The College Fix

For law school grads, job offers are down and student debt levels are up. The dream of becoming a highly-paid attorney is withering away for many young J.D.’s.

Over at the Discover Magazine blog, Razib Khan asks if law schools are scamming students, or if students are scamming themselves:

Whittier College of Law has a 40% unemployment rate for the class of 2011. The bar passage rate is 66%, and the tuition is $38,000. In contrast, Columbia 2011 grads have an unemployment rate of less than 1%, with a tuition of  $51,000. Obviously the inputs matter here. Columbia professors aren’t that much better than Whittier professors. Rather, Whittier is probably taking $38,000 a year from individuals who are marginal lawyer material. They’re selling people a dream.

This where cognitive biases come in. A rational person will ask if an individual with a unimpressive LSAT and low G.P.A. and lack of genuine passion for law can be a great lawyer. Most people are quite rational…about other people. When it comes to oneself there’s a strong bias, perhaps for evolutionary reasons, to delude oneself about one’s intelligence, attractiveness, conscientiousness, etc. Despite the “market signal” of the collapse of vast swaths of the legal industry in the wake of 2008, and the real correction in the number of applicants an students, these sort of data still imply that the supply of self-deluded suckers is large enough to saturate the market.

Read the full article here.

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