I first want to note how dumb it is to rip on a law dean who wants to explain what it is he's selling to a population of applicants that is likely more competitive for scholarships than the general pool. For a population aspiring to do depos [1], you kind of suck at asking questions so far. [2]
Here is a post critiquing Freedman's "great time to go to law school" post by somebody whose academic CV is kind of literally pretty much empirical jobs studies:
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/06/
I didn't really put effort into reading either article, because this is a Transparency 1.0 thing (I think;dr) and I am interested in the late capitalism angle. This may be perfectly appropriate as between more local jobs-oriented law schools if that's the context. [3] But leaving aside "fuck 'jobs,'" [4] this has notes of "bootstraps" in its "why don't people enter the workforce and get skills?" meme. Because boomers don't hire and the skills gap is flame, guy.
I will look forward to also not reading the "If you're not really that smart but just test well, maybe now is a great time to go to an expensive elite law school to get on a job conveyor belt and not be interested in the academic offerings" meme posts if "the market" comes back.
[1] Even if the most relevant professional skillset is ankle-biting, hivemind, crab-in-a-bucket syndrome, then various other posters may be thinking like lawyers, but I am still bored by it and don't think it's billable per se but I could be wrong.Paul Campos wrote:(1) Though I hesitate to reduce OP's OP to black letter form, I gather a central part of the point is that the law school crisis/scam is just a characteristic example of the crisis of what certain leftists refer to hopefully as late capitalism. I think that's right, which is why the transparency movement can only do so much even in law schools, let alone beyond them.
In a sense, one could say that we have reached the end of the law school scam — in the sense that young people who enroll in law school today have every opportunity to avoid being misled about the prospects that await them. Of course this is no excuse for continuing to engage in aggressive sales tactics that sound more like a condo time-share pitch than a disinterested scholarly evaluation of the evidence.
In other words, we’re moving toward a situation — we’re not there yet, mainly because of the cultural lag in recognizing what has been happening to the legal profession, i.e., the Legally Blonde Syndrome — in which law students will be no more prone to overestimate their career prospects than Ph.D. candidates are now prone to overestimate their odds of getting a tenure track job (I”m assuming here that the latter don’t tend to indulge in too much optimism and confirmation bias, although I have to admit that this assumption isn’t actually based on anything other than my own optimistic wish that this is the case. My co-bloggers and many commentators are in a position to confirm or correct this impression, and I hope they do so).
That is all to the good, but, in terms of genuine reform, it’s very much half or perhaps a third of a loaf. Genuine reform goes far beyond even optimal transparency (which is still far away in the law school world), because the crisis of the American law school is just a particularly sharp example of a far broader crisis: that created by an economy that simply doesn’t produce anything like enough appropriate (halfway decent-paying, skills based) jobs for our increasingly educated, and increasingly disaffected, younger generations.
The real scam, in other words, is the contemporary structure of our society. Making that transparent is a goal towards which the law school reform movement is playing its own small part.
[2] To be fair, Ron Don's are pretty solid, and got answers. 80k plus interest still seems pretty harsh CoL-adjusted, so maybe getting all "SCAAAAAAM" on behalf of, like, out-of-state students with no scholarship is totally fair enough? But, like, way to suck at the setup. I was not impressed by the way he blew his wad right at the opening, but such is life. Plus, I guess if the end goal is to draft depo questions from the fluorescent safety of the cube for a couple years and then get kicked out, or even to just write good ice burns for people in positions of institutional power, then my vocational critique does not really apply to Ron Don.
