New York Judge to Prospective Law Students: Caveat Emptor
Recently, a New York judge threw out a lawsuit by nine former students of New York Law School (NYLS) who accused the school of engaging in deceptive practices by inflating employment statistics to attract prospective students. Even though NYLS won the battle, neither the school, the students, nor the legal profession in general came out looking too good. The judge basically said that the school may be “lackluster” and the employment statistics may have been misleading (although not materially) but the students should have done their homework before plunking down over $100k on tuition.
Just by way of background, NYLS ranked #135 in the latest U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, which is only a few spots ahead of where the magazine stops assigning schools a number. NYLS charges its students $47,800 per year in tuition and fees alone. At least they seem to spell that one out in black and white on their website.
The crux of the disgruntled students’ lawsuit was that the school’s website and marketing materials would have led a reasonable consumer to believe that between 90 to 92 percent of the school’s graduates secured full-time jobs as lawyers within nine months of graduation. However, in reality that percentage included students who only secured part-time legal jobs, as well as students who secured non-legal employment. According to the complaint, only 40 percent of the school’s graduates had full-time jobs that required a law degree. Ninety-two vs 40 percent – minor details right?
Even if that detail was buried somewhere deep within the pretty NYLS brochures, the judge believed it was the students’ duty to dig deeper and find the hidden truth. He held that “by anyone’s definition, reasonable consumers – college graduates – seriously considering law schools are a sophisticated subset of education consumers, capable of sifting through data and weighing alternatives.”
We particularly liked this tidbit from the judge: “It is difficult for the court to conceive that somehow lost on these plaintiffs is the fact that a godly number of law school graduates toil in the drudgery or have less than hugely successful legal careers. NYLS applicants, as a reasonable consumer of a legal education, would have to be wearing blinders to not be aware of these well-established facts of life in the world of legal employment.”
Even after all this bad press, NYLS still publishes employment data that appears to be vague at the very least. If you look at their current numbers, it is unclear how they define whether someone has a legal job. They claim a job is a “legal position” if a JD is “required or preferred.” What exactly is “preferred”? More importantly, there’s a number that is glaringly missing from all those stats: only 65 percent of 2010 NYLS graduates were employed as lawyers at the time the data was gathered. After you remove the 5.7 percent of graduates “employed” as fellows, only 310 out of the 481 NYLS graduates are working in “legal positions” under the curious “JD required or preferred” standard. Moreover, they don’t disclose how many of those 310 had full-time legal jobs.
We here at Abnormal Use tend to agree that prospective law school students should be smart enough to do some independent investigating and figure out whether a law school is truly a good investment for them. It really only takes a few minutes of Google searching to reveal that most law school employment data is a somewhat of a sham. However, we can’t help but wonder whether law students should be expected to dig deeper. In this noble profession of law, shouldn’t a prospective student expect to be given honest, open, and candid information from the institutions charged with molding young lawyers?
