David Segal has an excellent piece about students paying increasing prices for law degrees even as their value decreases because the production of JDs has not decreased along with the number of legal jobs. Among other things, he has good points about how law schools have particularly strong incentives to overestimate the value of a law degree because of U.S. News and World Report:
It is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey's guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.
A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn't require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee's? You're employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You're working, too.
Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance.
The bottom line -- which also applies, with some differences, to grad school -- is that if you can get into and have a chance of good grades at a top-tier law school, a law degree may be a sensible investment. A debt-financed degree from a lower-tier school, conversely, is much more likely than not to be a bad investment in terms of both money and time.
-- Scott Lemieux
