January 2009

From our college admissions counselor Christine Foster:

At least one in every 150 children has some form of autism. These kids range from non-verbal toddlers lining up toy trains to talkative teenagers, whose special needs were noticed only when the organizational and social demands of adolescence began to overwhelm them. Each of them has parents who imagined a future life like their own, or even brighter, whose dreams were changed as they sat in a psychologist’s office. Last fall, my husband and I were the ones in that seat. Our bright, beautiful – and yes, quirky – 5 year-old son was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.

In the aftermath of his diagnosis, I began to look, among other things, at what resources there were at the college level. The answer? Not many. A handful of schools are offering special programs for kids with autism spectrum disorders. Others can seek services through their school disabilities office, but many aren’t equipped to deal with issues beyond academic accommodations. Need a time-extension for your tests or a note taker? Most can handle that. But for a kid with autism, who might need help organizing their school work, making connections with peers, or advocating for themselves with a professor, there isn’t as much available.

I’m now inspired to take a closer look at what’s out there and cast a critical eye to figure out what is working and what isn’t. As part of the Anna Ivey team, I work with college applicants, and my goal is to blog more about college offerings and the admissions process for students with special needs in particular -- from autism spectrum disorders and ADD/ADHD to learning disabilities and physical disabilities. If you have a question you’d like to see answered or a suggestion for a topic, please email us.

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First, a peek at a place that is doing it right. Marshall University in West Virginia has what was likely the first specific program aimed at serving students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Begin in 2002 with a single student, the program supports 20 full-time students. And Ellison expects demand to continue to burgeon. By February 1, he expects they will have sent out more than 200 applications for next year. Admissions are tough – in 2008, they received 30 applications, interviewed 26, and accepted just 5. Families pay a premium of $3200 per semester, above and beyond Marshall’s tuition to enroll their students.

Marc Ellison, the director of the program, who has worked supporting people with autism for more than 20 years, says there is definitely a sea change. “Clearly, it is a wave of 18, 19, 20 year old students unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Ellison says.

His program is ideal because they don’t offer cookie cutter services. They look at each student as an individual, assessing their strengths and needs and figuring out exactly what kind of scaffolding makes sense. Last year, one student, a music major, needed to pass a hearing in front of teachers before continuing in his field of study. But his anxiety about performing solo before that group was debilitating. Ellison’s staff helped to arrange two mock performances for the student to practice, gathering as many as 30 spectators for those sessions. The desensitization did the trick, and the student was able to continue forward with his music degree.

Unlike most college disabilities offices, Marshall’s program also provides support in three areas: academics, social, and independent living. The staff might, for example, help break down a larger assignment into smaller, more manageable chunks. The staff also has weekly contact with professors to see how things are going for their students. Socially, they run a social skills group where students can practice practical relationship building techniques. Students get hand-holding on balancing a check book, mapping out when bills are due, and helps some with monitoring to see that students are taking their medications. (Sounds like stuff many typically-developing students could use, too!)

So far, four students have graduated from the program. Two are working and two are in graduate school. But Ellison is quick to point out that the measures of success for these students might be different than for your average college student. Instead of graduating and getting a job, the bigger accomplishment might be staying social engaged.

Why bother, one might ask? Ellison’s answer is swift: “Frankly the time is right – with 1 in 150 or 1 in 166 with some kind of ASD, there is a tremendous blow coming to society if those children are undereducated. It is in everyone’s interest to recognize their strengths.”

These are not the happiest times to be coming out of law school or business school. An article and a blog posting in today's Wall Street Journal jumped out at me:

"Recession Batters Law Firms, Triggering Layoffs, Closings" is a sad post-mortem of the once-venerable San Francisco law firm Heller, Ehrman, which closed its doors last year. I summered there as a 2L, during much happier times (thank you, internet bubble). It sounds as if Heller, like many other firms, had been in the process of renegotiating its business model, and that's been a problem industry-wide. But check out this paragraph: 

When Heller lawyers gathered for a retreat in March 2007 in Santa Barbara, Calif., some had grown anxious about the firm's finances. Mr. Bomse staged a mock opera about the firm's struggles. It featured professional opera singers and members of the Santa Barbara orchestra, and cost the firm more than $200,000, according to a member of the firm's executive committee. During the performance, lawyer David Goodwin says his wife turned to him, aghast at what she imagined the cost to be, and said, "This is a poorly managed firm. You need to leave."

After reading the whole article, and this anecdote in particular, I find the article's title misleading. It's not clear to me at all that the recession is responsible for killing off Heller. The article points to the firm's overreliance on big cases that ended up settling, as well as clients in general who have been wising up and learning to avoid long, costly trials. And throwing money around on stupid things also says something about a firm's managerial priorities.

So lawyer-guy's wife got me thinking. When you're out intervieiwng, for any kind of job, you can take a look around at your prospective employer and, like that wife at the retreat, do a gut check. I know firms are spending a lot less on recruiting these days, but they still have to recruit. So if employers are being frugal in recruiting you, think about whether that's actually a good sign. Same goes for colleges and grad schools that try to lure you with stupid bling.

"Nowadays, an MBA Doesn't Equal Job Security" states the obvious to some degree -- did it ever equal job security? -- but take a look at the interesting comments to that blog posting, where we see a debate unfold about the commodification of MBA degrees vs. the school of thought that still puts a lot of stock in the "seal of approval" you're getting from the top schools. I'll add to that debate this observation: I'm hearing from a number of MBAs from the very top schools who are having trouble finding jobs right now. It's grim. Hang in there. An MBA, even from a top school, and even during economically healthy times, is not some sort of magic pixie dust you can sprinkle on your resume. You still have to do the work of figuring out what you want to do with your career, and figuring out how you're going to get from A to B. See here for more thoughts on that.

A huge thank-you to law professor Paul Caron for shining a public spotlight on a big problem.

Professor Caron has highlighted some astonishing bits of a recent podcast from a meeting of law school admnistrators:

AALS Committee on Research Program (Jan. 9, 2009), Citations, SSRN Downloads, U.S. News, Carnegie, Bar Passage, Careers: Competing Methods of Assessing Law Schools (podcast):

Bill Henderson (Indiana):

• 25:55: At 50 law schools, 20% of the students are either unemployed, flunked out, or are unknown, yet the ABA and LSAC disavow the use of data to rank law schools.

Richard Matasar (Dean, New York Law School):

• 1:16:50: "We are an input-focused business, and outputs are what the students are paying for."

• 1:21:20: "We should be ashamed of ourselves. We own our students' outcomes. We took them. We took their money. We live on their money to pay to come to San Diego [where the conference was held]. And if they don't have a good outcome in life, we're exploiting them. It's our responsibility to own the outcomes of our institutions. If they're not doing well ... it's gotta be fixed. Or we should shut the damn place down. And that's a moral responsibility that we bear in the academy. It's a leadership responsibility that each of us has. And damn the U.S. News if it affects our rankings. The kids are not gonna show up. Do you know that LSAT registrations are flat to down this year. That students' applications to law school are flat to down in a substantial number of law schools. That's never happened in a downturn in the economy before. They're catching on. Maybe this thing they are doing is not so valuable. Maybe the chance at being in the top 10% is not a good enough lottery shot in order to effectively spend $120,000 and see it blow up at the end of three years of law school.

Jason Solomon (Georgia):

• 1:29:20: "We're mad as heck and we can't take it anymore. ... To the panelists and others in the room: what are we going to do? Are people from AALS leadership here?"

Bryant G. Garth (Dean, Southwestern):

• 1:32:00: "This group has stonewalled completely and killed any kind of real consumer information for 20 or 30 years, and that's what made U.S. News own this particular enterprise. And it's something that maybe those that stonewalled for some long might have to take some initiative and responsibility in remedying the situation we find ourselves in." 

I'm also grateful to these law school professors and administrators for taking both moral and practical responsibility for this state of affairs. Dean Matazar in particular deserves a lot of credit.

Prof. Carson also called attention to this great article by Kathy Kristof in Forbes magazine called The Great College Hoax, a hoax that also applies to graduate school. In relevant part:

Accepted into the California Western School of Law, a private San Diego institution, [Joel] Kellum couldn't swing the $36,000 in annual tuition with financial aid and part-time work. So he did what friends and professors said was the smart move and took out $60,000 in student loans.

Kellum's law school sweetheart, Jennifer Coultas, did much the same. By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job. Yet even with Kellum moonlighting, they had to scrounge to come up with $145,000 in loan payments. With interest accruing at up to 12% a year, that whittled away only $21,000 in principal. Their remaining bill: $173,000 and counting.

Kellum and Coultas divorced last year. Each cites their struggle with law school debt as a major source of stress on their marriage. "Two people with this much debt just shouldn't be together," Kellum says.

The two disillusioned attorneys were victims of an unfolding education hoax on the middle class that's just as insidious, and nearly as sweeping, as the housing debacle. The ingredients are strikingly similar, too: Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging the masses to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it foists unaffordable debt on the most vulnerable marks. ...

Not only are college numbers spun. Some are patently spurious, says Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA. Law schools lure in minority students to improve diversity rankings without disclosing that less than half of African-Americans who enter these programs ever pass the bar. Schools goose employment statistics by temporarily hiring new grads and spotlighting kids who land top-paying jobs, while glossing over far-lower average incomes. The one certainty: The average law grad owes $100,000 in student debt. "There are a lot of aspects of selling education that are tinged with consumer fraud," Sander says. "There is a definite conspiracy to lead students down a primrose path." 

Here's what I've written on this subject before:

Readers of the Ivey Files and also my book (The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions) know that I've been discouraging people from attending all but the top law schools in the country, mainly because of simple math. As I wrote in The Ivey Guide:

You need to think of your legal education as an investment, and you should calculate your expected return on that investment. That's why it's so important to think about your career options coming out of various schools. If you have to pay $1,000 a month in after-tax dollars to cover your student loans, you'd better be sure you will be able to find work at a well-paying law firm after you graduate. If you graduate $100,000 in the hole, don't assume for as second you can run off and work for a public-interest legal clinic. And until you've paid off your debt, or unless you attend a law school with a generous loan-forgiveness program..., you won't have the freedom to go sit on a beach and stare at your belly button while you contemplate what you really want to do with your life. Think of it this way: Lots of people rush off to law school on the assumption that a law degree gives them freedom, but you don't really have freedom when you've mortgaged the next ten -- or thirty -- years of your life. (Law school graduates who join big firms don't have much trouble repaying their loans on the ten-year payment plan, but most law school graduates don't end up joining big firms, and many end up extending their loan-repayment schedules to thirty years.)

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The further down the food chain [of law schools] you go..., the less of a safety net you have. Once you get to the second tier and below, you need to be at or near the top of your class to end up at a top firm in your region or with a top judge in your region (the national market is a much more difficult proposition), and people in the bottom half of the class often face grim hiring prospects.

Law school applicants fight me on this all the time, but I stick to my guns. Most ABA-approved law schools are not worth the investment. It's painful for people to hear, and most insist on learning this truth the hard way.

Read the rest of that post (and a discussion of the dodgy and arguably fraudulent recruiting and reporting practices of schools) here.

I'm also intrigued by Kathy Kristof's comparison, in her Forbes article above, of this college/law school hoax to the housing bubble and the real estate mess we find ourselves in. Economist Richard Vedder and his Center for College Affordability have done interesting work on this subject. Read their thoughts here and here.

Edited to add: A recent BU Law School grad's one-woman mission to talk people out of law school. "Don't Do What I Did."

A while back I wrote about the predicament of an American law student who feared he was wasting his summer working for a non-profit in Cambodia. He felt frustrated by the corruption, the non-existent law enforcement, and the inertia he was witnessing in the legal system, and he was feeling useless and a bit depressed:

When I'm asked to comment on what I did and how I liked it, I don't want to be too negative or dishonest. But honestly: "I sat around a lot in a foreign country, went to meetings that I didn't understand, and helped absolutely no one, in part, because the judicial system is utterly corrupt" is probably a conversation killer.

I advised him:

You're there to help people, right? OK, you can’t do much legally, and I think you're right about that part of it. But you can do two things – you can learn and you can help. You should learn all you can about Cambodian law and government so that if it ends up being a country you care about, you can work for change there the rest of your life. You should go out into the community and do anything you can to help them. Teach English. Help with infrastructure projects. Pitch in at the local medical clinic. Anything. You went there not only to get experience for yourself, but to serve, right? So serve in whatever way you can, whether it's through your NGO or not. You'll be helping the people you came to help, albeit not in the way you originally intended.

Turns out, I was wrong. There are things you can do wearing your legal hat. This week's New Yorker has an article about a Harvard and Chicago trained attorney named Gary Haugen who went to Cambodia to offer legal services to the poor. In particular, he focuses on the absence of proper law enforcement -- the "abusive police, entrenched bribery, mismanaged courts.... The poor didn't just need lawyers; they needed new legal systems." In short, he's out there helping to fix all the things that were getting our intern down.

Since 1997, Haugen and his team of lawyers have provided legal assistance to almost 15,000 people in twelve developing countries: "bonded laborers, children who have been sold into prostitution, widows who have had land seized, poor people who...languish in jail for crimes they did not commit." 

Haugen has his critics, and his hiring practices in particular have come under fire (his organization is explicitly religious, and he requires a statement of faith from job applicants). But I wanted to share what he's doing because it demonstrates one way that people are using their law degrees to make real and immediate progress in the developing world.

A note of caution -- and career planning -- for law school applicants who want to do this kind of work. You'll need to get hands-on litigation experience before you become useful out in the field:

[H]e prefers to recruit government prosecutors, defense lawyers, and corporate lawyers who have extensive casework experience. "The circumstances afford no generosity for those who bring only good intentions, the best of motives or the most tender of hearts."

Recently I got an earful (or, more accurately, an inbox full) from some employers about the fine art of cover letters - mostly about what not to do. I'll paste in a sample below.

This is a good opportunity to remind my twenty-something crowd that there are often generational dynamics at work when you submit cover letters, to Gen Xers in particular. Overwhelmingly, my Gen X contacts recoil from what they perceive as extreme self-congratulation in Gen Y cover letters -- something to keep in mind when you're writing for a particular audience. Things that might fly with your own age group, or your boomer parents, or admissions officers don't necessarily go over well with everybody.

The other common theme is that long cover letters go straight into the trash, so keep your cover letters short and sweet.

Reactions? Advice? Anecdotes? Please share!

• So I am trying to staff my new office and am reviewing a few hundred resumes. Painful on many levels. Who the *hell* taught people to write cover letters that include phrases like "My analytic ability is keen" or "my written and oral skills are exceptional" or "I am confident you will find my communication skills outstanding" or, my favorite, "I am tomorrow's strategic executive."???? Literally every other letter includes this crap. Anna, save these people.
• I've been doing interviews for internship positions for the past few weeks. I've noticed how little I pay attention to the cover letters (I skim...I'm talking 30 seconds, tops). If the cover letter takes up the entire page, I almost never read it (I just look at the length and say, "too long").
• I've now read or skimmed a few hundred cover letters in the last 48 hrs and have learned nothing positive from a single one. Cleverness comes off as defensiveness and confidence as boastfulness. I don't even think the negative impressions I'm left with are necessarily deserved, and I've decided to give some interviews in spite of the letters. People need to shut up.
• They need to use extremely conventional resume formatting because I refuse to look at "Skill Profile" sections and resumes divided into quadrants and school listings that fail to show me grad dates. I shudder to think that the cover letters for my own 20 year old internship applications could even conceivably still exist somewhere. I committed all these sins in spades.
• I think cover letters should be extremely straightforward, repeat little that is in the resume, and never try to be boastful or cute. I know this is tougher for recent college grads - they presumably need to show why they want a particular job. But then just say that. Shut up about supposed attributes. If they want to be clever (and they shouldn't) then save it for the resume in the extracurriculars.
• I can think of a lot of scenarios when a cover letter is essential -- esp. when you are explaining a non-traditional path or a not-obvious transition. I just haven't seen many done well.
• First rule of cover letters is: do no harm. They can help, but rarely do, and the assumption in some professions is that the decision makers never see/look at the cover letter anyway, just the resume. So the goal is to write something that doesn't end up in your file with a highlighted part and a note that says "what a dolt!"
• I got 180 applications for the last position I had - for a job that includes lots of writing and even more editing. More than half the apps got thrown out based on the cover letter alone. Not just bad writing, but misspellings, grammar problems, proofreading errors, and one reference to "The Lord led me to you [sic] job decsripton [sic]." You've got to wonder what they thought they were going to accomplish.

Our colleague David Yi reports:

There are many questions and speculations about the soon-to-be-implemented accelerated 2-Year JD Program at Northwestern Law School. I recently spoke with two of my contacts at Northwestern Law to dig in and get some “insider info.” Here’s what I’ve learned:

* Currently there is a 2-year JD program already in progress for foreign attorneys. The new 2-year JD program for American law students will probably parallel that program closely.

* The 2-year JD program will primarily be for older applicants with significant work experience. Remember, Northwestern Law already prides itself for admitting students with at least 2 years of work experience. So when we’re talking students with significant work experience, we’re talking people who have really committed themselves to a career.

* An applicant must give compelling reasons and demonstrate why she needs the accelerated JD as opposed to the normal JD.

* In addition to the typical mandatory 1L courses, 2-year JD students will also be required to take business and leadership classes, such as accounting, finance, statistics, and project management.

The benefits are (I think) obvious – becoming a lawyer more quickly, and a more focused and tailored curriculum for people who know exactly what they want out of law school.

Here are the drawbacks that my contacts mentioned (in light of the 2-year program for foreign lawyers):

* The cost of the 2-year JD program is equivalent to the cost of the 3-year JD program, so you save no money.

* 2-year JDs will have only one summer (between their 1L and 2L years) for work opportunities. That means they have to take part in on-campus interviewing (OCI) with the regular 2Ls (when they've just started their accelerated program the May before) OR they have to apply the way regular 1Ls do, by sending hundreds of resumes and cover letters throughout Dec–Feb. Given the two options, it makes more sense that they partake in 2L OCI with the 3-year JDs. But…

* Although school starts in May for the 2-year JDs, these students will only have a semester’s worth of grades for employers to consider (and it might not even be clear yet that they'll have grades from that summer; it's assumed they will, but we're not sure). Moreover, given the steep learning curve in law school, first semester grades might not necessarily demonstrate students’ full abilities. In short, 2-year JDs might find themselves in the unfortunate situation of having to interview with only pre-law school grades, mediocre grades from one law school semester, and a pre-law resume. That could be a HUGE disadvantage compared to the regular 2Ls who will (by OCI time) have had at least one summer’s worth of legal work experience under their belt and an entire school year’s worth of law school grades.

Despite the drawbacks of Northwestern’s accelerated 2-year JD program, I am generally in full support of it. Time is money – the extra year gained from pursuing a 2-year JD can be immensely valuable. It means breaking into the job market more quickly without having to suffer through the third year of law school, which some people have come to identify as a waste of time (see here).

Today we're welcoming Nicole Vikan to our team. Nicole is a graduate of NYU Law School, has worked as a criminal prosecutor (including the Homicide Investigation Unit) at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, joined Fordham Law School's Career Planning Center as a career counselor (focusing on both the private and public sectors), and currently serves as a career counselor at Georgetown Law Center's Office of Public Interest, where she advises students pursuing public service careers.

Nicole will be working with law school applicants and people exploring legal careers (whether before, during, or after law school). She will also be blogging here. Keep an eye out for her first post!

If you'd like to work directly with Nicole, please email us.

Welcome, Nicole!