As expected, ABA surrenders to law schools on graduate jobs data reporting

5 December 2011 — It was a lovely press release:

      “The [ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission] is fully committed to clarity and accuracy of law   school placement data.  As a result of these changes, future law students will be better informed about their prospects than ever before.”

They even approved a new annual questionnaire intended to gather more detailed information about where recent law grads find work.  But the new questionnaire does not include all the changes that transparency advocates have been pushing for.  Law School Transparency — a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve consumer data for law students — has called upon the ABA to publish school-specific salary data that would allow prospective law students to see how much graduates of each school earn.  As with the old questionnaire, job and salary data will not be reported together and school-specific salary data will not be released publicly. Instead, each school will report the three states in which the largest number of its graduates finds jobs.

For a review of the ABA action from the National Law Journal click here.

For more about Law School Transparency click here. 

And for one of our previous posts which addressed many of these issues click here.

This is an element of the argument that law school is a bad decision which rests on two givens: the enormous debt incurred by most lawyers, and the lack of opportunity.   People rack up an average $92,000 in debt because of the implied promise of a high-paying job at the end.  For most pundits, a massive portion of law school applicants are extremely ill-informed about the career prospects resulting from a law degree.  

We covered all of these points in a post last year which you can access by clicking here.

And for a recent article on the law school debt bubble from AmLaw Daily click here.