Interesting development on the law school front

Via the New York Times, a change in testing requirements: 

Law schools, which have been plagued by a shortfall of students in recent years, are changing their admissions requirements. 

Two top-ranked schools — Georgetown University Law Center and Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law — this week joined Harvard Law’s recent move to make it simpler to apply. 

Applicants can submit the results of the more widely available Graduate Record Exam, the GRE, instead of those from the Law School Admissions Test, which long has been entrenched as the numeric gauge of law school success. 

Many law schools are casting wider nets to attract students who would not otherwise set their sights on a legal education. The schools hope that by making it easier for the engineers, scientists and mathematicians who typically take only the GRE, more of them will enroll....

Are there really that many STEM grads who are interested in law school?

(That's an interesting aspect of the post-Great Recession era - there was a lot of talk about a 'law school bubble', but it seems to me that there hasn't been the mass collapse of law schools that you would expect if the bubble had really collapsed. This 2017 report seems to suggest that enrollments are flat at best, which is not good news if you're a law school dean.) 

The lawyers are having it tough

From Jordan Weissman's ongoing tour of destruction in higher education, a graph of the U.S. News top 25 law schools' underemployment rates, as calculated by the Law School Transparency Project.

How they define underemployment: "Under-Employment Score. The percentage of graduates underusing their skills and credentials. These are graduates who have not successfully started any professional career nine months after graduating law school. We count a graduate as underemployed when he or she is Unemployed – Seeking, pursuing an additional Advanced Degree, in a Non-professional job, or employed in a Short-term or Part-time job."

It should be noted that the Bureau of Labor Statistics  showed ~8% unemployment for new advanced degree graduates in October 2011.

It seems to me that, unless you get into a top 5 law school, you have a less than 50% chance of a positive ROI on your tuition money. Hard to say, though.

It would be very interesting to know what would happen if a similar study were done of graduate schools in chemistry. 

Hey, isn't this like a postdoc for lawyers?

From the New York Times, an interesting indication of what happens when you have too many lawyers and not enough jobs for them:

...The result is a nonprofit law firm that Arizona State [University] is setting up this summer for some of its graduates. Over the next few years, 30 graduates will work under seasoned lawyers and be paid for a wide range of services provided at relatively low cost to the people of Phoenix. 

The Arizona State approach, called the Alumni Law Group, appears to be the most ambitious because of the number of lawyers it will employ (30), its projected cost (a commercial firm of comparable size would cost $5 million a year to run, according to the school’s projections) and its hope to be self-sufficient in a couple of years by charging for its services and gathering donations. 

...The plan is to have four to five groups of lawyers each overseen by a full-time, salaried supervising lawyer serving a range of clients. The firm will do legal work for other parts of the university, including its high-tech innovation center. The aim is to charge $125 an hour in an area where the going hourly rate is $250. The school also says it wants to reach out to veterans, Hispanics and American Indians whose legal needs are not well met. 

...Arizona’s plan, mooted at bar meetings and within law school circles, is producing envy — but also skepticism. Some see a naked attempt to improve the school’s ratings in U.S. News and World Report by increasing the percentage of its graduates who find work while doing little to address the access-to-justice problem. 

Critics say that $125 an hour is too high to serve those in need and too low to break even...

Isn't this sort of like a postdoc for lawyers? You graduate and take a lower paying job for more training? (Of course, here it really does seem like there might be an undeserved population -- but isn't that what law school clinics are for?) I think it's an interesting approach, but it sounds like it might cannibalize the business of local attorneys (or at least serve to lower their fees.) 

Law school entrance exam takers dropping

Credit: The New York Times

From the New York Times' Economix blog, evidence of lowered interest in law degrees from Catherine Rampell:

The number of people taking the Law School Admission Test, known as the LSAT, offered in October fell sharply, down 16.4 percent from the year before, reaching its lowest level since 1999. October is usually the most popular time to take the test, too.  

No wonder, then, that law schools are cutting the size of their entering classes. Perhaps this means it’ll still be easier to get into the top schools, though, depending on how much the most elite schools decide to shrink their class sizes. 

There was a huge surge in law school applications during the recession and its immediate aftermath as people displaced by the poor economy sought the “safety” of a legal career. But now potential students seem to have wised up to the huge debt burden and poor job placement prospects.

I wonder if there's been similar evidence of smaller Ph.D. programs. I haven't heard any rumors of such, but there are other drivers of large entering grad student classes (demand for TAs, etc.)

Readers, what say you?

Wow! Bimodal distribution in lawyer salaries

Adam is blogging a series on the possibility of a higher education bubble; he posts this graph of lawyer salary distributions. 

That is remarkable. I don't think a graph of industrial chemist salaries would have such a bimodal distribution, but I can't say for sure. Readers? 

Would you trade a Ph.D. for money?

That's a lot of Benjamins. (Credit: graphicmania.net)

Two Yale law professors suggest an innovative way of cutting down the number of law students:

Consider the innovative employment policy of the Internet shoe seller Zappos. At the end of a four-week training course, Zappos offers new employees a one-time offer of $3,000 to quit. In part, the company uses the offer as a screening device. If you’re the type who prefers a quick three grand to the opportunity to work at a great company, then Zappos isn’t the place for you. 

Law schools might analogously offer to rebate half of a student’s first-year tuition if the student opts to quit school at the end of the first year. (If the student has taken out government loans, this rebate would first go to repay this debt.)  A half-tuition rebate splits the loss of an aborted legal career between the school and the student. Each has skin in the game, so students will not go to law school lightly, and law schools will have better incentives not to admit students likely to fail.

I think this would be an excellent way of reducing the number of potential Ph.D. chemists. You can imagine saying at the end of a passed candidacy exam (or whatever examination you prefer):

Congratulations -- you're on your way to get a Ph.D.! Oh, by the way -- we are prepared to offer you a check for $20,000. If you take the money, you will leave this program with a master's degree and our thanks for reducing the supply of Ph.D. chemists. You have 1 week to consider the offer. 

What do you think you would do? I certainly would have considered it, but I probably would have turned it down. (Obviously, this would be subject to wild amounts of gaming; you'd have to practically set up roadblocks to make sure that people wouldn't be death-marching their way to candidacy to get the big payday.)

Q: What do you call 9,000 lawyers who graduated from New York?

Credit: Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc.

A: Moving truck renters.

Via Ezra Klein comes this interesting study by Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc. For each state, they compare the number of available positions, the number of bar exam passers and the number of law school graduates. They found that there weren't any states that had more job openings than bar exam passers (not a real surprise.)

I'm terribly curious as to what a similar study of Ph.D. chemists would show; I suspect that we'd see a similar trend, although I suspect that there are certain states (in the Mountain West, perhaps?) where there is a balance of openings versus graduates (1 opening a year, 2-3 graduates?) 

Should chemistry graduate school rankings be based on employment?

Over the weekend, there was a rather wonderful article in the New York Times about the perils of trying to become a lawyer. While the main story was the difficulties of keeping up with student debt (and the associated consumption issues), the article also covered the problems with tracking whether graduate law school students were unemployed. To wit:

Even students with open eyes, though, will have a hard time sleuthing through the U.S. News rankings. They are based entirely on unaudited surveys conducted by each law school, using questions devised by the American Bar Association and the National Association for Law Placement. Given the stakes and given that the figures are not double-checked by an impartial body, each school faces exactly the sort of potential conflict of interest lawyers are trained to howl about.

The surveys themselves have a built-in bias. As many deans acknowledge, the results are skewed because graduates with high-paying jobs are more likely to respond than people earning $9 an hour at Radio Shack. (Those who don’t respond are basically invisible, aside from reducing the overall response rate of the survey.)

Certain definitions in the surveys seem open to abuse. A person is employed after nine months, for instance, if he or she is working on Feb. 15. This is the most competitive category — it counts for about one-seventh of the U.S. News ranking — and in the upper echelons, it’s not unusual to see claims of 99 percent and, in a handful of cases, 100 percent employment rates at nine months.

A number of law schools hire their own graduates, some in hourly temp jobs that, as it turns out, coincide with the magical date. Last year, for instance, Georgetown Law sent an e-mail to alums who were “still seeking employment.” It announced three newly created jobs in admissions, paying $20 an hour. The jobs just happened to start on Feb. 1 and lasted six weeks.

A spokeswoman for the school said that none of these grads were counted as “employed” as a result of these hourly jobs. [snip]

As absurd as the rankings might sound, deans ignore them at their peril, and those who guide their schools higher up the U.S. News chart are rewarded with greater alumni donations, better students and jobs at higher-profile schools.

It's been years since I've seen the US News ranking for chemistry departments; as I recall, they lined up with the conventional wisdom quite well (H-bomb on top, etc., etc.)* I don't think they relied particularly strongly on post-graduation employment. (Law school rankings, I believe, are far more reliant on those numbers.)

I suspect that if the question was "At year 3 after receiving your doctorate, how many of your graduates are employed by private employers?", the numbers would begin to look a lot worse. Certainly postdoctoral fellowships should not count as 'employment'; it's unknown if BLS counts them as "employed", but I know that ACS does not. (It doesn't count them as being 'unemployed' either, but breaks them out into their own separate category.)

At some point in the future (especially if things don't recover with the overall economy), these questions will have to be answered by graduate schools in chemistry.

*Anon011020110850a challenges me to update the rankings. For overall chemistry graduate schools, they are: tied for 1st: Berkeley, CalTech, MIT, 4th: Harvard, Stanford, 6th: UIUC, 7th: TSRI, Northwestern, UW-Madison, 10th: Columbia and Cornell.

Q: When is a lawyer nicer than a chemist?

A: When it comes to talking about the cost/benefit analysis of law school versus graduate school.

From a CNBC article (via TheAtlantic.com):

"The American Bar Association has officially issued a warning on its website.

The ABA is now making the case to persuade college students not to go to law school. According to the association, over the past 25 years law school tuition has consistently risen two times faster than inflation. The average private law student borrows about $92,500 for law school, while law students who attend public schools take out loans for $71,400. These numbers do not include any debt law students may still have from their time as undergraduates.

Before the recession, the ABA cites statistics that show an average starting salary for an associate of a large law firm of about $160,000 a year. But by 2009, about 42 percent of graduates began with an annual salary of less than $65,000.

And those are just the newbies."

The full paper is here; it is titled "The Value Proposition of Attending Law School". It analyzes the cost of law school, employment trends for lawyers (including salaries), student loan concerns for new lawyers and ends with an admonition to potential lawyers to tread carefully before signing up for law school.* I am unaware of any similar paper being written or hosted by the American Chemical Society.

You can argue this is a matter of older lawyers protecting themselves from younger lawyers. I think it's worth keeping in mind that the writers and current members of ABA benefit (in some small fashion) from raising the barrier to entry to lawyering.

Whether we should discourage the education of future chemists is, in my opinion, an open question. However, I find it at least a little disturbing that a profession that's famous for coldbloodedness seems to have somewhat more regard for its future members than, say, the American Chemical Society.

*It should be noted that this report is from 2009.