Law School Is Buyers’ Market, With Top Students in Demand

“It’s insane,” Professor Rodriguez said. “We’re in hand-to-hand combat with other schools.”

In the new topsy-turvy law school world, students are increasingly in control as nearly all of the 204 accredited law schools battle for the students with the best academic credentials. Gone are the days when legal educators bestowed admittance and college graduates gratefully accepted, certain that they were on the path to a highly paid, respectable career.

Now, financially wobbly law schools face plunging enrollment, strenuous resistance to five-figure student debt and the lack of job guarantees — in addition to the need to balance their battered budgets.

To entice new students, some middle-tier schools have reduced tuition, including the law schools at the University of Arizona, University of Iowa and Pennsylvania State University

Selling Encyclopedias: The Dream of Advancement

Most telling, though, was the discovery that my best prospects had Wallace stickers on their car bumpers. George Wallace ran a populist campaign for president in 1968 that was based on Tea Party-like resentment of Washington and contempt for “pointy-headed” intellectuals who wanted to tell you what to do.

.. Fast forward to the present, where the wealth gap and the bleak prospects of the lower middle class have made that pixie dust even more potent (it’s striking that median household income as measured by the Commerce Department is actually a bit less today in real terms than it was in 1968, when vastly fewer women had entered the work force).

How the “performance revolution” came to athletics—and beyond.

And since many studies show that getting more sleep leads to better performance, teams are now worrying about that, too. The N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks have equipped players with Readiband monitors to measure how much, and how well, they’re sleeping.

.. The quality of classical musicians has improved dramatically as well, to the point that virtuosos are now, as the Times music critic Anthony Tommasini has observed of pianists, “a dime a dozen.” Even as the number of jobs in classical music has declined, the number of people capable of doing those jobs has soared, as has the calibre of their playing. James Conlon, the conductor of the Los Angeles Opera, has said, “The professional standards are higher everywhere in the world compared to twenty or forty years ago.” Pieces that were once considered too difficult for any but the very best musicians are now routinely played by conservatory students.

.. When John Madden coached the Oakland Raiders, he would force players to practice at midday in the middle of August in full pads; Don Shula, when he was head coach of the Baltimore Colts, insisted that his players practice without access to water. Today, teams are savvier about maximizing the benefits of practices, and sometimes that means knowing when not to practice. The Portland Trail Blazers, pioneers in using data to protect players’ health, will sometimes tell a lagging player to lay off practicing, lest he injure himself. To coaches of Madden and Shula’s generation, this would have sounded like mollycoddling. But last season the Trail Blazers had the healthiest team in the N.B.A.

.. Which raises a question: what are the fields that could have become significantly better over the past forty years and haven’t?

There are obvious examples. Customer service seems worse than it once was. Most companies underinvest in it, because they see it purely as a cost center, rather than a source of potential profits, and so workers are undertrained. Customer-service centers have often been set up to maximize the very things—speed and volume—that make for a poor customer experience. Continuous improvement is of no use if you’re not improving the right things.

.. If American teachers—unlike athletes or manufacturing workers—haven’t got much better over the past three decades, it’s largely because their training hasn’t, either.