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Law Students Worried About Prospects After Law School By Todd Schultz Law students have a new hero. Blogger Ethan Haines has announced that he will go on a hunger strike, demanding the reform of law schools in the U.S. Haines wrote letters to 10 of the top 100 law schools ranked by U.S. News & World, asking them to commit to new standards of transparency regarding job placement rates. He is also demanding that they agree to an audit of their career counseling programs.
Haines’ hunger strike is shedding light on the job market for new lawyers. A report from the National Associate for Legal Professionals says that the class of 2009 has reported a median salary of $72,000 and a national mean of $93,454. While those numbers are significantly higher than other advanced degrees, students entering and emerging from law schools anticipate a comfortable salary, as well as easy employment post once they graduated.
The University of California at Irvine started a law program in 2009, Concordia University in Oregon has plans to open a new law school in Idaho, and Lincoln Memorial University will be opening its doors to first year law students this fall. Law school admissions were up 5 percent during the fall of 2009. The amount of LSAT administrations were also up 6.4 percent. Analysts are suggesting that this is a pattern that may continue this fall.
Additionally, the NALP’s report claims that the mean and median numbers may be misleading due to high salaries at larger law firms. Graduates from elite law schools are more likely to obtain these positions, whose first-year lawyers make somewhere in the range of $160,000. Those high salaries skew the data, so that the actual average law student may be making even less.
Kyle McEntee, a third-year law student at Vanderbilt, and cofounder of Law School Transparency, is asking that law schools start reporting information on the employment status of graduates individually. The group wants to offer prospective law students more telling numbers as they consider attending law school. They expect that a list of this sort will demonstrate that while many graduates are well-paid after law school, many are not.
The employment rate of law graduates is down 3.6 percent over the last two years, with a current employment rate of 88 percent. The NALP survey shows that even a relatively high employment rate of 88 percent may even be deceiving to incoming law students. The report showed that nearly 25 percent of those jobs are temporary positions and many thousand of new J.D.’s were affected by delayed starting dates, pushed back months past the initial dates.
McEntee says, ‘’We are not disgruntled law students. We see a problem and we’re trying to solve it.’’ He started the Law School Transparency group after attending a program at the career office at Vanderbilt. He says he was offered this information during a program for students admitted to the university’s law school.
Law students are also noticing an increasingly smaller job market. Regardless of this, law schools are seeking increased enrollments and some universities are even creating new law schools.
Brian Leiter, the John P. Wilson Professor of Law and director for the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago disagrees with the lack of transparency. ‘’Students have always blamed career services offices for their difficulties finding jobs, and those complaints are, pretty uniformly without merit,’’ he said. The more serious issue, about which I’ve written for a long time, is misrepresentations by schools about employment and salary prospects.’’
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