Speaking at a January 9 program, sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools, the dean of New York Law School, Richard Matsar, said, "We should be ashamed of ourselves. We own our students' outcomes. We took them. We took their money. We live on their money . . . And if they don't have a good outcome in life, we're exploiting them. It's our responsibility to own the outcome of our solutions. If they're not doing well . . . it's gotta be fixed. Or we should shut the place down." (As transcribed on TaxProfBlog.)
Law schools may have many failures, but the shrinking legal market is showing that the failure of an education costing more than $120,000 to pay off for so many students might be the greatest one.
Some Questions to Consider
Does law school pay off as an investment?
- Is going to law school a "lottery" to be in the top 10%, as some critics are suggesting?
- Are monetary gains the only reason students go to law school? If there is another reason, are law schools the most efficient means to the goal?
- Assuming the recent criticism of law schools is justified, accurate, and correct, what can law schools do to remedy the problem? How can law schools get more students hired?
Brief Reflections
Criticizing law schools and higher learning institutions is easy. Thinking about ways to create better systems is much harder.
Ultimately, I believe that students and prospective students should be aware of the current problems and they should engage in a cost/benefit analysis to see whether the very expensive investment of law school will pay off by leading them to their goals.
Resources on the Criticism
The recent criticism is well summarized by the ABA Law Journal in "Law Dean Says Schools 'Exploiting' Students Who Don't Succeed."
http://www.abajournal.com/news/law_dean_says_schools_exploiting_students_who_dont_succeed/print/
TaxProf Blog succinctly excerpts the critical commentary and has interesting comments that follow the excerpts in "Is the Law Professor Gravy Train Over":
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/01/is-the-law-professor.html
The podcast of the AALS Committee on Research Program (Jan. 9, 2009), "Citations, SSRN Downloads, Carnegie, Bar Passage, Careers: Competing Methods of Assessing Law Schools" is available online:
http://www.aalsweb.org/fri/commresearch.mp3
