Sigh.  I wish Alpha Man had gone to law school or had at least agreed to write this, but he said it was MY responsibility and to tap into my “righteous anger.” Well kids, here it is.

The New York Times reports that law schools are automatically raising grades on PAST EXAMS for CURRENT LAW STUDENTS and PAYING LAW FIRMS to accept their students.  The first question that comes to mind is, why not help out recent alumni who have been UNEMPLOYED FOR 6 to 24  MONTHS particularly since their grades lack the NATURAL GRADE INFLATION already present on the transcripts of more recent classes?  Well, once you no longer affect the employment statistics of these hallowed halls of learning, nobody cares whether you live or die. 

First let me post the link and then I will dissect what it means for us JD debtors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/business/22law.html

Ok, first let us define the term grade inflation because the article doesn’t quite get it right.  Grade inflation is when, over a period of time, schools (either by changing a curve or by less exact methods) make an effort to raise the overall GPA of students.  There is nothing retroactive about this.  Grade inflation does not mean that “B” you earned your first year is a “B+” by your third year.  Grade inflation is when a member of the class of 2006 and a member of the class of 2009 turn in comparable Property exams the former is a “B” and the latter is a “B+.”  Now, this is bad enough once someone in the class of 2006 becomes unemployed and has to compete with younger graduates with no gaps in their resume and better grades.  Retroactively changing the grades is…I mean there aren’t words really to describe it.  It doesn’t really help students, it simply makes employment even more random than it already is…

Moving on to schools PAYING LAW FIRMS to hire their students…their current students.  No-name law schools have thousands to pay law firms to hire their students?  Why not just LOWER tuition by that amount?  That way students get hired by places that are actually interested in them, are not taxed on the money and don’t have a law firm skimming a tidy profit off the top.  I personally would hire ANYONE to do ANYTHING if I could pay them some fraction of what someone else was giving me to employ them – I just simply wouldn’t trust them with any work that materially affected my operation.

The bottom-line here is the commodification of law students.  In law school we are not the consumer, we are the product, and the beauty of the business is that we’re sold as a final product before we’re even bought as a raw material.  I’m supposed to be impressed by a law school that spends $3,500 so a law firm will hire it’s student when that same student borrowed and will pay back with interest $150,000?  What the law school is REALLY paying for is another sucker willing to borrow that much and put their life on hold for three years only to face crippling unemployment, economic hardship, chaos and shame for the rest of their working life.  How does this work?  Because now the law school can say that the kid they sent to that law firm is employed however temporarily, when it reports its statistics, which thereby effect its ranking, which is directly related to how much students will pay/borrow to go to the school.  And the shameful cycle continues.

To borrow a phrase from Icarus “I feel like a corpse screaming at the living.”  I’ve seen hell but nobody can hear me.  Probably because to accept the magnitude of the fraud being perpetrated would actually lead to madness in those who are currently being sucked into the black hole. It’s like a child hiding under the bed during a thunderstorm.  If you shut your eyes tight enough, just maybe it will go away.  Unfortunately we’re not that little anymore.  We have to face reality.