Summary: Former students of Thomas Jefferson School of Law have blamed the school in a lawsuit for a poor legal market and misunderstood employment rates.
Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego is the latest law school to be sued by former students, angry that their post-education days are not as successful and easy as they imagined.
- See Can’t Get a Job? Sue Your Law School for more information.
One of the twelve students involved in the lawsuit is Nikki Nguyen. She had a good job with Boeing Co. but decided to leave it in 2006 to pursue a law degree. She saw her sister’s career as a successful corporate attorney as a glimpse of what her future held. Unfortunately for Nguyen, she entered and then graduated from law school at a time when the industry was struggling. For over a year after graduating, she struggled to find a job to help her pay down her $180,000 in student loan debt.
The lawsuit brought by the former students accuses the school of inflating graduate employment figures and salaries. Their figures indicated up to a 90 percent employment rate in 2010 but did not disclose that those numbers included part-time and non-legal jobs such as a pool cleaner and Victoria’s Secret sales associate. The lawsuit also accuses the school of reporting unemployed graduates as employed and destroying the evidence from surveys that showed the true employment numbers.
Since these students were attending and graduating from law school there have been changes to the requirements for schools to follow from the ABA on how to advertise their employment rates. Now they must differentiate between the types of jobs graduates have such as legal or nonlegal and part-time or full-time.
The lawsuit is seeking over $1.5 million in restitution and damages. As Barry Currier, managing director of the accreditation and legal education at the ABA, stated, “We’re letting our concerns about employment and the job market, over which law schools have no control, drive too much of this conversation.” He also stresses that the LSAT is not the best way to determine how successful a student will be at passing the bar exam.
Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/law-695061-school-students.html
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