The Law School Transparency project’s push to collect better data about how well recent graduates are doing in the job market has gotten off to a slow start. The nonprofit group in July asked the 199 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association to provide more detailed job statistics than they now report to the ABA or U.S. News & World Report. Critics who contend that law schools overstate the career prospects and earning potential of their graduates hailed the move. However, only 11 schools met the Sept. 10 deadline for responses, and only three said they were considering providing the requested data—American University Washington College of Law, University of Michigan Law School and Vanderbilt University Law School. Ave Maria School of Law indicated it would decide later this week whether to respond, according to the transparency project.
Kyle McEntee, a Vanderbilt law student who co-founded the project, said he is not discouraged. “We’ve started the dialogue, and the first step is getting schools to recognize that there is a huge problem.” The project grabbed headlines recently when a blogger under the pseudonym Ethan Haines—who later revealed herself to be Zenovia Evans, a 2009 graduate of Thomas M. Cooley Law School—announced that she was going on a hunger strike to prompt law schools to reveal the job information. She ended her hunger strike 24 days later, having received no responses from the 10 law schools she contacted.
