Leadership’s Future: Law School
by Miki Saxon
When looking for a talented entry-level candidate, grades carry great weight with managers and HR.
This is especially true when hiring advanced degrees where starting salaries remain high and even more-so when the degrees are in the professions—doctors and lawyers.
Recruiters scour university campuses looking for what they judge to be the crème de la crème and you, the client, pay big bucks to access that talent.
Customers assume a certain level of integrity from educational institutions and equate grades with expertise.
So what happens to that integrity and those expectations when law schools lower the bar?
In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University, Loyola Law School Los Angeles, and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month.
Granted, it’s being done in K-12 schools all over the country, but law school? And at some of the most prestigious US law schools, too.
These the same associates who do most of the real work when your company shells out $500 or more an hour to hire a name on the door.
Many will become judges, local, state and Federal—even to the Supreme Court.
Some will join Federal enforcement agencies—SEC, Justice, FBI.
And many will eventually enter politics, which is justified considering how far that bar has already been lowered.
What’s next? Well, we have a real shortage of doctors now that is getting worse as our population ages.
Doesn’t that give you a warm and fuzzy feeling in the pit of your stomach?
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johncohen/152850884/
