Bogus Trends, Lawyer-Style

The Sunday Styles section in the Times today fronts a story about how law and medecine are allegedly becoming less desirable professions. Apparently, people are more and more attracted to creative professions and are thus less willing to enter into, or stick with, the medical and legal grinds.

In the grand tradition of bogus trend stories, it begins with an anecdote, follows with confirming quotations, and only then gets around to providing any actual data:

Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004—representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council...The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003

First of all, if you reduce 98,700 by 5.2%, you get 93,568. Reduce that by 6.7% and you get 87,299. Even accounting for rounding errors, that's not 83,500. Copy editors are supposedly maniacal about English usage, which is fine, but what about arithmetic?

More to the point, the "evidence" that both law and medicine are simultaneously becoming less attractive is that law school applications dropped by 15.4% from 2004 to 2006, while medical school applications increased by 27.3% from 2003 to 2006.

If newspapers insist on squeezing copy into the standard trend-story mold, then I guess there's little one can do to stop them. But if the numbers don't back the alleged trend up, then just leave the numbers out. It makes this stuff (a little) less aggravating.