Never Let Me Go

I was unaware that the New York Times was in the business of publishing scary stories. But then I opened up the paper on Sunday and, much to my horror, discovered how incredibly wrong I had been.

There, in full gore-splattered 3D horror-vision, was a feature-length article detailing just how those of us who chose to take the path down law school way would be slaughtered in the end.

The article casually throws around phrases like, "a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades," "recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated" and "some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished." The article details the awful job market for new attorneys with a sadistic excess for gore not seen since the heady days of the Hostel and Saw movies.

The most interesting thing about the whole thing is how law schools are presented as the monster who enjoys throwing kids into the grinder. To keep with the horror movie metaphor -- if law students are the airheaded camp counselors who make up the film's body count, law school is the crazy psycho who lured us all to its idyllic shores in order to satisfy its own blood lust.

Perhaps my favorite detail about the whole mess is how law schools manipulate the numbers in order to stay afloat in the rankings. They do so by offering low-paying temp jobs to some of their graduates in positions designed to last until the statistics are counted. The deadline for reporting what percentage of the alumni are employed 9 months after graduation passes, the school happily reports its artificially inflated 97% employment rate, and everyone moves on.

For instance, right now I work part-time for what is basically the minimum wage doing research for a professor. My commission, if you will, conveniently expires on February 24th, which the calendar tells me is just about nine months from graduation. After that, I'll be fully unemployed and have to figure something else out.

Am I bitter about this?

No.

I fully subscribe to this fiction. Why? Because the fact that the school participates in this mild charade only helps me and my fellow graduates. I provide the school with labor they don't really need that much (isn't research what 1Ls are for?). In return, I get spending money. And then we both become the beneficiaries of the inflated rankings. The school maintains its high rank and keeps charging money as a top school. Meanwhile, the value of my diploma increases because -- whether we like it or not -- the law school rankings correlate directly with how people in the community asses the quality of our education.

Imagine a world where the school didn't provide these "jobs" for me and dozens of others. Here, the school would have to report real employment rates closer to the hair-raising truth (who knows what they are? 65 percent? 70 percent? Is that too optimistic?). These numbers would make the school's rank go down, which would make our diplomas less valuable when compared to those of other schools. And while I know that a school's ranking is not an accurate representation of the quality of its education, you have to be pretty naive to think that admission and hiring decisions are not influenced by those damned lists. Everything is sacrificed at their altar, and there's not one thing anyone can do about it.

So we all happily participate in the conspiracy. And I do mean all -- quick research indicates that at least a dozen other law schools have similar programs. There's no other choice -- not for the school and not for us -- if anybody wants to stay relevant and employable.

And so we find ourselves here, in a very different kind of scary story. This is no longer the gory slasher film that the opening scenes suggested.

Instead, this mass delusion and happy participation in the lie is what lies at the heart of more dystopian horror narratives, such as Brave New World and 1984. Now we have to deal with a world where the whole damn system is a sham. And that, I think, is way more horrifying than one lone nut.