Thursday, December 30, 2010

Yep. I was a chump.

See here.  This TaxProf Blog post points out how much creative accounting folderol goes into reporting employment stats of law schools to U.S. News

As I've said before (see here), lying on these questionnaires isn't much different from the "earnings management" that went on at Enron and the other like-minded companies.  Refusing to lie puts schools at a huge disadvantage, but lying just results in a race to the bottom in accuracy while pursuing a race to the top in "100% employed" reports.

2 comments:

amar said...

nice post!

S. Serebnick said...

AS MY CCNY STATISTICS PROFESSOR SAID
IN 1950: "FIGURES DO NOT LIE BY LIARS FIGURE"
S. SEREBNICK