Top Law Schools

From a T-25 Law per fee waver:



99% employment rate (5 year average)
98% bar passage rate
11:1 student/faculty ratio
Nearly 12,000 active alumni
24 live-client legal clinics
8 research institutes
7 academic journals
8 semester study abroad programs
Summer comparative law program inChina
7th largest law library in the nation
Over 200 joint and dual degree opportunities

99%??? If that is true, why do I have any fear of leaving a $50,000 a year career and going to you law school? Don't schools feel an ethical responsibility? They see kids spend more than the price of a house on their educations and then end up at Walmart. Don't the feel like bad people?

youre preaching to the choir.......

Thats what I find most ironic. Law schools try to instill in students to have a high level of "ethics"... yet they pull shit like this.....

Why not just say Minnesota? Why make us google "7th largest law library"

BeerMaker wrote:Why Are Schools Still Misleading People??

Because people are still giving them their (or the government's) money.

BeerMaker wrote:Why Are Schools Still Misleading People??

Because it helps them recruit new crops of gullible, naive, and mostly financially illiterate students that fund law school through Federal student loans. Students that don' fully appreciate the very risky nature of these "investments." But it's not the law schools' problem if these students later are unable to find jobs and/or service the loans; law schools already got paid... upfront, and there is an "absolutely no refunds" policy in place. In other words, misleading people provides ample benefits with little to no risk.

tennisking88 wrote:Why not just say Minnesota? Why make us google "7th largest law library"

I figured it was minn after i read this.... 24 live-client legal clinics

Because it's what academia does. Undergrad is even worse about it. They make bank on emPty promises.

BeerMaker wrote:From a T-25 Law per fee waver:



99% employment rate (5 year average)
98% bar passage rate
11:1 student/faculty ratio
Nearly 12,000 active alumni
24 live-client legal clinics
8 research institutes
7 academic journals
8 semester study abroad programs
Summer comparative law program inChina
7th largest law library in the nation
Over 200 joint and dual degree opportunities

99%??? If that is true, why do I have any fear of leaving a $50,000 a year career and going to you law school? Don't schools feel an ethical responsibility? They see kids spend more than the price of a house on their educations and then end up at Walmart. Don't the feel like bad people?

For a school with 237 students, this means that only 2.37 students are unemployed.

But what if YOU'RE the .37?!?

Schools are always teaching bro, right now their teaching you not to believe everything you read in advertisements. This 200k lesson could really come in handy someday!

1) Convince vulnerable applicants they can haz jobz.
2)??????
3) PROFIT

No one attacks a retailer for saying they offer the best prices/services even if its completely false. Its marketing. People need to apply the same standard to recognize that universities, while not for profit institutions, still operate very much like their for-profit peers.

Because a ponizi scheme only works if you recruit new suckers into the mix?

top30man wrote:No one attacks a retailer for saying they offer the best prices/services even if its completely false. Its marketing. People need to apply the same standard to recognize that universities, while not for profit institutions, still operate very much like their for-profit peers.

Basically. I think the big disconnect here is that our generation was told by our parents and adult role models to essentially trust colleges and universities - during their time, you could trust colleges and universities. The issue is that our adults still believe that and preach it, even though it is no longer true. This leads to confusion among people in our generation.

But I believe that the message is slowly (and I do mean slowly) getting through.

top30man wrote:No one attacks a retailer for saying they offer the best prices/services even if its completely false. Its marketing. People need to apply the same standard to recognize that universities, while not for profit institutions, still operate very much like their for-profit peers.

Retailers have not been granted the ***privilege*** of accessing Federal credit, i.e., student loans. I am OK with holding schools to the same standard as other retailers IF this privilege is taken away.

I left Minnesota out because I didn't want single them out. I would've if they were the only one's pulling this garbage. They are a solid academic institution. I think it's time that these decent schools start fessing up and stop misleading people. If thomas cooley wants to state this garbage and people are dumb enough to buy in, then I suppose those fools deserve the loans. However, there are a lot of smart and capable people out there that are being scammed. I agree with the post about our parents generation trusting academia. It's a shame that we no longer can. I still think higher education is important, but the times they are a changin'

So my question to Minnesota would be: What percentage of your students are actually securing jobs, in a firm, making more than $100,000 per year? Anyone have a guess?

BeerMaker wrote:So my question to Minnesota would be: What percentage of your students are actually securing jobs, in a firm, making more than $100,000 per year? Anyone have a guess?

Lawschooltransparency can give you that number for the c/o 2009. I think it was 38% or so.

It was certainly lower for 2010, and probably somewhere in the middle of those two now.

EDIT: for 2009 it was at least 38%, scroll down to "private sector quartiles" --LinkRemoved--

lolUMNLaw

Damn, this school became a punchline fast. Was it the photojournalism piece documenting the UMN Law dungeon where the chairs are chained down so the students can't steal them that set things off?

minnbills wrote:

BeerMaker wrote:So my question to Minnesota would be: What percentage of your students are actually securing jobs, in a firm, making more than $100,000 per year? Anyone have a guess?

Lawschooltransparency can give you that number for the c/o 2009. I think it was 38% or so.

It was certainly lower for 2010, and probably somewhere in the middle of those two now.

EDIT: for 2009 it was at least 38%, scroll down to "private sector quartiles" --LinkRemoved--

Okay, I'm having difficulty interpreting this data. To me, it's saying that 94.1% are employed and the median pay is $120,000. That sounds pretty good to me. What am I missing here?

Link Broken. Go to lawschooltransparency.com and mouse over the select school link in the middle of the page to find Minnesota.

Helmholtz wrote:lolUMNLaw

Damn, this school became a punchline fast. Was it the photojournalism piece documenting the UMN Law dungeon where the chairs are chained down so the students can't steal them that set things off?

I think it has more to do with the school doors being left open all the time (so students can utilize the space) that forced the school to take measures to protect its assets.

BeerMaker wrote: Okay, I'm having difficulty interpreting this data. To me, it's saying that 94.1% are employed and the median pay is $120,000. That sounds pretty good to me. What am I missing here?

$120,000 is the median of people who reported their income who are working in the private sector. Which is 38%. The total salary data is around 50% if I remember correctly.

You need to read the fine print (even UMN's website is pretty clear about this, actually.)

EDIT: Chances are, the median salary for a whole graduating class is much lower. Because about half of the class didn't report its salary, and it's definitely safe to say that most of that group isn't making 100, you can safely say that the true median is much lower than 120000.

minnbills wrote:

BeerMaker wrote: Okay, I'm having difficulty interpreting this data. To me, it's saying that 94.1% are employed and the median pay is $120,000. That sounds pretty good to me. What am I missing here?

$120,000 is the median of people who reported their income who are working in the private sector. Which is 38%. The total salary data is around 50% if I remember correctly.

You need to read the fine print (even UMN's website is pretty clear about this, actually.)

EDIT: Chances are, the median salary for a whole graduating class is much lower. Because about half of the class didn't report its salary, and it's definitely safe to say that most of that group isn't making 100, you can safely say that the true median is much lower than 120000.

Gotcha, thanks! The link was broken and it was driving me mad. These stats are not that bad. I worry that 2010 was much worse, though.

How is UMN misleading people? Do you feel a rational consumer would look at 99% employment rate and assume they mean legal employment? Or is the 99% listed here not taking into account people who do not respond to surveys and that's what is misleading?

This is actually a genuine question. I'm trying to figure out the gripe here. It seems like fairly transparent advertising.

.

Gotcha, thanks! The link was broken and it was driving me mad. These stats are not that bad. I worry that 2010 was much worse, though.

The info is kindof hard to dig up but NALP had an interesting data set showing that legal hiring in Minneapolis-St. Paul dropped off by something like 40% during the crash, obviously a terrifying stat.

I think people just need to remember that once you get away from the T14 (and a few others in really strong markets like Boston) law school is not a safe bet to a high salary, or even a job in law in many cases.

TommyK wrote:How is UMN misleading people? Do you feel a rational consumer would look at 99% employment rate and assume they mean legal employment? Or is the 99% listed here not taking into account people who do not respond to surveys and that's what is misleading?

This is actually a genuine question. I'm trying to figure out the gripe here. It seems like fairly transparent advertising.

I think most people would assume that the 99% figure means that people are finding good work. Anyone who's been on TLS for more than a month or is diligent in doing research knows that isn't the case.

I'm pretty sure the 99% (which is an average across 5 years) is accurate according to LST, but after UIUC who knows.