Tag Archives: University of Kansas School of Law

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.

COMMENDABLE CONDUCT AWARD

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Regular readers know that I’m often critical of many law school deans. But when one of them gets it right, let’s give credit where it’s due. As the glut of new attorneys persists, the University of Kansas School of Law Dean Stephen Mazza became the latest dean to announce significant reductions in incoming class size. With that action, he has earned a “Commendable Conduct Award.”

Not the first

The University of Kansas isn’t the first to implement such cuts. Last year, Frank Wu, chancellor and dean of the University of California Hastings School of Law announced a 20 percent reduction in class size for the fall of 2012.

“The critics of legal education are right,” Wu said. “There are far too many law schools and there are too many law students and we need to do something about that.”

George Washington University, Albany Law School, Creighton University School of Law, and Loyola University Chicago School of Law have reduced entering class size, too. In March, Northwestern Law School Dean Daniel Rodriguez said his school would reduce the fall 2013 class by 10 percent. “We can’t ignore the destabilizing forces that the legal industry is facing today,” he said.

KU deserves special praise

All of these efforts to reduce the size of entering classes are commendable. But there are several unique aspects to the University of Kansas announcement that make it especially noteworthy.

First, the reduction as a percentage of enrollment in prior years is large: from 175 students graduating this year to a target of 120 students for the 2013 entering class and for the foreseeable future.

Equally significant, it appears that KU didn’t have to take its laudable step. The dean said that applications were down only about 10 percent — far less than many other schools. Moreover, an impressive 82 percent of 2012 graduates secured long-term jobs where a JD was required or preferred — far above the national average.

As an added bonus, a KU legal education is a relative bargain compared to many other schools: $18,600 tuition for full-time students who are state residents; $31,500 for out-of-state.

Motivations matter; outcomes matter more

Everyone expects that the decline in the number of law school applicants will produce lower average LSATs and GPAs for the entering 1L class. That, in turn, would hit the selectivity component of a school’s overall U.S. News ranking. It’s possible that some deans have reduced entering class size as part of a strategy to protect their rankings. But if the overall net outcome is that law schools as a group produce fewer lawyers three years from now, then the rankings may have helped to mitigate damage that they have caused since their first appearance in 1987.

Ay, there’s the rub. Will there be fewer total law graduates, or will other schools (and new ones in the pipeline) enroll the students that KU and others don’t accept? Indeed, will some schools expand enrollments solely to increase their tuition revenues? Asking those institutions to consider the long-term well being of the marginal students they recruit, or the sad state of the profession itself, would be asking too much, I guess.

One way to counteract the agendas of deans who refuse to do the right thing is to recognize those who do. Even more important is the task of helping prospective law students make informed decisions before they apply to law school. Over time, perhaps more of them will take advantage of increased transparency to assess realistically their own suitability for a satisfying and successful legal career. But at any age, encounters with confirmation bias are never easy.

Meanwhile, kudos to Dean Stephen Mazza and the University of Kansas School of Law. He’s been dean only since April 2011, but he’s already making a profound difference in the way that matters most — one person at a time. (And thanks to one of my regular readers who brought Dean Mazza’s announcement to my attention.)

EXPLAINING ABA INTRANSIGENCE

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Who are these people?

Recently, the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar rejected an important recommendation of its Special Standards Review Committee. The proposed rule would have required law school-specific disclosure of salary information. No dice, said the Council.

It raises a question that no one seems willing to ask: Who are these Council people, anyway?

Perhaps the Council’s composition is relevant to understanding why it vetoed its own committee’s effort to promote greater candor. In approving a host of other transparency initiatives that have been far too long in coming, the Council stopped short of requiring what might be the most important disclosure of all:

If a student manages to get a job upon graduation, what are the chances that it will pay well enough to cover educational loans, rent, food, and the bare necessities of life?

I don’t know how individual members voted, but their affiliations are interesting. The current chair is dean of the New England School of Law, which has a perennial place in the U.S. News & World Report unranked nether regions. (Regular readers know my disdain for the U.S. News rankings that have transformed deans into contortionists as they pander to its flawed methodology. But as an overall indicator of general quality groups rather than specific ordinal placement, they confirm what most people believe to be true anyway.)

Consider the other academics on the Council. The Chair-elect is also a dean — Washington University School of Law (23rd on the U.S. News list). The Council’s Secretary was dean at the University of Montana School of Law (#145 ). Others deans and former deans on the Council hail from Hamline University Law School (unranked), North Carolina Central University School of Law (unranked), University of Kansas School of Law (#89), University of Miami School of Law (#69), Boston University School of Law (#26). Another member is an associate dean —  University of Minnesota Law School (#19). The remaining academic Council members teach at Drexel University (#119) and Georgetown (#13).

Several other Council members who are not full-time professors have teaching affiliations with, for example, Cleveland-Marshall Law School (#135), University of Utah (#47), and Arizona State University (#26, tied with BU and Indiana University).

Each institution has its share of outstanding faculty and graduates; that’s not the point. But if these or most other schools had to disclose their recent graduates’ detailed salary information, would it make any of them look better to prospective students? Not likely.

The “appearance of impropriety” is an important ethical concept in the legal profession. Any dean or former dean on the Council who voted in favor of salary disclosure should say so. Those who don’t should live with the guilt by association that will accompany adverse inferences drawn from their silence.

Here’s the current Chairman’s spin on the situation: “There should be no doubt that the section is fully committed to clarity and accuracy of law school placement data. Current and prospective students will now have more timely access to detailed information that will help them make important decisions.”

Unless, of course, the information that students seek relates to the incomes they’ll earn after forking over $100,000-plus in tuition and incurring debt that they can’t discharge in bankruptcy.

Also from the ABA statement:

“The Council specifically declined to require the collection and publication of salary data because fewer than 45% of law graduates contacted by their law schools report their salaries. The Council felt strongly that the current collection of such data is unreliable and produces distorted information.”

If a forty-five percent response rate is sufficiently low to throw out data as unreliable because it produces distorted information, what does that say about U.S. News‘ survey used to calculate almost one-seventh of every law school’s 2013 ranking? The response rate for its “assessment by lawyers/judges” component was twelve percent.

I know, I know: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (Emerson, R.W.,”Self-Reliance,” First Essays, 1841)