“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University
This article lit up the screens of every laptop in one of my classes as students passed it around on gchat. I notice these things because I sit in the back of the class and can see everything. (I don't bring a computer either, otherwise I'll sit on gchat or whatever and I may as well have stayed up in my underpants)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Law schools love statistics. From top to bottom, law schools release shady and overly rosey reports about employment and salaries to entice potential law students into taking out non-dischargeable student loans. Are the law schools really to blame, especially a lower ranked school like TJ? Probably not.
Law schools receive more and better students by climbing the USNWR ranks (I'm not entirely sure why this weird system is worshipped the way it is, but it is the world we live in). Schools climb the ranking system, in part, by reporting high employment and high salaries from graduates. This creates a powerful incentive to 'cook the books' to win out. So, if a school wants to keep matriculating students, they have to cheat to compete. Tearing TJ a new one in the NYT probably won't bring the accountability necessary to change this system. To barrow from popular Law and Order actor Ice-T,
"Don't hate the player; hate the game."
The ABA needs to stop the way law schools game the USNWR rankings by cracking down on enron style cheating on the part of law schools to fix this type of problem. Maybe they should change the game and release their own rankings of ABA approved law schools each year.
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