Is Law School a Scam?

There simply aren't enough jobs to support the number of J.D.'s entering the marketplace. Currently there is a surplus of more than 7,500 attorneys in the state of New York alone. In California, the surplus is about 3,000.

But law schools have no interest in advertising these hard times. Instead, they tend to focus on the employment outcomes of only their most successful students in the brochures they send to prospective students.

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Worse yet, more and more law schools appear to be actively scamming their students by luring first year students with large merit scholarships that disappear after the first year is over.

Here's how it works: Law schools know that to enhance their institutional reputations, they need to attract the best possible students -- the ones with the highest GPAs and LSAT scores. So they offer huge scholarships -- worth tens of thousands of dollars per year -- in order to attract students that might otherwise choose higher ranked institutions.

But there's a catch. These scholarships are usually contingent upon maintaining a specified grade point average. If students fail to make the necessary grades, they lose their scholarships permanently.

At first glance, these required grade point averages look reasonable and attainable. But since first year law courses are traditionally graded on a curve, the law schools know ahead of time that a large number of students are, mathematically speaking, all but guaranteed to lose their scholarships after the first year.

Not surprisingly, law schools never seem to mention how grading on a curve will allow them to automatically disqualify a significant percentage of those awards when they send out scholarship letters to would-be students.

David Segal of the New York Times has written a revealing article on the scholarship bait and switch practices utilized by many law schools today. "Why would a school offer more scholarships than it planned to renew?" he writes. "The short answer is this: to build the best class that money can buy, and with it, prestige. But these grant programs often succeed at the expense of students, who in many cases figure out the perils of the merit scholarship game far too late."

Until recent years, merit scholarships of any kind were uncommon at law schools. But as national rankings have grown in importance, competition for top students has grown more intense. Many law schools are using merit scholarships to obscure the true cost of a legal education.

GPA-contingent scholarships are fine in principle. But it seems clear that law schools are using the practice of grading on a curve to ensure that they won't have to pay many of those scholarships after the first year. And that's dishonest.

Law schools should be upfront with students about their odds of retaining their scholarships.

Law schools are counting on the fact that by the end of the first year, students who lose their scholarships will feel too deeply invested to drop out at that point. They will have no choice but to take out large loans to pay for the final two years of law school. Even then, the odds of landing the kind of high paying legal jobs necessary to pay back all those loans are, for many of them, slim.

On second thought, maybe we should feel sorry for lawyers -- just a little.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix. He writes about culture and politics every Wednesday for the International Business Times. Follow him on Twitter @nathanharden.

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