ABA Section of Legal Education, which accredits law schools and regulates their behavior. At the end of March, California Senator Barbara Boxer put some pressure on the ABA President, Stephen Zack, to ensure that the ABA Section of Legal Education appropriately addresses the lack of quality employment information. The underlying idea: put the ABA on notice that a Senator is watching and that the Section of Legal Education needs to produce results.

Adding to the discussion, the outgoing president of the student bar association at BC Law School, Nate Burris, made public yesterday the creation of a coalition of 55 law school student bar association presidents. The coalition seeks congressional relief for the lack of law school transparency. (The full text of the press release is below. h/t Above the Law.)

Mr. Burris began contacting SBA presidents en masse about a month ago. (The full text of one of these emails, which we received from a tipster, is also below.) In this email, Burris made the following key points:

• Mr. Burris aims to use the support of law school SBA presidents for momentum
• The SBA president coalition planned to present the bill, for introduction, to four U.S. Senators (from Massachusetts and Vermont)
• The bill would require that law schools submit an annual report of employment information to the Department of Education
• The bill would empower the Department of Education to audit these reports

The initial draft of the bill would create a new reporting standard for employment data, with the Department of Education as the collecting body instead of the Section of Legal Education. This standard is the same as the LST Standard, except that it does not indicate who pays the salary, which is now an important distinction given the development of school-funded bridge programs. Perhaps more importantly, it does not protect graduate and employer privacy by separating employers from the salaries they pay.

LST and the SBA president coalition

We’ve spoken at length with Mr. Burris about our thoughts on the bill’s content and timing. Notwithstanding our concerns, which we discuss below, Mr. Burris is committed to improving law school transparency and we look forward to the conversation the proposal will generate. It will add to the collective understanding of the issues and encourage others holding leadership positions to express their comments publicly.

However, as we communicated to Mr. Burris, LST believes the decision to bypass the ABA Section of Legal Education (“Section”) is jumping the gun. While it is both understandable (and correct) to think that the Section has been too slow and too reticent to change, institutional sluggishness is not enough to justify seeking legislation just yet.

These actions are not yet warranted

Passing this legislation would essentially require a congressional determination that both the Section and the Department of Education are incapable of executing the job that Congress previously delegated. Accreditation authority was assigned to the Section by the Department of Education, to which Congress delegated the authority to appropriate accrediting power.

To alter this relationship, Congress would require enough evidence that the Department of Education has failed to adequately oversee the Section and that the Section has failed to adequately regulate law schools. The situation must be such that Congress feels compelled to do more than simply ask the ABA what the status is on increasing transparency. As Senator Boxer’s press release indicated, the political viability of more involvement is presently low.

This is not to say that attempts to get members of Congress involved aren’t a good idea. Certainly, they can exert substantial public pressure; Senator Boxer’s letter of inquiry may be just the beginning of congressional scrutiny. Presenting a bill to the four Senators may result in more investigation and present another opportunity to influence the ongoing conversation, perhaps ensuring that the Section fully addresses the lack of law school transparency sooner rather than later.

But the SBA president coalition is up against a very strong presumption that the Department of Education and the Section are capable of solving the problem once identified, and that they are willing to take the steps that are necessary to fix it. This presumption is derived from the decision to delegate regulatory authority in the first place. Now that the Section has prioritized employment reporting shortcomings, rebutting this presumption before they take final action (or before it becomes clear they are delaying taking final action) is unlikely. It is far too easy for the Section to reiterate what it told Senator Boxer: ‘rest assured, we are on it.’

Still, we are hopeful that the coalition’s proposal will result in further recognition from political leaders, along the lines of what Senator Boxer has already contributed. We also look forward to seeing more from SBA coalition leaders as they explore ways to improve law school transparency.

Shifting the focus

The most productive action at this time will be ensuring that the Council of the Section of Legal Education, which will eventually vote on any Standard 509 reforms proposed by the Standards Review Committee, considers and accepts a standard that adequately improves the quality of employment information. To this end, the coalition leaders should focus their energy on lobbying the Section to solve the issues that the coalition was formed to address. We hope to continue engaging with Mr. Burris and other coalition leaders to rally support for proposals that can do the job, such as the LST Supplemental Proposal.

This is not to say that engaging the Department of Education and Congress for direct action will never be appropriate and more politically viable. Continuous, national attention has unambiguously put the Section of Legal Education on notice that it has inadequately regulated law schools. But the pressure is first on the Section’s Standards Review Committee and next on the Section’s Council to accept the Committee’s new Standard 509 this year.

The Section must adequately remedy the lack of law school transparency if it wants to fulfill its responsibilities, both to the legal profession and under its delegated authority. If the Section falls short of fulfilling these obligations, it will be time to seek governmental reform. The political viability of getting Congress to reconfigure the current regulatory framework will be highest after the Section of Legal Education fails, not while it is in the process of establishing and voting on reforms.

• Proposed Bill (draft)

For prospectives seeking to make an informed decision about attending law school, the need for consumer information extends beyond disclosing post-graduation employment information. They also need to understand how much the degree will cost. Scholarships, grants, fellowships, and stipends (referred to generally as “scholarships”) are increasingly being used to attract stronger students who might otherwise be unwilling to attend a particular program at full cost. Unfortunately, getting honest information about the value of these scholarships can be almost as difficult as figuring out what graduates do after graduation.

The reason for this is that many scholarships are contingent upon achieving a certain level of academic success in law school, either on a semester or yearly basis. And while law schools are quick to point out the number of scholarship recipients or offers made to applicants each year, they are generally silent on how many students retain those scholarships once they’re in school and competing for grades on a curve. For this reason we have submitted a new proposal to the ABA Section of Legal Education. The proposal includes a new Standard [509(d)] and a chart [view here (.xls)].

Merit scholarships with strings attached are nothing new. They’re also not conceptually problematic when a student knows (or should know) what is required to retain the scholarship. Issues arise, however, when the combination of opaque grading curves and conditions bound to that curve obfuscate the meaning of the terms and limit a prospective’s ability to understand the expected value of the scholarship. Even if a scholarship recipient knows what the curve is, the GPA required to retain the scholarship, and that there are others in the class with a similar scholarship, they are still not able to know the real value of the scholarship because they cannot fully appreciate how those facts interrelate. This information is central to computing the price of law school, and the price of a law school is essential to evaluating law schools.

The lack of transparent scholarship retention information is starting to receive more attention: in fact, in addition to our latest proposal (below), it’s also the subject of an article in tomorrow’s New York Times. [Update: online version. The article also links to Professor Jerry Organ's new paper on the topic. Professor Organ is a member of the Questionnaire Committee; we've previously mentioned his important contributions on that front.]

LST’s Proposed Standard 509(d)

(d) A law school must publicly disclose scholarship retention data for all of its students by preparing and posting on its website the attached chart.
 (1) Scholarship retention information shall reflect the scholarship retention data for each student who:
  (a) matriculated in a JD or equivalent degree program at the law school during any of the three previous academic years for full-time students or four previous academic years for part-time students; and
  (b) received a scholarship for all or part of the student’s first year.
 (2) The scholarship retention data must be gathered and disclosed in accordance with the instructions and definitions issued by the Section’s Questionnaire Committee.
 (3) The scholarship retention information about the previous academic year must be posted on the school’s website by October 31 of the following academic year.
 (4) The scholarship retention information posted must remain on the school’s website for at least three years.
 (5) Any scholarship information pertaining to the potential scholarship recipient’s ability to retain the offered scholarship throughout law school must be disclosed to the potential scholarship recipient in any scholarship offer made.
  (a) The terms of the scholarship offer that are relevant to the potential scholarship recipient retaining the scholarship must be disclosed in plain English to the potential scholarship recipient.
  (b) These terms must be accompanied by scholarship retention information about scholarships with the same material retention terms.
 (6) Any scholarship information the law school discloses must be fair, accurate, and not misleading.
 (7) The term scholarship shall mean any scholarship or grant from internal sources (law school or university).

This proposal lays a foundation for putting better information into the hands of prospective law students. Additional definitions and instructions, either as part of an Interpretation to Standard 509(d) or as part of the Questionnaire Committee’s annual questionnaire, will help prevent schools from gaming the requirements and misrepresenting the underlying data.

The Supplemental Chart

The chart referenced in 509(d) [view here (.xls)] aims to show what happens to scholarship recipients during their time in law school. Understanding the chart begins with understanding that, for each anticipated graduation year, the “entering class” is the denominator for the percentage who “began law school with a scholarship or grant.” Every other percentage uses the number of students who “began law school with a scholarship or grant” for an anticipated class year as the denominator. After each academic year passes, a school will then report how many of its original scholarship recipients from the entering class lost their scholarships.

A few other notes:

• The “entering class” covers all students who matriculated at the school during the previous three (FT) or four (PT) years. Students who matriculate at the start of law school do not, however, necessarily all graduate on time or from the same school. Some students drop out, transfer, take a leave of absence, or are otherwise unable to continue their legal education.
• The “entering class” figure will never change, regardless of the number of graduates that leave the school. Likewise, students who transfer to the school will never be included in the “entering class.” It will also not include those who, for example, earned a scholarship due to high 1L grades or a commitment to public service. Even if a student changes her anticipated graduation year, the original “entering class” number will not change. This rule caters to the need to find a manageable way to collect and present complex scholarship retention data.

This restrictive definition carries consequences, of course. First, schools might look worse simply because people leave their school. But because the goal is to help prospectives determine the expected value of their scholarships, those who “lost their scholarship” should include students who actually lost their scholarship, as well as those who could have lost it but for the fact that they transferred, dropped out, or took a leave of absence. Someone “could have lost” their scholarship when the school could have exercised its option to not provide the scholarship.

In other words, if the scholarship recipient would have had too low of a GPA to retain the scholarship, the school cannot claim that it would have exempted the student from the scholarship requirements had the student not decided to drop out of school. We assume the school would have exercised its option if they could have because a school could have provided a scholarship without strings in the first place.

509(d)(5) Disclosures

In addition to disclosure to all prospectives through the Standard 509(d) chart, schools will have to disclose certain information to the prospective students it has offered a scholarship. This includes scholarship retention information about scholarships with the same material terms offered to the prospective. For example, the school would need to disclose the retention rate for previous scholarships with a 3.0 cumulative first-year GPA requirement.

The 509(d)(5) disclosure requirement recognizes that the statistics in the Standard 509(d) chart aggregate different classes of scholarships, and that a scholarship recipient should be especially concerned with how easily previous recipients retained the same class of scholarship.

Going Forward

We have submitted this proposal to the two committees in the ABA Section of Legal Education: the Standards Review Committee and the Questionnaire Committee. In the near future, we will try to convince the Section to adopt a final version of LST’s proposed Standard 509(d).

Please do not hesitate to let us know if you see any unresolved problems with either LST’s proposed Standard 509(d) or the accompanying chart.

• LST Standard 509(d) Chart

The 509 Subcommittee’s first draft proposal for a revised Standard 509 is a good start. But as we described in our analysis, the proposed revisions are only the first step towards greater transparency. The proposal does not go far enough to disaggregate the current employment information, resulting in a reporting standard that will still struggle to help match prospectives to the law schools that best meet their career objectives.

We have been working on our own proposal, separate from the LST Standard, for a few months now. We have discussed it with key people in the Section of Legal Education, law school administrators, and briefly with NALP’s Executive Director, Jim Leipold. It was born out of discussion at December’s Questionnaire Committee hearing. These conversations have helped shape The LST Proposal into a solution that meets the needs of all interested parties.

The LST Proposal

Our proposal can and should co-exist with the chart proposed by the 509 Subcommittee. Together, the proposals provide prospective students a quick overview of the employment opportunities at various schools while also allowing a more detailed, holistic view for those students who wish to delve deeper. We are hopeful that implementing the two proposals would result in more informed decisions and a more efficient allocation of students to the schools that best meet their career and educational objectives.

The LST Proposal has two core elements. First, each school would report graduate-level data about post-graduation employment outcomes on a “Job Outcome List.” For each graduate, schools would report, as applicable:

• Employment status
• Employer type
• Full-time or part-time
• Required credentials
• Location
• Whether the graduate received special funding
• Job Source

[View the detailed categories on this chart]

These data are already reported to NALP by all but six ABA-approved law schools (St. Louis University, University of Kentucky, Columbia University, and the three law schools in Puerto Rico). The Job Outcome List would be publicly available.

Second, schools would report known salary data for each graduate. Schools also already report these data to NALP. However, unlike the data on the Job Outcome List, the salary data would not be publicly available. Instead, the Section of Legal Education would create a national database of salary data just like the database NALP already has and reports about in Jobs & J.D.s. The database would include all employment data contributed by law schools each year.

The result would be a public, national database of job outcomes and salaries that respects individual and employer privacy desires. Prospective students would use this database for a general idea of lawyer pay in certain locations for certain jobs, as well as an indicator of the short-term economic value recent graduates are attaining with each school’s J.D.

Mechanics of the National Database

Pairing a national salary database with school-by-school, disaggregated employment information would allow prospectives to understand entry-level salaries without identifying the compensation of any individual graduate. To do this, the database would provide salaries for small, though statistically significant, cross-sections of law school graduates. The cross-sections would be created by using the factors that many prospectives consider to be part of their career objectives: employer type, location, and key job characteristics.

For example, for the Class of 2009 graduates, the average starting salary of full-time bar-required jobs in Los Angeles at law firms with 51-100 attorneys was $97,287. The 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th salary percentiles are, respectively, $75,000, $80,000, $90,000, $95,000, and $145,000. In Atlanta, the average starting salary for the same category is $107,619, and the salaries percentiles are, respectively, $80,000, $90,000, $90,000, $130,000, and $145,000.

Under The LST Proposal, prospectives would be able to match these salaries to a school’s actual placement track record in different places in different jobs. Under the 509 Subcommittee’s current draft, if a school collects fewer than five salary data points for a particular category, schools report no salary information at all. Prospectives remain unaware of how graduates fared because the only information available is that Y graduates obtained jobs with 51-100 attorney law firms, with no indication of location or required job credentials.

In order to understand what these salary percentiles mean to a prospective student considering X school, each school must provide enough disaggregated information to allow prospectives to match outcomes to the national salary database. This connectivity is crucial to an operational national salary database. This is one function that the Job Outcome List would serve.

There are a few ways to design the database, and we are hopeful that the ABA, NALP, LST, and other interested parties can have open discussions about how to best execute this vision. Initially, it is our view that between one and five years of salary data, back-provided by NALP, can be aggregated to create a richer salary dataset. The number of years used would depend on the type of job and location, as salaries have shifted more or less for different cross-categories of employment outcomes. (E.g. New York City 501+ attorney firm salaries have remained relatively stable within at least the last three years.)

Additionally, it is our view that the narrowest salary picture should be provided whenever possible. If enough data exist for 51-100 attorney law firms in Atlanta, city-level figures should be available. If not, the database would provide the next narrowest regional dataset. These higher-level datasets might be Fulton County, Metro Atlanta, Georgia, the South Atlantic (DE, DC, FL, GA, MD, NC, SC, VA, WV), and the United States. The categories could also carve certain locations out of a larger geographical area. For example, one category might be 2-10 attorney law firms in Georgia minus Metro Atlanta. The possibilities hinge only on having large enough datasets. Regardless of whether the narrowest set is available, each higher-level dataset should be associable with each listed job outcome.

Other Advantages of the Employment Lists

The benefits of this proposal do not end with the addition of elaborate, privacy-respecting salary information to the marketplace. After all, the jobs graduates take are often based on more than salaries, so a proposal that aims to help match prospectives to their best fit cannot end with only salary information. To this end, the Job Outcome List will help prospectives understand the various kinds of jobs graduates take at particular law schools. Its components offer various insights into the entry-level market and how each school fits into that market.

Long-term Help

Focusing on a single year of data is dangerous, but an improved standard must start somewhere. The concern is certain to be more pronounced when there is more disaggregated information available for public consumption. The fear that prospectives will pay too much attention to the first year of new data, while grounded in reality, is but a consequence of improved transparency at law schools. The LST Proposal will be best after three or five years. At that point, prospectives would be more able to discern which schools can best meet their individual objectives. And that should be everybody’s goal.

Ave Maria has informed Law School Transparency that the school will not be following through with its commitment to disclose employment data according to the LST Standard. Back in September, we received 11 responses to our initial request, including a few ‘maybes,’ but only one unmistakable ‘yes.’ We praised Ave Maria for being a leader among mostly silence.

Ave Maria had its critics at the time, but overall the school benefited from positive coverage in both the legal and popular press. According to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, Ave Maria was “a lone beacon of light [that had] emerged from the darkness.”

We wrote:

Ave Maria’s decision to comply with the LST Standard has the potential to be a catalyst. Their decision to elevate the importance of their future students’ welfare raises the ethical bar. As the discussion moves forward and LST seeks commitments from more schools, Ave Maria’s position draws a line in the sand and allows the public (and particularly the media) to ask why other schools refuse to do the same thing.

The school’s leadership adamantly supported increased transparency because, as an Ave Maria administrator put it, “it is the right thing to do.” There were some concerns about salary privacy, but we were able to assure Ave Maria administrators that, where a firm or individual could be matched with a salary on the separate Salary List, the school could opt-out, provided the circumstances met certain conditions. This assurance sufficed to garner a commitment.

Ave Maria’s About-face

Ave Maria’s dean, Eugene Milhizer, first decided that the school would not participate back in December. However, we were not informed about the school’s decision until 12 days ago, in response to us asking whether the school needed any help following the LST Standard Guidelines. We attempted to change the school’s decision and invited Dean Milhizer to a conference call. This past Friday, the career services director informed us that Dean Milhizer was not interested in discussing the issue further. We accordingly offered Ave Maria the opportunity to write an official statement for release with this post. Ave Maria declined further comment.

The people making the choices at Ave Maria might still think “the right thing to do” is to better inform prospectives about employment outcomes. However, the school does not want to act before the ABA opines on the issue, seeing as ABA reform is on the way. Part of Ave Maria’s concern is also that, if the school is the only one to comply with the LST Standard, it will not be useful to prospective students because they will not have anything with which to compare Ave Maria’s employment data.

The LST Standard – while important in setting an example for what is both adequately informative and cost-effective – has always been of secondary importance to our mission: encouraging and facilitating the flow of employment information. Quite simply, prospective law students are not adequately informed about job prospects from different law schools, and establishing the flow of timely, quality information will help. Whether prospectives begin making more informed decisions because schools share data with LST, because U.S. News decides to improve its methods, or because the ABA decides to act, we will be happy that prospectives’ law school decisions can be based on realistic views of the entry-level legal market.

As Ave Maria recognizes, part of the need for more granular data stems from prospectives’ difficulty in comparing schools in an effort to find which best meets their individual career objectives. But an equal part is simply understanding the post-graduation outcomes of a class of graduates. Prospectives need to know what happened to the entire class, not just the top performers.

Employment data would not be meaningless without other schools to compare with; it would just be less meaningful. We are certain that enough prospectives would both know what to do with employment data from even one school, and be appreciative of it.

Ave Maria is not alone in claiming this as the reason for not participating with our heightened reporting standard. This past Friday, as a result of a call from the Washington Post, American University also used this line of reasoning to justify its inaction:

Thank you for your message. In light of the ABA’s recent discussions regarding the employment data reported by law schools, and the possible changes that will be implemented in that area, we will continue to provide requested information to the ABA. Therefore, we respectfully decline to provide that data to LST.

But ABA Standard 509 is a minimum standard. Law schools are free to choose to report more employment information than required. Schools have the underlying data to provide adequate information about post-graduation outcomes. Every law school that does not exceed the annual reporting requirements has chosen not to be more transparent.

Every School’s Responsibility

When Ave Maria originally agreed to comply with the LST Standard, it admitted that the school was not in the practice of providing adequate employment information to prospective students. By waiting until the ABA dictates what Ave Maria must disclose, the school now acknowledges that it is willing to keep its prospective students in the dark.

Most law schools want to provide the minimum amount of employment information to prospective students. While all ABA-approved law schools provide employment information to the ABA (regulatory pressure), and almost all furnish U.S. News with additional information (market pressure), not all law schools share employment information on their websites or in their recruiting materials.

Ave Maria appears to want to settle for the new ABA minimum – whatever that will be. But the ABA Standards have failed to do their job for years now. There is no assurance that the new standards will be adequate, and it is all but guaranteed that new, additional, required information will not make it into the hands of consumers until after the next admissions cycle ends. While we remain cautiously optimistic about the ABA’s role in reform, prospectives still need better information in the meantime.

The ABA has a responsibility to provide leadership on this issue, but this does not remove or delay each individual school’s responsibilities. Schools have a professional responsibility, as the gateway to the legal profession, to prepare law students for a future in law. The preparatory obligation includes providing a meaningful education. This means creating an educational environment that prepares students for the successful practice of law, as well as teaching students what they can do to be productive and upstanding members of the profession and society. Beyond teaching the law (or how to think like a lawyer), schools should convey the imperative roles that ethics and trust play in the successful administration of justice. Students develop many habits and many impressions about how the profession regulates itself based on experiences in law school. When a school fails to do everything it realistically can do to provide a meaningful education about the law and profession, its graduates end up entering the legal profession less prepared for ethical practice.

The preparatory obligation also includes creating a meaningful window into the profession for prospectives deciding whether to attend law school. This means informing these consumers about things like program offerings, cost of attendance, and the job outcomes their graduates achieve post-graduation. Doing so would provide every prospective a fair chance to decide whether a particular school is the best match for their educational and career objectives. Unfortunately, many smart and capable students begin a career from which they will draw no real satisfaction, for which they will be poorly suited, and in which they will perform marginally because the practice of law is different from what they expected. The reasons for these problems are largely unsettled, and they likely have many blameworthy causes, but these problems have rightfully caused schools and the ABA to think deeply about what is going wrong.

There is a role for the ABA in reforming school disclosure policies, and it is a crucial role. But this role does not absolve schools of their own responsibilities.

The Consequences

The people who are most affected by Ave Maria’s choice to rescind are Ave Maria’s potential applicants. They are losing out on an opportunity to make an informed decision about attending Ave Maria. Now, they are left to rely on the Class of 2008 (not even 2009) statistics available on the school’s website, in our data clearinghouse, and in the ABA Official Guide.

While too many schools have likewise failed to provide Class of 2009 employment information on their websites, the lack of prompt, transparent Class of 2010 employment information will be particularly troublesome for prospective Ave Maria students.

The Class of 2010 marks the first class to graduate from Ave Maria since its move to Florida. Until May 2009, Ave Maria was located in Michigan. After some controversy, the school moved to Florida and resumed classes in August 2009. Because Ave Maria was a regional law school while in Michigan, it is reasonable to wonder how well the Class of 2010 did in the job market now that the school has moved to a state with little, if any, alumni network.

With yet another school deciding that its best interest is to continue keeping applicants in the dark, where does the profession go from here? The ABA must act on its responsibility to incorporate an effectual disclosure standard into accreditation. Nevertheless, it is always up to prospectives to request more information from the schools they apply to when they have questions. Most schools are hesitant to share quality employment information, but with enough pressure and persistence, prospectives can overcome law schools’ apathy towards their desire to make an informed decision. Schools need to believe that refusing to disclose better information will hamper their ability to recruit and continue operation.

We are starting to see a trend within legal education where people place a premium on disclosure. Transparent schools that take steps to better inform prospectives look good, while the schools choosing to withhold crucial information look bad. Ave Maria’s applicants will, contrary to expectations set by the school a few months ago, have the same limited access to employment data that other schools offer. Many of its applicants will be less than impressed with the school’s step backwards, but the real question is how many applicants at other schools are cluing in to what’s going on at American law schools.

The ABA Journal is reporting that the ABA’s Young Lawyers Division (YLD) voted to press for greater law school transparency. (View the resolution.) This is a positive development, but it is important to point out just what it really means for consumers.

Before diving into the text of the YLD’s resolution, it is worth revisiting where the law school transparency movement stands with the accrediting authority within the ABA Section of Legal Education, which operates independently from the rest of the ABA in its capacities.

Last year, Dean Donald Polden, Chair of the Standards Review Committee, appointed Dean David Yellen to chair a special subcommittee on Standard 509 (the “basic consumer information” standard). Dean Yellen has been working with his three-member committee to revise Standard 509. The timeline for approval by the Standards Review Committee is not set, but it will meet in both April and July. We expect that much of the work on the new standard will be completed by the second meeting, if not the first. This means that any proposed 509 revisions would be ready for public comment before August 2011.

Meanwhile, Dean Art Gaudio, Chair of the Questionnaire Committee, conducted a very thoughtful hearing this past December “to review and revise where appropriate the reporting of placement data by law schools.” Despite an invitation from Dean Gaudio, no YLD representatives attended the questionnaire hearing. The timeline for improving the annual questionnaire is unsettled, but it was clear from the hearing that the committee intends to resolve the questionnaire’s shortcomings sooner rather than later.

These two committees, along with the Accreditation Committee, are the most important in the Section of Legal Education. One committee sets the standards for accreditation, one collects data from law schools in light of accreditation needs and other considerations, and the third administers the accreditation process. If these three committees are going to regulate law schools successfully, the amount of cooperation among them, along with sound policy, will dictate the level of success.

The best way to understand what the YLD can do, and how useful each of its resolutions can be, is to understand how the YLD fits into the overall picture. The YLD may make recommendations to the ABA House of Delegates, which can adopt policy on behalf of the entire ABA. But because the accreditation arm of the ABA operates independently, a resolution on law school transparency is not binding authority. Any influence that such a resolution could have is a function of its substantive contributions and political prowess.

As we explain more thoroughly below, the YLD resolution does not add much substance to the ongoing discussions on law school transparency. Essentially, the “Truth in Law School Education” resolution is supposed to represent the concerns of young lawyers. The YLD will present the resolution at August’s ABA House of Delegates meeting. If adopted, it will also represent the concerns of the entire ABA.

But many of the recommendations are either too late or too abstract to have much impact on the Section of Legal Education, which is already well underway in the revision process. We can only hope that the ABA’s potential decision to adopt the YLD resolution in August can exact political pressure on the Section of Legal Education to improve disclosure policies at ABA approved law schools.

Last year, little was known about what the YLD intended to do. Now that the YLD has released its resolution, we can more clearly analyze how this will affect the flow of consumer information from schools to prospective students.

Predictably, the YLD has taken a principled stance on law school behavior, suggesting that schools need to change both what they report and how they report it. According to the YLD’s press release (provided in full below), “the proposal . . . is expected to be influential,” so the YLD certainly expects that the resolution will make change more likely. But as we explain below, the substance and timing of the YLD’s recommendations leave much to be desired.

The resolution urges six recommendations to various parties, including ABA-approved law schools and the Section of Legal Education. These recommendations are similar to many comments (Note: The ABA has changed its website and the documents are currently unavailable. This link points to the Google cache.) made at the questionnaire hearing in December.

Additional Employment Rates

BE IT RESOLVED, that the American Bar Association urges all ABA-Approved Law Schools to report employment data in a manner that accurately reflects whether graduates obtain full- or part-time employment within the legal profession, both in the private and public sector, or employment in alternative professions, as well as whether such employment is permanent or temporary.

To people who have not spoken with career services deans about the difficulties in categorizing employment outcomes, the YLD’s recommendation may sound robust. But it lacks clear definitions and structure. Such a simplistic set of terms provides little guidance. What qualifies as a job within the legal profession? Is it a job that requires bar passage? What about international legal jobs or other jobs that are arguably “legal” but simply prefer a J.D.? What if the job requires a J.D. but not bar passage? What characteristics determine whether a job is temporary or permanent? Are clerkships temporary, seeing as most are year-long appointments? Are contract attorneys temporary, even though their positions are likely with legal temp agencies, which may be considered permanent even though the individual projects are not? Is a job at McDonald’s as a manager temporary? Should a job be considered temporary based on whether a student affirmatively answers that “I intend to find another job within X months (or as soon as possible)?” Should schools use NALP’s definitions and policies?

Many of these questions would be resolved through the adoption of a more rigorous disclosure standard, such as the one we proposed. There are also problems with the structure of aggregate reporting rates, which the YLD does not address. For these rates, what will be the denominator for these employment categories? Will it be all graduates or just employed graduates, or just employed graduates for whom the employer type is known? Should schools count those pursuing graduate degrees towards the denominator? Does it matter for the denominator whether a graduate is unemployed and not seeking employment?

This resolution raises more questions than it answers. Without answering the above definitional and structural questions, this resolution adds little substantive to the discussion. More analytical rigor is needed to push the substantive discussion forward.

Structurally, what they might be getting at is something like the following:

Employment Category	% of Class	FT	PT	Legal	Non-Legal	Temp.	Perm.
Law Firms	55%	95%	5%	90%	10%	0%	100%
Business & Industry	10%	75%	25%	40%	60%	65%	35%
Government	10%	100%	0%	65%	35%	0%	100%
Public Interest	5%	60%	40%	90%	10%	20%	80%
Judicial Clerks	2%	100%	0%	100%	0%	100%	0%
Academia	3%	50%	50%	0%	100%	50%	50%
Unemployed	12%	-	-	-	-	-	-
Unknown	1%	-	-	-	-	-	-
Graduate Degree	2%	-	-	-	-	-	-

This suggestion assumes away the above-mentioned ambiguities. It would do a passable job at increasing transparency, but if this is the intended suggestion it is not at all clear from the text of the resolution.

Access to Employment Information

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the American Bar Association urges all ABA-Approved Law Schools to include this employment information data on their websites, in their catalogues, and in their acceptance notices sent to applicants for admission, or include in each of those locations a conspicuous notice of where such data can be obtained

Access is key, but it is currently of secondary importance. The Questionnaire Committee and Standard 509 Subcommittee are currently considering a central location for employment information (one that is conceptually similar to LSAC’s Official Guide website). This website necessitates that the Standards Review Committee and Questionnaire Committee work together—the former via an accreditation standard and the latter executing that standard via the annual questionnaire. This goes directly to what the YLD wants to do with the resolution: put employment information into the hands of the consumers.

The most important issues are how the information is presented, whether the information is comparable, and whether it conveys something meaningful to those reading it. Without fixing the information, access only propagates low quality information.

Still, it is noteworthy to have yet another voice calling for schools to share the employment information they already have. Too many schools do not provide any information above and beyond what they report to the ABA, and too many others do not even include employment information on their websites.

Salary Information

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the American Bar Association urges all ABA-Approved Law Schools to increase transparency regarding their graduates’ salaries by displaying data regarding the salaries on their websites when such disclosures would not violate the confidentiality of graduates’ salary information, and to similarly display the national median salary information, by employment type, for all law school graduates, and the median salary information for the schools’ respective states and regions.

Concern for salary confidentiality is a widely acknowledged, important consideration. But currently, the ABA does not consider any salary information to be “basic consumer information” under Standard 509. This will change, as both the Questionnaire Committee and Standard 509 Subcommittee plan to require salary information as part of reform. The focus is therefore on how to share salary information while respecting privacy, in a way that helps prospective students to make an informed judgment about the short-term economic viability of a school’s law degree.

There is already a lively discussion going on about how to provide quality salary information, rather than whether to do it all. As such, this recommendation is an interesting contribution, if a little late. The real discussion at this point is about how to execute a suitable vision in Standard 509 and on the annual questionnaire.

Cost of Attendance

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the American Bar Association urges all ABA-Approved Law Schools to similarly publicize the actual cost of law school education, on a per-credit basis, and the average cost of living expenditures while attending law school.

As we wrote last week (this suggestion is precisely what Mr. Zack called for), this suggestion puzzles us:

Mr. Zack also emphasizes that the cost of attendance should play an integral role in an applicant’s calculus. However, his examples miss the point. He calls for information about “hourly credit cost” and the “standard of living in [the schools'] given areas . . . over a three year period.” The ABA already collects and distributes this information, and all schools provide it on their websites. School projections might serve some function, but they generally do not have any knowledge of or control over rising tuition. Mandating projections would be a waste of time and money because it’s something applicants can already do within a reasonable degree of specificity.

Mentioning cost transparency is an easy public relations win for Mr. Zack, but it has no substance as presently conveyed. To be fair, he does cite these suggestions as examples for how schools can share “what the real cost of their legal education will be.” But the real problem isn’t with understanding how much the degree costs. The difficulty is trying to comprehend what $200,000 looks like over the life of repayment, including interest. Requiring that debt service schedules accompany every law school application and acceptance letter might help, though this would be information that is already available via an internet search.

While it is good to see that the YLD and Mr. Zack agree, this suggestion diverts attention from far more important cost considerations. Perhaps their desire to say something that sounds meaningful outweighs their desire to contribute meaningfully to pressing for law school transparency.

Standard 509, the Annual Questionnaire, and a Model Questionnaire

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the American Bar Association urges the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to consider revising the Standards for Approval of Law Schools to require law schools to provide on their websites, and in other reasonable methods of communication, additional data on employment and placement of graduates and collect more information from schools through the Section’s Annual Questionnaires to be published by the Section as part of its consumer-information function.

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the American Bar Association urges the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to consider using and adopting a model questionnaire created by the American Bar Association which will incorporate the various provisions of this resolution.

The final two resolutions suggest that the Section of Legal Education do what it is already doing, and the YLD is exactly right. The Questionnaire Committee and Standard 509 Subcommittee are so far doing a great job. They take seriously the interests of all stakeholders, and understand why it is so important to get better information into the hands of consumers.

It is difficult to take the YLD seriously when their resolutions do not add anything new to the conversation. Why the YLD has chosen to highlight the contributions of the YLD, without acknowledging the contributions of the committees they are trying to influence, is beyond us. That simply is not an effective strategy.

The YLD is in a great position to advocate for the interests of new members to the legal profession, assuming they choose to become more engaged. Our ultimate hope is that the YLD revise its strategy by talking to those in the Section of Legal Education who are already working on these issues, and then provide useful input on behalf of the YLD’s members. Law schools have plenty of advocates on their side of the argument, ready to explain why reform is too expensive or why it doesn’t matter; the legal profession needs those representing consumer interests to advocate as well.