Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Judge erases 200K+ in student loan debt for 2004 law school graduate

Interesting story.

“Law School Transparency” is misleading its customers about the cost of law school and overcharging for data that are available for free (Michael Simkovic)

Brian Leiter recently noted problems with Elizabeth Olson’s uncritical coverage of “Law School Transparency” (LST) in an article published in Bloomberg.

The most important substantive problems with Olson’s recent article about LST not already mentioned by Professor Leiter are that: (1) Olson doesn’t mention that LST’s business model is repackaging and selling to prospective law students data that are readily available from the ABA for free and are available in more reliable form from U.S. News for less than half the price; and (2) Olson doesn’t mention that LST’s analysis of ABA data is deeply flawed, biased against law school attendance, and at a minimum highly controversial. 

The clearest example of problems with LST’s analysis is the expected amount of debt after graduation—a point where other data sources are readily available and LST’s claims can be checked. 

Law School Transparency routinely suggests that law students will graduate law school with two to five times as much debt as suggested by more credible sources like the ABA, U.S. News, the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, and student lenders.  The overwhelming majority of credible sources suggest that law graduates typically complete law school with around $90,000 to $150,000 in debt.^[1]   U.S. News reports a range a from $51,000 to $213,000 across the law schools it covers. By contrast, LST’s most prominently displayed expected debt after graduation figure averages a much higher $260,000, and ranges from $130,000 to $390,000.

LST reports its overstated cost figure prominently as the “non-discounted cost” of law school or the "full debt-financed cost of attendance." For example, according to U.S. News, Rutgers graduates typically graduate with $56,000 in debt for those who have debt and 16% have no debt at graduation.  But according to LST, Rutgers graduates face a “non-discounted cost” more than four times higher—$230,000—and a “full debt-financed cost of attendance” as much as five times higher—between $229,000 and $278,000.  Even with median grant amounts and in-state tuition, LST estimates that Rutgers graduates will have $175,000 in debt at graduation—3.5 times as much as U.S. News’s data.

U.S. News reports that Stanford law graduates complete their degrees with around $132,000 in debt.  A full 36 percent of Stanford students graduate with no debt.  But according to LST, the “full debt-financed cost of attendance” and “non-discounted cost of attendance” at Stanford are both 3 times higher at $390,000.

Real data on the actual costs of law school are readily available for free from the ABA, which reports tuition and fees and typical scholarship amounts.^[2] U.S. News’s premium product, “Grad Compass” provides better (albeit imperfect) coverage of law schools than LST, also offers information on other graduate programs, and costs less than half as much as LST’s product. 

How does LST arrive at debt estimates that are so much higher than the actual data?  By making outlandish assumptions that are all biased in the direction of finding a higher debt amount / higher total cost of law school, including assuming:

 

• Law students never work during law school or in the summers between their years of law school, even though almost all law students do
• Students never live at home or with relatives during law school or find ways to reduce expected living costs below estimates provided by law schools, even though many students do;
  • (NOTE: estimated expenses provided by educational institutions are used in conjunction with tuition and fees to set maximum borrowing limits for federal student loans, and may therefore be set toward the high end of the range of students needs to avoid forcing students and lower income families with limited access to credit to borrow from higher cost sources)
• Students never pay down any of their debt or even the interest on their debt while they are in school, even though many students do
• Students and their families never use resources other than federal student loans to finance their degrees even when lower costs of capital are available elsewhere, even though many students do
• Students (by default) are assumed to receive no scholarship money, even though at many law schools half or more students do

 

LST’s paid product, which costs $75, provides some additional services, but these are generally available for free elsewhere.  Some of these services, such as a push-poll disguised as a personality-assessment, appear to be of such low quality that they may have negative value. 

Additional services include:

• an LSAT guide.

LST offers an LSAT guide from a company that is relatively new and has limited market share.  Free LSAT practice tests are available directly from LSAC, which creates, administers and scores the LSAT.  Free exams are also available from several well-established LSAT test prep companies.  LSAC sells an official guidebook for $8 and has a lot of free information on its website.  Khan academy also offers free LSAT prep.

 

• A prediction of likelihood of admission

LST’s paid product also provide a prediction of the likelihood of admission to law school, conditional on getting certain test scores and grades.  However, LSAT offers a similar service for free.  The ABA data includes information on the range of test scores and GPA of admitted students at each law school in each year.  It’s unclear from the website how or if LST’s product improves on these free resources.

 

• An unscientific personality assessment featuring questionable privacy protections, dubious claims, and push polling

LST also offers a third-party personality assessment to determine whether you are suited to be lawyer.  However, attempting to navigate to the website of the company providing this service (a Nevada LLC) raises a warning from my web browser that the website is not secure and my data could be stolen.  Perusing the terms of service does not provide reassurance about privacy protections.

The website is unclear about how, or whether, the personality assessment was scientifically validated.  It appears to be based on comparing the responses to survey questions of a non-random, non-representative sample of lawyers and non-lawyers to the profiles of prospective law students who are years younger, without any longitudinal evaluation of subsequent outcomes.  To the best of my knowledge this is not a scientifically accepted method for validating a psychometric instrument as a predictor of career satisfaction or success later in life.  There’s a link to a white paper, but it’s a sloppy thrown together jumble based on blog posts, and it is not peer reviewed.  In what appears to be a bit of push-polling against law school attendance the white paper claims that signs that you’d be a good lawyer include a lack of empathy, a lack of initiative, a lack of resiliency, a lack of sociability and a lack of creativity—basically being a lump of coal. 

Actual peer reviewed studies have found that success as a lawyer is associated with more positive personality traits like contentment, self-confidence, openness, competence, maturity, good situational judgment, a wide range of cultural interests and relative freedom from irritability and hostility and dispositional optimism.

Peer reviewed research has also found that the overwhelming majority of law graduates do not regret their decision to attend law school.  By contrast, LST’s website claims that “Nearly 50% of all lawyers wouldn't enter the profession if they had it to do over.” LST provides no source for this claim and no explanation of the methods used to reach it. (LSAC also offers a free fun quiz, but has no pretensions about scientific validity).

The ABF, NALP and other groups sponsored a study of career satisfaction, debt, and earnings called After the JD (which has 3 waves) and may offer more helpful information than anything LST provides.

 

Free or inexpensive information for prospective law students is available from well-established non-profits like LSAC, the AccessLex Institute,^[3] the American Bar Foundation, and NALP.  Unlike “Law School Transparency”, these non-profits actually are transparent about their own sources and uses of funds.

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Puff piece on "Law School Transparency" at Bloomberg Law

This is pretty thin.  I spoke to the reporter for a half hour, pointing out that the key turning point for transparency was when the ABA mandated better reporting of emplyment data by schools after getting pressure from Senators Boxer and Coburn back in 2010-11.   None of these facts made it into the article, because the reporter had already decided, I guess, to do a puff piece on LST (which, to be honest, I didn't realize still existed until she called me).   The reporter was puzzled that law school Deans say almost nothing about LST; I pointed out the obvious reason:  because it's irrelevant, in a way the ABA is not.

(The last I recall hearing about LST was when they tried to "shakedown" law schools back in 2013.)

 

 

Are "transformative gifts" really transformative?

Law.com has a list of naming gifts to law schools over the last few decades, with the majority coming in the last two decades.  Here are the biggest gifts, by year:

    1998:    $115 million to the University of Arizona

    2001:    $30 million to Ohio State University

    2001:    $30 million to the University of Utah

    2008:    $35 million to Indiana University, Bloomington

    2011:    $30 million to the University of Maryland

    2013:    $50 million to Chapman University

    2014:    $50 million to Drexel University

    2015:    $100 million to Northwestern University

    2016:    $30 million to George Mason University

    2019:    $50 million to Pepperdine University

    2019:    $125 million to the University of Pennsylvania

For some of these gifts, it's too soon to say what their effects will be, and some of them served more, one suspects, to help newer schools stay afloat and continue to grow during tough times (e.g., Chapman, Drexel). On the other hand, George Mason's gift has already resulted in a lot more hiring by that school.   But Ohio State, Utah, and Indiana all seem to be roughly where they were at the time of the gifts:  strong state flagships, neither much better, and certainly not worse.   The same goes for the most remarkable gift of them all, the one to Arizona, much lauded at the time.   I gather a good chunk of that gift went to bricks and mortar, rather than expanding the size of a fairly small faculty.  Northwestern's more recent major gift was followed a few years later by belt-tightening anyway.

It remains to be seen whether any of these gifts will really change the strength and status of any of these schools.  In ten years, we'll probably have a clearer idea of the impact given how recent many of the largest gifts are.

The growing importance of "privacy law"

An open letter from scholars and practitioners.

"Carey Law" may resume being "Penn Law" in shorthand

It would be a wise decision.  (Prior coverage.)

Some students and alumni of "Penn Law" are not happy about becoming students and alumni of "Carey Law"

They have a point.  The University of Maryland already has a "Carey Law School," making losing the connection to Penn a particularly bad idea.   Why not "Penn Law-Carey"?

Toronto Law keeping "blacklist" of alums who criticize school?

This is not a good look, although perhaps this incident is sui generis.  It is true that the University of Toronto charges more law school tuition than any other law school in Canada, and has for awhile, but this was part of a (mostly successful) effort to make Toronto faculty salaries competitive with the top 15ish U.S. law schools for both recruitment and retention purposes.

 

Nominee for 9th Circuit Lawrence VanDyke deemed "unqualified" by ABA...

...based on interviews with dozens of lawyers and judges who had worked with him and found him “arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge of the day-to-day practice,” and who also described a "lack of humility," and an "'entitlement' temperament."  That certainly well describes his reaction to being called out for his idiotic apologia for Intelligent Design creationism fifteen years ago.

$50 million gift to Pepperdine Law from Los Angeles real estate developer Rick Caruso...

...for whom the Law School will now be named.  Additionally, Mr. Caruso has committed to help the Law School raise another $50 million over the next ten years (he presumably has the right contacts to make that happen!).

This is definitely in the category of "Wow!" gifts to law schools.