Unforeseen Consequences

As you might imagine, law schools mostly graduate people who want to be lawyers. Sure, some of them go to work at other things, and those who want to practice law still have to pass the bar exam. But the main reason you spend time cramming Supreme Court cases into your head is so that you can shout, "You're out of order! You're out of order! This whole trial is out of order!" as the bailiffs are dragging you away.

Unfortunately, unemployment has hit the legal profession as well these days, so a number of folks find themselves finished with law school, holding a swell-looking juris doctorate diploma in one hand and a big stack of IOUs in the other, but without a place to work. Some of these folks remember that when they were deciding whether or not they would go to law school or choosing which law school they wanted to attend, the schools themselves released placement statistics that were supposed to show how many of their graduates got jobs when they finished. Said numbers may, in fact, have influenced their decisions. But now they're out, and they find themselves on the wrong side of the statistics.

So they're probably more than a little ticked off, and they've got time on their hands as well as a rather specialized set of job skills that's not getting used right now. What to do, what to do? Aha! I'll sue my law school for artificially boosting placement statistics in a misleading fashion! Technically, the suits were filed by actual law firms on behalf of some law school graduates, but you know those firms are going to have really motivated clients.

I saw the link to the Inside Higher Education report at Critical Mass, a blog by a former university English instructor who noted that law schools are not the only post-graduate educational outfits that may be churning out more graduates than there are jobs for them to do. Many if not most of the academic humanities fields are producing far more PhD's in their respective fields than there are teaching positions for them to fill. Those brand-new doctors come out of school with a lot of debt and relatively few marketable skills other than teaching their particular specialization, at least if "marketable" refers to the kind of employment that will help them pay back those large debts. The same problem is not unknown even at the bachelor's degree level, as students may find themselves waiting many months before anything even close to their field opens up, and the competition for those slots will be pretty tight.

Will English or sociology or literature PhD's be next to join the suing brigade? I don't know, but according to the Inside Higher Ed report, there seem to be a lot of law school graduates looking for something to do these days. If I were a college, I'd start to get worried.