Using Statistical Caveats To Mislead Students About Law School

An oversight in an earlier article gives rise to some more troubling observations.

Last week, I wrote about a bizarre proposal that law schools invest thousands of dollars into an outreach program designed to confuse the mainstream media outlets that regularly report on empirical studies revealing skyrocketing debt, a sagging job market for even top students, and scores of graduates unable to convert their law degree into paying work.

One cite included in that piece was a stat from Steven J. Harper — himself citing the ABA — that 60 percent of the class of 2014 has yet to find full-time work. Technically, the stat tracked by the ABA is that 60 percent of the class of 2014 has yet to find full-time, long-term work in jobs requiring bar passage. Did that make my sentence wrong? Sure. Does it ultimately matter in context?

Nope. And worse, this caveat can lend support to the same rhetorical strategy of confusing the straightforward reality of the market.

Make no mistake, precision is always appreciated, but as lawyers, we also appreciate some threshold of materiality. If the qualifier fails to materially alter the plight of a hefty percentage of law grads unable to find work with their degrees, then it may be a “correct” qualification, but one without much impact. And that’s where this quibble actually opens the door to a more troubling observation: technicalities can open the door to abuse. The pernicious impact of statistics loaded down with caveats is that those interested in pushing a rosy picture of legal education can develop rhetoric around these qualifications — like this quirk of the ABA’s tracking intended to prevent schools from touting flipping burgers as an employment success story — to obfuscate.

Take, for example, a couple of Professor Jonathan Adler’s tweets to us over the weekend explaining why he thought it was important to qualify that 60 percent number:

Fair points, but also points that, perhaps unintentionally, exacerbate the problem of systematically misleading students that the Simkovic proposal seeks to institutionalize.

First, the implication is that if one included the universe of students with these bar passage-less jobs it would bring the 60 percent figure to something reasonable. What would be a reasonable figure? Well, the labor market as a whole strives for 96 percent employment. Are 36 percent of 2014 grads ensconced in consulting jobs or lobbying gigs? I’m incredulous. But this is the problem with the rhetoric employed to frame this argument — these other jobs aren’t counted but hinted at by exclusion from the cited number. It opens the door to suggesting, vaguely and anecdotally, that there are fulfilling jobs out there for students taking advantage of their degrees… and that any more than a handful of graduates can access these job.

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Second, the jobs Professor Adler highlights sound pretty prestigious. And they are. Which is why it should raise some suspicions when you consider that the bulk of graduates complaining of a lack of bar-passage-requiring employment come from the lower-tier law schools. The 64.5 percent of Ave Maria grads without jobs requiring bar passage aren’t the ones locking down gigs at Bain Capital. And that’s where these numbers are the most important. No one doubts that going to Yale is a good career decision, even if it doesn’t result in a job requiring bar passage, because some set of Yale grads are always going to go off and become dictators or some such. But the aggregate employment numbers are important for the students looking at bottom-rung schools expecting to get legal jobs afterward. Undermining the staggering employment numbers with the idea that they’ll be landing on their feet in a cushy executive job is misleading and irresponsible.

Third, unless your job on Capitol Hill is “counsel,” then it’s not a positive use of your degree. All of these hypothetical jobs — consulting, VC work, legislative work — are jobs that students can and do routinely secure straight out of undergrad. If this qualifier has any meaning in the context of exploring the overhyped value of law school, it has to point to some unique value to securing a law degree. There’s a lot of chatter about “J.D. Advantage” jobs, but there’s no standard of defining these jobs to ensure that the $200K+ a student spends on a degree actually places them at an advantage over a candidate coming directly from undergrad.

This is all to say that understanding and respecting the accuracy of statistics is important, but of equal and underappreciated importance is understanding how those caveats support rhetorical assumptions that can mislead far more.

Earlier: Law Schools Need To Lie More About The Market
ATL vs. Law Dean vs. Common Sense

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