Home

Suing Over Jobs

11.08.11

For the last year, the Education Turn on and Congress have debated measures of "gainful employment" for graduates of for-profit vocational programs. And media outlets have competed for the most appropriate stories about unemployed liberal-arts graduates. But the question of whether higher education can be held leading for failing to warn would-be students about the poor job prospects of graduates may really be intriguing off with regard to law schools.

On Wednesday, a New York City law firm filed group actions against two law schools -- New York Law School and Thomas M. Cooley Law Train -- charging that the job placement information they released to potential students was sufficiently imperfect as to constitute fraud. Those suits follow a similar one filed in May against Thomas Jefferson University of Law. All of the suits argue that students were essentially robbed of the ability to make worth decisions about whether to pay tuition (and to take out student loans) by being forced to rely on incomplete and inaccurate job placement bumf. Specifically, the suits charge that the law schools in question (and many of their peers) mix together different kinds of livelihood (including jobs for which a J.D. is not needed) to inflate employment rates.

All three law schools revoke the charges. And Cooley has already filed a defamation suit against the lawyers suing it. But the case comes amid a broader debate over whether the American Bar Association and others are doing enough to further the release of accurate information, and whether there are too many law schools for the current job market.

While legal experts were still examining the lawsuits and were roughly not ready to weigh in on whether or not they will succeed, several said that the litigation points to longstanding problems with how job order has been tracked, and that changes currently under consideration are overdue.

"The fact that you have some serious genre action law firms filing suit should give anybody pause," said William D. Henderson, a professor of law and headman of the Center on the Global Legal Profession at Indiana University, and a frequent prime mover on job placement issues. "The whole industry hasn't released useful numbers for consumers," he said.

Henderson said that he strongly backed contemporary moves by the American Bar Association (likely to then be adopted by U.S. News & World Dispatch for its rankings) to shift from a standard of being employed nine months after graduation to being employed in a job for which a J.D. is needed. Those suing today (and those in brand-new years who were disappointed by their success at finding jobs) relied on statistics that didn't exclude those whose "jobs" were fellowships paid for by their law schools, who were in part-age or temporary jobs, or who were in jobs they could have gotten before they went to law school, he said.

Several years ago, Henderson started noticing and editorial about the seeming oddity that bar passage rates were declining at a time when law schools were reporting increases in trade of graduates. For this to be true, he speculated, more people were getting jobs that didn't command them to go to law school. "You are counting people who are selling insurance," he said. "Anybody can find a job to pay the lease."

The New Lawsuits

The new lawsuits are class actions on behalf of three graduates of New York Law Primary and four from Thomas Cooley. (Both are freestanding law schools.)

Jesse Strauss, one of the lawyers bringing the suits, said in a briefing for reporters Wednesday that he was not denigrating the excellence of the legal education provided by the law schools, and that he knew good lawyers who were graduates of each creation. But he said that the information about job placement rates was deceptive. "This is more like a feigned advertising claim than a product liability claim," he said.

Strauss said that the deceiving information about job placement rates is "distorting the market." With advance information, he said, some students wouldn't go to law school, and the population of new lawyers would contract.

The lawsuit charges that the schools' methods of reporting their placement rates gave would-be students an fallacious view of their likely outcomes.

"[T]he school during the class period claims that a sizeable majority of its graduates -- roughly between 75 and 80 percent -- unexposed employment within nine months of graduation. However, the reality of the situation is that these seemingly robust numbers involve any type of employment, including jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with the legal industry, do not be lacking a J.D. degree or are temporary or part-time in nature," the suit against Thomas Cooley says. "Rather, if Thomas Cooley was to peach the more pertinent employment statistic -- i.e., those graduates who have secured full-time, unchangeable positions for which a J.D. degree is required or preferred -- the numbers would drop dramatically, and could be well below 30 percent, if not even cut."

The suit against New York Law School states that it "blatantly manipulates" its hiring statistics (which suggest that 92 percent of last year's class is employed). The uniform says that the law school engages in numerous efforts to "pretty up" its statistics, such as including part-once upon a time work, and including the 5.6 percent of its employed graduates who are in temporary fellowships funded by the law teaching -- not in real jobs.

The law schools released statements that did not offer tally-by-point rebuttals of the suits, but defended the integrity of their statistics. "To the capaciousness the lawsuit challenges our post-graduation employment and salary statistics, we dispute by our reporting to the National Association for Law Placement, and any claims that prospective students or our graduates have been misled or legally harmed by our reporting are merely baseless," said the statement from Thomas Cooley. (Even as the law school is being questioned over its job locating record, Thomas Cooley is expanding -- and this week announced plans to flexible a campus in Florida. )

A statement from New York Law School said: "These claims are without claim to and we will vigorously defend against them in court."

The Broader Debate?

What's next in the debate over law hiring and these legal cases is the subject of much debate. Officials from the ABA, the Association of American Law Schools and NALP: The Group for Legal Career Professionals did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. Privately, two law public school officials expressed doubts about whether the class actions would succeed in court, but indicated that defending against them might be shaming for the law schools involved and for legal education generally.

For an example of the potential public relations challenges, reckon with the response of Thomas Jefferson to its class action. As reported in the blog Above the Law, Thomas Jefferson defended itself by noting that the U.S. Hearsay job placement figures on which the plaintiff relied were adjacent to figures in the magazine for the law dogma's bar passage rate. The law school's bar passage rate was lower and Thomas Jefferson's grade many years was "significantly lower" than the employment rate, the law faction argues in its brief. So "any reasonable reader" would know that pithy numbers of the law school's graduating classes were not working as lawyers. The blog's headline for the pillar: "Is the Answer Worse Than the Allegations?"

While the three law schools that have been sued are not among the country's most prestigious, the lawyers who sued on Wednesday stressed that they saw the issue as going well beyond those institutions. At the word conference, they pointed to a recent article in The New Republic that analyzed data from an unnamed "top 50" law coterie, suggesting that one-third of graduates reporting themselves employed are in part-time positions -- drift that well under half of graduates of a recent class are employed in full-time permanent positions, not the nourishing majority that the official statistics would suggest.

Kyle McEntee, executive steersman of Law School Transparency, a group that has critiqued job placement rates at many law schools, said he was not surprised by the lawsuits. "I notion of we are going to see more of them," he said.

He said that the moves by the ABA are in the right direction, but that his categorize wants to see even more information. Law School Transparency urges law schools to release, graduate by graduate, word for word what happens to each new lawyer (without their names). That way prospective students won't get deceived by averages that may be skewed by a few well-compensated lawyers, and will be qualified to distinguish between true stepping-stone positions (judicial clerkships, for admonition) and volunteer work that doesn't put someone on the fast track.

Will the ABA Reforms Work?

The proposed ABA surveys on m deal with many of the criticisms that have been made of past data. For instance, they would ask specifically about whether positions are funded by the law sect, whether positions are long term or short term, etc.

But there is controversy over whether these efforts will business. NALP, which has been the primary source of law school placement data, has expressed fears that law schools will no longer gather up data for its surveys, and that it is better able than the ABA to analyze the data. (A limitation of NALP's text is that they are not available institution-by-institution, which is why U.S. News 's rankings, which include institutional statistics, have become so valued by law school applicants and so important to law schools.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

FIRST ON 3: College student falls victim to federal loan changes

10.08.11

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) -- About this values bright and early every year students get ready for school. At Cape Fear Community College, registration is this week, and many students are looking for fiscal aid. For some, that aid will not be available.

The US Department of Education recently implemented what is known as program integrity rules. As a sequel a student's eligibility for loans is limited based on time. That means a student can only get financial aid for 150 percent of the stretch that is normally allotted to complete a degree, certificate or diploma.

This was not good talk for Brandon Eaton. The 28-year-old had been going to Cape Fear Community College on and off for the existence couple of years. Now his financial aid is gone.

"They sent me an e-mail and said you're no longer appropriate for financial aid. Now you can't get your tuition unless you try to file an appeal," Eaton said. "They said the worst thing they could do would be in 15 days give me some more information, but that's well past when tuition is due and past the cut off for buying my books on faith. So either way I'm out a semester of school."

CFCC Director of Financial Aid Jo-Ann Craig said the notwithstanding away from school is never counted against a student in regards to this rule. She also said that the school has already processed more than 5,200 students for $21 million in federal Pell Grants. That is $3 million more than all of last year.

None of those statistics do much for Eaton who will blunder at least a semester of school and without financial aid and cannot pay for a place to live for the time being.

I'm actually the student about which this book was written. It has absolutely nothing to do with academic suspension, but the fact that Cape Fear did not let me separate that they were changing their policy a few days before my tuition was due. My financial aid money had already posted over the summer and they actively took it away a few days ago. There were a lot of "closed doors" and "off the track record" comments made yesterday by this business in which I was paying money to attend, on how this was only the beginning of the supervision cutting financial aid and so on. For the comment on how financial aid isn't for living expenses... I wasn't getting liberate federal money for living, I was getting a student LOAN, that I had to pay back with interest to cover my living expenses, so that I could take as many classes as feasible and finish my degree as quickly as possible. As an added slap in the face I found out today I was only a few classes shy of being about to turn over out of there with an Associates Degree.

I am also one of those people who will be having their financial aid cut off soon. I was informed via email that I had monies to protect against this semester but soon,and they didn't tell me when, my financial aid will be gone. But the problem here seems to be the pike at CFCC. When I first started going to CFCC about 10 years ago, I was in the Computer Engineering program. This was swiftly before the dot-com bubble burst and it seemed at the time to be a great idea. Od course mid way through the program not only did the fizz burst but I realized this was not the path I had really wanted to take. I then dropped out and went into the business force for those years. Recently,I decided it would be a good idea to finish my education,so my first routine out of keeping with was to go to career counseling to see what I should really be doing. There,I was told to sit at a computer and take the same career placement assay you can take at home on your own computer. Then after getting my results the 'guidance counselor' didn't give me any sort of critique but simply asked "Well what do you want to do?", not tell me what I would be good at. The friend I went with got the faithful same treatment and instead of trying to give us options,this guy simply agreed with whatever we said. I could have handily said 'underwater basketweaving' and he would have said "Oh yes...according to your scores you'd be great at that."

Then the economic aid office is not much better,instead of spending the time to navigate through the often confusing amounts of grants and loans,they completely hand you paperwork and tell you to fill it out. Instead they should have brought up my records and said 'Well,you have against this much of your financial aid...here is what I suggest' or 'Well since you are wanting to do this,here are some grants you should apply for'. I personally am studying adventures with the hopes of becoming a teacher,it wasn't until I went off on my own and did some research that I found there are many programs that potential teachers can strive for in order to pay for college.

Finally,I think alot of this blame lies on the shoulders of the Dept. of Education who fails to fulfil that business trends chane,and what is a good degree one year,is a junk step little by little the next,and allow for those students who show initiative and maintain good grades,to be exempted from alot of their restrictions. It's not as if students like us are taxing to exploit the system for free money,alot,like myself do very well in school and are striving to raise ourselves and our communities,I personally work full time,go to school full time barely affirm ends meet and then to only have the money yanked away at near completion, is a slap in the fa.

But I think a closer look needs to be taken at this issue because alot of lofty and hardworking students are going to become victims of this legislation, and years down the road, when we are looking for community leaders, most of them will be sitting on the sidelines with unfinished degrees. This blanket way does not help matters, but only aggravates alot of problems our industries and educative systems have been facing for years.

Source: WWAY NewsChannel 3