Web/Tech
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Unpacking “over-education” claims (Michael Simkovic)
Tom Friedman's latest New York Times column uses the labor market for executive assistants and executive secretaries to illustrate dubious claims about credentialing and over-education. Friedman argues that since most current executive assistants and executive secretaries don't have bachelor's degrees, employers should not try to upgrade the workforce by hiring new executive assistants and secretaries with bachelor's…
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Competitive Scholarships, Mandatory Courses, and the Costs and Benefits of Disclosure (Michael Simkovic)
There is a wide range of views about the benefits, costs, and appropriate use of conditional merit scholarships—scholarships that under their terms, will only be retained after the first year of law school if students maintain a minimum GPA or minimum class rank (if there is a mandatory grading curve, a minimum GPA effectively is a…
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A better grading system and double standards around occupational licensing
A better grading system Professor Merritt argues that mandatory grading curves can be unfair when one class has stronger students than another. I agree. Statistician Valen Johnson—whom I cite in my last post as an authority on grade inflation— has developed a clever solution to this problem which involves adjusting grading curves within each class based…
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Scholarships, Grade Inflation, and Motivation (Michael Simkovic)
In her latest post, Deborah Merritt maintains that scholarships conditioned on maintaining a minimum GPA or class ranking are troubling when used by law schools, even though such conditions are routinely used by other educational institutions and state government programs. According to Professor Merritt, the problem is that the mandatory curve in law school is such that…
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Are Conditional Scholarships Good for Law Students? (Michael Simkovic)
Many critics have attacked law schools for offering merit scholarships that can only be retained if students meet minimum GPA requirements. Jeremy Telman has a fascinating new post analyzing these scholarships in light of common practices in higher education and the peer-reviewed social science literature. It’s a powerful counterpoint to a previously unanswered critique of law…
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Geography Matters (Michael Simkovic)
A number of critics have argued against extrapolation from Professor Merritt’s study of the Ohio legal market to the national legal market. In her response, Professor Merritt makes some good points, and also several key points with which I disagree. Professor Merritt suggests that an important contribution of her study is providing up-to-date information about…
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New York Times relies on unrepresentative anecdotes and flawed study to provide slanted coverage of legal education (Michael Simkovic)
Just when you thought The New York Times was rounding the corner and starting to report responsibly about legal education based on hard data and serious labor economics studies, their reporting reverts to the unfortunate form it has taken for much of the last 5 years*—relying on unrepresentative anecdotes and citing fundamentally flawed working papers to paint legal…
The stigmatisation of certain theories, counter-intuitive to many, as ‘preposterous’ should be avoided. It is not ultimately conducive to discovering…