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The University of Illinois is just one of several law schools that are now under scrutiny for misleading current and potential law students into believing certain information about graduates of the school. The school released false information about starting salaries upon graduation as well as high rates of employment upon graduating from the school. The school lead potential students to believe that the chances of landing a job upon recent graduation were very high and promising and that the starting salary would be high.
Recent graduates of the University of Illinois are upset that the school falsified such important statistical information. Students were led to believe that there was a higher success rate of finding employment in the field of law immediately after graduating and are now realizing that this is not true. Many of the recent law school graduates are having a hard time finding employment due to the recent cutbacks which have caused many law firms to merger with one another in an attempt to survive.
Because of the downward spiral of the economy and the recession, very few laws school students are finding immediate employment after graduating. In fact, in 2009, only about fifty percent of law school graduates found employment in the legal profession after a period of time.
Senator Barbara Boxer is urging the American Bar Association to protect potential law students by providing only the most accurate information and statistics about post graduates instead of giving hopeful students such misleading information. “The difference between the information reported by schools and the real legal employment rate for recent graduates is very troubling,” says Boxer.
The American Bar Association claims that it is working to make the necessary changes for potential and current law school students. The ABA only wants to release accurate information to these potential law students about future employment in the legal field. To ensure accuracy, the ABA will begin collecting information and statistics from different law schools on their own.
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Kyle McEntee, a law school student since 2009, has said, “Law school is not the magic ticket to financial security that people think it is.” McEntee also says, “For some it will be and for some it won’t be. People need know that when deciding how much debt to take on.”
The dean at Loyola University Chicago’s law school agrees that it is in the best interest of the students to give honest and correct statistics and information about recent graduates to potential students. Around half of the students who graduated from Loyola were able to find jobs at law firms within a nine month period. Only a handful of graduates were able to land jobs for bigger law firms. Yellen says, “It’s incumbent on us to give an accurate sense of how students are doing.” He also says, “If a school has an 85 percent employment rate but half of them are short-term, nonlaw jobs, that’s not something it should keeping from students.”
