Career Lies My Graduate School Told Me

RCM ^ | 03/14/2012 | Steven Malanga

[SeekAndFind]

Lately the efforts of a trio of advocates to sue law schools on behalf of unemployed graduates have gained much media attention. Eager, but out-of-work graduates make compelling figures on the evening news, especially when they are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and have passed the bar but are working in bars because they can't even get a job interview with a law firm.

The lawsuits, alleging that the schools have been misleading students about their postgraduate employment prospects, have helped stoke a certain amount of indignation because job prospects for lawyers have been declining for years, yet law schools have continued expanding enrollments. Some schools have apparently lured students by advertising job placement rates for graduates of 90 percent or better, even though there is currently only one job for every two law school graduates in the country. If consumer advocates and government watchdogs can go after so-called for-profit and technical schools for misleading students about their job prospects, why not traditional law schools, too?

Although the lawsuits seem somewhat quixotic right now, if they succeed in pressuring schools to provide more detailed information about how their graduates perform in the job market (and maybe even prompt some schools to issue tuition rebates as part of broader settlements), the legal action could reverberate well beyond law. The next target could well be university graduate programs that for years have been producing Master's and PhD grads for whom there is little or no gainful employment.

Programs in fields like the humanities, where some professors claim schools have been misleading students for 40 years about job prospects, or grad schools in disappearing fields like journalism, might suddenly find themselves ripe for similar suits.

William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English Literature, has been a harsh critic of schools which continue to churn out PhD graduates who have no prospect of gainful employment in the one area in which they are qualified, namely teaching in a college. In a series of commentaries in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Pannapacker paints a distressing picture of humanities graduate schools operated for the pleasure of the professoriate, in which students pursuing careers for which there are no job prospects are "an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river."

Over a 20 year period from 1987 through 2007, he notes, humanities programs sharply increased the annual number of doctoral students they graduated, from 2,991 to 4,366. Those increases came even as colleges and universities cut their tenure track positions and substituted adjunct and part-time positions, producing "ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility." Those who tried to find work outside the academy discovered they were unemployable, avoided by suspicious corporate recruiters who wonder about all those years spent on campus.

These students, you're thinking, have only themselves to blame. Surely with a little bit of research they could have figured out just how bad things are.

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[RightOnline]

Yeah, that too....just keep in mind this was around 1968 or so....

[Pecos]

It’s simply called the law of supply and demand. No matter who, no matter which group or agency tries to repeal that law - it just doesn’t stick.

When I was in high school, I told my dad that I wanted to get a degree in history. He asked what I was going to do with it. I responded by getting a degree in mechanical engineering, and reading history on the side.

[Jack Hammer]

Law scool grads suing their law schools; the irony is delicious.

[Altariel]

I think you were looking for “proliferation”.

:-)

[kosciusko51]

Yes! That was it. Stupid mental block.

[kosciusko51]

Thank you.