Tag Archives: Thomas M. Cooley Law School

JUXTAPOSITIONS

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Shortly after Thanksgiving, a California court denied Thomas Jefferson Law School’s motion to dismiss its alumni’s fraud claims. The school made headlines in early 2011 when some graduates claimed that misleading employment statistics caused them to incur staggering debt for a degree that didn’t lead to a legal job. It was the first school to face such a suit and is now the third one to lose a motion to dismiss the claims.

Reasonable consumers?

Last summer, two other law schools failed to get the cases against them thrown out: the University of San Francisco and Golden Gate University. A California state court judge hearing both cases ruled that whether those schools’ representations were “likely to deceive a reasonable consumer is a question of fact.”

The court observed, “[P]laintiffs allege that they were in fact deceived by the statements they attribute to defendant, and there is nothing before me to suggest that any of the plaintiffs were not reasonable consumers of a law school education.”

Sophisticated consumers?

The California court in the USF and Golden Gate University cases distinguished an earlier ruling that went the other way. In a similar case against New York Law School (not NYU), a New York state court judge described prospective law students as “a sophisticated subset of education consumers.” He thought that they should have looked more carefully at the numbers that the school touted, as well as data available to them from other sources. The losing plaintiffs have asked the appellate court to take another look at the issue.

Likewise, courts in Michigan and Illinois have dismissed four other lawsuits against Thomas M. Cooley Law School, DePaul University College of Law, John Marshall Law School, and Chicago-Kent Law School. Wait for the results of more appeals before accepting as definitive the schools’ quick claims of vindication.

Who’s right about these prospective consumers of legal education? Are they a special class of individuals who possess unique skills in evaluating law school representations about their graduates’ fate? Do they have special strength that allows them to resist the promise of a well-paying legal job as the reward for three years’ work and a $100,000+ investment?

Either way, aren’t they somebody’s kids?

Today, it’s seems easy to say that students who believed law school claims of 90+% employment rates and six-figure starting salaries for their graduates should have known better. But abandon such hindsight for a moment and think back to 2004, when some of the current plaintiffs were thinking about attending law school.

The lawyer bubble was growing, but until the summer of 2012 the ABA didn’t require schools to provide meaningful employment data to prospective students. Full-time, part-time, non-degree-required, and law school-funded positions were lumped together to create a rosy picture of job security that was, in fact, a cruel illusion. As the Great Recession began in 2007, that picture looked even more appealing to young people who were looking for any employment lifeboat in a sinking economy.

Accountability

So far, no plaintiff has prevailed on the merits of any claim against any law school. The preliminary rulings in California mean only that those plaintiffs get an opportunity to prove their cases. As that process unfolds, no one should let would-be law students off the hook completely. But confirmation bias is a powerful force; it takes uncommon perception to see things that contradict preconceived notions, including some students’ naive dreams about what life as a lawyer might mean.

If law schools continue to act without any serious accountability for their roles in creating the massive and growing oversupply of lawyers, greater student introspection alone won’t solve the problem. Case Western Reserve Law School Dean Lawrence E. Mitchell proved that point in his recent (and flawed) New York Times op-ed, “Law School is Worth the Money.” For those who prefer data and analysis to self-serving salesmanship, Vanderbilt Law School professor Herwig Schlunk has a response: for too many young lawyers, it isn’t.

For far too long, deans have avoided accountability for behavior that has created the lawyer bubble.  At long last, perhaps some judges will correct that injustice.

THE NEXT DEBT CRISIS

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One of the next big bubbles is educational debt. A recent article in The New York Times notes that it exceeds one trillion dollars — more than total consumer credit card debt. Meanwhile, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports that for those aged 40 to 49, the percentage of educational debt on which no payment has been made for at least 90 days has risen to almost 12 percent. Sadly, history will view these as the good old days.

Middle-aged education debt blues

Growing delinquencies among middle-aged debtors result from two phenomena. First, some people took out loans for their own education, such as the 50-year-old who woman told the WSJ that she got her bachelor’s degree in 2008. The recession pushed many newly unemployed workers into higher education as a way of reinventing themselves. For some, the strategy worked.

A second group consists of parents who took out loans to fund their kids’ education. A related Department of Education program is, according to the Journal, “among the fastest-growing of the government’s education loan programs.”

Now extrapolate

For anyone who thinks this problem is bad now, wait until today’s twenty-somethings who went to law school and can’t get jobs reach their forties. Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor William Henderson has analyzed the origins and long-run implications of current trends. His article with Rachel Zahorsky, “The Law School Bubble,” describes them in thoughtful detail.

Recent graduates in particular know where this is going because many are already there: Lots of debt — averaging $100,000 for recent classes — and limited prospects of employment with which to repay it. Meanwhile, the nation’s law schools are turning out more than twice the number of lawyers as there are law jobs.

The problem is growing, but so is denial. Recent headlines proclaimed that a drop in law school applications must be a sign that the market is self-correcting. After all, first-year enrollment fell by seven percent — from 52,500 in 2010 to 48,700 in 2011. Now for some context: The current number is about the same as total one-L enrollment was each year from 2002 to 2006.

How are law schools responding to this continuing crisis? Some better than others.

Law school reactions

Deans at George Washington University, Hastings and Northwestern recently announced that they were considering plans to reduce enrollments. Meanwhile, Thomas M. Cooley Law School opened a new campus in Tampa where it has signed up 104 students — double the number it initially expected. Last month the WSJ quoted Cooley’s Associate Dean James Robb, who said that the school “isn’t interested in reducing the size of its entering class on the basis of the perceived benefit to society.”

All right, let society take care of itself. But how about the school’s students? Two weeks after the Journal article, the ABA reported recent law school graduate employment data that, for the first time, refined one category of “employed” to include only jobs requiring a J.D. degree. For that group, Cooley’s “full-time long-term” rate for the class of 2011 nine months after graduation was 37.5%. Remarkably, more than two dozen law schools did even worse.

I wonder how those who run Cooley — and many other law schools — would feel if they had to bear the risk that some of their alumni might default on their educational loans. For now, we’ll never know because: 1) the federal government backs the vast majority of those loans, and 2) even bankruptcy can’t discharge them.

Meanwhile, a court recently dismissed Cooley alumni’s complaint alleging that the school’s employment statistics misled them into attending. The most revealing line of Senior Judge Gordon Quist’s ruling is the conclusion:

“The bottom line is that the statistics provided by Cooley and other law schools in a format required by the ABA were so vague and incomplete as to be meaningless and could not reasonably be relied upon.”

Too bad for those who did. In some ways, the profession is a terrible mess — and it’s just the beginning.