PBS Frontline to Air Report on the For-Profit Higher Education Scam

[WhipperSnapper]

As for education arm's race. Get a math or science degree pass your teaching certs and go make $50k a year. Or go into nursing, dental hygene, certain engineering fields, etc etc.

The problem is clueless people go into area where they have no path of getting a job in their field or make money if they are.

I'm not sure that teaching is such a good area any longer. According to recent news reports states are going to start laying off teachers all over the country. Maybe it's better if you're a science or math teacher, I don't know. (Does anyone have first-hand knowledge about the job market for science and math teachers?)

I don't think that what you say is bad advice, but it isn't a solution to the Education Arms Race because if everyone became nurses, dental hygenists, engineers, and high school science teachers we would have a large oversupply of people in those fields. (Some engineers would probably argue that we have an oversupply of engineers in certain specialties.) Simply put, those few fields where there is some demand (if any) for more people cannot possibly absorb the masses of college-educated Americans seeking work in the fields they trained for.

As for the legal market. The legal market is over saturated with dumbasses who go to law school to try and make money.

I think it might be more accurate to think of them as being naive but ambitious people who have been indoctrinated with the belief that higher education is the key to at least middle class success and that all lawyers are rich (this is what the general public believes). They are pretty hard-working folks by-and-large. I'm not sure it's appropriate to call them dumbasses any more than it is appropriate to call victims of other frauds and scams dumbasses.

Most law students cannot stand law but they think its a path to riches. Those that enjoy law and aren't in the legal profession to try and make money are the ones who stay in the legal profession. Those thst see a JD = $$$$ either dont make the grades to make $$$$ or they do and are out within five years. As for the commets about some law schools having 90% of their students unemployed at 9 months might be true for a handful of schools now, but certainly not the majority. Is there an oversupply of JDs? Yes, but most schools have more than 10% of their class employed.

I doubt I said that 90% were unemployed after 9 months. (I probably said the law schools claim that they have 90+% employment after 9 months.)

I don't know if you have a JD or not, but I have talked to a couple hundred law students in the past few years from top fifty law schools, read news articles, and paid attention to this field and I am pretty certain that the oversupply is much much greater than 10%. I suspect that in the past two decades only 50-60% of all law school graduates have been able to find jobs actually working as a lawyer. That number for new graduates in the past two years is probably closer to 5-10% (When news articles report that Harvard graduates are having difficulty finding legal employment, it implies something about the rest of the legal job market.)

 

[Wreckem]

I'm not sure that teaching is such a good area any longer. According to recent news reports states are going to start laying off teachers all over the country. Maybe it's better if you're a science or math teacher, I don't know. (Does anyone have first-hand knowledge about the job market for science and math teachers?)

I don't think that what you say is bad advice, but it isn't a solution to the Education Arms Race because if everyone became nurses, dental hygenists, engineers, and high school science teachers we would have a large oversupply of people in those fields. (Some engineers would probably argue that we have an oversupply of engineers in certain specialties.) Simply put, those few fields where there is some demand (if any) for more people cannot possibly absorb the masses of college-educated Americans seeking work in the fields they trained for.


I think it might be more accurate to think of them as being naive but ambitious people who have been indoctrinated with the belief that higher education is the key to at least middle class success and that all lawyers are rich (this is what the general public believes). They are pretty hard-working folks by-and-large. I'm not sure it's appropriate to call them dumbasses any more than it is appropriate to call victims of other frauds and scams dumbasses.



I doubt I said that 90% were unemployed after 9 months. (I probably said the law schools claim that they have 90+% employment after 9 months.)

I don't know if you have a JD or not, but I have talked to a couple hundred law students in the past few years from top fifty law schools, read news articles, and paid attention to this field and I am pretty certain that the oversupply is much much greater than 10%. I suspect that in the past two decades only 50-60% of all law school graduates have been able to find jobs actually working as a lawyer. That number for new graduates in the past two years is probably closer to 5-10% (When news articles report that Harvard graduates are having difficulty finding legal employment, it implies something about the rest of the legal job market.)

High School Math/Science teachers are pretty much in demand in every state. I know a guy who went on a teachers job fair in Texas and had 13 on the spot contract offers, all in the $50-55k range. It was only thirteen because he didn't go to every school district there.


You must know a lot of people in the bottom of law school classes. The numbers over the past few years are bad, but not in the 5-10% employed range. No where near that bad unless you are solely talking about BigLaw, and BigLaw placement has always been low. The fall of the financial markets gutted BigLaw, and its still recovering/may never recover.

As for your comment about a Harvard law grad not finding a job. Well, there could be a number of reasons 1. GPA/class rank is low 2. they are a social retard 3. they got no offered/defered by big law and dont want to get a job unless its paying 6 figures. There are plenty of people that fall in #3 because they thought law school was the path for 6 figures(they were stupid, thats med school, vet school, or dental school).

The classes of '08/'09/'10 have had some hard times but again employment by recent law grads is more than 5-10% of that time frame.

You are right about the 50-60% range over the past two decades(possibly 3 decades), but are COMPELTELY wrong about the last two to three years.

The biggest problem with law school are morons that go into it thinking they are going to get rich, etc etc. They dont research it properly. I dont know how many people that I took the LSAT with who were so underprepared/talked about how it doesnt matter how well they did they would still make alot of money. Etc etc. Stupid people think getting a MBA or JD = ticket to riches. Do the schools lap it up? Sure they do but as long as there are 1500 people a year that are willing to enroll in Cooley there will continue to be schools taking their cash.

The ABA tried to not accredit schools in the past, they got sued and lost. People need to save themselves from them selves, no one else is going to do it, nor should they.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

The problem you're having is that you think what's good for the school and its students are two different things. They're not. If the students are successful, the school will be successful. Degrees are one of the two products of a university (the other being research). If the quality of a university's products is poor, then fewer people will buy it. Thus, it is always in the best interest of both parties to promote the other as best they can.

I agree with you in part and disagree with you in part. I agree with you that schools do have an interest in their students being successful because it furthers their primary interest. The only reason the schools are interested in the success of their students is so that they can bring in more tuition dollars and government money and grow larger. If they have to make a choice about whether or not to bring in more tuition dollars or to dramatically cut down on how many students they have, they will choose to bring in more tuition dollars.

The problem is not that universities' products are poor but that those products are unneeded (in the quantity they produce them) by society and by the economy at large. If the unversities were seriously concerned about the well-being of their students then they would have to being closing or at least significantly reducing the size of many of their graduate and professional programs. Some of those programs (MBAs, law degrees) are also used as cash cows to turn a profit for the university; that is to say that they charge much more money than the actual cost of providing the education.

I disagree that if the products of the university have little economic value that people will stop buying them. For example, people still major in art history and political science. Also, a huge information asymmetry exists between what universities, employers, and professors know about the employment prospects in various fields and what students, parents, and high school guidance counselors know. Also, as I mentioned, everyone has been indoctrinated to believe that higher education necessarily has value. Furthermore, even if it isn't a guarantor of middle class success, not going to college will deprive you of a club card for being able to get a middle class job and so people will go to college even if they understand that it is merely the new high school diploma.

I'm not terribly familiar with the ABA or how it is governed. However, the equivalent organization for engineers (ABET) is simply an organization which says whether or not an engineering department is accredited based on its published standards. Schools spend a huge amount of time and money trying to meet these standards because accreditation is supposed to indicate that the graduates of an accredited program have a minimum level of competence in their field of study. However, this process has become so costly and cumbersome that many universities are considering dropping it and telling ABET to piss off. This is a dangerous road to go down, as there are certainly benefits to having an accreditation system. A superior alternative would be for ABET to update its requirements and/or a new accreditation company should be formed with better or more relevant standards.

I don't know anything at all about ABET and engineering, but I suspect it's much more honorable than the ABA. Here is a link to an unusually honest op-ed written by the President of the California Bar Association where he says:

Howard B. Miller, President of the State Bar of California -- "There is notoriously unreliable self-reporting by law schools and their graduates of employment statistics. They are unreliable in only one direction, since the self-reporting by law schools of “employment” of graduates at graduation and then nine months after graduation are, together, a significant factor in the U.S. News rankings — which are obsessed over, despite denials, by law schools and their constituencies." See Truth in Lending and in Careers.

Does meeting ABA requirements mean anything in a legal sense (i.e. does it control the bar exam which allows one to practice in a given state)? ABET has no such legal authority, and the ABA shouldn't either.

Yes. ABA accreditation is required in order for a law school's graduates to be able to sit for the Bar Exam. My understanding is that the U.S. Department of Education passed this duty of accreditation to the ABA. So, the ABA can pretty much regulate the law schools if it wants to. California and perhaps one or two other states will allow graduates of some non-accredited law schools to sit for their state bar exams. (It would be pretty stupid to go to law school if you could never practice as a lawyer but perhaps some people do it.) The running joke is that the ABA will pretty much accredit just about any new law school that opens up and many lawyers are angry at the ABA for approving new law schools.

 

[DAGTA]

Anyone have a link to the video? I missed it on airing.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

High School Math/Science teachers are pretty much in demand in every state. I know a guy who went on a teachers job fair in Texas and had 13 on the spot contract offers, all in the $50-55k range. It was only thirteen because he didn't go to every school district there.

OK, I'll take your word for it for what it's worth. I'd really like to hear it coming from a couple high school science teachers, but I don't have enough first-hand knowledge about this area to really discuss it in any detail. Of course, I take just about all claims of good job markets skeptically in this economy. (The media tends to put a happy face on everything, so I try to add lumps of salt to all claims about how Field X is hot.)

You must know a lot of people in the bottom of law school classes. The numbers over the past few years are bad, but not in the 5-10% employed range. No where near that bad unless you are solely talking about BigLaw, and BigLaw placement has always been low. The fall of the financial markets gutted BigLaw, and its still recovering/may never recover.

Would you regard a number like "50% found employment in the legal profession" as a a good number? The legal profession has been glutted for at least two decades now and even during better economic times students had problems finding jobs in the legal profession. In today's current economy I don't think it's just students at TTTs and in the bottom half of the class who are having problems.

If you look at the numbers themselves, intuitively, the nation has more lawyers than it could possibly need. Did you know that the United States has about 1 lawyer for every 257 people? (I obtained that figure by dividing Census Bureau population projections by the ABA stats for the number of licensed attorneys nationwide.) No other first world nation has a number that comes close to that.

When was the last time you needed a dentist? When was the last time you went to the doctor? When was the last time your or someone you knew needed an attorney? Was this a once-in-a-lifetime need or a once-a-year need? Yes, businesses need much more legal counsel than do people, but do they need it to the extent that the nation needs one attorney for every 257 people?

Based on the number of students in law school we are currently producing enough new lawyers to have about one lawyer for every 165 people (assuming that lawyers work for 40 years after they graduate in their mid-twenties). (I accessed some publicly available statistics showing the number of students at each law school, added them up, divided by three, multiplied by 40, and then divided by the US. population. I did all of this work previously for the purpose of a private project and not for posting stats on forums.)

As for your comment about a Harvard law grad not finding a job. Well, there could be a number of reasons 1. GPA/class rank is low 2. they are a social retard 3. they got no offered/defered by big law and dont want to get a job unless its paying 6 figures. There are plenty of people that fall in #3 because they thought law school was the path for 6 figures(they were stupid, thats med school, vet school, or dental school).

Here are links to three articles that appeared recently in the ABA Journal:

Harvard Law Students, Legal Recruiters among Those Hit by Law Firm Cuts

Harvard Law to Job Hunting Students: Don't Panic

The Crimson H: Jobless Harvard 3L Wonders, Why Me?

I disagree that the Harvard students who fall into your third category are stupid. You would fully expect that if you graduated from one of HYS that you would have little difficulty finding a six figure job as people had for years in the past. Anyway, my point is that if Harvard students are having difficulty, what are the students at the 20th and 50th ranked schools experiencing? (I don't even want to try to imagine what it must be like to be a student at a Third Tier Toilet law school right now.)

In fact, I don't think that law students in general are necessarily stupid for having gone to law school. We've all been indoctrinated to believe that higher education is the key to vocational success since Kindergarten, the general populace believes that all lawyers are rich and the only lawyers anyone ever sees on TV or in the movies are successful and have status, and then (as the President of the California Bar alleges) the law schools have been putting out misleading statistics (some people would even argue that it's borderline fraudulent and the law schools have been doing it with the tacit sanction of the ABA). The only place you can really find any information to the contrary are a few news articles (which suggest that this is a temporary problem caused by the depression and that the market will improve in the future) and the scam-buster blogs such as JD Underground and Exposing the Law School Scam.

The classes of '08/'09/'10 have had some hard times but again employment by recent law grads is more than 5-10% of that time frame.

I don't know; it's pretty rough out there for the young pups. On the blogs, stories are being published about how people are saying that even the top five students at the non-first tier schools have been having difficulty.

You are right about the 50-60% range over the past two decades(possibly 3 decades), but are COMPELTELY wrong about the last two to three years.

I think that even a number like 50-60% employed in the field of law is still unacceptable for people who have 7 years of college education and who are incurring huge costs to attend law school ($100,000-$185,000 after factoring in cost of living expenses). For those costs the number should be closer to 95%. In order to get the number up to 95% I recommend closing 60% of the law schools or a dramatic reduction in the number of seats.

The biggest problem with law school are morons that go into it thinking they are going to get rich, etc etc. They don't research it properly.

What kind of research do you recommend that people do? The law schools and the ABA are putting out or tacitly sanctioning misleading statistics. It seems like the only thing you can really do to learn the truth is to stumble across JD Underground and the other scam-buster blogs. It might also be possible to call local attorneys and ask them what they think, but those attorneys are the ones who were able to succeed (or to at least be able to afford a Yellow Pages ad).

I dont know how many people that I took the LSAT with who were so underprepared/talked about how it doesnt matter how well they did they would still make alot of money. Etc etc. Stupid people think getting a MBA or JD = ticket to riches. Do the schools lap it up? Sure they do but as long as there are 1500 people a year that are willing to enroll in Cooley there will continue to be schools taking their cash.

The ABA tried to not accredit schools in the past, they got sued and lost. People need to save themselves from them selves, no one else is going to do it, nor should they.

For those who don't know, the reference to the ABA being sued was an anti-trust lawsuit. I think it was filed by some podunk school that was denied accreditation and the ABA entered into a consent-decree with the Department of Justice. However, the ABA could still do things to try to reduce the number of people who go to law school short of pulling schools' accreditation on a whim such as increasing the standards for accreditation, issuing public warnings to undergrads, requiring a minimum LSAT score and undergraduate GPA to attend law school, and most importantly, putting an end to the false and misleading reporting of employment statistics.

I agree with you that many of the people who go to law school are dumbasses in the way that you describe. They are naive and inexperienced and have been heavily indoctrinated since childhood. Some of them have parents and families who are pressuring them to get advanced degrees. Also, there is a sense of desperation because they could not find jobs with their history and poly sci degrees and so they figure that they have nothing to lose by pursuing a professional degree that has an actual real world application. A huge amount of information asymmetry exists.

So, how are you doing? Have you graduated yet and were you able to find a job in the legal profession? If you're still in law school, were you able to find a paying summer position that could lead to an offer of permanent employment? What kind of school are you attending in terms of its tier? Do you read JD Underground and the scam blogs?

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Anyone have a link to the video? I missed it on airing.

See the first post in this thread.