Generation U
Last week, The Economist published an article called “Generation i.” The “i” was not a capital “I”—a reference to self-centeredness, a characteristic we often assign to the next generation coming of age, both out of a reflexive stereotype, as well as with an enduring familiarity with the characteristics of late adolescence. Rather, it was the more humble and humbling lower-case “i,” and referred to one of the most ethically confounding components of the law school curriculum today: externships. The Economist article referred to externship by its synonym, “internship,” (hence, the “i”) and considered the—ideally, educational and professional—experience in the context of a global trend in which internships have become widely required for entry into the most elite professions, such as law, finance, corporate management, journalism, and government.
The Economist article highlighted that with the rise of internships expected prior to hiring, the market has also seen an increasing number of these internships being unpaid, which effectively serves to segregate poor potential interns from wealthier ones. After all, it is far more difficult for a poor student and her family to support her for several months while she works for free. But it gets worse. As legal educators are well aware, many young people not only have to work for free, but they have to pay to do so in today’s market. In the case of law school students, some will be paying $15,000 or more to work full-time in law offices off-campus over the course of one semester. Is there a point at which this becomes exploitative?
One generation ago, in the late 1990s, I racked up approximately 3,500 hours of law practice experience between my first day of law school and my graduation day and was paid close to $100,000 in the process. If one were to add in my field experience with human and children’s rights, my experiential hours would have approached 4,000. Of those, only approximately 100 were earned through a law school-sponsored externship.
What did my law school do while I was off campus getting thousands of hours of legal experience? It treated me like an adult and tried to support me with flexibility and funding. It granted me a one-year leave to take a paid position working in an international law firm in Tokyo, let me complete my third year in another law school on the other side of the country where I clerked at the law firm where I happily spent the first eight years of my legal career, gave me two grants to support my field work in children’s rights, and allowed me to spend a January term researching child labor in Asia. In other words, the school allowed me a significant amount of freedom to design an educational and professional experience that worked for me as an individual. In exchange, I took my law school classes seriously, participated actively in the law school community, paid full tuition for three years, and despite the income I earned, still graduated six figures in debt with a studio apartment overlooking a parking lot and driving a 1987 Volkswagen Jetta. But I had experience and purpose and was positioned to launch, so I was happy.
Can we offer law students similar opportunities to individualize their legal education and professional development today? I think we can. The ABA’s recent decision to stop limiting law students’ ability to work more than 20 hours a week is a step in the right decision, as is the standard requiring law schools to mandate that students take more experiential courses. But, these changes do not go far enough. In today’s market of declining enrollment for law schools, some deans will be tempted to balance the budget on the backs of students and satisfy the experiential course requirements by offering low-quality externship opportunities. Every law school in the country must resist the temptation to allow our students to mortgage their futures with government-backed student loans in exchange for the “opportunity” to work for free off campus without substantial support from the law school.
Instead, law schools should see the new ABA standard requiring six credits of experiential coursework as an opportunity to strengthen and diversify course offerings that have long been neglected in the legal academy. These offerings should include a variety of law practice simulation courses leading into multiple clinical practice opportunities followed by a successful externship placement or paid clerkship that could lead to a permanent job offer, such as those described in last week’s article in The Economist. In other words, we need to ensure that our students are competitive to launch in a market very different than you and I entered one or two generations ago.
At every stage of this learning process, law schools should ensure that experiential course offerings are high quality and well-resourced, even when they occur off campus. When a student writes a check for thousands of dollars to a law school to work for free, the law school has a heightened moral obligation to ensure that the student has adequate support and supervision from the law school to help ensure that the experience is truly educational and professional and the student is successful. The student should complete the semester, or at his or her least law school career, feeling that, even in a market that many of us fear is increasingly exploitative, the law school had the student’s back. Law schools should not be seen as part of the exploitation and class stratification of “Generation i” being witnessed on a global basis.
Instead, we should transform our approach to “Generation i” into “Generation U,” getting to know our students individually, discovering their dreams and aspirations, and then helping to design an educational and professional program that is all about them. Sometimes that will mean providing high levels of support, other times, it will mean just getting out of their way, but always it should include high-quality choices, both academic and experiential. In doing so, let’s ensure that internships are all about education with our students at its core—in other words, a capital “U” bringing together us, the University, and You, our students.