Another reason to hate lawyers...

NYT has an article about how law schools are automatically inflating grades to make their students appear smarter to prospective employers. I do not even know where to begin. The article quotes Deans of some well-known schools as saying a wholesale grade inflation is warranted because their students are disadvantaged against other schools who do the same thing. Basically, it's ok for us to lose any sense of ethical standards because we are doing it to combat all of our competitors' low(ering) ethical standards.

One schools is even removing "C"s from the grading scale. To be fair, law schools have always tried to maintain a bell curve for grading, which put a lot of students in the "average" or middle. There's a shocker, mediocre attorneys.

The momentum for this move? Law school grads are not getting jobs! Another shocker. It's not like we have a surplus, or anything. Every college grad with a diploma can get into some kind of law school (which is not true for other professions, btw). Mount this on top of the ideas that students have about law jobs (mostly through media, Boston Legal, etc) and the idea that it pays a lot of money, and BAAM everyone wants to be a lawyer.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has had a recurring theme of articles about PhD graduates in the humanities (esp. English). The authors argue about the ethics of encouraging students to get a PhD in English because there is a surplus. English PhDs have a difficult time finding a tenure-track position and many staff adjunct positions for years until a position opens. At my small college we had 120 applicants for an open English position. In the Business Department, we get about 25 resumes for open positions.

Will lawyers become like English PhDs? Working for  peanuts and foraging for long-term work? Let's hope so. Honestly, if you believe in a [reasonably] free market, then all labor gluts eventually get worked out. The pain endured by manual laborers as we transitioned to a knowledge (and outsourced) economy has been great. The idea of the "life of the mind" for English PhDs must now being reconciled with the reality of "have no positions in your field". My dream of slowing the open faucet of new JDs might come from the market itself. Whether staunching the flow of law grads ever changes our litigious society is another question. Until we do reduce the numbers of lawyers, please understand, that they DESERVE higher grades. If anyone can make an argument for it sound ethical...it's lawyers.