Home / General / Scenes from the class(room) struggle Pt. 2

Scenes from the class(room) struggle Pt. 2

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Part One here.

In a new study, Lauren Rivera and Andras Tilcsik reveal the enormously powerful effects class and gender, and the complex interplay between them, have within a particular elite hiring market (associate positions at large law firms). Some further thoughts:

(1) It’s often said that big law firm hiring is an unusually meritocratic process within the context of the competition for elite professional positions in the US economy.  The logic of this claim is that all you have to do to get an associate position in Big Law is go to an elite law school and not finish too close to the bottom of your class (with “too close” varying from perhaps bottom 5% at Yale to bottom 40% at Georgetown).  And all you have to do to go to an elite law school is get a high GPA and LSAT score, since law school admissions are almost completely numbers driven, so, unlike the elite undergraduate admissions process,  it doesn’t matter how many “other-centered” volunteer projects you worked on aka how much time and money your family had to create an altruistic-appearing application for their special snowflake.

There are a bunch of problems with this claim.  First, getting a high GPA and LSAT are themselves not exactly pure meritocratic achievements.  For instance, the struggle to get a high GPA is aided greatly by attending an elite private undergraduate college that pretty much gives everybody As because hey they got into Harvard so . . .

Second the LSAT is a very learnable test, especially if you have that time and money thing going for you again.  Getting high grades and high test scores is to a great extent a reflection of inheriting lots of capital, of both the pecuniary and the cultural kind.  It would be an exaggeration that “merit” in the context law school admissions means “high class status,” but it’s not a gross exaggeration.  (The fact that an occasional working class kid will score a full ride to Williams, sweat blood to get a 173 on the LSAT, and then get admitted to Harvard Law School is a most convenient fact from an objectively anti-egalitarian ideological perspective, since such paragons can be paraded before us endlessly as proof that the system is really “fair” if you squint just right).

Third, the supposedly meritocratic and therefore implicitly class-neutral nature of law school admissions — and by an increasingly tenuous extension subsequent legal employment — overlooks the truly fantastic cost of law schools, and especially elite law schools, in America today.

Here’s why this is a key factor in replicating and protecting the economic and social status quo:

Suppose a non-privileged law school applicant (NPLSA) has, despite the enormous advantages privileged applicants have in obtaining such numbers, combined GPA/LSAT credentials in the 99th percentile of applicants.  NPLSA can apply to, say, Columbia, and will probably get in.  But here’s the rub: having numerical credentials in the 99th, as opposed to say the 99.6th percentile means that NPLSA will have to pay sticker price to attend Columbia, as indeed around 60% of Columbia law students do.

And what’s the sticker cost of attendance these days?  Oh it’s just a modest $91,450.  That’s for nine months by the way — summer expenses not included.  And this COA is based on the school’s shall we say optimistic estimate that a student will pay $1,393 per month for rent and utilities in Manhattan and environs.  And the tuition portion of this cost is going up by 4% per year, so the annual nine month COA is going to be $100,000 by the time NPLSA is a third-year.

All told, if NPLSA borrows the money from our accommodating federal government to go to CLS, he or she is going to have around $336,000 in debt when the first bill becomes due, six months after graduating.

Now, given these staggering totals, here’s a surprising little statistical nugget: 41% of Columbia Law School’s 2015 graduating class had exactly zero law school debt at graduation!  Now why is that?  Because lots and lots of unambiguously rich kids go to Columbia Law School.  This in turn is a reflection of how much easier it is for upper class people to display “merit” via the purchase of high GPAs and LSAT scores. But I repeat myself.

Moving right along . . . many a defender of the law school (and by extension the social) status quo will wax avuncular to our hypothetical NPLSA, and advise this person who doesn’t know what boat shoes are to apply to a non-elite law school, where his or her sterling academic record will surely garner a full tuition scholarship.

As plans go, this one is so simple it’s brilliant: go to law school for “free” (not counting living expenses and opportunity cost), finish at the top of your class, and then get one of those fancy law firm jobs without all the soul-crushing debt.  Tastes great and less filling!

Which brings us back to Rivera and Tilcsik.  There are two big problems with this plan. First, law school grades are fairly unpredictable, so going to a particular law school with the intention to finish at the top of the class is a Plan A that’s badly in need of a Plan B.  But the problem that’s more germane to R&T’s findings is that finishing at the top of your non-elite law school class is a great way to get an elite legal job — if you’re already part of the upper class (And also a man. See below.)  If not — too bad, so sad: you aren’t going to be a good “fit” for our “firm culture,” dontcha know.

So maybe you should take on that $336,000 in debt (soon to be $400,000) to go to Columbia after all, where you can “compete” against the two out of every five of your classmates who have no debt, a parent who is the GC or maybe the CEO of a company that bills out tens of millions a year in legal fees to the big firms where you’ll be trying to get a job, and lots of boat shoes.

(2) Another rationalization that the defenders of the status quo will deploy when presented with things such as R&T’s finding that big law firms discriminate pretty much consciously against upper class women compared to upper class men (and even perhaps compared to lower class women, although not nearly to the same extent) is that the reasons people in these firms give — informally of course — for doing so are “good” reasons, with “good” here meaning “arguably profit-maximizing.”  Basically the argument, stripped of rhetorical flourishes, goes like this: To succeed at a large law firm, you must, to a greater or lesser extent, dedicate yourself completely to your work.

People who have any interests outside of work, such as occasionally seeing or — let’s get really radical here — playing a role in raising their children, aren’t going to be maximizing profits as much as people who would rather do really important things like proof-read financial documents.  Instead, their lack of “commitment” to (highly paid, high status) work will lead them to take up trivial pursuits such as bringing into the world, and subsequently nurturing and raising, a tolerably socialized human being or three.

Since the average woman “chooses” to dedicate herself to the latter activity much more often than the average law firm associates “chooses” to spend any time, quality or otherwise, with his children, then the fact that big law firms don’t want to hire people, aka women, who make the former choice is just a reflection of the inevitable and just and right and efficient workings of our beneficent Market (blessed by its name), as opposed to a horrendously unfair, inhumane, and soul-destroying rat race, one feature of which happens to be the continuing reproduction of massive class and gender inequality.

 

 

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