Lawprof Deborah Merritt — who does clinical ("experiential") teaching herself — explains the program at Washington & Lee’s School of Law (which aims to make grads "practice ready"), shows the truly bad results for students who had reason to hope they'd be more (not less!) marketable, and comes up with 4 possible reasons for the unintended consequences:
1. Practice-ready lawyers don't cause there to be more jobs openings (and they might even cause there to be fewer jobs, if these people can do more work sooner).
2. For all the talk about practical training in law school, employers might not care quite that much when it comes to choosing among job applicants.
3. The practical experience in law school might not align closely enough with the job. Merritt teaches a criminal defense clinic and admits that students who take this clinic "are stereotyped as public defenders, do-gooders, or (worse) anti-establishment radicals–even if they took the clinic for the client counseling, negotiation, and representation experience." She also asks: "If a student chooses experiential work in entertainment law and intellectual property, does the student diminish her prospects of finding work in banking or family law? Does working in the Black Lung Legal Clinic create a black mark against a student applying to work later for corporate clients?" The political slant of law schools — especially when it comes to who wants to teach clinics — tends to result in clinics that may send the wrong signals to the employers who have slots to fill.
4. Maybe the program stimulates "higher or more specialized career ambitions" in the students, so that they don't want the kinds of jobs that are available. The actual practice of law — as experienced by most lawyers — might not be what these supposedly "practice-ready" graduates want to do.
I'm sure you can add to this list or synthesize these elements.
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