Two Yale Law School professors have proposed a novel way to reduce the number of unemployed law-school graduates struggling with six-figure debt: Pay those who have gotten off to a shaky start to drop out.
Writing in Slate, Ian Ayres and Akhil Reed Amar say law schools should seriously consider returning half of a student’s first-year tuition if he or she opts to quit after the first year.
“A half-tuition rebate splits the loss of an aborted legal career between the school and the student. Each has skin in the game, so students will not go to law school lightly, and law schools will have better incentives not to admit students likely to fail,” they write.
The proposal, which has generated considerable buzz in the legal blogosphere, is one of several consumer-protection ideas that law professors have floated in recent weeks as the debate over legal-education reform intensifies.
As law schools continue to graduate increasing numbers of students into a shrinking job market, many jobless graduates are accusing the schools of misleading them about their employment prospects.
That critique has led to lawsuits against three schools—New York Law School, Thomas M. Cooley Law School, and Thomas Jefferson School of Law—as well as public rebukes by federal lawmakers.
Meanwhile, a tax-law professor has posted a statistical analysis of just how risky an investment law school might be for three hypothetical students.
Paul L. Caron, a professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, concludes that while it makes sense for some—like an English major who gets a generous scholarship to attend Harvard Law School—over all, the payoff prospects are bleak.
“Law school is a very risky (and expensive) investment; it should not be entered into lightly,” he concludes.
In their analysis, the Yale professors argue that law schools should provide applicants with more comprehensive information about how their graduates have fared in the job market. Instead of just reporting the percentage who are employed nine months after graduation, they should release their graduates’ annual salaries for the first 10 years after graduation, the authors say.
They should also break down the bar-passage rates for graduates based on their grades and admissions test scores, they say.
“Anyone who starts law school with less than a 50-percent chance of passing the bar within three years of graduation should be required to sign a special waiver that he has been informed about the riskiness of his education investment,” the authors write.
The tuition-rebate idea was inspired by the Internet shoe seller Zappos.com, which, at the end of a monthlong training program, tests new workers’ loyalty by offering them $3,000 to quit. In the law schools’ version, students who have taken out government loans would apply the rebate toward that debt.
“There’s a psychological tendency to double down on a bad debt,” Mr. Amar said in an interview on Monday. Paying students to quit “lets you walk away and not feel like a loser. It’s your choice, but we want you to be fully informed.”
One reader suggested that students be given the opportunity to walk away after one year with a master’s degree rather than staying on for three years for a J.D.—an idea that Mr. Amar says is worth pursuing.
The idea isn’t likely to get takers at a top-tier school like Yale, where even students who struggle their first year are likely to land jobs, the authors concede. They’d still like to see Yale lead the way in rolling out the plan.
Yale’s law dean, Robert C. Post, was unavailable to comment on the proposals, a law-school spokesman said this week.
While law schools continue to be hit with a barrage of bad press, the backlash has some legal educators chafing.
Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston, agrees that some law schools are gaming the system by, for instance, employing their own graduates for short-term jobs to boost their placement statistics. But much of the criticism aimed at law schools is misdirected, he believes.
“We can’t have all the world’s economic woes laid at our feet. We do what we do, and we do it well,” he said, adding that he was speaking as an individual and not in his role as president of the Association of American Law Schools.
And Mr. Olivas contends that while law firms are hiring fewer lawyers, there are still plenty of opportunities available for law-school graduates.
“Most of these students are going to find their way if they’re willing to be flexible and to look more broadly,” he says. “Not everyone is going to practice law in the traditional sense, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.”
