A Conversation on Innovation

Paved with good intentions

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1. Wow… So many thoughts, not sure where to start.

   1) Once again, this shows the ultimate impact of free money. When money is free flowing, and there is a ton of it, everyone in the system will act to maximize their take. I don’t believe the vast majority of the people in the structure of the system are explicitly malicious. Yet I do believe that ultimately a structure like this will get corrupted to whatever degree the law, or oversight, will allow.

   2) Schools are ultimately about money. Sure and prestige and a perception of where they are in the pecking order, which is then tied to money.

   3) And why? Ultimately, a school is about the jobs it can bring the students. We can see the perverse impact this has on behavior as outlined in the article, and this is the case if even half of it is true.

   I don’t see how this system can be fixed or improved. The free money is not likely to be turned off. The structural elements can only be mildly tweaked with oversight.

   To have a better system would require something truly new. And for law school, since there are too many students for too few jobs, there is no anchor to be leveraged.

   We need to pick a system where the market has too few good new employees, and focus on making that more efficient. Right now, employers have a very easy way to pick the top, and it seems with a poor market they can get the top…

   Mark

   

   Mark Gogolewski

   April 19, 2011 at 9:31 am

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   • Mark,

     Completely agree that a solution needs to be something new rather than an improvement. Beginning to believe that as an axiom that you can’t improve something which is on a path to make the problem that it was supposed to solve worse, you have to change it with something new.

     Sanjay

     

     sanjay

     April 19, 2011 at 12:19 pm

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