The percentage of law students expecting to work in private law firms dropped to 50 percent this year, from 58 percent in each of the last three years, according to an annual survey by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Wednesday. The percentage of law students surveyed that expected to work in the public-interest sector rose to 33 percent from 29 percent. The findings indicate that law students are adjusting their career expectations due to the current economic climate, Lindsay Watkins, the survey's project manager, told The Chronicle. "The amount of law-school debt did not seem to affect students' choices to enter traditionally lower-paying fields like public-interest law or government service," Watkins said.
A Muslim civil rights advocacy group is protesting a new policy at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences banning individuals from covering their faces on campus, The Boston Globe reported Tuesday. The college hopes the policy, which bans anything that covers the entire face, including ski masks and scarves, will ensure public safety by allowing college safety officials to identify people on campus, according to The Globe. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic relations, said he believed the policy targeted Muslim women who wear veils over their faces, according to The Globe.
Graduates of Teach for America are less likely to vote, give charitably and be civically engaged than students who dropped out of the program or who were accepted but declined to participate, according to a recent study by Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt of Stanford University, The New York Times reported Sunday. Graduates of the national non-profit organization, which places recent college graduates in public school teaching positions, are less civically involved because of exhaustion and disappointment with the program's approach to educational inequity, McAdam told The Times. Wendy Kopp, Teach for America's founder and president, disagrees with the results of the survey, which is the first to survey Teach for America graduates about civic involvement, The Times reported. Teach for America, which was founded almost 20 years ago, has over 17,000 alumni, 63 percent of whom remain in the education field and 31 percent of whom remain in the classroom, according to The Times.
