A recent column by The New York Times' Chuck Klosterman on the ethics of skyrocketing law school tuition in a terrible job market has angered a prominent legal blog.
Matthew Dreiling, a student considering law school, wrote to Klosterman to ask whether it was moral for law schools "to keep enrolling students and collecting tuition dollars knowing that their product is a risky (or outright bad) investment."
Klosterman responded that the burden of finding work is "mostly" on the students, not the school.
Law school is not a "symbiotic exchange" that guarantees students the jobs they want just because they pay tuition, Klosterman said.
"[Y]our particular question is performance-based; you want to know if it’s unethical for colleges whose students are less successful in the job market to demand the same unreasonable tuition as the ones whose graduates perform well," Klosterman wrote. "And it’s not unethical — it’s just fiscally unfortunate."
Above The Law vehemently disagrees.
"A law school’s success in the job market is kind of the point. It’s not like college. People don’t go to law school to find themselves or become immersed in liberal arts. They don’t go to have long conversations about obscure texts. People go to law school, for the most part, with the focus on acquiring skills that can be applied to a job. If there is no job at the end of it, if the market is telling you that your skills are not economically desirable, then there has been a failure."
The argument really heats up when Klosterman contends law schools are motivated to make sure students get jobs because the school's reputation will benefit.
ATL wasted no time ripping into Klosterman for his premise:
Actually, the best thing that a law school can do for its reputation is succeed in the U.S. News law school rankings. And those rankings obviously, painfully, have little to do with employment success of graduates. U.S. News is focused on inputs (GPA, LSAT score, money spent per student), not outcomes (jobs, jobs, jobs). Graduating people who become successful is an occasional externality of admitting people who already are.
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