Brian Tamanaha (Washington U.), The Depth and Breadth of Misleading Employment Numbers by Law Schools (And How to Solve It):
It is by now well known that law schools have been posting misleading employment numbers. We get it. Additional reminders of this verge on tiresome redundancy.
But we don’t get it. Law professors have no idea how deep and pervasive this practice is (top to bottom). It is still continuing. And the extent of the deception is shocking.
South Texas College of Law, for example, lists in the current US News profile its earnings quartiles for full-time private sector jobs as follows: $75,000 (25th percentile), $92,500 (median), $160,000 (75th percentile). That looks great. However, only 5 percent of the people employed in the private sector provided salary information. What this means is that those numbers represent 18 graduates (at most) out of a class of 376. A savvy prospective student would be able to discern that these salary numbers are extremely unrepresentative (the percent reporting is not indicated in the magazine, but available through subscription). Unsuspecting readers would be fooled into thinking that good money was to be had coming out of this school. …
Law schools complain that it is unfair to blame them for low salary reporting rates—it is not their fault, they say, that students do not provide this information.
But that is not the primary explanation for what is going on. Grounds for skepticism lie in the results of the following chart, which plots response rate against law school rank. As with the employment chart posted here, a strong downward drift is evident, with the top schools having uniformly high response rates and the lower ranked schools having lower rates (with exceptions to be mentioned).
The further one goes down the ranking, the greater the proportion of graduates who do not disclose their salary. Why? There are two obvious explanations. Greater numbers of students at lower schools are embarrassed to state their earnings. That is a part of it. Another part is that law schools with low reporting rates are not trying very hard to get this information. …
The law school funny number problem is out of control. And it won’t stop on its own. Anyone who thinks the fix will come from the current ABA efforts to provide greater transparency is deluded.
There is only one possible solution in the short run. The deans at the top 20 law schools must sit together in a room, agree on the standards, and personally guarantee the veracity of what they report. All the other law schools will follow (or be embarrassed by continuing to post ridiculously implausible salary numbers). This must be done soon, before the next cycle of numbers comes around.
Leadership, collective action, and integrity–that’s what we need to end this terrible situation.
