There is a common perception
in some of the States, particularly those with a particularly difficult Bar exam,
that provided you can pass the Bar no one will care where you got your law
degree. In California, for example, where fewer than half of the people who sit
for the exam each year will pass it (and stories about people taking five or six
tries to pass are common), it’s difficult to imagine that anyone who did pass
would have trouble finding work. Maybe it won’t be the most glamourous (or
high-paying) job, but surely there will be something you can do with your new
credentials. Unfortunately, this wasn’t true even before the market became
glutted with lawyers in the 1990s, and it is even less so now…
Despite the old joke about
the person who graduates last in his or her class from medical school still
being called “Doctor,” unless you plan to hang out a single and go into
practice by yourself the school from which you received your degree will still
matter. In a field where there will generally be more applicants than available
jobs, such as in legal practice, you will very rapidly encounter situations
where a managing partner has a choice between multiple candidates with
identical credentials except for the quality of the school that conferred their
degrees. At that point priority will probably go to the candidate from the best
school, or at least from one that does not have a “horrible” reputation…
At that point, we have to
question whether allowing anyone who wants to enter your law program,
regardless of their odds of passing the Bar or getting a job afterwards, is any
less fraudulent than promising people that they can become a celebrity chef
with nothing more than a few months of school and a significant amount of debt.
I’m not going to address the shenanigans the Charlotte School of Law (and
others) have been pulling with fake scholarships and gaming the student loan
system, because that absolutely is fraud, but the question of how bad a student
can be before you have an ethical responsibility to tell them to do something
else with their money and ambitions is still valid…
The problem becomes even
murkier because there really are people who don’t do well on standardized exams
like the LSAT, or even in regular classes, who really can excel when actually
doing the job. When we include possibilities such as regulatory agencies and
corporate positions that require law degrees but do not actually involve legal
practice, things become even more convoluted, and when you consider that there
are also people who have completed fully accredited law school programs and
passed their state Bar who are still failures in practice, the question becomes
hard to resolve even in the abstract. So I have to ask:
Do we, as business people or
as teachers, have an ethical responsibility to exclude students from
educational programs in which we sincerely believe they have no realistic
chance of achieving any eventual success? Granted that as decent, caring human
beings we don’t want to strand anyone with a huge debt that they can’t repay
and no viable job opportunities, do we have any right to tell someone that
their commitment and hard work will get them nowhere? Does our answer change if
our own employment (and survival) depend on keeping students in school, or at
least not driving away paying customers? I’m not suggesting that we have an
obligation to keep anyone in a program that we know is beyond their abilities
just so that our employers can continue to collect their tuition, but things
are rarely that cut-and-dried in the classroom. How do we decide when it would
be kinder to cut someone loose than string them along, and where do we draw the
line?
It’s worth thinking about…
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