{"id":71762,"date":"2012-07-01T22:57:27","date_gmt":"2012-07-02T06:57:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=17127"},"modified":"2012-07-01T22:57:27","modified_gmt":"2012-07-02T06:57:27","slug":"the-law-school-scam-as-a-cognitive-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/07\/01\/the-law-school-scam-as-a-cognitive-bias\/","title":{"rendered":"The law school scam as a cognitive bias"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been aware of the whole &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com\/\">law school scam<\/a>&#8221; genre for years. The basic issue is pretty straightforward: <strong>all the problems of higher education with easy loans and inflated tuition for credentialing are manifest writ large in law schools<\/strong>. Here are some plausible numbers, <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052702304458604577486623469958142.html\">Law Grads Face Brutal Job Market<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The numbers suggest the job market for law grads is worse than previously thought. Nationwide, only 55% of the class of 2011 had full-time, long-term jobs that required a law degree nine months after graduation. The ABA defines &#8220;long-term&#8221; jobs as those that don&#8217;t have a term of less than one year.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the whole article, and you see how law school deans try to present weasel explanations for the damning statistics. There&#8217;s also a nice <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052702304458604577486623469958142.html#project%3DLSCHOOL20120625%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive\">interactive graphic<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Whittier_Law_School\">Whittier College of Law<\/a> has a 40% unemployment rate for the class of 2011. The bar passage rate is 66%, and the tuition is $38,000. In contrast, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Columbia_Law_School\">Columbia<\/a> 2011 grads have an unemployment rate of less than 1%, with a tuition of \u00a0$51,000. Obviously the inputs matter here. Columbia professors aren&#8217;t that much better than Whittier professors. Rather, Whittier is probably taking $38,000 a year from individuals who are &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been aware of the whole &#8220;law school scam&#8221; genre for years. The basic issue is pretty straightforward: all the problems of higher education with easy loans and inflated tuition for credentialing are manifest writ large in law scho&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[415,2046],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-law-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71762"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71994,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71762\/revisions\/71994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}