Editorial: Hamline, St. Thomas law schools ignoring transparency

As I've posted before, some recent law school grads are furious over their student loan debts, claiming their law schools lured them in by exaggerating their job prospects.

Now the nonprofit Law School Transparency Project is trying to help by producing better data on the schools so prospective students can make better-informed decisions about whether (or where) to go to school.

Hamline and St. Thomas are reportedly ignoring the issue, and have received a chiding from the Star Tribune:

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According to (founder Kyle) McEntee, who is a third-year student at Vanderbilt, only one small law school in Florida has agreed to comply with the organization's proposed standards. Only a few -- one is William Mitchell -- even bothered to respond to their request. Two Minnesota law schools -- Hamline and St. Thomas -- didn't' respond to a Star Tribune editorial writer's queries about the project. Law schools raise understandable concerns about who this new organization is, but they ought to recognize that its founders are asking valuable questions. Law schools should be learning from McEntee's ahead-of-the-curve organization, which has prospective students' best interests in mind, instead of ignoring it.

The newspaper shouldn't hold its breath, though. According to LawJobs.com:

The project grabbed headlines last month when a blogger under the pseudonym Ethan Haines -- who later revealed herself to be Zenovia Evans, a 2009 graduate of Thomas M. Cooley Law School -- announced that she was going on a hunger strike to prompt law schools to reveal the job information. She ended her hunger strike 24 days later, having received no responses from the 10 law schools she contacted.