Saturday, April 20, 2013

Truth and nothing but the truth

The Frankfurt newspaper discusses the lawsuit of New York University law students against the University.  It was lost because advertising need not be true.  Wow.  The "idea" or "myth" was obviously "inspiring" but it cost the students a great deal of money, time and effort with disappointment as a result.  Truth in advertising should be expected and especially from schools of higher education.  This judgment to me is disappointing.

The advertisement had stated that 97% of students had found work within 9 months of graduation.  The research into this statistic had included the work of people who were working as restaurant servers, for example.

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/zum-studium-verfuehrt-schlecht-informiert-geld-zurueck-12150344.html

We note that the Frankfurt newspaper lets us cut and paste paragraphs:


Tatsächlich schauen viele der jährlich etwa 43.000 amerikanischen Absolventen von Rechtsfakultäten gerade in die berufliche Röhre, unter anderem, weil das, was vor Jahren noch ihre Aufgabe war, inzwischen von Datenbanken oder von Indern erledigt wird: die Begutachtung von Dokumenten, das Finden von Präzedenzfällen, der Entwurf von Verträgen, das Bereitstellen juristischer Information.
Der Richter am New Yorker Appellationsgericht fand zwar, die Hochschulen mögen falsch informiert haben, aber nicht falsch genug, um verklagt werden zu können. Reklame, mag man sich das übersetzen, ist eben Reklame. Von einem verständigen „Konsumenten“ juristischer Lehre, so las sich die jetzt bestätigte Originalentscheidung vor einem Jahr, könne die Einsicht verlangt werden, dass der Markt optimistische Werbebroschüren obsolet mache.


Translating the above:

"Indeed many of the 43,000 graduates of law faculties are presently side-lined career-wise.  The work they might have been doing is nowadays often done by data banks or workers in India.  This would have included work such as the evaluation of documents, the finding of cases of precedent, the designing of contracts or the  finding of information...  In the end, the judge of the court of appeal in New York decided that while the universities may have provided false information it was not false enough to warrant a law suit.  Advertisement is advertisement.  An insightful 'consumer' of  'studies in law' can be expected to be critical enough to realize that the job market can make optimistic advertisements obsolete."

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