It appears that law schools are hiring people exactly like themselves. It would be ideal for law schools to employ a variety of people, but the elite are hiring the elite, according to Inside Higher Ed. Prestigious graduates are more likely to be hired because the people doing the hiring were once prestigious law school graduates. This means that most law school professors have no real world experience. It would be ideal for them to expand their horizons, but they simply choose not to. The Ivy League law schools, including Harvard, Stanford and Yale are full of ex-law school students who were hired to be teachers because of their extra good credentials. Diversity and the lack of “practical skills” seem to mean nothing when it comes to the hiring process. Tracey E. George and Albert H. Yoon have been conducting a study to prove this less than ideal way of adding new professors to their faculty staff and they have said, “Missing from those experiences is substantial time outside of a law school. The lack of real-world experience affects the capacity of new hires to teach skills courses and to assist students making the transitions to those real-world jobs.” The top fifty law schools recruit from other top fifty law schools. It is unfair, but if one is fresh from a tiny law school then one can pretty much accept that he or she is not going to get the job they want. Don’t blame tough times, just blame the elite.
Image Credit: Inside Higher Ed