Sunday, January 09, 2011
Complicity
The "New York Times" had a good expose yesterday on law schools in the United States and how "corrupt" many of them have become--fudging statistics on post-graduate employment, for example, to create a higher percentage of graduates in the job market than what really exists. The "Times" characterized their fudging of numbers in terms of "Enron-like" manipulation, referring to the defunct energy company that had cooked its books to the point of leading hundreds of thousands of individuals to bankruptcy.
The "Times" also was critical of the ratings system in "US News & World Report," which knowingly publishes these fudged figures on the best and the worst law schools--ratings, by the way, that are used by thousands of individuals every year to determine where they want to spend their hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. Here is the part of the story that I liked the best, and most applicable to this blog:
So much for our media--the "watchdog" meant to protect our interests.
The "Times" also was critical of the ratings system in "US News & World Report," which knowingly publishes these fudged figures on the best and the worst law schools--ratings, by the way, that are used by thousands of individuals every year to determine where they want to spend their hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. Here is the part of the story that I liked the best, and most applicable to this blog:
And what about U.S. News? The editors could, but won’t unilaterally demand better data from law schools. “Do we have the power to do that? Yes, I think we do,” said Robert Morse, who oversees the law school rankings. “But we’d have to create a whole new definition of ‘employed,’ and it would be awkward if U.S. News imposed that definition by itself. It would be preferable if the A.B.A. took a leadership role in this.”
So much for our media--the "watchdog" meant to protect our interests.
