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Jun
4
Does Indiana need another law school?
Filed Under education | Comments Off
Indiana Tech recently announced that it plans to open Indiana’s fifth law school in Fort Wayne.
Is opening another U.S. law school the right thing to do at a time when there is arguably an oversupply of legal talent and a dearth of law jobs? NALP’s figures show 2010 law graduates are “the lost generation,” according to Above the Law.
Next year’s graduates (Class of 2011) can expect the trend to remain the same because “legal employment tends to continue to decline in the years after a recession.” (PDF).
The American Bar Association’s Law News Now reports that a record low number of recent law graduates have jobs that require bar passage. Other recent law graduates are stuck in dead end document review jobs, including one honors graduate who is suing her law school saying it mislead her regarding job opportunities.
Lawyer salaries have fallen so much that some out-sourcing firms are now keeping projects stateside, instead of sending them overseas to places such as India. Writes the New York Times: “Legal temp companies now pay as little as $20 a hour to lawyers for document reviews that a decade ago might have been billed at $200 an hour.”
Even academics giving law graduation commencement speeches are telling law students to lower their expectations and to “get over” expecting high paying jobs:
Emory University law professor Sara Stadler thinks law grads need to stop coveting high-paying jobs that just aren’t available. And she said so in a commencement speech earlier this month.
“Get over it,” Stadler told law grads. “The one thing standing in the way of happiness for many people is a sense of entitlement.” The Fulton County Daily Report covered the speech.
Indiana Economic Digest writes that it might not be the best time to open a law school:
Applications to law schools nationally and regionally are expected to dip this year, jobs in the legal industry have been dwindling and the internal structure of the profession is changing rapidly.
It may not appear to be the best time to consider starting a law school, which is what is on the table at Indiana Tech. …
… NALP reported that members of the 2009 graduating class nationally were more likely than previous classes to be working part time, working a temporary job or working in a job that does not require a juris doctor degree.
The University of Delaware has delayed plans for a new law school and law school applications are down across the country as students realize that the cost-benefit analysis points to better job opportunities elsewhere.
Joe Hodnicki at the Law Librarian Blog writes that demand for legal services and the ability of clients to pay the amounts new grads will need to pay off their student loans isn’t present these days.
I personally don’t think the demand is there. And if it is, I don’t believe that many of those 447 people per lawyer would be willing to pay the rates a new lawyer would be forced to charge to pay back school loan debts.
Indiana Attorney Paul Ogden seconds the view that the legal job market is over-saturated — firms aren’t paying new attorneys salaries, just commissions on work they happen to bring into the firm.
According to Indiana Tech, we don’t have enough lawyers in the State of Indiana. Try telling that to recently admitted attorneys who hit the job market only to find there are no jobs. Every year, Indiana licenses hundreds of new attorneys. Yet if you look at university job boards, you’ll regularly see maybe 4 or 5 legal job openings listed. The math is not good. Near the end of the press conference, a reporter said that perhaps a law degree could be useful in other areas, an idea which the Indiana Tech spokesman endorsed. That’s not reality. The reality is that once you have that law license, you’re pigeonholed as an attorney and you’re probably not going to be considered for non-lawyer jobs.
New Indiana Tech grads will have to ask themselves if they’ll be able to build a book of business that will be able to support the $1000+ they’ll have to pay per month to the Department of Education or other student loan lenders to get their loans paid off in 10 years? Will they be able to afford a house payment if they incur massive student loan debt? Will Indiana Tech law grads be able to afford to start a family? Will Indiana Tech grads be able to pay off their student loan debt before incurring new student loan debt when their children go to college? These are the questions potential students will have to take into consideration before committing to $84,000+ in student loan debt (not taking into account high annual tuition inflation rates).
On a practical note, why would anyone want to go to a brand new school with no reputation and no law alumni base when people who do the hiring in the legal field routinely only look at applicants from the top First Tier schools for the most elite jobs.
Writes Courtney Comstock in the Business Insider:
Earlier this year, Lauren Riviera, an assistant professor at Northwestern, published research about how top firms like hedge funds and investment banks only hire from “top tier” schools. …
The report says elite law firms, investment banks, and consultancy firms are only looking for recruits from the “top 5,” Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Wharton, according to her research.
A new Indiana Tech law school doesn’t make economic sense for students and for the state. The only people who will make money will be the school officials who collect the tuition payments funded by non-dischargable student loans. Pumping out 100 new attorneys per year to try to find jobs in the Fort Wayne area will be a recipe for economic disaster in the local legal field.
Elie Mystal at Above the Law writes of Indiana Tech’s planned law school:
Does somebody have to die? Does somebody have to commit suicide? Does somebody have to leave a suicide note that reads, “I just couldn’t go on paying off the debts I incurred from going to this law school”? What is it going to take before somebody, some organization, some kind ofregulatory authority steps in and prevents universities from opening up debt-generation shops under the guise of providing legal education?
Aug
1
Will open source textbooks change education?
Filed Under economy, education, open source | 4 Comments
I remember paying a lot for textbooks when I was in school.
I also remember the high cost of text books mean using older text books when I attended school in New Jersey. When my family moved to Indiana, textbook costs meant paying book rental fees, even though the rest of a student’s elementary and secondary public education tuition cost was state financed by virtue of the Indiana Constitution.
It wasn’t uncommon to pay hundreds of dollars for textbooks when I was in college and law school — only to have them become almost worthless when it came time to sell them back at the end of the year. Some of it was the bookstores trying to maximize their profits — sell the books high, then buy them back for as little as they could, then resell them as used books for as high as the market would pay. It’s the American way.
Sometimes the books were made obsolete by new editions. This year’s text might have been reformatted or updated with new information making the older version less valuable, even though the core of the information remained valid and worthwhile for readers.
Some textbooks, such as mathematics and science texts, should seem to be the type of books that would retain their value because it is unlikely that major portions of the subject will change from year to year, but they are often republished as well.
But the internet might be changing this traditional publishing marketplace. Open source books are the future. Will open source textbooks — and publishers such as Curriki — catch on as students and schools seek ways to cut costs?
Writes the New York Time’s Ashlee Vance about a new effort to bring open source books to the public:
Over the last few years, groups nationwide have adopted the open-source mantra of the software world and started financing open-source books. Experts — often retired teachers or groups of teachers — write these books and allow anyone to distribute them in digital, printed or audio formats. Schools can rearrange the contents of the books to suit their needs and requirements.
But progress with these open-source texts has been slow.
The future is here.
But, will educational systems adopt open source textbooks?
