Tag Archives: Steven Freedman

ARE YOU A SMOKIN’ BUCKETFUL OF AWESOME?

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Some of my previous posts challenged law school deans, admissions officers, and faculty members who live in denial about the crisis in legal education. This time, I celebrate a law professor who sees things as they are and isn’t afraid to speak truth to power.

Before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina, Professor Bernard Burk was an academic fellow at Stanford. Prior to that, he spent 25 years in private practice at a firm that eventually merged with Arnold & Porter. We don’t agree on everything, but Burk’s three-part series at the Faculty Lounge culminates in a June 30, 2014 post that earns him my latest “Commendable Comment Award.”

Questioning The “Versatility” Sales Pitch 

Burk analyzes the “versatility of a legal degree” argument. It’s often cited to counter some law schools’ dismal employment outcomes for graduates seeking jobs that actually require a JD. More specifically, the ABA allows schools to soften their self-reported employment results with a loosey-goosey category: “JD-Advantage” positions. To be sure, some are good jobs; but many aren’t. The problem is that schools don’t have to disclose any information about them.

The ABA’s definition of JD-Advantage includes a range of examples so broad that it demonstrates the potential for gaming the numbers: corporate contracts administrator, alternative dispute resolution specialist, government regulatory analyst, FBI agent, risk manager, accountant, journalist, human resources employee, law firm professional development worker, and almost anyone working at a law school in any capacity — from admissions to career services. And even that list isn’t exclusive.

Schools following the ABA’s honor system of reporting don’t need much imagination to dump lots of graduates into the JD-Advantage category. Perhaps that’s one reason that the category has been growing so dramatically. For the class of 2013, more than 6,300 graduates had what their schools called JD-Advantage jobs, a significant increase from 5,200 for the class of 2011.

Admissions Deans as Used Car Salesmen

Professor Burk compares law schools relying on undifferentiated JD-Advantage jobs to used car salesmen. Both assure you that what they have is what you need. But used car salesman never say, “No worries, pal. You should buy this car because, even if the engine implodes the minute you drive off the lot, the smoking pile of scrap that’s left will have measurable salvage value.”

“We generally don’t buy cars for their salvage value,” Burk notes, “especially when any car you buy will have salvage value if it can’t serve the purpose you actually bought it for.”

But some — not all — JD-Advantage jobs look more like the realization of a legal degree’s salvage value for those who have them. That doesn’t mean a legal education lacks intrinsic value. As Burk observes, some prospective students might view what they learn in law school as valuable for its own sake, regardless of whether it leads to a career in the law or enhances their earning power. But three years and $150,000 in tuition is more than most people are willing to spend on such a personal enrichment exercise alone.

A more thoughtful approach is what Burk calls the “Practical Justification Test.” Like the prospective used car purchaser, the prelaw student asks (or should ask), will a law degree actually take me where I want to go? For this group, full-time long-term JD-required employment upon graduation is the most meaningful outcome because law schools exist to produce lawyers. Distinctions based on that criterion should be critical in deciding whether and where to attend law school.

Hope v. Reality

A third rationale for law school involves magical thinking. That’s where some deans, faculty, and admissions officers have now staked their claims. Burk describes the premise of this argument as follows: “[T]he course of study transforms you into such a Smokin’ Bucketful of Awesome that the degree alone routinely opens doors to countless jobs unrelated to the course of study that would otherwise be closed to you or that you will be so much better at whatever you do that the degree is a Rocket to Success at almost anything.”

In response to Burk’s categories, University of Kansas Assistant Dean for Admissions Steven Freedman (the subject of one of my earlier posts) offers a fourth category: “[M]any students see the versatility of a law degree as form of risk insurance.”

Freedman’s comment generated lines from Burk earn him my latest “Commendable Comment Award”:

“[T]outing the salvage value of a law degree as ‘a form of risk insurance’ without offering a clear-eyed assessment of how likely it is that the risk insurance will be needed, what its coverage limits are, and how cheaply you could get the same benefit another way is inexcusably incomplete. It’s a failure to accept the difference between a Smokin’ Bucketful of Awesome and smoking pile of scrap.”

There’s an easy fix. The ABA could require law schools to disclose in detail what their graduates are actually doing in JD-Advantage jobs or, at a minimum, how much they’re earning in such positions. Until that happens, prospective students would be wise to assume that, for most schools, the category includes a lot of scrap.

MORE JOBS, EXCEPT FOR LAWYERS

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During April 2014, job growth exceeded economists’ expectations. The recovery continues, but one line item in the latest detailed Bureau of Labor Statistics report should be particularly troubling to some law school deans and professors who are making bold predictions about the future.

The Facts

As the economy added 288,000 new jobs last month, total legal services employment (including lawyers and non-lawyers) declined by 1,200 positions from March 2014. A single monthly result doesn’t mean much. But over the past year, total legal services employment has increased by only 700 jobs.

In fact, according to the BLS, since December 2007 net legal services employment has shrunk by 37,000 jobs. Meanwhile, law schools have been awarding 40,000 new JD degrees annually for more than a decade.

The Denier’s Plight

Some law school deans and professors still object to any characterization of this situation as a “crisis” in legal education. In fact, one professor proclaimed last summer that now is still a great time to go to law school because a lawyer shortage would be upon us by the fall of 2015! Before rejoicing that we’ve almost reached that promised land, note that in 2011 the same professor, Ted Seto at Loyola Law School – Los Angeles, similarly predicted that the short-term problem of lawyer oversupply would lend itself to a quick and self-correcting resolution when the business cycle turned upward.

Well, the upward turn has been underway for several years, but significant growth in the number of new legal jobs hasn’t accompanied it. Nevertheless, tuition has continued to rise. For prelaw students now contemplating six-figure JD debt, law school deniers have a soothing argument: A degree from anywhere is well worth the cost to anyone who gets it.

Using aggregate data, the deniers ignore dramatic difference in individual outcomes for schools and students. Some deniers even use their lifetime JD-value calculations to defend unrivaled tuition growth rates for law schools generally. In somewhat contradictory rhetoric, they simultaneously promote income-based loan repayment plans as a panacea.

Leadership?

Recently, one dean assured me privately that deniers have now become outliers. If so, the overall reaction of deans as a group remains troubling. In particular, law schools have countered a precipitous drop in applicants with soaring acceptance rates. The likely result will be a fall 2014 class somewhere between 35,000 and 38,000 first-year students.

Likewise, law school sales pitches have devolved into cynical efforts at selling something other than the practice of law. They market the versatility of a JD as preparation for anything else that law graduates might want to do with their lives. But so is medicine. So are lots of things. So what? Medical schools train doctors. Isn’t the core mission of law schools to train lawyers? What will remain after we abandon that sense of professional purpose and identity?

Practicing Law? Oh, I Could Have Done That. 

All of this raises a question: How do the law school deans and professors in denial about the state of things deal with unpleasant facts that don’t fit the world view they’re trying to sell others? Ignore them. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, as the self-designated Wizard of Oz might say to Dorothy. Somehow, we’ll get you back to Kansas — where associate admissions dean Steven Freedman at the University of Kansas recently went public with his denial.

Like similar predictions, Freedman’s analysis is suspect. For example, his projections of a lawyer shortage by 2017-2018 ignore the excess inventory of new law graduates that the system has produced over the past several years (and is still producing). (In a follow-up comment to his own post on “The Faculty Lounge,” Freedman defends his resulting calculations on the unsupported grounds that “the vast majority of them retired or changed careers” — an assumption, he acknowledges, that contradicts the real world observations and data of Jim Leipold, executive director of NALP.)

Even worse, Freedman offers a general recommendation to every prospective student — “Enroll today!” was the title of his first installment at “The Faculty Lounge.” But he fails to mention that employment outcomes vary enormously across law schools. His post’s subtitle — “Why 2017-2018 Will Be a Fantastic Time to Graduate from Law School” — is fraught with the danger that accompanies the absence of a nuanced and individualized message.

Ironically, in the real world of clients, judges, and juries, attorneys who ignore the key facts in a case usually lose. Eventually, they have trouble making a living. Someday, perhaps the law school deniers will have that experience, first-hand.