Dive Brief:
- While law school students who graduated with high amounts of debt and no job have tried to sue their law schools before, Anna Alaburda’s case against Thomas Jefferson School of Law in CA.
- The New York Times reports Alaburda claims she would not have enrolled had she known the law school’s job statistics for graduates were misleading, though Thomas Jefferson says it filed the data the American Bar Association’s accrediting arm required.
- Judges in Michigan, Illinois, and New York have thrown out cases from law students who they have said enroll in graduate education at their own risk, though jobs data from law schools has faced significant scrutiny in recent years and the ABA has strengthened its reporting requirements since Alaburda went to law school.
Dive Insight:
Law schools grew for years to accommodate the increasing demand from students wanting to study law, but that created an oversaturation of the job market, which continues to plague law school graduates. The number of students applying to law school has been down for several years as students react to their changing job prospects in the field, and many law schools have reduced the size of their law school cohorts accordingly. At trial, Alaburda will have to overcome the fact that she got one job offer from a law firm after graduating and turned it down.
Law schools may be the latest higher education sector to face scrutiny for their graduates’ outcomes, but they are certainly not the first. More often, of late, for-profit colleges have been at the receiving end of criticism about job placement data. Several are facing investigations and lawsuits by states attorneys general and federal agencies. Meanwhile, the Department of Education is angling to get Congress to allow it to set minimum standards for student outcomes related to accreditation.