"In response to a question about what’s driving the costs of legal education, Syverud said that the focus on particular types of classes or faculty is a "red herring." "The painful truth is that the problem with costs is that law professors and deans are paid too much relative to the amount of work they do," he said. "The whole problem of costs would go away tomorrow if our salaries were halved.""
-Kent Syverud, chair of the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar
Tax Prof Blog via Rabel
77 comments:
Ooooh.
That's my best Merv Griffin, who, I might add, had big wallet himself.
Of course they are. For most of the history of the Republic there WERE NO law schools to hand out union cards. One could "read law" and if one passed the bar exam that was that. Huey Long and Abe Lincoln were both products of that system. What current law schools mainly do is teach lawyers how to make money. Proof of their superfluousness is the fact that there are many law schools in which over 50% of the grads fail the bar. Looked at in that way people like we-all-know-who are parasites on society. The proof is in the pudding. If one can "read law" and pass the bar while law-school grads fail the bar at high rates in many cases, it does not say much for the gate-keeper process..
Or, so it was said.
Red herring is sexist.
PS: And Frank Lloyd Wright (a U. of Wisc product and a member of my fraternity) did not graduate from Architectural School, either..
Watch it, rh, I have a hair trigger.
Now, the interesting thing about Law Profs is that most of them, as far as I know, don't have more than a Law degree, which gives itself the lofty D after the J, but really is just a 3 year professional degree, a weighty masters.
The salary then draws in the people who might go other directions, so it's also often what draws students to particular schools. The salary gets very intelligent people to want to be law professors, which then maintains the standards of having law schools in the first place. High salaries isn't a side issue, it's really at the heart of the whole system. Take that away, half the salary, those people who teach will go elsewhere. Leaving either holes in the faculty or sub-par professors who are willing to take the salary that matches their abilities, sub-6 figures.
Now, that might be better for the country, but it would undermine the whole law school system, so there's no incentive to change at all. Lawyers do what lawyers do even in law school, make money off their clients first and foremost.
It's a racket. You can't practice law without a law license, and in order to get a law license, you have to pay big bucks to go to a law school. They have you by the short hairs and they know it.
Through the mid 19th century many doctors were educated in the same way as Lincoln - they "indentured" themselves to an established doctor. This, of course, was in areas away from the big cities.
deborah said...
Red herring is sexist.
Watch it, rh, I have a hair trigger.
There's an old Playboy joke I will refrain from quoting.
They should be paid $60-70,000 per year.
If they want more than that, they can come out of their fantasy land and practice law for once in their life. They can handle real cases with real people and make real arguments in order to convince people rather than simply shooting off at the mouth in the classroom.
Paddy O said...
Now, the interesting thing about Law Profs is that most of them, as far as I know, don't have more than a Law degree, which gives itself the lofty D after the J, but really is just a 3 year professional degree, a weighty masters.
It used to be an LLB, with an LLM and LLD as grad degrees.
JD gained popularity in the 70s.
edutcher, I'm curious how each of those degrees differs in time and focus/studies.
I'm underpaid and over taxed. Does that count for anything? I'm afraid not.
I saw Red Herring open for Hair Trigger at SXSW last year.
I'm enough of a free-market capitalist to say that Law Professors are welcome to earn whatever an employer is willing to pay them.
I'm also enough of a free-market capitalist to say that employer should not be the government, nor should they be subsidized by the government ( through student loans or other means. )
As long as ever increasing tuitions are subsidized by government loans, then this trend will continue. It's all government payback for the decades of successive leftist indoctrination entrenchment in colleges and universities nationwide.
I'm underpaid and over taxed. Does that count for anything?
Sure, you count as one of the other serfs.
But the high cost is a benefit. People who value a college degree usually value it based on how much the school costs. Lower the cost with everything else staying the same and many would just choose somewhere else that costs more. We call these "suckers". Nobody makes a better sucker than a "smart" person.
"The painful truth is that the problem with costs is that law professors and deans are paid too much relative to the amount of work they do..."
The second part of that sentence offers an easy solution.
I told my boss several times that I thought I was overpaid.
He said no, at this level it's the going rate.
That's sort of the Japanese model of a contract. If one side is unhappy with the deal at some point, you renegotiate so that both sides are happy again. You watch out for the other guy.
Universities are like satellite DCs.
To the contrary, it's unconscionable how little money law professors get paid once you stop to consider how much money the law schools get from selling the law review articles.
AprilApple said...
Universities are like satellite DCs.
A veritable archipelago!
Now, I'm not one to knock higher learning, but something is out of whack with University's monoclonal politics. Politics even matters in the hard science. If you want to read about a colorful character in chemistry, read this.
The vast expansion of the legal industry since the IBM antitrust litigation would be a great topic for a book.
My former law firm, which shall remain unnamed due to NDA, pioneered the spend the opposition into the ground and choke them with discovery documents strategy.
Of course, technology facilitated this. WP and data storage made it possible to bury the court and the opposition under a mountain of documents.
The rich salaries of law professors probably parallels the expansion of the legal industry. With the legal industry in decline, will salaries also decline?
"To the contrary, it's unconscionable how little money law professors get paid once you stop to consider how much money the law schools get from selling the law review articles."
Yeah, but they make it up through their Amazon portals.
What ails the University system is a relative dearth of students willing to pony up the buck for the education. This in turn has to do with hiring at law firms which is flat and has been so for a coup years. It's the whole "Big Law" business model which priced itself out of business via ever increasing billing rates for clients. This in turn was tied to salaries to on Wall St.
I read recently in "Above The Law" that partner productivity was starting to slip and to show in the bottom line of the AM Law 100. This means too many chiefs and not enough indians and signals either a need for deadwood partners to get the axe or for hiring of more underlings. But the law industry isn't going to recover until we have a different business in place in DC.
Limbaugh is awful explaining economics, which comes from being awful at thinking of two things at once in math so he doesn't get it.
That's what's ruining the entertainment value of his program.
It used to be just episodes of moral posturing that you had to skip.
El Pollo--
Great story. What is Welch money?
Jack Welch?
@AprilApple: The Robert A. Welch Foundation, not to be confused with Robert W. Welch who founded the John Birch Society. That being said, many liberals consider chemistry -- especially Texas oil chemistry -- to be in bed with Evil itself.
We need to close all law schools for 5 years. We have way too many attorneys.
Paddy O said...
edutcher, I'm curious how each of those degrees differs in time and focus/studies.
As I understand it from Wiki (I know...), an LLB was a degree in the common law. an LLM (which I had always assumed existed but never seen as a credential) is either for foreign legal professional or specialists, such as admiralty law. The LLD is supposed to be the professional equivalent to the JD.
If you want, you can wade through Wiki's entry on the JD.
FWIW (which may be nothing), as a kid in the 50s, the LLB was the credential of most lawyers that I saw. LLD was kind of a professorial thing IIRC.
ndspinelli said...
We need to close all law schools for 5 years. We have way too many attorneys.
A lot of young lawyers would agree.
Unemployment rates for most new grads are very bad.
Ann Althouse is worth every penny of her $177, 000 salary.
And how this blog got established is all the proof you need,...
I think that for many years (in fact most of history) academicians were relatively underpaid compared to their counterparts in industry and "the real life." The same was true of civil servants.
Something changed beginning in the late 1990's to early 2000's or so; faculty members (or their reps) clamored for a greater share. State workers won proportionally greater rewards as well as sinecure. In a sense, it was a reward for suffering for so long. But now the tables have turned. Now faculty members and government employees -- and "early" retirees -- look relatively relatively overpaid. But it only looks this way because of the anemic private sector.
Another "problem" with faculty members is their almost complete specialization as funded grant providers in their chosen fields. This in turn requires a growing coterie of administrative and teaching assistants to do the work that faculty themselves once did.
Rabel said...
The second part of that sentence [...law professors and deans are paid too much relative to the amount of work they do...] offers an easy solution.
Agreed. So what exactly defines their "work?" Number of classes taught? Publications? Does the professor who teaches two classes get paid the same as one who teaches 4 classes? Why?
edutcher, I liked the summary. It's interesting to me that it's the ABA who said the JD should be considered the equivalent to a PhD. Of course!
They couldn't trick enough people to getting an advanced degree, and would lose those people to much higher paying practices. So, the bare minimum degree to practice professionally is also the advanced degree.
The S.J.D, which is the real equivalent, is "turning it up to 11!"
Many denominations require an M.Div to become pastors. That's a 3 year degree that emphasizes both academic and practical skills (usually requiring proficiency in Greek and Hebrew along the way). It's a professional degree for practicing the profession.
It's a Masters. Yes, it's a mastering of divinity itself, but still a masters. Which makes it the real equivalent to a JD. I guess an MJ just sounds too pedestrian.
Meanwhile in the fields of religion and theology, a mere MDiv is just enough to get a person into a PhD program, which is the level required by virtually every other academic discipline as well.
I have a friend also on faculty at UW-Madison. She's in a science field. She brings to the table a bachelors, a Masters of Science, a Doctorate, and a post-doctoral fellowship. I don't know her salary but I strongly suspect she gets paid less than law professors.
It's also the case that many the best PhD programs in other fields also provide full funding for the students. So, do well enough, you get free schooling, which makes them pretty smart in Bagoh's book.
Thanks, it's a ton of material to go through for something that could be explained more easily.
That's lawyers, I guess.
"Law profs and deans overpaid?"
It takes 5 minutes to write: "The law is whatever I think it is today."
It takes a law degree and years of practice to write that impenetrably.
I think this post in needlessly provocative.
Deb you are a shit stirrer just like Lydia on "The Real Housewives of Orange County."
Have you guys been watching?
They are currently doing the three part reunion where they discuss the whole season. Part two is next week where they fight about Vicki and Brooks.
Vicki is one of the stars of the show and she got hooked up with this guy Brooks that everyone thinks is a crook and a grifter. Her daughter refuses to allow the guy in the house while she is living there and all her friends tell Vicki that Brooks is a no good low life who is only after her money. You see they got alarmed when she gave him 20% of her vodka company and 505 of the proceeds from her Amazon portal.
I know that it is a new show but somehow it seems like a repeat. Like Yogi always says "It's déjà vu all over again".
What?
I have to ask it again, like Rabel suggested, just w-h-a-t is the measure of productivity for professorships in Law? Classes taught. Publications? Research grants? What that is in the law field, say what? I can understand research grants in the hard sciences, and in medicine, but Law? I'm probably ignorant of the facets of law that require "research." I'd think they'd be covered by the dubious grants for the sociology filed.
In short, just how is the value of a law professorship measured? No one here has yet come close to that.
How are you going to get excellent professors if you pay them comparatively low salaries?
"just w-h-a-t is the measure of productivity for professorships in Law?"
I think it's cashing the paycheck.
Or maybe breathing.
"excellent professors"
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Professors are just drones. Replace them with robots. Everything should be done with computers on-line and end the needless wasteful spending and onerous college loans.
It's 2013. Time to move on.
Say you want a law professor who could be working at a white shoe firm. You can't pay that kind of money, not even close. But you can pay a very comfortable salary and offer far better hours. Looks like that's exactly what they do.
If by their fruits we shall know them, well, I give you the Supreme Court.
By excellent, I mean highly desirable in the legal market.
Also an apprenticeship program like reading for the law can be part of the educational process. Let the fledgling ambulance chasers learn from people who actually work in the real world not ivory tower elitists.
The people have definitely been given the shaft through the legal profession in many ways. But you're not hiring on the basis of the outcome for society. You're hiring from the market of lawyers as it exists with success defined as that market defines it.
Trooper, I think you're largely right, but existing schools want to keep making big bucks, so they're not going to jump on that. Maybe some big name schools with gigantic endowments will start the turn that way.
"highly desirable in the legal market"
It's not a market if the government is paying the tab. A huge portion of law school income comes from tuition that is inflated by student loans that cannot be repaid.
That bubble is bursting, so we'll see whether they remain highly desirable in the rapidly shrinking legal market.
IANAL, but lawyers I read are saying that much of the work in law has dried up, maybe permanently.
There are way too many lawyers. Fortunately their time on easy street is over. Maybe they can be retrained for something useful.
Like copy machine repairman or sous-chef at the Olive Garden.
Freeman as a home schooler you are the wave of the future. Soon enough college will be home schooled. It is just a matter of time. You have pointed the way that will lead to the end of these big time universities. They are the horse and buggy of the educational experience.
I am still amazed that one can be a law professor without actually having practiced law. How the heck does that happen? Is it really just a bunch of theory? No wonder our system has devolved to what it is.
If that happens, the certifiers will be the next big businesses.
I think a real education in person would be worth the big bucks. But who offers that anymore? It seems like a huge part of an excellent education is inoculating against hubris. What institutions do that these days?
"How are you going to get excellent professors if you pay them comparatively low salaries?"
Freeman, do you think it's really that hard to find excellent law professors?
I don't. And I don't think the salaries are in most cases terribly out of line. What I do find odd is the light work load some seem to have. By all means, pay what the market demands, but for heaven's sake, put them to work and reduce the total number on faculty.
Freehunt said: If that happens, the certifiers will be the next big businesses.
Exactly
One metric of a law professor is whether they're tapped to help in litigation. Like Alan Dershowitz is. It pays well. Or whether their colleagues hold them in high esteem. These are normal metrics.
The refrain of "we need to pay them well so they won't jump to higher paying gigs" is easily tested. Name one who recently left academia for a better paying job.
You can't name one because no one would hire them. Seriously if you want a lawyer you want one that actually practices law not one that only knows theory.
Everyone hates lawyers until they need one.
Freeman, I've worked in the public and private sector w/ attorneys since 1978. The ones who make big bucks in firms work their asses off getting to that point. The attorneys who don't want to work hard look to become professors, judges, and govt. bureaucrat attorneys.
All the lawyers that took the bar with my daughter and worked in private practice have lost their jobs, my daughter is still working. All of their hard work and long hours didn't help them keep their jobs.
Inga said...
Everyone hates lawyers until they need one.
As far as it goes, true.
Not all lawyers are ethical (witness William Westmoreland) and therein lies the rub.
That said, any time anything legal is involved, get a lawyer (preferrably one you can trust*) should be the first words in your head.
* We have one, she owes The Blonde her life.
Freeman Hunt said...
If that happens, the certifiers will be the next big businesses.
Allow me to expand on that:
Gatekeeping is an old endeavor. St. Peter in Heaven. Medieval Guilds. Franz Kafka. Bar exams. Wheat from chaff and wit from chafe. Meade-evil checkpoints.
Discrimination is to humans what inequality is to nature.
Rabel, I think you're defining excellent as "teaches law well" while I'm defining it as "highly marketable."
Indoctrination is expensive!
Compared to what? Or perhaps better, compared to whom?
The lawprof making $170,000 annually is working perhaps six months after subtracting summer, Christmas and Easter vacations. That equates to about $340,000 for an attorney working full time. That income level is very, very rare.
In my circle of friends are several well-educated, high IQ, hard working attorneys. They earn from $85,000 to about $165,000 per year for working long, long hours every day. It ain't easy. Any one of them would leap at the opportunity to earn $170K for a half-time job.
As consumers we have been taught to believe that expensive means quality when it often does not. A high-priced law school is not necessarily better than a lower cost school. Law schools bt design limit admissions so the demand for admission outruns the supply of openings. They can therefore charge more for their product in relation to its actual value, and there is economic fat that allows high salaries and ridiculous benefits.
How to lower the cost? Eliminate all admission requirements except one: if you have completed your junior year of college with at least a 3.0 GPA, come on in. And all classes are taught by practicing attorneys.
Freeman, yes.
Everyone hates lawyers until they need one.
That's only because they won't let me shoot you.
You want to shoot me?
How strange.
I don't hate lawyers. Like any industry there's good and bad. I do think that the law school industry is a fair bit bloated.
And I think law begets law, so the more bloated one side, the more bloated everything gets, so that we're a nation where laws don't really mean anything other than what a person in power wants them to mean, or not mean.
That's craziness. I'm glad there are lawyers who can help sort the system out for those who are suffering under it, but I'd rather the system be significantly more orderly to begin with.
Another way law professors aren't at the same status as others: law journals. What other field sees students as the best arbiters of academic thought? Law journals are a weird system in comparison to other fields.
Michael Haz gets it 99% right.
And we are going to need more lawyers, a lot more lawyers, who will work for cheap after Hillary gets elected and implements HillaryLaw - the legal counterpart to ObamaCare.
A few years ago, before Obamacare passed, my Congressman solicited ideas for what to do in lieu of it. I suggested that they model healthcare education on science education: subsidize the hell out of it and invite more people into the pool. Smart people -- even some really smart people -- will work for next to nothing for long periods of time. The risk is that it cheapens the brand so much that domestic students no longer even chose it as a career, and foreign students are asked to pick up the slack --which by and large they have done. Law has had a special insularity for the longest time: proficiency in English. But as the population changes, so goes the service industry.
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