Following up on my prior post, Thomas Cooley Responds to Herwig Schlunk: Is Law School a Good Investment?: The Careerist op-ed, The Cooley Strategy Exposed, by Kyle McEntee & Patrick J. Lynch (Law School Transparency):
Last week, Nelson Miller, associate dean of Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s Grand Rapids campus, wrote an editorial, Lawyer Employment Remains Strong, that appeared in The Careerist. Using employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he argues that lawyer job prospects are strong, that the legal profession has less risk than others, and that any noise questioning the value of obtaining a J.D. is as erroneous as it is inflammatory.
We will not spend much time discrediting Dean Miller’s “data-based” arguments, including Cooley’s Report One, which is the basis of this latest editorial. (That report has been thoroughly and thoughtfully discredited in an article by Matt Leichter.) To make a long story short, the underlying data upon which Report One depends excludes at least one broad segment of law school graduates: People who never became lawyers in the first place because they couldn’t find legal jobs.
So what is Miller’s editorial really about? Is it just an honest attempt by a law school administrator to educate students and allay unfounded fears propagated through the media? We don’t think so. …
Miller has every incentive to distract consumers and conceal what Cooley graduates face after graduation. The 2009 Cooley graduates had an average law school debt in excess of $106,000, but only 42.2% obtained full-time legal work by February 2010. …
As prospective students become more informed and the ABA exerts greater oversight to protect consumers of legal education, some enterprising deans will find ways to reduce tuition and class sizes, adapting their schools’ models to stay in business. Others will close up shop for lack of demand. And in the interim period, representatives like Miller will attempt to convince anyone who will listen that there is nothing wrong with taking on $106,000 in nondischargeable debt for their Cooley law degree.
