One of my research assistants transferred to another law
school last week. This was hardly a
surprise. His rejection letter from the
other school might as well have said, “Do not worry. We plan to admit you as soon as we do not
have to report your relatively low GPA and LSAT to US World News and Reports or
other institutions that rank law schools.
We look forward to having you pay two years of full tuition.” Similar winks and nods occur throughout
contemporary legal pedagogy.
Whether law
schools should encourage transfers is a fair question on which I have no
intelligent opinion. On the one hand, if
faculty are free to move to higher ranking institutions, so should students. On the other hand, for purposes of institutional stability, there is an obvious difference
between faculty members who over a thirty year career spend ten years at three
different institutions and law students changing schools after a year. I’m a bit of a stick in the mud, so I do not
like lots of transferring, but that is hardly a good reason to impose my
preference on others.
The problem
with continuing the above line of analysis is that contemporary law school
transfer practices are strategies for increasing tuition dollars without risking the
paper credentials of the class that have nothing to do with such concerns as
institutional stability and free choice.
Administrators are well aware that in normal times they cannot gain more
tuition dollars by increasing the size of their first year class without
lowering their institution's average GPA and LSAT numbers ( in recent years, you
cannot even maintain the size of your class without lowering average GPA and
LSAT). If, however, the same students
are told go elsewhere for a year and then transfer, the law school gets two-thirds
the tuition revenue with no cost to paper credentials.
The result
is that law school student credential reports are presently often as misleading
as law school student employment reports.
The unreported credentials of the second and third year students in schools that
accept substantial transfers are likely to be much weaker than the reported
credentials of their first year class. No good reason exists, however, for
thinking first year credentials far more important than second or third year
credentials. To the extent students have
an interest in peers with strong paper credentials, that interest remains
constant over time. Employers making
decisions whether to hire a law school graduate should be more concerned with
the unreported credentials of that student’s third year class than with the
reported credentials of the first year class.
Of course,
a fair case can be made that these credentials are meaningless. But to the extent they are meaningful they
ought to be accurate. And the present
practice of not counting transfers in student body credentials promotes
or is misrepresentation.
Once upon a
time, we thought that universities ought to have high ethical standards in
large part because, as the place where professional socialization took place, modeling
the very best professional ethics was extraordinarily important (we also
thought universities were places of higher learning rather than revenue
generating bodies, but that is another post).
Increasingly, however, as universities are told they ought to behave
more like businesses, those who insist on higher standards are mere eggheads,
who no doubt are unfamiliar with practice. I think a bar ethics commission would look
askance at a lawyer who cooked numbers in the same way as we encourage law
schools to cook the credentials of their students. Perhaps law schools with “University” as part
of the name ought to set a better example.