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.