How would you advise a client who came to you when another party shorted him on the goods due under a contact? Or substituted inferior goods? Or simply made representations about the goods that were not true?
Now what if the “client” was your law firm, the “goods” was your new associate, and the other party was one of the top law schools in the country? Well that is precisely what is happening.
According to the New York Times, some law schools, including heavyweights Georgetown and Tulane, have decide to retroactively inflate the grade point averages of recent graduates by 0.333 of point. The measure is designed to make the former students “look more attractive in a competitive job market” and take effect on the grades of students who have graduated over the last few years.
But is this ethical?
Arguably not. Like the sage observation that when someone says “they are not doing it for the money” means they are doing it for the money; all too often the altruistic mantra of “doing it to help the kids,” means anything but. The percentage of graduates who gets jobs after graduation is a factor used in the highly coveted U.S. News & World Report Law School Rankings. The higher a school’s ranking, the greater the prestige. The greater the prestige, the more the school can charge for tuition.
Several years ago a flunked-out law student named Thomas Bentley sued his law school claiming he was too stupid to have been admitted n the first place – and the world laughed. Bentley’s theory was that the new law school president had instituted two polices upon taking over: lower admission standards and higher tuition. The (obviously inadvertent – would argue the law school) result was around a 30 percent student attrition rate and a nice increase in tuition collected for the school. Bentley argued that he was set up to fail and was only admitted to the school could get his cash. Given this “grade inflation” scheme, was Bentley on to something or was the law school merely “helping the kids” by giving marginal students a chance to show they could make it in law school?
More and more it has become apparent that law schools have become mere businesses and this most recent development casts serious doubts on whether those businesses actually care about the quality of the product they put out. These institutions, created to benefit society, have fallen into a pattern of self-service.
A possible solution is the breaking of the ABA accredited law school monopoly by allowing for a return to the venerable tradition of “reading for the law” – the ability of a person to sit for the bar exam after having apprenticed with a firm rather than having attended law school. Such an arrangement seems perfectly suited for these troubled economic times; apprentices could actually make money, rather than spend it , while learning to become a lawyer, and firms could personally groom up and coming legal talent so that they knew what they were getting. Though not a panacea, the option of “reading for the law” would certainly be a greater benefit to the profession than the inflated grades and runaway student debt which the law school monopoly has brought us.
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