Ethan Haines is on a hunger strike. As the self-appointed spokesman for all law students, he is “disillusioned by law school employment statistics, commercial school rankings, and antiquated career counseling programs.”
Evidently, he’s “being the change” he wants to see. (What does that even mean anyway? I want my law school to do more to get me a job so I’ll starve myself? If law schools are really as negligent and out of touch as Ethan appears to believe, would they really care if he starves himself to death?)
Go get em, Ethan. In the meantime, I’ll eat the food you would have. Seriously. Can you pass that month-old cookie over here?
While I sincerely hope that Ethan’s protest has some impact, I doubt it will.
I’m glad for the attention Ethan’s effort is focusing on the shortcomings of law school career counseling offices. I wonder what more they can do though? The travesty that is employment data reporting and commercial rankings formulations have been well-documented. But the law school career office has not gotten as much attention.
Our career office manages fall recruiting, hosts a job board, schedules mock interviews, runs lectures, maintains an alumni database, helps with resume and writing sample review, publicizes and co-hosts job fairs and networking events. At some point, isn’t up to the graduate students to do some legwork too?
Obviously, it’s not that simple. And in many ways it’s not the career office’s fault that the economy has tanked and they have very little control over the size of their budget. However, when I think of my interactions with our career office, I wonder what value they really add. Herein is what intrigues me about Ethan’s effort.
Despite all the “activity” the career office appears to be engaged in, I have a hard time knowing whether that activity is worth anything, or whether it really can be worth anything. The career office isn’t a placement service or a staffing agency. They help students put themselves in a position to find a good job by providing resources to connect with other alumni and notifying students of open, publicized opportunities. Beyond that, the career office is at the mercy of the law school’s budget (often just an allocation from the University and not a direct correlation to tuition payments) and the quality of students and education the law school produces – neither of which the career office has any control over.
So… there are a few of my thoughts. What do you want your career office to be doing that it’s not already?
I crack myself every time I tell it. That’s probably because I’ve never been much of a joke teller and this one qualifies more as a witty rejoin than full on joke.
Anyway, goes something like this…
Someone: Wow! Entering your last year of law school. That must be a great feeling.
Me: Definitely.
Someone: Must be nice to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Me: It is. I just can’t tell whether it’s daylight or a train. Either way, it’ll all be over soon.
Someone: *Stares quizzically* (Unless they’re a lawyer or law student. In that case, I get a chuckle.)
Me: **Laughing uproariously** (mostly on the inside)
Some gallows humor never hurt anyone I suppose.
I think it’s the sense of impending… what exactly? doom? elation? freedom? crushing debt payments?…. what?….
It’s this sense of impending anything (and everything) that’s exhilarating and frightening at the same time.
Thousands of law students in classes past entered this last year with that future, at least in the short-term sense, determined. A job offer in hand, ready to be bored to death during their last year of school. The last few years have changed that, particularly at second tier schools like ours where even summer gigs have been hard to come by.
For my part, my summer has given me much more hope that the daylight I’ll at some point emerge into will in fact be what I’d hoped – a hard won, rewarding career.
Still, I’ll never let go of the truth to my joke that this economy and any long-term changes it has yielded may not make it easy or possible to emerge unscathed into a job that is relatively well-paid and stable as many of our predecessors have done.
Sure, that weighs on me, but not nearly as heavily as some assume when I tell the joke or talk about school or law or whatever.
It is after all really just a joke.
And I am after all generally optimistic about my last year in school and what comes next.
I’ve just completed an 11- week job interview, having spent the summer at a law firm in the DC area.
While I had a truly great experience, I must say I have a profound respect for those “blawgers” who, in addition to working full-time as attorneys, are able to add useful and interesting commentary to the online discussion of their areas of practice. Despite my ambitions to blog my way through the summer, I could never quite muster the energy after a 10 hour day of challenging and intense legal work.
As I decompress and take some time off from work altogether, I’ll share some things I did and learned this summer.
We start back to classes on the 23rd, so we’ll begin to post more regularly again soon about our last year in law school.
Law school introduced me to a tradition that I’ve come to really enjoy – applauding your professor at the end of a semester. This was not part of my undergraduate experience. But as a form of recognizing that a professor has spent a semester dropping some serious knowledge on our asses and/or as a means to recognize our endurance of said dropping, it simply can’t be beat. When a professor does not receive the applause (which has happened at least once in my experience… and deservedly so, if you ask me) it is all the more striking.
Of course, one of my favorite law school traditions is followed closely by my least – exam preparation. Another concept that was almost completely missing from my undergraduate experience, yet one that I’ve come to begrudgingly respect.
This sequence from The Paper Chase depicts both the relief expressed through the applause and the stress that sets in following it…
Rankings are important. I don’t deny that. But they’re only important so far as they go – they are a rough gauge of the prestige of your school. They can be, and are, manipulated. They can become a self-fulfilling prophecy – if you focus on how low your rank is, you will start to assume you’re not any better.
Since our school seems intent on obsessing about its ranking, I’ll add two more cents on the rankings question. By way of background, this week our law school’s dean is meeting with students to discuss the latest U.S. News Rankings:
The Student Bar Association has asked Dean Miles to meet with students to discuss the U.S. News and World Report rankings and answer any other questions students may have for her. We’ve scheduled this Conversation with the Dean on Thursday, April 22, at 5:30 pm. All students are invited to attend and should feel free to come in late or leave early as class schedules permit.
Our school is ranked #98 in the latest rankings. Last year it was #94. The year before it was #88. We’re going down. If we read into the dean’s letter of last week, we’re to believe that we’re staying roughly the same on key indicators while a handful of other schools are moving up. That’s shaky ground to stake when you’re graded on a curve. Perhaps this shaky defense of the school’s record is why the SBA is nervous about the decline. I give them credit for pushing the Dean on it and appreciate their work.
I’m not bitter about this. The bottom line is I have a fairly unsophisticated (shortsighted? juvenile?) view of rankings. I care about the rankings to the extent that I understand it’s a key factor in assessing job candidates, at least in the early stages of a lawyer’s career. I care about them to the extent that they, if at all, make schools focus on the actual quality of education and educational environment.
Frankly, I don’t think our school hires or keeps enough top-notch, Ivy-educated legal scholars who would power a move up in the rankings. We get strong faculty reputation marks. We have some genuinely excellent professors. And more than a few so-so ones. I think if we want to move up in rankings and quality of education, a good first step will be figuring out how to attract and, more importantly, keep professors who can cultivate a more rigorous academic environment.* There have been several good hires in this regard in recent years. We’ll see if it continues.
But here’s my take… So what?
So your school’s ranked 242nd. So? You can’t control that. The question is what are you going to do about it?
You’re in law school. Now work your ass off and prove to whoever will listen that the rankings are nearly meaningless when you have someone who’s talented, smart, aggressive, diligent, thorough, and conscientious. The qualities that make a good lawyer graduating from Yale are the same as those for one graduating from Catholic University. Likewise, a lazy, entitled person graduating from Yale will get exposed just like the same person graduating from Catholic, it just might happen on a different timeline (and, frankly, different payscale).
Prestige is important. And rankings provide a nice way of measuring your school against others. But at some point you need to prove that you can do the job. And many lower ranked schools are damn good at preparing people to be damn good lawyers. It may be more work to get a shot at proving it at a big firm (particularly in today’s economic climate), but you can only control so much.
If you don’t like that, get good grades and transfer. You knew where your school measured up when you started. If you ignored that or didn’t come to terms with it, it’s not worth whining about now.
______
* A great example of this is a few (maybe more than a few) years back, Justice Scalia was at school for a panel discussion. An illustrious panel. Not a single faculty member showed up. Not one. In discussing the event with organizers in our law school’s atrium and how excellent the quality of its dialogue and focus, Justice Scalia is said to have thundered, “This law school’s faculty stands indicted.” Or something like that. The point isn’t that Scalia is a blow-hard, but that it suggests a lack of interest among our faculty in this sort of academic exchange and dialogue.
CUA Law students received this message from the Dean today regarding the latest US News & World Report law school rankings. It’s the most direct communications we’ve received from the Administration about the annual rankings in my time at the school.
I share it here, without further commentary, for your comments or other thoughts on law school rankings…
April 15, 2010
Dear CUA Law Students:
Every year April marks the completion of another semester of coursework, the anticipation of final exams, and the annual U.S. News rankings of America’s graduate schools. As you may already know, CUA remains among the Top 100 Law Schools in the overall ranking. In the 2011 edition, we are ranked #98, a ranking shared with four other law schools; our part-time program is ranked #21 among 84 part-time programs.
Because the survey and our ranking are widely discussed among the community and may be significant to each of us in different ways, I would like to share some information with you regarding this year’s results and what it means for CUA. The survey is primarily based on statistical data that all law schools are required to report on the ABA Annual Questionnaire. Accordingly, the information that is the basis of the survey includes LSAT/GPA/selectivity of the entering class, student/faculty ratio, placement statistics, bar pass rates, as well as a peer assessment score.
This year, CUA’s data reflected improvement in LSAT/GPA/selectivity, student/faculty ratio, and the bar pass rate. Our peer assessment score remained the same. Thus, in every key statistical area, save one, we have maintained or improved upon previous numbers. Our job placement rate for the Class of 2008, the statistic reported in this year’s survey, was the lone rating where CUA saw a decline. This was primarily a result of the 2008 job market downturn. The job placement rate for the Class of 2009 is much improved due to the efforts of our Office of Career and Professional Development and a recovering employment market. That improvement will be reflected in next year’s U.S. News survey. We anticipate making statistical improvements in other survey factors as well.
I hope that this information has been helpful. Please feel free to contact me or any other member of the administration if you have additional questions regarding the survey.
Best wishes for a strong finish to the semester and good luck on your finals!
Justice John Paul Stevens is retiring “effective the next day after the Court rises for the summer recess this year.”
Fight The Hypo contributor Magnus Wellborn were discussing how we wished that these confirmation battles could focus more competence, substance, and intelligence rather than this carefully, choreographed dance designed to obscure backroom discussions and avoid saying anything of note. It’s really just political theater, the players in which are so careful to avoid saying anything that media and opponents might demagogue that it borders on comedy.
I’m sensitive though to how the issues at play – abortion, gun rights, privacy, security – are important, though. However, the focus on what a judge believes about the policy questions behind these matters can sometimes keep us from understanding how a good and brilliant lawyer approaches the legal questions and implications behind them.
Of course, this is in no small measure the result of asking the Court to decide matters of policy and define the scope of certain rights of individuals (see, e.g., privacy) and the scope of power of the federal government (see, e.g., commerce power). I get that.
So, you’re a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. What do you ask Justice Stevens’ replacement?
I am becoming quite interested in this question we touched on regarding the pending constitutional challenge to the health insurance reform bill, namely are there are any meaningful legal constraints on Congress’ ability to regulate or mandate certain kinds of individual behavior and choice? Okay, so it’s not an exciting line of inquiry, but to me it can get to a nominee’s views of the nature of federal power (legislative and judicial) and which questions should be decided by which body and how they should be decided. So… IF (and this is a big IF) you could engage the nominee in any sort of discussion of this issue, my initial line of questioning might go something like this:
Let’s talk about the Commerce Clause. How would you describe the nature of the limits, if any, that Lopez and Morrison place on Congress’ Commerce Power?
So, is that limitation a broad limit on Congress’ ability to regulate traditionally intrastate non-commercial activity? Or is it a narrow exception?
If it is a narrow exception, what is the court’s role in assessing whether Congress has overstepped its commerce power and how do you see that role changing?
Are there areas of current or older Supreme Court jurisprudence that might be revisited in order to limit Congress’ commerce power?
Do you generally view it as a positive development that Congress is able to exert its will over matters it deems of national importance with fewer legal or formal constraints other than the Bill of Rights?
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