New Advise-In Solutions Video: Why Taking the LSAT Can be Harder for “Smarter” People (and What You Can Do to Solve the Problem)

Last week, I exchanged e-mails and talked with a man who, like many considering taking the LSAT, raised the question of the relation between the LSAT and “intelligence.”  This question comes up a lot, in different forms, and I’ve talked about it on this blog a few times.  These particular conversations motivated me to put up a new public video, “Why Taking the LSAT Can be Harder for ‘Smarter’ People (and What You Can Do to Solve the Problem).”

My short answer to the question of whether the LSAT is an “intelligence” test is, No.  Understanding that the LSAT was not an intelligence test (beyond core abilities to read and process information in the English language) was a key step in my own LSAT preparation and my 180 score on my only try. Lots of people were telling me that the LSAT was a disguised intelligence test which, had it been true, would have made it impossible for me to get my highest LSAT score.  What I determined was that none of those people could produce a shred of convincing evidence in favor of the intelligence test thesis; it was pure assertion, mostly by people who’d never taken the test.  I didn’t know if it was or wasn’t a test of intelligence but decided to test the hypothesis by preparing for and taking the exam believing it wasn’t a test of intelligence as much as a test of what seemed more obvious, my ability to take this test.

This video discusses a related point of cognitive research, which is why, in high-stakes tests, people with higher cognitive abilities actually have more trouble that those with less such power.  That’s, of course, exactly the opposite of what you’d expect if the LSAT and similar tests tested intelligence.  Had I known about this research when I was preparing for the LSAT, I wouldn’t have had to wonder about whether the LSAT is an intelligence test; I’d have been much more confident that it isn’t.

At a minimum, that finding of cognitive research indicates that what high-stakes tests test is largely, well, the ability to just take the test.  That’s a theoretical point with practical implications—it changes how you should prepare for the LSAT, and the video focuses on these practical implications.  Theory can be interesting, I suppose, but the key for those who are actually going to take the exam is to be able to operationalize the theory so that it makes an actual difference in your ability to obtain your best LSAT score.  Otherwise, it’s just wind.

I hope the video is helpful to you.  The video is one of a series that I periodically produce (of course, clients have on-demand access to over 55 videos, most of which won’t be publicly available, but I think it’s important to try to give a little perspective and assistance to a wider audience as well).  You can access the videos by clicking on the “Watch our Videos” button on any page of the Advise-In Solutions website.  You can also subscribe to Advise-In’s videos once you’re on YouTube, so that you’ll be notified automatically of new videos.  Or you can visit Advise-In’s YouTube channel by clicking here.

An Extra $3,600 per Year: Many Law School Borrowers Will Need to Find It Right out of Law School

Last week’s deal to increase the national debt ceiling (i.e., Congress deciding that it was still willing to pay debts it had itself incurred) involved some heavy costs for beneficiaries of many government programs.

One of those groups is graduate students, including law students, who will no longer have access to federally subsidized loans.  What difference does that make for law school borrowers?  About $300 per month.  That’s how much more a borrower will pay, every month, for the repayment term of a maximum (for law students) of about $26,500 available through the soon-to-be-unsubsidized program.  The changes go into effect in July of 2012, just in time for next year’s entering law class.

What was a subsidized loan?  It was a loan in which the government paid the interest on a loan while the borrower was still in school, and for several months after graduation.  Now, that interest will simply accrue.  Students won’t have to pay it while they’re in school, but if they don’t, that just increases the amount of the monthly payment that will be due during the loan repayment period.  CNN calculates that number at about $207 a month.  I’m not sure how CNN got to that figure—when I calculate the numbers, it’s very close to $300 (assuming a $26,500 loan amount and no change in the interest rates for federal loans), or $3,600 per year.

For debt-laden law students whose law school debt load has increased significantly over the last several years, to say nothing of any undergraduate debt that students were already carrying into their legal careers, $3,600 is not chump change.  Considering the current average debt load and the state of the legal market, most law students won’t be taking that $300 out of “surplus” after graduation.  It will have to come from somewhere, either larding on yet more debt (in that case, probably high-interest consumer debt) or out of consumption, savings or investment, or some combination of all of those.

And what else could you do with $3,600 per year?  You could buy decent health insurance, repair damage from that burst pipe, pay for unexpected dental expenses, lease a pretty nice car, take a nice vacation, upgrade your wardrobe substantially, etc., etc.

Every law student borrowing after the change kicks in and anyone thinking about going to law school in 2012 or after should work this change in law into their financial spreadsheets, or have a trusted advisor do it.  I do that kind of work for any Advise-In admissions and application client who wants me to, and we integrate their debt profile into several post-law school income scenarios.

The loss of the “grace period” is also difficult, since many students will need to pay for their bar review course (often taking out even more debt in the process) and will likely have significant wardrobe and other expenditures related to getting (or looking for) a professional job.  The grace period was one way to help bridge that period.  But it’s gone, R.I.P.  That should also be thrown into the spreadsheet scenario cauldron.

None of this factors in a likely result of the debt ceiling crisis—whether next week or next year, at some point, if as a country we continue to say that repayment of our debts is optional, the cost of borrowing is likely to increase.  It may not happen right away because a lot of alternatives (European national debt, for example) are a little scary at the moment.  But it’s hard to see how, over the next several years, interest rates can stay at their current low level, so potential borrowers should be factoring in an increase of some basis points for loans that they’ll need for their second and third years of law school.  Now, if inflation increases, and if current borrowers won’t need to borrow more at those inflationary rates, some of that impact could be mitigated.  Increasingly, however, many borrowers seem to be repaying debt by taking out more debt.  That simply can’t end well.

The bottom line is that unless you’re able to pay your debt out of surplus after law school, every dollar of debt adversely affects your well-being by several dollars.  At some point, for many the debt becomes unmanageable, affecting not only financial well-being but also psychological health and relationships.  The loss of federal subsidies may or may not have been a wise choice in setting our national priorities.  Irrespective of that, law and other graduate students will have to deal with it.  The option that Congress apparently thinks it has—maybe we’ll pay our debts and maybe we won’t—isn’t a choice it will give student borrowers.

New Advise-In Solutions LSAT Logic Games Video: Dealing with Time Pressure in LSAT Analytical Reasoning

LSAT logic games (LSAT analytical reasoning questions) are intimidating for many takers of the LSAT.  The major problems for most LSAT takers are dealing with the time pressure of logic games and avoiding panic.  That’s an issue with all parts of the LSAT but especially logic games.  The paradox of analytical reasoning is that because the section is almost entirely about time, the right way to approach it is to worry about time—less.

Understanding that paradox and knowing what to do with it was central to my getting a 180 LSAT score on my first and only try.   This new video, “LSAT Analytical Reasoning: Dealing with Timing Pressure in LSAT Logic Games”, explains part of Advise-In’s approach to analytical reasoning.  If you want to see that approach in action, you can also watch “Simplifying LSAT Line Games (and Making You Faster): Advise-In Solutions’ Step-by Step Approach to LSAT Line Games”.

There are a lot of analytical reasoning videos on the internet. Advise-In’s approach is distinctive for a few reasons:

1. It’s proven.  It’s how I got a perfect score and how my clients do as well as they do on the LSAT.

When you take the LSAT, you want the pressure of the day to melt away. The way to do that is to have clear, repeatable techniques that are simple to apply and that make the right answer clear with a minimum of (which is not to say no) mental strain. That’s particularly possible in LSAT logic games. If you can keep the logic games clear and straightforward, you’ll be less likely to make careless mistakes or to so sap your mental energy that you won’t have as much left for the rest of the LSAT as you should. And that’s what it takes to get your best LSAT score.

If you’re preparing for the LSAT, you shouldn’t be afraid of analytical reasoning, but should look at it as the section where, more than any other, you can simply be a mechanic. What’s important in logic games is getting your initial diagram correct from the start and thinking it through fully.  After that, for about two-thirds of the questions (on average), you should not have to think much at all; the answers should jump off the page. 

2. You see the 180 LSAT scorer who teaches all Advise-In clients. If you look at most big-box mass-LSAT prep company videos, you see the person they want you to see, presumably the best they have, in their opinion. If everyone were equally good, well, they’d do a video with every instructor. If you like the person they have as their front-person, great, but good luck getting that person to teach you. Mass-prep companies won’t (as far as I know) guarantee that, and many are likely not even working with the company still. You get who they give you. That’s just how Wal-Mart-type LSAT prep works.  Unlike Wal-Mart, though, you can’t actually buy what you just saw in the window.

In contrast, at the end of this Advise-In video, you see my number and, if you call it, you’ll talk to me. If you’re a client, you’ll work with me. If you don’t like the video, well, Advise-In isn’t for you. If you do, there’s no bait-and-switch.

My clients already enjoy unlimited access to over 50 LSAT prep videos at no extra charge.  Of course, even over 50 videos can’t substitute for the intensive, customized programs that I design and implement for my clients. Nor will they substitute for the detailed analysis of each piece of paper that my clients send to me over the course of their programs. And by definition, the videos won’t incorporate the real-time adjustments I make to each client’s program based on their performance and needs.  But they’re an exciting additional resource for my clients.

I hope this video is helpful for you as you prepare for the LSAT.

Why Reading Comprehension is Underemphasized in LSAT Prep, and What You Can Do about It

A few weeks ago, I spoke with John Richardson, who teaches LSAT prep in Toronto, about doing a blog post for our sites on why most LSAT prep courses—and their marketing material—tend to underemphasize reading comprehension.

Things have been a little busy lately, but sometimes delay is a good thing.  In this case, it allowed me to have lunch with Elise Jaffe, a former law firm colleague who is now the pre-law advisor at Hunter College in New York City.  Elise and John are always insightful and, while this post is my view, it owes a lot to those conversations.

There are several reasons why reading comp seems to be the forgotten stepchild in LSAT prep courses and marketing.  Some of them are merely commercial; others are inherent in the relatively short-term nature of LSAT prep, which is to say that most programs don’t address reading comprehension very well because—within the structure of most LSAT prep programs—it’s harder to address.  In combination with the limited objectives of most LSAT programs, the result is that reading comprehension feels like an afterthought.

I’ll talk about a little theory below.  The practical payoff is simple, though: Read—a lot—before you begin your intensive LSAT prep.  The more of a reader you are, the easier you’ll find reading comprehension especially, and logical reasoning to a lesser (but still significant) extent.

As Elise and John, in their own way, noted to me, taking a too-narrow view of the LSAT (which, I’ll add, is in the commercial interest of most LSAT prep programs) is positively damaging to performance.  Elise emphasizes that in one very important way, LSAT prep isn’t a short-horizon task.  It may be that you only “prepare for the LSAT” for a relatively short time but you start from somewhere; that is, you rely on a long personal development of reading and analytical skills.  To help develop those skills, Elise recommends to her students that, throughout their college careers, they become regular readers of the New York Times (relatively inexpensive with student rates) and at least one other respected news source, targeting op-ed pages in particular if they don’t have time to read the entire publication.  One of my first posts on this blog contained similar advice.

John’s R.E.A.D. principle is in a similar vein.  It’s a great “back-to-basics” reminder that what the LSAT, in its essence, is asking you to do is to understand and analyze the information it presents.  No one starts doing that from a blank slate.  Any taker relies on a better or worse history of doing exactly that, understanding and analyzing information as it’s presented.

I’m not recommending extending dedicated LSAT prep time—I think that too long spent preparing is just as unhelpful as too short a time, as I’ve said several times on this blog.  What’s important is the preparation you do before you start “preparing” for the LSAT.

A great LSAT prep program can maximize your reading ability but can’t create it from scratch (or nearly scratch).  Knowing and using the right techniques for you are important to maximizing your LSAT performance—but they’re not alchemy.  LSAT books that purport to teach you “how to read for the LSAT” are more harmful than beneficial—that’s another reason why I continue to believe that the best decisions I made in my own LSAT prep were to take all those books to the dumpster and to ignore all those programs and tutors that held out the possibility of great results (“crushing the LSAT,” “beating the LSAT,” etc.) without any pedagogically sound plan as to how to get to those results.

The basic fact is this. Takers of the LSAT have been reading (more or less well and more or less heavily) for a long time.  For example, although I didn’t start my LSAT prep anywhere near the 180 score I got on my only LSAT, I had the advantage that I was a heavy reader (and I had no idea what the LSAT books were trying to tell me about reading—they had nothing to do with how I read or should read, and I was pretty convinced that I was already a better reader than the books’ authors).  I didn’t read quite the way the LSAT wanted me to but I read a lot.  So, what I needed to do was to change the way I processed and analyzed information.  But I didn’t need to learn how to read, understand or process information at a reasonably high level.

When prospective clients take a diagnostic (or show me their actual LSAT after having taken another program), I worry more about the ultimate cap on their scores if reading comprehension is weak.  I’m upfront about that with them.  I think that’s my duty.  The bottom line is that I’m not qualified—nor, to my knowledge, is any other LSAT instructor—to teach remedial reading.  I can help tweak reading habits but 10 weeks—or, for that matter, 6 months—isn’t enough time to completely rebuild reading habits.  I can teach more efficient reading, better analysis of arguments and various other techniques specifically to maximize how any individual is already reading—but I can’t teach someone how to read.  And any LSAT book or instructor who tells you it or he can (especially in a few weeks) is either badly deceived, less than truthful or a severely underpaid sorcerer.

Even in making adjustments to how you read, the longer you have and the more dedicated you are, the better off you’ll be.  That’s the function of the pre-program that I offer to my clients.  The objective of that program is to get clients in the habit of reading in the way that the LSAT wants them to read without using up LSAT questions doing it, and giving ourselves more time to get it right.  Some of my clients are doing the pre-program (at no additional charge) for over a year—it’s just a few hours a week but it pays considerable dividends.

I don’t know of any other LSAT prep company that offers a similar program.  Why?  Well, it’s time and effort, for one.  And most LSAT prep programs are volume-based, so it’s not worth their effort.  But since the issue with those whose reading comprehension is weaker is more one of reading generally—and less one of 8 or 10 or 26 weeks of LSAT prep—these programs don’t emphasize reading comprehension.

They can’t, really.  And to the extent that mass-market LSAT prep intends to get its students a marginal improvement on a base score, they don’t have to—they can get enough small improvements through marginal moves.  Still, they should make the limitations of what they’re doing clear, in my opinion.  If what you want—and you should—is your best LSAT score, you should start preparing for the LSAT long before you start preparing for it, either in a dedicated pre-program like the one I offer clients or in a self-designed program.  If you do that, your LSAT-specific work will have greater impact.

That’s all in “LSAT mode.”  There’s a more important consideration.  As a lawyer, one of the two or three activities that will take up the largest proportion of your time will be—reading.  And you’ll need to be a very careful and efficient reader to be a first-rate lawyer.  While I am generally of the opinion that the LSAT has a single purpose—to help get your best law school admission with the most merit-based financial aid you can get—it’s important to keep the end goal in mind.  If you don’t like to read, you should think carefully about whether the law and being a lawyer are right for you.  And the most practice you get at analytical reading—of the type tested on the LSAT, among others—the better off you and your clients will be when you become a lawyer.

The ABA Approves New Law School Employment Data Reporting (and it Should be Helpful to Law School Applicants)

Sometimes, crow is just delicious.  In the past, I’ve been extremely critical of the pretty miserable law school employment data that the ABA requires law schools to report, as well as the seemingly glacial pace of the ABA process in compelling law schools to report data that would actually be useful to law school applicants and not subject to easy manipulation by law schools.

There was good news last month that indicated that the ABA might approve a significant overhaul to the current lax reporting system.  I held my tongue on the grounds that you can’t tell the number of chickens by counting eggs.

But yesterday, the ABA announced that its Legal Education and Admissions section has approved significant changes, which will be reported next year.  There are still hurdles—among them, defining certain terms and seeing how law schools actually report the data—but law school applicants and their advisors should have to fight through a lot less white noise beginning next year.  In the meantime, applicants need not wait until actual publication to politely request relevant data from law schools.  Law schools can no longer (as some of them, unbelievably, did) claim they just don’t have some basic data.

Most important, the ABA appears to have taken seriously its job as law schools’ regulatory body.  It doesn’t matter so much that it may (or may not) have done so under increasing political pressure or that the ABA’s own statements of concern were often clumsy, at best.  Nor may it matter that the ABA explicitly noted that it wants to avoid “unnecessary” effort by law schools—you could take that to say that law schools simply do (or clearly ought to) have basic information available.

There are a few highlights but the best way of seeing the scope of the changes is to look at the chart that the ABA appears to be requiring law schools to complete (see the last page of the memorandum that begins of p. 20 of this pdf) and comparing that chart to what had previously been required.

Assuming that these changes were adopted in full (today’s ABA release includes confusing language saying that “these [reported] and other proposed changes were recommended in June,” leaving open the possibility that some of the changes described below may not have been approved), here are some of the more significant changes:

1.  Instead of requiring simple employment data, the ABA will require a specification of what jobs require a J.D.; which one prefer a J.D., and which ones don’t.

2.  Full-time vs. part-time employment will now be reported separately.  That’s a significant advance and should prevent law schools (depending on the definition of “part-time”) from slipping over the significant difference between the two in income, prestige and future career potential.

3.  The ABA will require reporting of the number of jobs funded by the law school, a technique that several prominent (and other) law schools have used in the last several years that had the effect of significantly enhancing the appearance of employment percentage numbers.  You can appreciate that law schools want to “bridge” their graduates’ employment in tough times and still want to understand the extent to which they’re doing it, appropriately discounting the employment numbers.

4.  Law firm jobs will be broken out by size of firm.  That’s a significant improvement over the prior aggregation of law firm data.  The ABA, unfortunately, did not require law schools to further disaggregate their government and business employment data.  That will still be something that applicants will need to find out on their own.

5.  Salary information will be “unbundled” from employment information.  This should help with some of the incredible numbers we’ve seen some law schools report regarding their “median” salaries, which have been artificially inflated by (in some cases) shockingly small sample sizes.  Instead, the NALP numbers on statewide salaries will become the gold standard, on the theory that this will decrease cherry-picking of statistics by law schools.

To be honest, I was initially suspicious of this unbundling but have come to believe that the ABA made the right choice.  If any individual law school’s sample size is large enough to be meaningful, applicants and their advisors can put it on the list of items to cover.

6.  Clerkship data has been broken down into federal and state clerkships.  That’s important and, while the data could always be more granular, it should prevent some law schools from touting clerkship numbers as if they are the equivalent of U.S. Supreme Court clerkships.

I think there’s more the ABA could have done but what they appear to have done is a lot.  There are still uncertainties to be resolved, of course, before anyone should exhale.  First, we’ll see what law schools actually do.  I’m pretty confident that some will engage in some creative interpretation of the requirements.  That’s related to a second point.  Just as when legislation is passed, attention turns to regulatory lobbying, here the ABA’s official statement notes that “Definitions for these categories [part-time/full-time; J.D. required; J.D. preferred; “another profession”; “non-professional”] will be developed this coming fall.”  Um, that’s 90% of the game—if the definitions are lax, the data will be meaningless and potentially deceptive.  It will be of paramount importance to see how these categories are actually operationalized.  I haven’t eaten my crow yet but I’m really hoping that I’ll have a double-helping when it’s finally out of the oven.

If the categories are operationalized in a meaningful way, I won’t say that the new reporting scheme will make my clients’ and my job easier.  There’s still additional information that any individual client or law school applicant will want in order to make her or his decision responsibly.  More important, the task of getting that information and negotiating with law schools in a friendly and productive way will continue to be a challenge requiring careful tactical thinking.  All that is just the nature of the business when you’re making a six-figure investment in law school.

Here’s what I hope the new reporting scheme will do.  First, it will make applicants’ and my work more productive and efficient.  There should be less obfuscation and obstruction to combat, and law schools will be less able to hide the ball or cherry-pick their statistics.  Perhaps more important, at least for the moment, the ABA has signaled that it will act, and that business-as-it’s-been-practiced simply isn’t good enough anymore.  If law schools internalize that regulatory mood, and some of them likely will (others likely will immediately look for new ways to manipulate their data), law schools may also be more forthcoming with—and view it as less of a burden to provide—additional or clarifying information that law school applicants need to make a good-faith, responsible decision about which law school to attend.  Law school applicants may also feel a little bolder about requesting data they need to make their decisions.

A New Resource for Advise-In Solutions LSAT Clients: Over 50 LSAT Prep Videos

Last month, we released a few videos on You Tube (you can find them by searching for Advise-In Solutions at youtube.com) and noted we’d soon provide full panoply of LSAT prep videos for Advise-In clients.  That project has come to fruition, I’m glad to say (and also relieved, since my website designers, video editors and I are a little winded).  Yesterday, Advise-In Solutions launched a client-only portion of the Advise-In website with over 50 LSAT prep videos (over 10 hours of material) to which each of my clients will have free on-demand unlimited access.  The videos include, at an introductory level, everything anyone would ever want to know about the LSAT.

I hesitated a little to do this project.  My father, who passed away several years ago, told me a story once about when he first wanted to learn how to use his ATM card at a community bank.  The bank said it would be happy to train him but really preferred that he not use it, since the bank liked to see and talk with its customers (as you might guess, that was a long time ago).  I had a similar quandary with this video project.  The hallmark of what Advise-In Solutions does is customized, individual work with my clients.  But sometimes, more is, well, more, and I ultimately decided that as long as the videos were a supplement to, and not a substitute for, my clients’ and my intensive one-on-one work, they would make Advise-In’s LSAT programs even more effective.

The videos include the place of the LSAT in law school admissions, LSAT foundations (including especially Advise-In’s emphasis on simplicity and preparing with one day—exam day—constantly in view), practical introductions to the LSAT and each of its sections, LSAT techniques and dos and don’ts in studying for the LSAT.  Over half of the videos are step-by-step practical illustrations of how to do individual types of LSAT questions. Since I don’t outsource any teaching or advising to temporary employees or those looking for a little money on their way to law school but who may or may not have any real teaching ability or commitment to students, all of the videos were done by me (I’m hoping my clients won’t get too tired of watching me—but that’s what the “stop” button is for).

Some of these videos will be released publicly in the future—I’d have loved to have gotten those out a little earlier but (unlike my internet vendors), current clients are my first priority, prospective clients and the public my second.  The public videos won’t include the detail that my client-only videos do (and in many cases, the client videos won’t be public) but they will provide a lot of free help with LSAT preparation for those who aren’t in a position to use Advise-In’s programs. 

I’d also thought of doing some admission and application videos, and there’s some of that in the videos I did.  But I ultimately decided against a full-on set of videos, simply because there are really very few general rules for law school applications and admissions that haven’t already been discussed in one way or another on this blog—almost everything else depends entirely on each individual’s situation.

Of course, I’m thrilled to provide another resource to help each Advise-In client obtain her or his best LSAT score and law school admission and financial aid opportunities.  I also want to express my deep appreciation to Nikola Dević and Anne Gwynn (on the video side) and Carl Lorentzen (for redesigning Advise-In’s website).  Their efforts have been tremendous and they have my thanks.

Is “Fraud” Too Strong a Term for What Some Law Schools Say?: Not According to One Law Professor

“My salary is paid by the current structure, which is in many ways deceptive and unjust to a point that verges on fraud.  But as a law professor, I understand that what is good for me is that the structure stay the way it is.”

      –Paul F. Campos, professor, University of Colorado School of Law

That’s the most stunning statement in yesterday’s New York Times article on the law school admissions market.  The Times sometimes takes awhile to catch up to what market participants have known for some time but this is the second recent article in the Times targeting law schools.  Like its last article on excessive law school debt, yesterday’s piece doesn’t provide a lot of new information to the well-informed but it’s a must-read distillation for anyone considering applying to law school.

Here are some highlights:

1.  The flat structure of law school tuition.  The article focuses on New York Law School and its (soon-to-be-former) “reformer dean,” Richard Matasar.  The article notes that NYLS tuition and fees now exceed Harvard’s, despite the obvious difference between Harvard and NYLS in reputation, graduate placement, and virtually everything else that matters to a law student.

We’ve talked about the flatness of the tuition structure on the Advise-In Solutions website and this blog repeatedly.  It’s one reason why law school is a risky, uncertain investment.  If you want to make that investment anyway, it’s vital to improve your attractiveness to better law schools as much a you can by raising your GPA (with challenging courses), getting your best LSAT score and submitting a top-flight application package.  You’re likely to pay virtually the same amount regardless of what law school you attend, but the payoff from higher-ranked law schools is astonishingly better than from other law schools.

2.  The squishiness and unreliability of law school employment data.  While the ABA has announced some reforms relating to the employment data law schools are required to report (more on that in a future blog), the current data is often less than useless.

We won’t use Prof. Campos’ “F” word but, for example, NYLS reported to US News that its “median” graduate starting salary was $160,000 (in other words, it’s median was the starting salary at large New York City firms)—and this despite the acknowledgment that “most of its graduates, in fact, find work at less than half that amount.”  I don’t know how to parse that—a “median,” by definition is a peg that is supposed to reflect that one-half of the relevant group are above the median and one-half below.  So, even what should be a clear statistical measure is, apparently, not.

This kind of data indicates why it’s important to ask law schools the right questions, and to have a strategy for doing so.  The median, even if it were reliable, doesn’t tell you anything about the average starting salary.  Nor does it tell you how those salaries are broken down by class rank.  One of the key differences between law schools is the depth of the bench, i.e., how far down the class rank the really good jobs go.

That doesn’t even touch the question of low reporting rates from graduates.  NYLS’ (and every other law school’s) data is based on those who responded to its requests for initial employment information—a whopping 26% of its class.  You don’t need to wonder whether the unemployed are less likely to report than the employed, or whether the underemployed are less likely than the fully employed.  They are, so law school data, even absent “fraud,” will always reflect a cheerier reality than, well, reality.

I’ve talked about the difficulty of getting law schools to provide meaningful employment information.  In some cases, law schools simply refuse to do so, or don’t do it after promising that they will.  I’m happy to say that none of my clients have attended any law school to which they’ve been admitted who didn’t provide meaningful employment data to them.  To do so would be like buying a stock when the company refuses to disclose financial information.  It’s a bad idea.  No qualifications.  Just a bad idea.

3.  Law school tuition continues to rise, and it’s rising at a pace considerably faster than undergraduate education.  In the late 1980s, annual law school tuition was, on average, less than undergraduate education; now, it averages considerably more.  We should not expect that trend to change, unless and until there is less demand for the limited number of law school seats available.

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There’s a lot more useful data in the Times article but they key points are these: law school are a business, and a lucrative one.  What’s more, law schools are institutional businesses.

To say they’re businesses isn’t a slam (I run a business, too), it’s just a fact.  But its being a fact—and that you should expect law schools to act like businesses—is not always clear to applicants, and law schools not only don’t make it clear, they often cover their business mission in a veneer of “education”- and “altruism”- speak.  That’s persuasive to a lot of people because we have a cultural image of people who go into education as self-sacrificing and underpaid.  In a lot of cases, that’s true, but not at law schools.  There’s a lot of money to be made, and law schools don’t mind making it.  Dean Matasar, when asked about one of the contradictions between his “reformist” agenda and what NYLS (and a lot of other law schools) are actually doing, said simply “The answer is that we exist in a market.”

That’s a refreshing admission but it’s worth noting that Dean Matasar is stepping down as dean and is pursuing future career options “outside of legal education.”  That gets to the institutional point.  It isn’t that law school administrative personnel or faculty are terrible people; it is that they’re part of an institution and respond to institutional imperatives.  They’re not business owners that can respond solely to their own demands of integrity (or, in some cases, lack thereof).  So, while Dean Matasar, Prof. Campos and others can acknowledge the problems, there’s only so much they will be willing to do to solve them.  That’s why meaningful oversight from the ABA as well as pressure from outside groups such as pre-law advisors, bloggers and advocacy groups is so important.

But the most important pressure is going to come from prospective law students.  I know it doesn’t seem like it sometimes but applicants have power, principally the power to vote with your feet.  Know the information you need from law schools and develop a strategy for getting it.  If you can’t get that information from a particular law school, don’t go there—and tell the law school why.  The bottom line is this—institutional businesses in a competitive market will, some of them anyway, get away with what they can.  One way to distinguish those who are legit from those who aren’t is whether they’re forthcoming with meaningful information (a good caution for the LSAT prep market as well).  The only way that some of the less wholesome practices of law schools will stop is, in the end, for applicants to make them stop.

At a “macro” level, that may already have started to happen.  The Times’ data on spiking law school enrollment is old and doesn’t account for the steep drop in applications this year.  That decline is a good sign but it doesn’t really help those who really do want to go to law school and become lawyers.  If you’re one of those, you can help yourself by doing you due diligence and not accepting unsatisfactory answers to legitimate questions.