The Last Gen X American

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By: The Last Gen X American

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Matt Leichter

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…Appears on the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation’s blog. Here’s a snippet. Land value taxation should, in theory, raise total wages and greatly increase the housing supply; but people should be mobile too, even including nonresidents who come in to elbow out poorer ones for the benefits the system provides. In Minneapolis where I live, we have seen significant growth in high-end housing in recent years but very little for the poor. So what can…
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[The following post first appeared on this site on January 1, 2012. What it said then still applies today, mutatis mutandis. Thanks for reading the blog and have a prosperous 2020!] Behold, the curse of a long memory. Last January [2011], Google Alerts sent me an e-mail informing me that the National Inflation Association (“Preparing Americans for Hyperinflation”) issued a press release predicting that the higher ed bubble was “set to burst beginning in mid-2011.…
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Full-time tuition at private ABA-accredited law schools rose 1.5 percent before adjusting for inflation, according to my analysis of (mainly) data released by the ABA in December. I focus on private law school tuition because public law schools receive varying degrees of state subsidies, so they do not reflect the already distorted legal-education market’s prices. This year’s data release features a revision to the ABA’s collection methodology: providing fees that law schools frequently added…
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By October 2019, there were 36,983 enrollees from the applicant pool at 197 ABA-accredited law schools not in Puerto Rico. This is down 67 (-0.2 percent) from 37,050 in October 2018. Three law schools, Valparaiso, Whittier, and Arizona Summit, appear on the ABA’s required disclosures Web site and spreadsheets, but they are just placeholders. Arizona Summit had 17 enrollees last year. La Verne and Thomas Jefferson do have 509 reports, even though they announced their…
…Appears on the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation’s Web blog. I argue that the residential upzoning policies in the Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive plan won’t really lead to more affordable housing. Here’s a quote: [The] Minneapolis 2040 plan does something that no other major American city has ever attempted: it shifts zoning practice away from real-estate parcels for single-family use. No, it doesn’t abolish them altogether, thus forcing homeowners to build condos or apartment buildings. Rather, the plan…
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On September 4, 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its employment projections for the next cycle, 2018-2028. For 2018, the BLS’s Employment Projections program (EP program) estimates that there were 823,900 lawyer positions (as opposed to discrete lawyers) in the United States. This figure includes self-employed attorneys. In 2016, the EP program found 792,500 lawyer positions, so there has been some growth between the two years. According to the BLS’s Current Population …
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Ahoy, readers! I bring good news: Now that we’ve endured a full year under the LSAC’s new regime of six LSAT administrations per year, I can now return to regular LSAT-tea-leaf-reading reporting! Woohoo! But wait, there’s more! Because the LSAC now regularly reports first-time test takers (and it graciously furnished me with data from previous years) I can now provide even more detailed tea-leaf reading! I’m especially pleased because for the first time in a…
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As an appendix to my employment report, here is a ranking of all the law schools that reported employment data by their percentages of graduates finding full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required jobs. (Taste all the those hyphens.) PERCENT GRADUATES EMPLOYED FULL-TIME/LONG-TERM IN BAR-PASSAGE-REQUIRED JOBS (EXCL. LAW-SCHOOL-FUNDED JOBS) RANK LAW SCHOOL ’17 ’18 CHANGE 1. Columbia 92.6% 93.5% 0.9% 2. Virginia 91.6% 92.6% 1.1% 3. Duke 93.8% 91.4% -2.4% 4. Chicago 92.1% 91.3% -0.8% 5. Cornell 92.1% 90.8%…
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Good morning, folks! Law-school-employment data are in, and before there’s a revision, this post will depict what they show. As with last year, I’m going to start with the headline information and save the law-school-level ranking of shame for later. To begin with, here’s the table of graduate underemployment. (Everything on this post excludes the three Puerto Rico law schools.) STATUS (EXCL. P.R.) 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Unemployed – Not…
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) usually completes its updates of its many measures of occupational employment for the previous year by April. Data for 2018 are now available, allowing a comprehensive summary of lawyer employment for that year. For detailed discussion of what the BLS datasets are and how they address lawyer employment, I recommend the lawyer overproduction page [updated!]. For context, according to the Current Population Survey (CPS), the number of people who…