Not a day goes by that a friend or acquaintance does not ask me about the Times piece a few weeks ago that posited whether law school is "a losing game." This is because law graduates incur great debt to acquire their law degrees only to enter into an over-burdened market that will not provide adequate jobs for all. At the center of this mess are the law schools, which massage their numbers in order to win (or not lose) the rankings game. According to my colleague Bill Henderson, “Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm.” Things are so bad, he says, that “[e]very time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”
The examples can be quite disheartening. Most troubling are the numbers that involve students and jobs. What does it mean to be working right after graduation, for example, or nine months after? Waiting tables counts, or stocking shelves at the local grocery store. Worse yet are anecdotes of law schools hiring their own graduates for short periods of time in order to count them as "working," whether at graduation or nine months later.
Henderson calls this state of affairs an open secret, and he is certainly right about that. My first reaction upon seeing the the Times piece was one of surprise tinged with incredulity. I could not believe, that is, that people did not know about this. How could they not? Or put another way, how could law schools keep their actions secret for as long as they have?
