IF COLLEGE EDUCATION IS IN TROUBLE, HOW CAN LAW SCHOLL EDUCATION NOT BE?

Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) ("For the first time in our history, we face the prospect that the coming generation of adult Americans will be less educated than their elders." Id. at 26. "A renowned teacher . . . , Lionel Trilling, remarked near the end of his life that when, 'through luck or cunning,' small-group discussion works well, it 'can have special pedagogic value.' . . . What he meant was that a small class can help students learn how to qualify their initial responses to hard questions. It can help them learn the difference between informed insights and mere opinionating. It can provide the pleasurable chastisement of discovering that others see the world differently, and that their experience is not replicable by, or even reconcilable with, one's own. At its best, a small class is an exercise in deliberative democracy, in which the teacher is neither oracle nor lawgiver but a kind of provocateur." Id. at 57-58. "[L]iterature, history, philosophy, and the arts are becoming the stepchildren of our colleges. This is a great loss because they are the legatees of religion in the sense that they provide a vocabulary for formulating ultimate questions of the sort that have always had special urgency for young people. In fact, the humanities may have the most to offer to students who do not know that they need them--which is one reason it is scandalous to withhold them. One of the ironies of contemporary academic life is that even as the humanities become marginal in our colleges, they are establishing themselves in medical, law, and business schools, where interest is growing in the study of literature and the arts as a way to encourage self-critical reflection among future physicians, attorneys, and entrepreneurs, It is ironic, too, that amid rising concern over America's competitive position in the global 'knowledge economy,' we hear more and more about the need for technical training, and less and less about the value of liberal education at home, even as the latter gains adherents among our competitors abroad." Id. at 99-100.).

Richard P. Keeling & Richard H. Hersh, We're Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) ("So grades have become poor indicators of educational quality, just as have the actuarial measures . . . . Grade inflation--the nearly universal consequence of the marriage of declining standards with consumer values--has rendered GPAs so unreliable and suspect that some corporate recruiters have begun to ask interviewees for their SAT scores instead. Think about what that means! It says that some recruiters now believe that standardized data about the educational aptitude of entering students (for instance, SAT or ACT [what about the LSAT for law students?] scores are more predictive of success on the job than unstandardized, culturally constructed, poorly correlated data about academic performance in college. Grades then tell us practically nothing . . . . " "So what then do grades actually show? Grades primarily show the degree to which students have been successful in anticipating and meeting a professor's requirements for the display of knowledge that was intended to be acquired in a course. Cramming the night before a midterm or final exam installs enough facts in short-term memory to allow clever and high-functioning students to pass (or, in too many colleges, to even get A's and B's). But higher learning depends far less on short-term memorization of information than on the integration of knowledge and the generation of meaning by each student--processes that require time, reflection, and feedback. So it is that a student can ace an exam, or a course, without learning anything of substance; the hastily memorized facts and figures fade quickly from the mind, leaving little evidence that anything there has changed, But if grades do not suffice in demonstrating learning, how do we know that learning has happened? How can colleges prove that their educational programs are effective?" Id. at 31-32.).