Phila. Legal Community Holds School Supply Drives

Philadelphia's legal community recently hosted two school supply drives for needy students in the area.

Phila. Legal Community Holds School Supply Drives

Philadelphia's legal community recently hosted two school supply drives for needy students in the area.

Civil Practice: Woodchips Are Real Estate, So School Could Be Liable for Injury

A school district is facing potential liability for injuries a sixth-grade girl suffered on a school playground because a Monroe County judge ruled the layer of woodchips covering the playground qualified as the school's real estate.

Credit Card Use Falls; Borrowing for Cars and School Rises

Consumers increased their borrowing by $10.4 billion in July from June to a record of $2.85 trillion, the Federal Reserve said on Monday. That followed a gain of $11.9 billion in June.

A category that includes auto loans and student loans increased $12.3 billion in July to a record $2 trillion. But a measure of consumers’ credit card debt fell by $1.8 billion to roughly $850 billion. That followed a $3.7 billion decline in the credit card category in June.

July consumer borrowing illustrated economic trends that have surfaced since the recession: Americans are using credit for their most urgent needs, while forgoing debt for discretionary purchases.

The auto and student loan category was up 8.1 percent from a year earlier and rose in every month but one since May 2010. But credit card debt has barely changed in the last year and was nearly 17 percent below its peak, in July 2008, seven months into the recession.

Slow job growth and small wage gains have made many Americans more reluctant to charge goods and services. That could restrain consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of economic activity. Americans may also be hesitant to take on more high-interest debt because of higher Social Security taxes.

At the same time, the weak economy is sending more people back to school. The Federal Reserve’s consumer credit report does not separate student loans and auto loans. But the Federal Reserve Bank of New York quarterly report on consumer credit shows student loan debt has been the biggest factor in borrowing increases since the recession officially ended in June 2009.

Economists expressed hope that as the impact of higher Social Security taxes fades, consumer spending will strengthen in the second half of this year. That forecast also counts on steady job growth to bolster income gains and support higher spending.

But some forces continue to restrain growth, including thousands of federal furloughs, which depressed income growth in July. And job growth has been weaker than first thought.

The Fed’s borrowing report tracks credit card debt, auto loans and student loans but not mortgages, home equity loans or other loans secured by real estate.

Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity

BOSTON — When the members of the Harvard Business School class of 2013 gathered in May to celebrate the end of their studies, there was little visible evidence of the experiment they had undergone for the last two years. As they stood amid the brick buildings named after businessmen from Morgan to Bloomberg, black-and-crimson caps and gowns united the 905 graduates into one genderless mass.

But during that week’s festivities, the Class Day speaker, a standout female student, alluded to “the frustrations of a group of people who feel ignored.” Others grumbled that another speechmaker, a former chief executive of a company in steep decline, was invited only because she was a woman. At a reception, a male student in tennis whites blurted out, as his friends laughed, that much of what had occurred at the school had “been a painful experience.”

He and his classmates had been unwitting guinea pigs in what would have once sounded like a far-fetched feminist fantasy: What if Harvard Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success?

The country’s premier business training ground was trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem. Year after year, women who had arrived with the same test scores and grades as men fell behind. Attracting and retaining female professors was a losing battle; from 2006 to 2007, a third of the female junior faculty left.

Some students, like Sheryl Sandberg, class of ’95, the Facebook executive and author of “Lean In,” sailed through. Yet many Wall Street-hardened women confided that Harvard was worse than any trading floor, with first-year students divided into sections that took all their classes together and often developed the overheated dynamics of reality shows. Some male students, many with finance backgrounds, commandeered classroom discussions and hazed female students and younger faculty members, and openly ruminated on whom they would “kill, sleep with or marry” (in cruder terms). Alcohol-soaked social events could be worse.

“You weren’t supposed to talk about it in open company,” said Kathleen L. McGinn, a professor who supervised a student study that revealed the grade gap. “It was a dirty secret that wasn’t discussed.”

But in 2010, Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s first female president, appointed a new dean who pledged to do far more than his predecessors to remake gender relations at the business school. He and his team tried to change how students spoke, studied and socialized. The administrators installed stenographers in the classroom to guard against biased grading, provided private coaching — for some, after every class — for untenured female professors, and even departed from the hallowed case-study method.

The dean’s ambitions extended far beyond campus, to what Dr. Faust called in an interview an “obligation to articulate values.” The school saw itself as the standard-bearer for American business. Turning around its record on women, the new administrators assured themselves, could have an untold impact at other business schools, at companies populated by Harvard alumni and in the Fortune 500, where only 21 chief executives are women. The institution would become a laboratory for studying how women speak in group settings, the links between romantic relationships and professional status, and the use of everyday measurement tools to reduce bias.

“We have to lead the way, and then lead the world in doing it,” said Frances Frei, her words suggesting the school’s sense of mission but also its self-regard. Ms. Frei, a popular professor turned administrator who had become a target of student ire, was known for the word “unapologetic,” as in: we are unapologetic about the changes we are making.

By graduation, the school had become a markedly better place for female students, according to interviews with more than 70 professors, administrators and students, who cited more women participating in class, record numbers of women winning academic awards and a much-improved environment, down to the male students drifting through the cafeteria wearing T-shirts celebrating the 50th anniversary of the admission of women. Women at the school finally felt like, “ ‘Hey, people like me are an equal part of this institution,’ ” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a longtime professor.

And yet even the deans pointed out that the experiment had brought unintended consequences and brand new issues. The grade gap had vaporized so fast that no one could quite say how it had happened. The interventions had prompted some students to revolt, wearing “Unapologetic” T-shirts to lacerate Ms. Frei for what they called intrusive social engineering. Twenty-seven-year-olds felt like they were “back in kindergarten or first grade,” said Sri Batchu, one of the graduating men.

Students were demanding more women on the faculty, a request the deans were struggling to fulfill. And they did not know what to do about developments like female students dressing as Playboy bunnies for parties and taking up the same sexual rating games as men. “At each turn, questions come up that we’ve never thought about before,” Nitin Nohria, the new dean, said in an interview.

The administrators had no sense of whether their lessons would last once their charges left campus. As faculty members pointed out, the more exquisitely gender-sensitive the school environment became, the less resemblance it bore to the real business world. “Are we trying to change the world 900 students at a time, or are we preparing students for the world in which they are about to go?” a female professor asked.

The Beginning

Nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 2011, Neda Navab sat in a class participation workshop, incredulous. The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Ms. Navab had been the president of her class at Columbia, advised chief executives as a McKinsey & Company consultant and trained women as entrepreneurs in Rwanda. Yet now that she had arrived at the business school at age 25, she was being taught how to raise her hand.

A second-year student, a former member of the military, stood in the front of the classroom issuing commands: Reach up assertively! No apologetic little half-waves! Ms. Navab exchanged amused glances with new friends. She had no idea that she was witnessing an assault on the school’s most urgent gender-related challenge.

Women at Harvard did fine on tests. But they lagged badly in class participation, a highly subjective measure that made up 50 percent of each final mark. Every year the same hierarchy emerged early on: investment bank and hedge fund veterans, often men, sliced through equations while others — including many women — sat frozen or spoke tentatively. The deans did not want to publicly dwell on the problem: that might make the women more self-conscious. But they lectured about respect and civility, expanded efforts like the hand-raising coaching and added stenographers in every class so professors would no longer rely on possibly biased memories of who had said what.

They rounded out the case-study method, in which professors cold-called students about a business’s predicament, with a new course called Field, which grouped students into problem-solving teams. (Gender was not the sole rationale for the course, but the deans thought the format would help.) New grading software tools let professors instantly check their calling and marking patterns by gender. One professor, Mikolaj Piskorski, summarized Mr. Nohria’s message later: “We’re going to solve it at the school level, but each of you is responsible to identify what you are doing that gets you to this point.”

Mr. Nohria, Ms. Frei and others involved in the project saw themselves as outsiders who had succeeded at the school and wanted to help others do the same. Ms. Frei, the chairwoman of the first-year curriculum, was the most vocal, with her mop of silver-brown hair and the drive of the college basketball player she had once been. “Someone says ‘no’ to me, and I just hear ‘not yet,’ ” she said.

After years of observation, administrators and professors agreed that one particular factor was torpedoing female class participation grades: women, especially single women, often felt they had to choose between academic and social success.

One night that fall, Ms. Navab, who had laughed off the hand-raising seminar, sat at an Ethiopian restaurant wondering if she had made a bad choice. Her marketing midterm exam was the next day, but she had been invited on a very business-school kind of date: a new online dating service that paired small groups of singles for drinks was testing its product. Did Ms. Navab want to come? “If I were in college, I would have said let’s do this after the midterm,” she said later.

But she wanted to meet someone soon, maybe at Harvard, which she and other students feared could be their “last chance among cream-of-the-crop-type people,” as she put it. Like other students, she had quickly discerned that her classmates tended to look at their social lives in market terms, implicitly ranking one another. And like others, she slipped into economic jargon to describe their status.

The men at the top of the heap worked in finance, drove luxury cars and advertised lavish weekend getaways on Instagram, many students observed in interviews. Some belonged to the so-called Section X, an on-again-off-again secret society of ultrawealthy, mostly male, mostly international students known for decadent parties and travel.

Women were more likely to be sized up on how they looked, Ms. Navab and others found. Many of them dressed as if Marc Jacobs were staging a photo shoot in a Technology and Operations Management class. Judging from comments from male friends about other women (“She’s kind of hot, but she’s so assertive”), Ms. Navab feared that seeming too ambitious could hurt what she half-jokingly called her “social cap,” referring to capitalization.

“I had no idea who, as a single woman, I was meant to be on campus,” she said later. Were her priorities “purely professional, were they academic, were they to start dating someone?”

As she scooped bread at the product-trial-slash-date at the Ethiopian restaurant, she realized that she had not caught the names of the men at the table. The group drank more and more. The next day she took the test hung over, her performance a “disaster,” she joked.

The deans did not know how to stop women from bartering away their academic promise in the dating marketplace, but they wanted to nudge the school in a more studious, less alcohol-drenched direction. “We cannot have it both ways,” said Youngme Moon, the dean of the M.B.A. program. “We cannot be a place that claims to be about leadership and then say we don’t care what goes on outside the classroom.”

But Harvard Business students were unusually powerful, the school’s products and also its customers, paying more than $50,000 in tuition per year. They were professionals, not undergraduates. One member of the class had played professional football; others had served in Afghanistan or had last names like Blankfein (Alexander, son of Lloyd, chief executive of Goldman Sachs). They had little knowledge of the institutional history; the deans talked less about the depressing record on women than vague concepts like “culture” and “community” and “inclusion.”

As the semester went on, many students felt increasingly baffled about the deans’ seeming desire to be involved in their lives. They resented the additional work of the Field courses, which many saw as superfluous or even a scheme to keep them too busy for partying. Students used to form their own study groups, but now the deans did it for them.

As Halloween approached, some students planned to wear costumes to class, but at the last minute Ms. Frei, who wanted to set a serious tone and head off the potential for sexy pirate costumes, sent a note out prohibiting it, provoking more eye rolls. “How much responsibility does H.B.S. have?” Laura Merritt, a co-president of the class, asked later. “Do we have school uniforms? Where do you stop?”

A few days before the end of the fall semester, Amanda Upton, an investment banking veteran, stood before most of her classmates, lecturing and quizzing them about finance. Every term just before finals, the Women’s Student Association organized a review session for each subject, led by a student who blitzed classmates through reams of material in an hour. Some of the first-years had not had a single female professor. Now Ms. Upton delivered a bravado performance, clearing up confusion about discounted cash flow and how to price bonds, tossing out Christmas candy as rewards.

Like many other women, Kate Lewis, the school newspaper editor, believed in the deans’ efforts. But she thought Ms. Upton’s turn did more to fortify the image of women than anything administrators had done. “It’s the most powerful message: this girl knows it better than all of you,” she said.

Breaking the Ice

One day in April 2012, the entire first-year class, including Brooke Boyarsky, a Texan known for cracking up her classmates with a mock PowerPoint presentation, reported to classrooms for a mandatory discussion about sexual harassment. As students soon learned, one woman had confided to faculty members that a male student she would not identify had groped her in an off-campus bar months before. Rather than dismissing the episode, the deans decided to exploit it: this was their chance to discuss the drinking scene and its consequences. “They could not have gone any more front-page than this,” Ms. Boyarsky said later.

Everyone in Ms. Boyarsky’s classes knew she was incisive and funny, but within the campus social taxonomy, she was overlooked — she was overweight and almost never drank much, stayed out late or dated. After a few minutes of listening to the stumbling conversation about sexual harassment, she raised her hand to make a different point, about the way the school’s social life revolved around appearance and money.

“Someone made the decision for me that I’m not pretty or wealthy enough to be in Section X,” she told her classmates, her voice breaking.

The room jumped to life. The students said they felt overwhelmed by the wealth that coursed through the school, the way it seemed to shape every aspect of social life — who joined activities that cost hundreds of dollars, who was invited to the parties hosted by the student living in a penthouse apartment at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Boston. Some students would never have to seek work at all — they were at Harvard to learn to invest their families’ fortunes — and others were borrowing thousands of dollars a year just to keep up socially.

The discussion broke the ice, just not on the topic the deans had intended. “Until then, no one else had publicly said ‘Section X,’ ” Mr. Batchu said. Maybe it was because class was easier to talk about than gender, or maybe it was because class was the bigger divide — at the school and in the country.

That was only one out of 10 sessions. At most of the others, the men contributed little. Some of them, and even a few women, had grown to openly resent the deans’ emphasis on gender, using phrases like “ad nauseam” and “shoved down our throats,” protesting that this was not what they had paid to learn.

Patrick Erker was not among the naysayers — he considered himself a feminist and a fan of the deans. As an undergraduate at Duke, he had managed the women’s basketball team, wiping their sweat from the floor and picking up their dirty jerseys.

But as he silently listened to the discussion, he decided the setup was all wrong: a discussion of a sex-related episode they knew little about, with “89 other people judging every word,” led by professors who would be grading them later that semester.

“I’d like to be candid, but I paid half a million dollars to come here,” another man said in an interview, counting his lost wages. “I could blow up my network with one wrong comment.” The men were not insensitive, they said; they just considered the discussion a poor investment of their carefully hoarded social capital. Mr. Erker used the same words as many other students had to describe the mandatory meetings: “forced” and “patronizing.”

That week, Andrew Levine, the director of the annual spoof show, was notified by administrators that he was on academic and social probation because other students had consumed alcohol in the auditorium after a performance. (His crime: dining with visiting family instead of staying as he had promised in a contract.) He was barred from social events and put on academic probation as well.

That was just what students needed to believe their worst suspicions about the administration. Ms. Frei had not made the decision about Mr. Levine and worked to cancel his academic probation, he said later, but students called her a hypocrite, a leadership expert who led badly. Hundreds of students soon wore T-shirts that said “Free Andy” or “Unapologetic.”

“Daddy, why are the students hating on you?” Mr. Nohria’s teenage daughters asked him, he told students later.

A few days before commencement, Nathan Bihlmaier, a second-year student, disappeared while celebrating with classmates in Portland, Me. He had last been seen so inebriated that a bartender had asked him to leave a pub. When the authorities told students that Mr. Bihlmaier’s body had been dredged from the harbor, apparently after a fall, Mr. Nohria and Ms. Moon were standing beside them.

The first year of their experiment was ending with a catastrophe that brought home how little sway they really had over students’ actions. Mr. Bihlmaier had not even been the drinking type. In the spirit of feminist celebration, Ms. Sandberg gave a graduation address at the deans’ invitation, but during the festivities all eyes were on Mr. Bihlmaier’s widow, visibly pregnant with their first child.

Amid all the turmoil, though, the deans saw cause for hope. The cruel classroom jokes, along with other forms of intimidation, were far rarer. Students were telling them about vigorous private conversations that had flowed from the halting public ones. Women’s grades were rising — and despite the open resentment toward the deans, overall student satisfaction ratings were higher than they had been for years.

A Lopsided Situation

Even on the coldest nights of early 2013, Ms. Frei walked home from campus, clutching her iPhone and listening to a set of recordings made earlier in the day. Once her two small sons were in bed, she settled at her dining table, wearing pajamas and nursing a glass of wine, and fired up the digital files on her laptop. “Really? Again?” her wife, Anne Morriss, would ask.

Ms. Frei been promoted to dean of faculty recruiting, and she was on a quest to bolster the number of female professors, who made up a fifth of the tenured faculty. Female teachers, especially untenured ones, had faced various troubles over the years: uncertainty over maternity leave, a lack of opportunities to write papers with senior professors, and students who destroyed their confidence by pelting them with math questions they could not answer on the spot or commenting on what they wore.

“As a female faculty member, you are in an incredibly hostile teaching environment, and they do nothing to protect you,” said one woman who left without tenure. A current teacher said she was so afraid of a “wardrobe malfunction” that she wore only custom suits in class, her tops invisibly secured to her skin with double-sided tape.

Now Ms. Frei, the guardian of the female junior faculty, was watching virtually every minute of every class some of them taught, delivering tips on how to do better in the next class. She barred other professors from giving them advice, lest they get confused. But even some of Ms. Frei’s allies were dubious.

At the end of every semester, students gave professors teaching scores from a low of 1 to a high of 7, and some of the female junior faculty scores looked beyond redemption. More of the male professors arrived at Harvard after long careers, regaling students with real-life experiences. Because the pool of businesswomen was smaller, female professors were more likely to be academics, and students saw female stars as exceptions.

“The female profs I had were clearly weaker than the male ones,” said Halle Tecco, a 2011 graduate. “They weren’t able to really run the classroom the way the male ones could.”

Take the popular second-year courses team-taught by Richard S. Ruback, a top finance professor, and Royce G. Yudkoff, a co-founder of a private equity firm that managed billions of dollars. The men taught students, among other lessons, how to start a “search fund,” a pool of money to finance them while they found and acquired a company. In recent years, search funds had become one of the hottest, riskiest and most potentially lucrative pursuits for graduates of top business schools — shortcuts to becoming owners and chief executives.

The two professors were blunt and funny, pushing a student one moment, ribbing another one the next. They embodied the financial promise of a Harvard business degree: if the professors liked you, students knew, they might advise and even back you.

As Ms. Frei reviewed her tapes at night, making notes as she went along, she looked for ways to instill that confidence. The women, who plainly wanted to be liked, sometimes failed to assert their authority — say, by not calling out a student who arrived late. But when they were challenged, they turned too tough, responding defensively (“Where did you get that?”).

Ms. Frei urged them to project warmth and high expectations at the same time, to avoid trying to bolster their credibility with soliloquies about their own research. “I think the class might be a little too much about you, and not enough about the students,” she would tell them the next day.

By the end of the semester, the teaching scores of the women had improved so much that she thought they were a mistake. One professor had shot to a 6 from a 4. Yet all the attention, along with other efforts to support female faculty, made no immediate impact on the numbers of female teachers. So few women were coming to teach at the school that evening out the numbers seemed almost impossible.

As their final semester drew to a close, the students were preoccupied with the looming question of their own employment. Like graduates before them, the class of 2013 would to some degree part by gender after graduation, with more men going into higher-paying areas like finance and more women going into lower-paying ones like marketing.

Ms. Navab, who had started dating one of the men — with an M.D. and an M.B.A. — from the Ethiopian dinner, had felt freer to focus on her career once she was paired off. She was happy with her job at a California start-up, but she pointed out that she and some other women never heard about many of the most lucrative jobs because the men traded contacts and tips among themselves.

This was the lopsided situation that women in business school were facing: in intellectual prestige, they were pulling even with or outpacing male peers, but they were not “touching the money,” as Nori Gerardo Lietz, a real estate private equity investor and faculty member, put it. A few alumnae had founded promising start-ups like Rent the Runway, an evening wear rental service, but when it came to reaping big financial rewards, most women were barely in the game.

At an extracurricular presentation the year before, a female student asked William Boyce, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital firm, for advice for women who wanted to go into his field. “Don’t,” he laughed, according to several students present.  Male partners did not want them there, he continued, and he was doing them a favor by warning them.

Some women protested or walked out, but others said they believed he was telling the truth. (In interviews, Mr. Boyce denied saying women should not go into venture capital, but an administrator said student complaints prompted the school to contact the firm, which he had left decades before.)

The deans had not focused on career choice, earning power or staying in the work force; they felt they first needed to address campus issues. Besides, the earning gap posed a dilemma: they were hoping fewer students would default to finance as a career. “Have the courage to make the choices early in your life that are determined by your passions,” Mr. Nohria told students.

Plenty of women had taken Mr. Ruback and Mr. Yudkoff’s classes on acquiring and running businesses, including Ms. Upton, who had delivered the crackerjack finance presentation. She counted 30 to 40 classmates planning search funds, all men except for a no-nonsense engineer named Jennifer Braus. The professors eventually decided to finance and advise Ms. Braus, hoping other Harvard women would follow.“Nothing succeeds like success,” Mr. Ruback said.

Ms. Upton decided to take a far lower-risk job managing a wealthy family’s investments in Pittsburgh, where her fiancé lived. “You can either be a frontier charger or have an easier, happier life,” she said.

Looking Ahead

Of all the ceremonies and receptions during graduation week, the most venerated was the George F. Baker Scholar Luncheon, for the top 5 percent of the class, held in a sunny dining room crowded with parents who looked alternately thrilled and intimidated by what their offspring had achieved.

In recent years, the glory of the luncheon had been dimmed by discomfort at the low number of female honorees. But this year, almost 40 percent of the Baker scholars were women. It was a remarkable rise that no one could precisely explain. Had the professors rid themselves of unconscious biases? Were the women performing better because of the improved environment? Or was the faculty easing up in grading women because they knew the desired outcome?

“To my head, all three happened,” Professor Piskorski said. But Mr. Nohria said he had no cause to think the professors had used the new software, and the subjective participation scores, to avoid gender gaps. “Sunshine is the best disinfectant,” he said, a phrase that he said had guided him throughout his project.

One of the Baker scholars was Ms. Boyarsky, the classroom truth-teller. Two hours after the luncheon, she stepped up to a lectern to address thousands of graduates, faculty members and parents. Of the two dozen or so men and only 2 women who had tried out before a student committee, she had beaten them all, with a witty, self-deprecating speech unlike any in the school’s memory.

“I entered H.B.S. as a truly ‘untraditional applicant’: morbidly obese,” she said.

The theme of her speech was finding the courage to make necessary but painful changes. “Courage is a brand new H.B.S. professor, younger than some of her students, teaching her very first class on her very first day,” she said. “Courage is one woman” — the one who reported the groping episode — “who wakes the entire school up to the fact that gender relations still have a long way to go at H.B.S.”

And, Ms. Boyarsky continued, she had lost more than 100 pounds during her final year at Harvard. “Courage was then me battling the urge to be defensive — something I believe I had been for a long time about this particular issue — and taking a hard, honest look within myself to figure out what had prevented change,” she said.

Even before she finished, her phone was buzzing with e-mails and texts from classmates. She was the girl everyone wished they had gotten to know better, the graduation-week equivalent of the person whose obituary made you wish you had followed her work. She had closed the two-year experiment by making the best possible case for it. “This is the student they chose to show off to the world,” Ms. Moon said. For the next academic year, she was arranging for second-year students to lead many of the trickiest conversations, realizing students were the most potent advocates.

The administrators and the class of 2013 were parting ways, their experiment continuing. The deans vowed to carry on but could not say how aggressively: whether they were willing to revise the tenure process to attract more female contenders, or allow only firms that hired and promoted female candidates to recruit on campus. “We made progress on the first-level things, but what it’s permitting us to do is see, holy cow, how deep-seated the rest of this is,” Ms. Frei said.

The students were fanning out to their new jobs, full of suspense about their fates. Because of the unique nature of what they had experienced, they knew, every class alumni magazine update and reunion would be a referendum on how high the women could climb and what values the graduates instilled — the true verdict on the experiment in which they had taken part.

As Ms. Boyarsky glanced around her new job as a consultant at McKinsey in Dallas, she often noticed that she was outnumbered by men, but she spoke up anyway. She was dating more than she had at school, she added with shy enthusiasm.

“I am super excited to go to my 30th reunion,” she said.

Brent McDonald and Hannah Fairfield contributed reporting.

DealBook: Obama Says Law School Should Be Two, Not Three, Years

Bits Blog: Code to Joy: The School for Poetic Computation Opens

DealBook: Debating, Yet Again, the Worth of Law School

Harry Campbell

In the debate over whether law schools are worth what they cost students, sober analysis often seems to give way to angry rhetoric.

The heated response to the recently released paper titled “The Economic Value of a Law Degree,” which found that a law degree on average had $1 million in value, thus was no surprise. The indomitable Elie Mystal at the Above the Law blog, called the study “garbage,” stating that it was an “advertising piece for law schools still hoping that they can trick prospective law students into making bad choices.”

What does this study do that it can inspire such anger? The paper looks at what a law school graduate can expect to earn from a law degree. The authors, Michael Simkovic, a law professor, and Frank McIntyre, a labor economist, find that the “mean annual earnings premium of a law degree is approximately $53,300” a year, and that the average pretax value of a law degree over a lifetime was $1 million. In other words, the average law school graduate can expect to earn about one million dollars more than if they had not gone to law school.

Averages, though, are only part of the story, as they can be biased upward by a small number of high earners while many others make nothing. Mr. Mystal’s critique strongly focused on this point.

But the authors also found that median additional lifetime earnings for those with a law degree were $610,000. That means half of law school graduates made more and half less than this amount over their lifetime. So even at the 25th percentile, lifetime additional earnings were $350,000.

Thus, the earnings for 75 percent of law school graduates easily exceeded the amount of tuition paid, even with tuition at about $50,000 a year. The authors also found that the median law degree holder earned 60 percent more than the median college graduate.

This data refutes some of the arguments made by those who say law school is a “scam.” It is no surprise that this study would be attacked by many of the same people. After all, the law school scam industry has been bountiful for some, just like being a Kardashian.

To be fair, this criticism is also well intentioned. These commentators are springing to the defense of real law students who cannot find jobs. But it is simply that, and when the rhetoric dies down, perhaps this paper will turn to a more serious and needed study of what is going on in the law market and what the true value of a law degree really is. (And yes, in fair disclosure, my bias is that of a tenured professor at a major law school.)

In particular, even beyond its salary points, the paper by Professors Simkovic and McIntyre makes a number of new points that should inform the debate. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on lawyer salaries is often cited to justify the assertion that law school is not economically justified based on current lawyer salaries.

The study’s first major point is that these Bureau of Labor Statistics figures are probably biased downward. The reason is that the numbers do not include the salaries of self-employed lawyer, who are not only sole practitioners but also mostly law firm partners.

Among the AmLaw 100, the top 100 grossing law firms in the country, the average partner earned $1.47 million in 2012. This study corrects this downward bias by using broader-based data compiled by the Census Bureau.

Projections by the statistics bureau are often cited as supporting a shortage of jobs for law school graduates. But to my knowledge no one has actually looked back at prior years to see how accurate these forecasts have been. It may well be that the statistical projections are unreliable or it may not, but no one has even looked.

The study’s second major point is that loan default rates for law graduates are much lower than for college graduates. The Department of Education only reports default rates for independent law schools.

Using these figures, which go through the recession into 2011, the authors project that the average default rate for law school students who graduated in 2009 was roughly 3 percent. By contrast, the default rate for students with an undergraduate education or less was 19.2 percent.

The default rate among law schools varies significantly, and some, like Vermont Law School, had a 0 percent default rate. The authors cite this finding as justifying the conclusion that most law school graduates are earning enough to cover their debt, refuting a common claim made by commentators.

Because this data is based on numbers provided by independent law schools, which tend to rank in lower tiers, default rates at more highly ranked schools may be even lower.

The study’s third major point is that about 40 percent of lawyers currently do not practice law. Much has been said about the number of law school graduates who are not finding law jobs, and surely there are many who do want law jobs but cannot find one.

The full-time employment rate for law graduates who obtained legal jobs was only at 56.2 percent last year, according to the American Bar Association. But given these figures, it appears this has always been the case, and it is hard not to conclude that many lawyers do not go to law school to be lawyers (again, no one has really looked to see if this is true or not, though). Indeed, according to the Simkovic-McIntyre study, 50 percent of senators and 10 percent of chief executives at large companies are lawyers.

While the attacks on the article will probably continue, it would be more beneficial to everyone if the paper instead inspires a deeper look at the data. To my knowledge, this is the first study performed by a professional labor economist to look at this issue since the financial crisis.

Much of the previous research has been akin to forecasting the weather during a hurricane. The biggest critics of law schools have looked at the current data and simply assumed it would always be the case.

To be sure, the job market for lawyers has historically been a cyclical, and it is currently at a low. Law jobs are harder to find, and law school graduates have too often been left struggling. This is one thing that has always been the case, but it is more so now.

Still, no graduate program promises its graduates a job. Just look at those offering doctorates in English. But even if 75 percent of students have an economic justification for law school, not everyone does. In this light, every potential student should do a real cost-benefit assessment in light of the law school tuition he or she will be paying.

This study steps outside the current tempest to look at data over a period of decades. Since only 2 percent of a law school graduate’s lifetime earnings come in the first year after graduation, the longer term is arguably a better measure; looking at current employment rates is only one part of that picture.

Ultimately, that is what the debate over law school boils down to these days. Will the recent turbulence persist, or will the historical data win out? If the current figures represent the new normal, something about law has changed and there will be fewer jobs going forward.

But that may not be the case. The market may recover, as markets tend to do and as the population grows. There may even be more legal jobs if, for example, the Dodd-Frank Act becomes a full-employment act for lawyers.

As for the argument that technology has changed everything in the law market, I was struck by a quote in a study from the Harvard Law Review in 1901, decrying modern technology by stating, “[t]he stenographer and the typewriter have monopolized what was his work … and he sits outside of the business tide.”

This quote from a hundred years ago shows that claiming change is afoot – bringing obsolescence and wholesale disruption in the law market – is a century-old phenomenon. The question is whether this time is different.

Proposal by ABA Alarms Law School Diversity Advocates

A proposal to tighten the American Bar Association's bar passage requirement for law schools hasn't gone over well with some advocates for diversity in the legal profession.

U.S. Standards for School Snacks Move Beyond Cafeteria to Fight Obesity

“Parents and schools work hard to give our youngsters the opportunity to grow up healthy and strong, and providing healthy options through school cafeterias, vending machines and snack bars will support their great efforts,” Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, said in a statement.

The new rules were required under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was passed by Congress in 2010 with broad bipartisan support. The law, supported by Michelle Obama and drafted with an unusual level of cooperation between nutrition advocates and the food industry, required the Agriculture Department to set nutritional standards for all foods sold in schools.

The department had previously set the standards for fats, sugars and sodium in meals prepared in schools, and the new rules bring other foods under similar standards. When schools open in the fall of 2014, vending machines will have to be stocked with things like whole wheat crackers, granola bars and dried fruits, instead of M&Ms, Cheese Nips and gummy bears.

“By teaching and modeling healthy eating habits to children in school, these rules will encourage better eating habits over a lifetime,” said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which worked on the legislation. “They mean we aren’t teaching nutrition in the classroom and then undercutting what we’re teaching when kids eat in the cafeteria or buy food from the school vending machines.”

Health advocates are taking the same approach to curb the consumption of fatty, sugary and salty foods that they did to reduce smoking: educating children in the hopes that they will grow up healthier and perhaps pass along healthy eating behavior to their parents.

Ms. Wootan said she was pleased that the rules would prevent the sale of sugary sports drinks like Gatorade in high schools. The drinks have already been withdrawn from elementary and middle schools, but Ms. Wootan said teenagers mistakenly think such drinks are healthier than sodas. “All they are is a sugary drink with added salt,” she said.

Some Republicans were critical of the new rules. Representative Lee Terry, a Republican from Nebraska, tweeted his opposition using the hashtag “nannystate” and writing “RIP tater tots.” Schools could probably sell Tater Tots, a hash-brown potato nugget made by Ore-Ida, if they were baked instead of fried.

Schools and big food and beverage companies have been trying to improve the nutritional quality of food sold in educational institutions for some time. The American Beverage Association, which lobbies on behalf of the beverage makers, noted that its members had already reduced the calories in drinks that are shipped to schools by 90 percent.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents big food companies, applauded the new rules, though it said it would continue to encourage the Agriculture Department to phase them in gradually.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the agriculture secretary. He is Tom Vilsack, not Vilsak.

Colorado's high court upholds school funding

DENVER (AP) - The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Colorado's school funding system is constitutional, siding with the state in a landmark lawsuit filed by parents and school districts challenging the way schools are funded.

Law School Offers A Second Chance to Rejected Students

One law school is giving applicants who don't make the initial admissions cut a second chance to prove they have what it takes. And it's doing it for free.

ALI Names Harvard Law School Prof as New Director

Daniel J. Meltzer, the Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is set to take over as the director of the American Law Institute in June 2014.

Consumer Debt Increases on Car and School Loans

WASHINGTON (AP) — American consumers borrowed more in November to buy cars and attend school, but they stayed cautious about using their credit cards.

The Federal Reserve said Tuesday that consumers increased their borrowing in November by $16 billion from October to a seasonally adjusted record of $2.77 trillion.

Borrowing that covers autos and student loans increased $15.2 billion. A category that measures credit card debt rose just $817 million.

The sharp difference in the borrowing gains illustrates a broader trend that began after the recession. Four years ago, Americans carried $1.03 trillion in credit card debt, a high. In November, that figure was 16.5 percent lower.

At the same time, student loan debt has increased significantly. The category that includes auto and student loans is 22.8 percent higher than in July 2008. Many Americans who have lost jobs have gone back to school to get training for new careers.

The November increase also reflected further gains in auto sales, which rose 13.4 percent in 2012 to top 14 million units for the first time in five years. The need to replace vehicles lost to Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast may have also contributed to the gain.

Consumer spending rebounded in November, helped by lower gas prices and solid job growth that carried over into December. Employers added 155,000 jobs in December and 161,000 in November.

Steady hiring may have encouraged consumers to keep borrowing and spending, despite concerns about the sharp tax increases and government spending cuts that were scheduled to occur at on Jan. 1.

Still, some analysts expect borrowing and spending may have slowed in December as budget negotiations in Washington intensified. Congress and the White House did not reach a deal to avert sharp tax increases until Jan. 1. And they delayed tougher decisions about spending cuts for two more months.

Consumer confidence fell in both November and December, which may slow spending in December. Consumer spending drives about 70 percent of economic activity.

Law School Enrollment Continues to Decline

Approximately 8,000 fewer first-year law students will show up nationwide this year compared to two years ago, when enrollment reached an all-time high, according to the American Bar Association. This year's numbers represent a 15 percent decline since then and a 9 percent decline since last year.

Fla. Law School Launches Human Rights Collaboration in Colombia

By Karen Sloan All Articles 

The National Law Journal

November 30, 2012

The human rights programs at two Colombian law schools will get a boost from the U.S. government and the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has allocated $757,200 for the law school to help establish the Colombian Caribbean Human Rights Center, which will promote research and community service.

The center will train students at the Universidad del Magdalena and Universidad del Norte in international human rights standards, human rights advocacy, and how to assist vulnerable populations including minorities and displaced people. The law schools are located in Santa Marta and Barranquilla, Colombia, respectively.

"Respect for the rights of individuals, especially vulnerable populations, is vital to the development of the democracy and economy of a nation," said Jon Mills, who heads the law school's Center for Governmental Responsibility and will help direct the new project. "We are honored to have this opportunity to work with two distinguished Colombian universities on such an important priority for the U.S. government."

Administrators noted that the recent end of a civil war in the South American country and free trade agreements have made the advancement of human rights there of greater interest to the United States. Colombia is a close trading partner with Florida.

The Levin College of Law will work alongside the UF College of Education and Center for Latin American Studies on the project, which is slated to last three years. Plans call for close collaboration between UF and the partner law schools in mounting workshops in Colombia; creating opportunities for Colombian law faculty and students to study in Florida; and financing research partnerships.

"The higher education sector is rapidly developing in Latin America and the Caribbean," education professor Pilar Mendoza said. "The University of Florida is uniquely positioned to take advantage of these developments and engage in these types of collaborations."

Law School Dean's Eagerness to Innovate Brings Promotion

By Karen Sloan All Articles 

The National Law Journal

November 19, 2012

George Washington University Law School dean Paul Berman
Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi / NLJ

Paul Schiff Berman has been at the helm of the George Washington University Law School only since July 2011, but his willingness to experiment caught the eye of university leaders. Provost Steven Lerman announced on November 12 that Berman would leave the deanship at the start of 2013 to assume the newly created position of vice provost for online education and academic innovation. In that role, Berman will spearhead the university's "efforts to realize the great promise of online and hybrid education," Lerman said in announcing the move.

Berman came to George Washington after three years as dean at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. The National Law Journal spoke with him about his new job and his leadership of the law school. His answers have been edited for length.

NLJ: It's a little ironic that a law school dean will head an online education and academic innovation effort, given that law schools aren't exactly known to embrace technology or change. How did you end up in this position?

Berman: I am very interested in thinking about the future of legal education and education more generally. I believe that there is a tremendous amount that is good and strong at the core of the educational structure, but I also think there is a lot that needs to change to make our education models work in the 21st century. Legal academia is what I know, and so I have worked in both of my deanships to find places to innovate and try to transform some of the models for legal education. Increasingly, it is clear that innovation is necessary on a university level, and it is equally clear that -- while I don't think online will replace in-person universities -- our university can't avoid thinking about how to put educational models online.

NLJ: What do you think you did at the law school level that indicated to the university's higher-ups that you are the right man for this job?

Berman: In general, I demonstrated the ability to move ideas forward more quickly than is typical in the academy. Specifically, we created a degree program with the business school on the law and business of government contracting, which was designed as a business master's degree where executives would get half business content and half government contracts content. In the intellectual property arena, the law faculty has voted to create a master's degree for non-lawyers who want to learn about law but don't need the three years of a law degree.

My willingness to think about how legal education can reach people beyond those who plan to be lawyers made it clear that I was interested in expanding the scope of education, generally, to populations that have historically not been included in the educational model.

NLJ: Innovation is a bit of a buzzword. What will you actually be doing in your new job?

Berman: It's a little premature for me to say, precisely, what programs we're going to launch. This is the beginning of a process. Having said that, I think that the opportunities are wide open. There are a number of different types of online education models that are interesting. I think that one of [George Washington's] great strengths is the fact that it is a great convening entity for thought leadership and policy discussions. It's in D.C., so we have access to policymakers. I think that can be extended online to create more of a forum, in real time, for national and global public policy, think tank-type discussions that don't require everyone to come to D.C. Can we expand the model of the academic conference so it has an even broader scope and scale? That's one thing I'd love to explore.

NLJ: Eighteen months is a relatively short tenure as dean. What stamp do you think you will leave on the law school?

Berman: We put a lot in motion. From a programmatic point of view, we expanded our professional development training program for all first-year students. We created a one-on-one mentoring program, where every student gets assigned to an alumnus in practice. We launched the two programs for non-lawyers, which I mentioned earlier. I think we expanded the energy put into our alumni and development, and we recalibrated the law school's economic model to respond to the changing economics of law school and changing applicant pools, and so forth. I feel as if the law school is on quite a strong trajectory.

Promoters Hope Law School Plays in Peoria

Law school enrollments are on the decline and job prospects for law graduates have deteriorated, but the idea of launching additional law schools continues to intrigue university administrators and lawyers.

A small group of judges and prominent attorneys in Peoria, Ill., has quietly been exploring the feasibility of opening a law school at Bradley University -- a private school with about 6,000 students. That effort has been under way for the past year, but came to light on October 21 after a columnist for the Peoria Journal Star caught wind.

The Bradley University College of Law is far from a reality, cautioned U.S. District Judge James Shadid of Peoria, who is leading the effort. But an early study has indicated demand for a law school that would largely serve aspiring attorneys who live within about 150 miles of the central Illinois city, he said.

"The more we explored, the more it seemed like it might be possible," Shadid said. The law school closest to Peoria is the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, close to a two-hour drive away, he said.

The state already has nine law schools, six of which are about 3 1/2 hours away in Chicago. But law students who want to attend a private school in Illinois have no options outside of Chicago, Shadid said, and Peoria is bound to charge lower tuition. "Cost is very important to students today, and I can't imagine how we couldn't be less than the Chicago-area schools," he said.

To succeed, the law school would need to differentiate itself from competitors, possibly through a focus on health law or intellectual property. Those fields would dovetail nicely with Peoria's location as the home of the University of Illinois College of Medicine and the headquarters of Caterpillar Inc., Shadid said.

The exploratory committee has yet to determine how much tuition would be, or even how much it would actually cost to open a law school. Shadid envisions a total enrollment of about 300 students, but organizers have no timeline. For now, the early results of the feasibility study have been turned over to Bradley University administrators. University President Joanne Glasser has been supportive, Shadid said.

The idea has a redevelopment angle. Supporters hope a law school would spur economic development in Peoria's downtown, and Mayor Jim Ardis told the Journal Star that he likes the idea.

Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law Dean Gary Roberts, a Bradley University alumnus and a member of the feasibility committee, said it may seem a strange time to contemplate yet another law school. But the fact that legal education is under significant pressure to change might make the timing perfect, he said.

"The market is telling us that we need a different model of education," he said. "Changing an existing law school is like turning the Titanic."

Subscribe to The National Law Journal

You must be signed in to comment on an article

Sign In or Subscribe
">

The Boss: Revolution Foods’ Chief, on Healthier School Meals

My mother taught business skills at a local high school, then put herself through law school at the age of 40. Now, at 63, she has a thriving solo law practice in San Antonio. My father was a community banker and knew everyone in town. I have two brothers, who are 3 and 11 years younger.

When I was 14, I applied to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, after my mother and I visited at the suggestion of a friend. I was accepted. But we weren’t rich. I came back every summer and worked as a waitress in San Antonio to earn money.

After high school, I attended Boston College, studying finance and accounting. I was an unpaid intern one summer at Merrill Lynch in Boston, and another summer at Smith Barney in San Francisco. That job was also unpaid, so I worked at night as a waitress to support myself.

After graduating in 1997, I joined Citibank as a global analyst trainee. I was in the first group of women to join the bank’s high-yield corporate finance group. Over Thanksgiving that same year, I met my future husband, Steve Richmond, an investment banker and budding entrepreneur.

About 18 months later, I followed my managing director to FleetBoston Robertson Stephens, to help found its high-yield finance group. But by 2000, I wanted to pursue my interest in education, so I left and moved to Nairobi to help start a school for children with learning disabilities. It was called the Kenya Community Center for Learning. I wrote the business plan, secured the facility, raised the funds, helped recruit students and paid the bills. I also taught geography and life skills and sports, which convinced me that my career should be in education reform and health. I still serve on the center’s board.

After I returned in 2002, Steve and I moved to San Francisco, where we married two years later. He worked on a start-up,and I found a job at Resources for Indispensable Schools and Educators, or RISE, a nonprofit that aims to recruit and retain quality teachers in public schools in low-income areas.

I decided to get an M.B.A., and enrolled at the. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. The summer of 2005, I worked as an associate for Leadership Public Schools, a Bay Area nonprofit that operates a network of charter high schools in low-income communities. While helping to design a food service program, I continuedto see a lack of healthy, quality meals.

At school, I met Kirsten Tobey, a fellow student who shared my interest in providing students in need with nutritious meals. We developed a business plan for meals with fresh ingredients at a manageable price, and in 2005 we turned that plan into Revolution Foods.

After earning our degrees in May 2006, we began a pilot program with three charter schools in downtown Oakland. We prepared 300 meals daily in a rented kitchen. We expanded our business in California, then to the Washington, D.C., area. After that, we expanded to Denver, Houston as well as New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and most recently New Orleans.

We now have 850 partner schools in 11 states. Nearly 900 employees at our seven regional kitchens prepare about 200,000 healthy breakfasts, lunches, snacks and dinners for children daily.

Kirsten and I still work together — we’re both mothers now. We have learned that a good team is essential, and so is humor — no matter what the situation.

Penn State Law School Establishes Partnership With Dubai Institute

By Karen SloanAll Articles

The National Law Journal

September 14, 2012

The Persian Gulf is turning into the destination du jour for American law schools looking for academic partnerships.

Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law and Policy last month announced that it is helping the Qatar Foundation develop a graduate legal training institute in Doha, Qatar. Now, the Pennsylvania State University Dickinson School of Law will collaborate with the Dubai Judicial Institute in the United Arab Emirates.

Under the agreement, the schools will foster research partnerships, joint conferences, faculty exchanges and practice opportunities for students. The programs will offer students and faculty insight into the increasingly international practice of law, according to officials from both schools.

"For example, Penn State law students and faculty will be able to create a study visit to the DJI to learn about law and legal institutions of the UAE and to experience a unique commercial hub in the Middle East," said Penn State dean Philip McConnaughay.

The partnership will support the mission of the Dubai Judicial Institute, said director general Al Sumaiti -- to train attorneys and judges and conduct research. The institute was founded in 1996 and also offers training for prosecutors and private and public sector agencies.

"We are committed to fostering and adopting initiatives to build on the potential of law students and welcome the opportunity to work with Penn State Law in what will most certainly be a successful and beneficial partnership," Sumaiti said in a written statement.

Karen Bysiewicz, Penn State's associate dean of graduate and international programs, said students have shown a growing interest in the Middle East. "Moreover, Penn State Law is well-positioned to be involved in trainings of lawyers and judges internationally," she said. "We have a number of judges or former judges on our faculty. We also have faculty members with significant international research, as well an extensive collaboration with the Penn State School of International Affairs."