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<p>What I find odd about this epistemological stance is that newmassdad doesn’t seem to be particularly shy about voicing his opinions on plenty of other threads for which little hard data is presented, if it exists at all. For example, he has posted numerous threads regarding his opinions about UC that seem to be generalized from the experience of his daughter, which by nature is merely a ‘case study’ where the number of observations is by definition equal to one. Maybe UC is a strong school because of the positive experience enjoyed by his daughter, or maybe she just happens to be an outlier. But when confronted with actual statistical data - even if incomplete- that points to a conclusion he dislikes, he retreats behind a smokescreen of “I don’t know”. </p>
<p>The more fair way is to draw conclusions from whatever data is available. If newmassdad’s daughter had a positive experience at UC and he wants to present that as data from which to draw conclusions, I have no problem with that. But similarly, others should be allowed to present possibly incomplete statistical data and draw conclusions from that. {If anything, the latter data is actually better than the former, for at least that data has information about more than one case.}</p>
<p>If anything, the truly ‘correct’ response to deficiencies of the data should actually be: “I don’t know, but I want to find out.”, which is where Cue7’s suggestion is apropos. So to enlighten us all, how about if newmassdad, Cue7, and I together write an email to the UC career office and ask them for data regarding the law schools that UC students are admitted to. Whatever response we obtain, we will pledge to post it here. That will allow us to modify our conclusions in light of whatever new evidence we find, or validate our concerns if no response is forthcoming. Barring that, how about we ask a current UC student - of which there surely must be some here on this board - to view the information and post some of it here. </p>
<p>Otherwise, it seems to me that the actual (and sad) response being invoked is: “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”</p>
<p>To be clear, I have nothing against UC. Indeed, I believe that UC offers an education that is highly beneficial to a great many of its students. But - here’s the rub - I can’t “prove” that. Nobody is going to allow me to run an experiment where I take a bunch of students, have half of them randomly assigned to attend UC and the other half to some reference school and then track their career paths and happiness over time.</p>