Unemployed
and under-employed law graduates have sued several law schools, claiming the
schools used false or misleading employment data to induce them to enroll and
spend $150,000-or-so of their yet-to-be-earned dollars. One law school advertising tactic, for
example, was to label jobless graduates as “not seeking” employment; this
allowed a school to hide the abysmally high unemployment rate of its graduates. Another, more common tactic was to count
graduates as “employed” even when their jobs had absolutely nothing to do with
law (e.g., working at Starbucks), or were only temporary jobs created by the
law school to artificially boost its employment statistics. Another was to say that, for example, 92
percent of all grads were employed, when in fact only 92 percent of the 40
percent who responded to the survey were employed. In sum, law school advertising at many
schools took tremendous liberties in spinning the facts.
