I had said in response to Debbie’s post that I was going to put up a short post on student “consumerist” attitudes, and my last post may have helped me to frame this in a slightly different way.
I have written about this issue before. In my ten years or so of teaching experience, I have felt an uptick in “consumerist” attitudes among students. This usually involves a complex of traits and factors: an antagonism to any professor behavior with any taint of “paternalism”; a view that the student has paid for a set of services and demands that they be filled; a further view that the student is entitled to use his or her services as he or she wishes, and if that means skipping classes, not doing the reading, not participating in class, disappearing behind a laptop, and so on, then that’s up to him or her; a lack of desire to collaborate with other students, to do anything that’s not directly related to grades, or to do anything that’s not absolutely required. Doubtless others could add more observations to that list. The perennial question about skills versus theory is related to this consumerist attitude, but slightly different. Some students feel especially keenly that the law school’s obligation is to find them a job and/or teach them how to be a lawyer, and thus are especially keen on refusing to engage in any discussion that’s broader, more theoretical, or more normative. But even when a class is practically oriented, they may still feel that how they learn and participate (or don’t) is their own business and no one else’s.
Again, I found some of the discussion about this at the “First Amendment Institutions” conference quite interesting.
A professor from a state law school said that he tells his students that, at his school at least, the students there have been selected, and that not everyone who applied got in; so those students who did get admitted and decided to come have a duty not only to themselves but to others. Another engages his students in grading other students’ work, something he does not to save himself work but to find another way of getting students involved and learning; he tells his students that as long as they engage in this exercise, they have an obligation to each other to give real value to their education and not simply phone it in. Both seemed pleased with how these approaches have worked. I have had somewhat mixed success with an approach of my own. I ban laptops in my legal ethics class, and I have had better participation and a number of students thanking me for doing so. On the other hand, I tell students that if they want to take notes by laptop, they can sign up to do so but must share their notes. The last time I did this, despite the fact that some students insisted, in consumerist fashion, that they know best how to learn for themselves and that they learn best through laptop note-taking, they nevertheless preferred not to sign up to use their laptops if it meant that they would have to share their notes with others, believing (wrongly, in my view) that they would lose a competitive advantage as a result. (Since these were the same students who told me they could only learn via laptop, it’s not clear why they didn’t think they would gain more from using their laptops than they would lose by sharing their notes.) I haven’t heard similar complaints this year, but neither have any of my students been willing to sign up to take notes, and again sharing seems to be the issue. (I will have to think about ways to revise this policy. One of my colleagues at the conference told me that another professor hires one student to take notes for the class, and I might do something like that in the future.)
One conclusion reached by some of my colleagues at the conference is that the consumerist attitude can be disaggregated from the concern about professorial paternalism; that is, students should help each other, participate in class, and otherwise think about others, but not because the professor “knows better.” I think the two are more related than that. There is a fair argument to be made that students have a duty to each other, regardless of whether the professor knows better or not. But it is also true that professors craft these kinds of collaborative policies, or insistence on class participation, that serve as the framework within which students must demonstrate their concern for others. And we do so because, in our view, we do know better. After almost a decade of teaching, I do have an experienced-based, expert sense of what works and doesn’t work for students and for the teaching and learning process. And to my mind, it does involve and require meaningful participation in class. I think I am right to insist on that, and to impose rules that require it; and I think that my students have “bought” into this obligation, and are not simply entitled to tell me to leave them alone to do things as they like.
But more important, perhaps, might be emphasizing a sense of community. As I said in my last post, the scholarly community can be a genuine community. When it is, scholars come together and work together to improve the overall enterprise, regardless of whose name is on the manuscript. That’s what a good faculty workshop should be and sometimes even is. It imposes a duty on both the author, to listen and not just aim to impress or refute, and on the audience, to read and seriously think about the manuscript and how to improve it, and to use questions to help the manuscript rather than to soliloquize, restate their own views yet again, or otherwise puff themselves up. It seems to me that students are also part of a community, a common enterprise; although they may not always feel that way, especially given the competition for grades, it’s true, and they may find at times that they are buoyed up by their membership in a caring and helping community. If that’s right, then they might consider, when trying to decide whether to speak up in class or share notes or doing something else or whether to just retreat into themselves, whether they are both failing in their duty to their community and depriving themselves of one of the most rewarding and engaging parts of the law school experience.
I am not speaking out of undue romanticism; having experienced this for myself, I know that a spirit of community and common mission can exist for students in law school, and that it can be a profoundly important part of one’s education. Perhaps it is something worth reflecting on, and perhaps upon reflection some students will decide that it’s worth laying aside their consumerist attitudes and at least trying to see what law school feels like from a communitarian perspective.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on October 3, 2011 at 11:06 AM
Comments
Mr. Mackie-Mason likes to hear himself talk. But he doesn’t say anything. Just filler.
Posted by: anon | Oct 6, 2011 9:51:42 PM
Gilman Grundy: Of course students can’t learn about every professor’s style before matriculating at a school, but it seems like it’d be pretty easy to at least get a general sense of the culture at the school. If students are interested in that, they can talk to current students, the admissions office, or The Internet, before enrolling.
And any student who’s made it through 17 years of school before law school *should* know that there’s a chance some professors will have certain rules in classrooms. If they care to, they’re free to factor that risk into their decision.
My basic point is that students were never promised that they’d be able to use laptops/skip class/whatever. They lack even a good faith cause to expect that those things would be allowed. So even if consumerism is expected, it rings false to suggest that paying $X in tuition gives someone the right to use a laptop in class.
Anyways, as regards consumerism in general, I think an important point for students to consider (and I think this is the gist of the original post) is that they’re not just consumers. Like any other academic environment, students are part of an academic community, and they owe something to that community. (Maybe not if they’re going to a degree mill, but that’s a different issue.) And so, yes, it’s fair to condemn excessive consumerism when it means students aren’t fulfilling their obligations to their colleagues.
Posted by: Andrew MacKie-Mason | Oct 4, 2011 9:42:38 PM
If you read his book, even Alan Greenspan (who is one of the biggest free market minds out there) understood that fraud kills a free market. He was a serious advocate for the punishment of fraud by the court system.
Posted by: anon | Oct 4, 2011 1:53:24 AM
@Andrew MacKie-Mason – “The thing that’s always struck me about arguments like yours is that the students buy-in to the system that’s in place.”
This argument is only sound if legal education is seen as a free market in which the students are given all of the relevant information before “buying-in”. It is not, students have only limited choice as to which school they go to – nor is it realistic for them to know the foibles of every single professor who might teach them on joining. Students have no real opportunity to discover these things before starting, and only limited opportunity to transfer if they don’t like the way things are at a particular school.
Compare this to the way things work in a private practice law firm, where every client can decide even the format in which their advice is received, and will be most vocal if the provider deviates from their standing instructions.
More to the point, what is being condemned here is the very idea of students acting like consumers, and it is this that I am responding to.
Posted by: Gilman Grundy (AKA FOARP) | Oct 4, 2011 1:25:35 AM
1. I very respectfully asked you for examples of jobs, where the questions “Do you have a job? Did your job require bar passage? What salary do you earn?” were vague. You responded with a slew of questions but not one example of such a job.
2. Another non-response.
3. I asked you for one example of “fraud” and you gave me nothing.
4. Another non-response.
5. You write, “I’m not sure why, exactly, the ABA and law schools are responsible for the federal government’s bad investments.” Interesting, are you able to understand the concept of securities fraud?
6. You characterize my desire to investigate why students choose law school when it costs taxpayer billions and doesn’t lead to jobs as “central planning on a Lenin scale?” So investigating economic activity is now central planning?
7. Finally, a responsive answer.
8. Another non-response.
Mr. Mackie-Mason, this is a very serious issue of criminal fraud against (a) students, (b) taxpayers, (c) the nation’s economy and (d) honest competitor programs. Apparently your sense of morals isn’t upset by what’s happening and you want to turn it into some circuitous “define evil” philosophy 101 debate. I’m not interested.
Posted by: anon | Oct 3, 2011 11:51:06 PM
Anon @10:54:
I would be better able to answer your questions if you would provide a specific example of a school’s data reporting that you believe is fraudulent. Arguing generalities will only get us so far, but even though it’s really outside the scope of this post I’ll do my best to give a quick response.
1. There are clearly grey areas in interpreting what jobs “require bar passage.” Do we include only jobs where a regulatory agency actually makes bar passage a prerequisite to working in the position? Do we include people whose positions have them doing some work that requires bar passage, but also work that does not? (Say a person is hired at a small company as tax lawyer/accountant. Only some of their work is actually law related, but do we count the entire job as “bar passage required”?). Do we count positions where the hiring company makes bar passage a requirement even though no outside agency requires it? What if they say “bar passage strongly preferred”? Or simply “bar passage preferred”? Would it change your answer to the last two if, even though it doesn’t seem to be a requirement, the company has never hired anyone but a lawyer for those positions? Moving on to “JD required,” do we count positions where it can legitimately be said that the law school education was necessary to good performance? Who makes that call?
2. This can’t really be answered without specific examples, but my best guess is that it’s a combination of regulatory rules that *require* the publication of actual numbers, and consumer preference for numbers – even in the presence of unavoidable uncertainty and definitional messes – over a lack of numbers.
3. This is a straw man that doesn’t actually address anything I said.
4. I’m not sure of the relevance. Nor does it require being a mathematician to do basic arithmetic.
5. I’m not sure why, exactly, the ABA and law schools are responsible for the federal government’s bad investments. Again, absent actual fraud by the schools – lying to government regulators about numbers – if student loans turn out to be a bad taxpayer investment, the government should simply stop offering them – or severely limit them.
6. That’s a central-planning suggestion on a scale that would make Lenin proud. We should look into fraud and other things that cause market inefficiency. We shouldn’t prevent adults from making their own mistakes.
7. Every person’s situation is different. I suppose there are some people who actually looked at all of the information available and were defrauded by lies. I’d guess that there are also lots of people who didn’t do all of the research they should have, and are now pissed that other people didn’t do it for them. Of course everyone’s feelings matter in one way or another, but it’s far from clear exactly how those feelings should factor into policy decisions. Simply appealing to their ‘feelings’ doesn’t do anything to clarify that.
8. Again, a straw man not actually responsive to my post.
Regarding “semantic games”: precisely because “this is a very serious matter,” I think it’s important to be clear and correct in the language we use, to be moderate in our tone and serious in our approach to problem solving.
Now, in the interest of not taking up more room on the comment thread with this tangential discussion, I’m not going to respond again here, though I’m more than happy to continue it in another forum. You’ve obviously found my blog, and you’re more than welcome to contact me at the email listed there if you want to keep talking.
Posted by: Andrew MacKie-Mason | Oct 3, 2011 11:31:39 PM
5:15 and 6:19, correct me if I’m wrong but if you went to the UK and Australian governments and asked for $250,000 to attend the school of your choosing they would laugh at you. Their loan programs are much much smaller than the American programs, and their schools make much less money than the American schools. This huge influx of federal money is why America has the best universities in the world as measured by academic productivity, inventions and so on – and I hope you don’t dare challenge this.
America is an exceptional country and its education system is in another universe when compared to Australia or the UK. No offense. It’s like comparing the US military with the UK or Australian military. There is no comparison.
You are also very obviously and insultingly wrong when you claim that those who can’t get a job out of law school are unemployable people who would not have gotten into any other program that would teach job-worthy skills.
Posted by: anon | Oct 3, 2011 11:24:51 PM
Also, please avoid playing semantic games in your response (e.g. “Oh, also: the “market value” of a degree is, by definition, what it sells at on a market. You’re talking about something more along the lines of ROI.”)
This is a very serious matter with hundreds of thousands of victims who lost precious money and years of precious life, and they deserve something better than some Philosophy 101 “define evil” type of response.
Posted by: anon | Oct 3, 2011 11:03:09 PM
That is an astonishing post Mr. Andrew Mackie-Mason, but please allow me to dig a bit into your thought process.
1. What exactly is “grey” about the questions: Do you have a job? Did your job require bar passage? What does your job pay? Please provide examples in your answer.
2. Further, if it’s a “grey area” then why do law schools present hard and concrete number portending to have job placement that is in fact two or three times better than their actual numbers? Why don’t law schools simply state “job placement information is grey and so we can’t give you concrete numbers?”
3. If lying about job placement statistics to lure kids into paying you money that they would have otherwise spent on another program is not fraud, then please give me an example of what you consider fraud.
4. What are your thoughts on Solyndra being investigated by the FBI for defrauding the United States government out of $450 million in federal loan guarantees? You claim to be a mathematician. Are you able to do a back of the envelope estimate of how much federal revenue goes to law schools each year?
5. Having answered that, at what level of missed student loan payments (either due to deferments, IBR or default) should law schools & the ABA be investigated for squandering precious taxpayer money? Please provide a dollar amount. $450 million? $1 billion? $10 billion?
6. If a student is denied the opportunity to learn a skill that the economy could use, because he went to law school to learn a skill that – by virtue of the fact that there are no legal jobs – are of no use to the economy, then shouldn’t we investigate why he/she went to law school, for the sake of the country?
7. What about a student who feels victimized and defrauded because, rather than enter into a program that would have gotten him/her a job, he chose law school. Do this person’s feelings matter?
8. What about the competitor academic programs who are honest, and who lose precious student loan revenue as a result of their honesty. Do they have a right to be upset when law schools beat them out, not by the merit of their program, but rather by lying about job placement numbers?
Posted by: anon | Oct 3, 2011 10:54:00 PM
anon @2:25: I’m always surprised to hear people focus on the fraud side of the issue. Yes, legitimate fraud happens and when it does, it should be dealt with. But (a) there’s a lot of grey area between fraud and perfect reporting, and (b) it’s not clear that perfect reporting should be the goal.
Screaming on and on about how law schools are literally defrauding their students is pointless (in that most people agree it’s wrong) and counterproductive to the kind of serious discussion needed to address the actual structural concerns. Prof. Horwitz’s post is an entry in that serious discussion about what law school should be, and I’m not sure how your comment contributes.
I should also note that students, if they’re intelligent enough to make it through law school, should know that no product will have the market value advertised by the sellers. They should be able to expect companies to be *honest* in their advertising, but value is so subjective and uncertain that anyone relying on “advertised value” as a reliable, determinative factor in decision making is a fool. (Oh, also: the “market value” of a degree is, by definition, what it sells at on a market. You’re talking about something more along the lines of ROI.)
Gilman Grundy: The thing that’s always struck me about arguments like yours is that the students buy-in to the system that’s in place. They know (or should, at least) that some professors will require them to attend class. They know (or should) that some professors won’t allow laptops in class. Etc.
Students (and more importantly, prospective students) are free to use their buying power to try to encourage schools to adopt models more to their liking, or they’re free to vote with their pocketbooks for schools that have a more laissez faire attitude. But so long as the information’s there when they’re choosing to make the purchase, they have no moral entitlement to having things the way they want them to be.
Posted by: Andrew MacKie-Mason | Oct 3, 2011 9:23:33 PM
Anon 2:22 – it’s true in Australia, too. I’m an American myself, but I really dislike these false claims of exceptionalism.
As for this: “They want the school to be honest about the value of the degree, so they aren’t tricked away from a more deserving program.”
The schools should be honest about the values of their degrees, yes. But the issue is that the students who are not finding employment, in most cases, are not eligible for access to “more deserving” programs. The argument in favor of fuller disclosure, as I understand it, is to deter students who will be unemployable from entering law school in the first place, not to shunt them towards “more deserving” programs (that ordinarily will not offer them admission).
Posted by: exceptionalism | Oct 3, 2011 6:19:24 PM
To anon 2:22 re: American exceptionalism. Since 1998, student loans in the UK are income contingent.
Posted by: anon | Oct 3, 2011 5:15:11 PM
Ah, but Student King, we disagree. It happens.
Posted by: anonymous | Oct 3, 2011 3:40:34 PM
Ah, but 3:03:56, while cost alone “has not been the only driver of this phenomenon”, cost alone, as it is today, completely *justifies* this phenomenon.
Posted by: Student King | Oct 3, 2011 3:29:25 PM
Good point Jo. Law schools like to claim your essay, life history blah blah affect the decision but in reality it’s a very simple computation based on your LSAT and GPA.
Posted by: anon | Oct 3, 2011 3:27:45 PM
But the students who have been “selected” are providing the school with more than just money- they are providing LSAT scores and GPAs which will contribute to the school’s USNWR ranking. As an undergraduate who was accepted into many fine law schools, I had no delusions about why I was accepted, notwithstanding comments from the dean and my professors about how much of a special snowflake I was. They never met me. My resume was barely one page long. My professor recommendations were from professors I’d never spoken to until I asked them. One only agreed to do it after I told her my LSAT score and she knew I was a lock for some good schools. The only reason I was accepted was because my LSAT and GPA would contribute to the school’s USNWR ranking. I was a commodity.
So when I am being bought (literally in the form of scholarship money from lower ranked schools) by law schools based on two data points, I think I am justified in feeling like the school owes me the advertised return on my investment or transparent data about what that return will be. Since it is very easy to get money for law school the bargain is actually very striaghtfoward- students decide to allocate their valuable LSAT and GPA scores to schools based on the projected ROI, with factors like tuition and scholarship adjusting the equation.
Posted by: Jo | Oct 3, 2011 3:08:19 PM
As I pointed out in another thread on this blog, the issue of the consumer orientation of students goes beyond law school and predates the current concerns about law graduates’ employment problems. Mark Edmundson identified the issue back in 1997 in an article for Harpers entitled, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students.” It got a lot of attention. He taught English at UVA, a state school, whose tuition at that time did not approach what we are talking about with law students. So, cost alone has not been the only driver of this phenomenon.
Posted by: anonymous | Oct 3, 2011 3:03:56 PM
Students asking that they should get something approaching their money’s worth and behaving like (gasp!) consumers!?! Heaven Forfend!
I mean, they are only paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s almost like they think deserve to have some say in the way they are educated simply because they’ve pay your salary or something . . . . .
Seriously, as a former teacher I understand something of your wish to teach in the way you find most suitable, and to be the master in your own classroom. However, condemning students for having some sense of entitlement in their studies when they are paying what, in many parts of the US, would be a sum of money equal to that of a reasonably-sized house, and when they stand on average a 50/50 chance of actually finding work in the legal field on graduation, is almost Marie Antoinette-like behaviour.
Posted by: Gilman Grundy (AKA FOARP) | Oct 3, 2011 2:47:08 PM
Prof. Horwitz,
Students do not expect the school to find them a job. They expect the degree to have the market value that the school advertised. Those are two different complaints, so different that it’s not fair to conflagrate them.
In the US the government will give every young person $250,000 for an education of the students’ choosing. This money does not have to be repaid until the student earns enough income to comfortably do so. This is one of those rare “only in America” things that make the rest of the world green with envy.
Students choose their program based on a number of factors, but one very important (possibly determinative) factor is the ability to get a job after completing the program. To analogize to another market, customers choose between equally priced cars based on factors like ride quality, MPG, performance and so on.
If a car company lied about their MPGs, performance, ride quality and such in order to get customers to buy their product, they would be sued. If these lies were designed to take federal government (perhaps EPA) money the US Attorney’s office would step in an prosecute them. However, law schools are free to brazely turn 25% and 50% employment rates into 99% employment rates with a median salary of $80,000 by (a) counting anyone who does any kind of work as employed and (b) counting only the salaries of those in full time jobs (see LST’s surveys showing that about 50% of each class did not report a salary).
It’s important to understand how serious this is. It is a crime, an outrageous crime against (a) the student, who is misled away from a more deserving program, (b) the US Treasury who will have to make up for the losses incurred when graduates can’t pay the loans back, (c) the country whose economy suffers due to mis-training and (d) other programs who lost out on revenue because they were honest about their placement.
So no, students don’t want the school to find them a job. They want the school to be honest about the value of the degree, so they aren’t tricked away from a more deserving program. And they expect the school, that is teaching them law!, to not act criminally against them and their country. Thus your response is like Toyota advertising 50MPG on a 20MPG car, and then complaining that customers expect Toyota to buy their gasoline, followed by a lecture about how “you chose Toyota and we could have sold this car to other buyers” followed by a lecture about how “Toyota drivers should act like a community and share driving strategies” and so on.
Posted by: anon | Oct 3, 2011 2:22:15 PM
One conclusion reached by some of my colleagues at the conference is that the consumerist attitude can be disaggregated from the concern about professorial paternalism; that is, students should help each other, participate in class, and otherwise think about others, but not because the professor “knows better.” I think the two are more related than that. There is a fair argument to be made that students have a duty to each other, regardless of whether the professor knows better or not. But it is also true that professors craft these kinds of collaborative policies, or insistence on class participation, that serve as the framework within which students must demonstrate their concern for others. And we do so because, in our view, we do know better. After almost a decade of teaching, I do have an experienced-based, expert sense of what works and doesn’t work for students and for the teaching and learning process. And to my mind, it does involve and require meaningful participation in class. I think I am right to insist on that, and to impose rules that require it; and I think that my students have “bought” into this obligation, and are not simply entitled to tell me to leave them alone to do things as they like.
I accept your expertise, but I wonder if you could clarify it a bit for me. Do you see collaboration, participation in community and the like to be Pareto superior for learning outcomes (i.e. no one is worse off, and at least one person is better off) or only superior on average?
Posted by: Brad | Oct 3, 2011 1:59:20 PM