Law schools: Still hiding the sad truth from students

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/20/law-school-misrepresentation/

by DanielBMarkham • 13 years ago

36 51 13 years ago

management.fortune.cnn.com

nhebb2• 13 years ago

Should law schools be held to a different standard than undergraduate programs? Last I checked, colleges don't advertise the employment prospects for a typical bachelor's degree. If you are smart enough to get into law school, you should be able to do enough research to gauge your prospects after graduation based on the law school you plan to attend and your undergraduate GPA.

scarmig• 13 years ago

The issue is, in popular culture, law is viewed as a relatively easy way (compared to medicine) to enter the upper middle class. This is outdated, but the fact remains, and it's re-enforced by many people in high ranking positions having a background in law.

Many people, particularly groups of people traditionally excluded from professional life, really have no idea about the reality. The information is out there, but if you've always been told that law is the safe, smart thing to do, you might not even know to look. Known unknowns versus unknown unknowns, and all that.

Most people fall into their work not out of a rational economic analysis (which is pretty damn hard, even for people who do it for a living) but out of impressions born of the zeitgeist. When someone chose to study CS or become a programmer (or whatever it is that you did), he or she probably didn't go through heaps of research about its prospects and then read a couple of books about whether or not those would continue in the future. Most likely, he chose to do it because he enjoyed computers, had friends with big salaries out of school, and knew there was a bunch of money flowing into companies like Google. Through luck of the draw, that decision worked out.

Evbn6• 13 years ago

Number of Google m/billionaires who saw many people getting rich from a CS degree when they were in school: 0.

Fighting the previous war is always foolish. Money is made by leading the pack, not following it.

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

Law schools are almost always more expensive than undergraduate programs, aren't they?

the_watcher7• 13 years ago

Yes. Plus the new interest rates are 6.8% and 7.9% (the majority of which is 7.9%), which accrues immediately, as subsidized loans were eliminated last year.

the_watcher7• 13 years ago

The problem is the statistics that are given contain ABA-approval. Now, thanks to the efforts of LST and the broader scamblog movement, you should know better, but 5 years ago before anyone really talked about this? Is it reasonable to expect people not to trust the governing body's numbers to at least be in the realm of reality?

nhebb2• 13 years ago

> The problem is the statistics that are given contain ABA-approval

Can you expand on that? Are they providing misleading data?

smoyer• 13 years ago

It's not in the best interest of the individual colleges that make up a university to discuss the prospects of their graduates. This article could be written about many of the liberal arts degrees or even about the lower-end students in science degree programs.

antiterra2• 13 years ago

Those aren't trade schools with a public perception of solid return.

The bottom dropped out of law about 5 years ago, when jobs were cut and law school enrollment went up. Not everyone has gotten the memo.

There was never a time where people assumed they could pull anywhere near six digits their first year out of school by getting a graduate degree in writing poetry.

_delirium3• 13 years ago

The fact that lawyers with jobs are still extremely highly paid in many cases also skews the perceptions, I think. Lawyers at the big firms are still making $150k+. That's different from areas like some parts of the liberal arts, where you don't really see people pulling down those kinds of salaries at all, so nobody is under the illusion that $150k+ jobs exist. In law they really do exist: salaries at law firms are comparable to those at tech firms. It's just that the odds of getting one of those jobs have significantly decreased over the past 5 years.

Why that situation remains, I'm not as sure. Why has the glut of lawyers not brought down salaries or prevailing rates? It seems instead that incomes have become bimodal, with one group of highly paid lawyers, and another group of very poorly paid lawyers with unstable employment.

rayiner8• 13 years ago

Lack of transparency is a huge issue. I remember when I started law school in 2009, the economy had just collapsed and we had zero information about how graduates were faring. The kind of stuff that's available today, at least from the better law schools, information detailing the precise number of students that went into which jobs, just didn't exist. For most schools it still doesn't.

That being said, the problem with law schools is just a microcosm of the problem facing higher education throughout the country. Skyrocketing tuition has meant that more and more of the lifetime increase in earning power obtained by a degree is being captured by schools. Indeed, these days for many people the net expected value is negative. But demand for higher education seems completely inelastic, largely perpetuated by the cultural myth that the way to improve our lot as a nation is for more education and better education. The fact of the matter is that more education isn't going to make well-paying middle class jobs come back from China, any more than it's going to break the cycle of poverty in inner city ghettos. It's just a smoke signal to justify ever increasing ranks of higher-paid teachers and professors.

Also, as ever, there are university administrators with their heads in the sand: "Sarah Zearfoss, senior assistant dean for admissions, financial aid, and career planning at the University of Michigan Law School, says law schools have growing increasingly aware of the major shift in the job landscape. 'We had not been doing anything different than other law schools,' she says, noting that graduates had gone on to prestigious private firms, nonprofits, and government jobs or clerkships. 'Our students were getting great jobs, but then the economy changed and we began to see some decline in offers.'"

The situation at the University of Michigan has declined from the point where nearly everyone could get a job justifying the almost $50k/year in tuition to the point where only 50-60% of the class can do so. That's the "new normal" and it's more than just "some decline."

Yes, people going to graduate school should be able to run the numbers, especially now that so much more information is out there, but in the face of administrators like these, is there any wonder why many choose to believe instead?

jimktrains2• 13 years ago

> But demand for higher education seems completely inelastic, largely perpetuated by the cultural myth that the way to improve our lot as a nation is for more education and better education.

I wouldn't say that. I would say that the problem is by thinking a if you don't have a B[AS], you're worthless. Trade schools are, and will continue to be, important.

Mike Rowe sums it up in an address to congress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NwEFVUb-u0

randomdata2• 13 years ago

I believe the parent's point is true. In my location (there is variance here), a graduate of a four year program needs to earn something like $43,000 per year to earn on par with a minimum wage worker without a post-secondary education when you consider the accumulated costs and lost opportunity.

The average income of a college graduate in my location is $34,000 per year. That means the majority of these graduates are effectively making less than minimum wage, yet the enrolment only continues to rise, if anything. That definitely seems inelastic to me.

coditor• 13 years ago

The number of law school graduates has always exceeded the number of computer science graduates (yes a comparison of a graduate degree to an undergraduate but CS majors rarely need another degree).

fnayr• 13 years ago

This is part of the reason why I decided not to apply for law school despite scoring well on the LSAT (176). I couldn't commit to working 80 hours a week at a big law firm to pay off 250K of debt unless I was sure I loved the work.

verbalist2• 13 years ago

With a 176 LSAT you probably would've gotten some rich scholarships barring unusual circumstances.

the_watcher7• 13 years ago

My 50% scholarship at a top 15 school (one of the cheaper ones too) still left me looking at a 40K per year bill with COL. You might be able to get a close to full ride if you are willing to go to a less prestigious school, but most aren't, since law is such a prestige obsessed world. It doesn't make much sense, given that there isn't really any difference in education quality or breadth between the schools. Law firms might as well just look at undergrad LSAT and GPA's, since that's about the extent of the filter "which law school you went to" applies.

jacques_chester4• 13 years ago

I think the basic problem is that law is taught in the USA as a graduate degree, so the stakes are higher.

In Australia, most universities teach law as an undergraduate degree. It's basically viewed as the replacement for the Arts degree of the 50s: a generalist degree that shows a comfort with doing large volumes of work with verbal abstractions.

Lots of Australian law students discover that they don't want to be lawyers. They go on to other professional careers instead -- the public service, management etc etc. In my case I quit and did computer science.

I don't regret it. Legal thinking is unusually thorough and careful.

the_watcher7• 13 years ago

I believe the US is the only country in the world to teach law school as a graduate degree. It's a function of every school modeling itself on Harvard Law (which was the first American law school). It makes much more sense to teach law as an undergraduate degree followed by an internship, since it removes the massive debt burden brought on by undergraduate + graduate school debt.

rayiner8• 13 years ago

Canadia also.

rayiner8• 13 years ago

That is of course the proper way to do it. You can thank Big Academia for getting rid of the sensible LLB here in the U.S.

Indeed, even if you are an American and really want to be a lawyer it's not necessarily a bad idea to try your hand at an Australian or British law school then do an LLM in the U.S. Or learn to speak Cantonese and head over to Hong Kong (or Hindi and head to India, or Portuguese and head to Brazil) where economic development has created a large demand for lawyers.

jacques_chester4• 13 years ago

The biggest switching divide is between common law countries (broadly, everywhere the British were) and code/civil law countries (broadly, everywhere else). They're actually quite different systems of law, not just similar systems with different contents.

joonix• 13 years ago

Australia's education sector is catching the bug though. They want the profitable grad education, and thus Melbourne uni now offers only a JD (3 year graduate program).

jacques_chester4• 13 years ago

UWA recently did this too, but then they partly backpedalled by offering guaranteed places in the following law degree.

So really what you're getting is a 6 year double degree instead of a 5 year double degree.

I think it's a bugger up, but I got my BCompSci (H1) and I'm happy I got in before the Melbourne Model struck.

the_watcher7• 13 years ago

I dropped out of a top-15 program. The legal education is in crisis mode right now. Last I looked, applications to law school were lower than any year since they started counting them. Formerly "competitive" schools like American have dropped all pretense of admissions standards. In my opinion, at least one school will have gone belly up in the next year (and without significant reform, that's just the tip of the iceberg).

Evbn6• 13 years ago

Well American only had pretenses to begin with.

Georgetown and then GWU had reputation, and UDC was a nice decently priced "local" school, like the one whose name escapes me (Suffolk?) in Mass where all the Mass politicians went.

American was always a tuition soak for rich wish-they-could-bes.

Evbn6• 13 years ago

We mock the fools who joined CS programs in undergrad to pursue a love of money but didn't care about computers. Why should we pity the law students? There is still plenty of work available for someone who wants a law degree in order to defend the defenseless and fight tyranny. But the market for predatory loan paperwork and anti-competitive M&A's s drying up. Those lawyers can cry into their beers with the RIAA lobbyists and the infamous buggy whip manufacturers.

rayiner8• 13 years ago

There actually isn't. My friends from law school who sold their souls to corporate American mostly found jobs. It's my friends who wanted to defend poor people, fight racial injustice, or save the environment that had problems finding jobs. Corporate America is doing fine--it's the public sector that's really been gutted by the recession.

Not that I think this is a positive state of affairs, mind you. Karmicly, those people are a lot more deserving of jobs.

Evbn6• 13 years ago

I didn't mean to suggest that good works would pay well, but I guess I implied that.

rollo_tommasi• 13 years ago

That's quite a nasty and vindictive worldview you've got there.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

There is still plenty of work available for someone who wants a law degree in order to defend the defenseless and fight tyranny.

I really like law as an intellectual discipline and (I think) I would be happy to work at it for a fairly ordinary wage as opposed to big bucks. But it's hard to study outside of a conventional school (lack of contact with other students or feedback from faculty) and fairly tough to get job of any kind and accrue experience no matter which school you go to...and although there are schemes designed to enable relatively low-paid lawyering in the public interest by reducing loan obligations, I really don't care for the idea of running up >$100,000 in debt at a fairly high rate of interest. There aren't exactly a lot of low-cost law schools and scholarships/grants are not transparent at all.

RougeFemme• 13 years ago

I have a relative who got into of the top 15 law schools. Despite getting a scholarship, he's still borrowing 30K per year. He was having doubts about being a lawyer; he was doing it mostly because people were saying "you're smart; you should do it." and he saw the JD as a means to an end. (I'm not sure what the "end" is, but he had no intention of being a lawyer "for life".)Anyway, though he did well his first year, he hated almost every second of it. He's cutting his losses, getting a job (hopefully - he's had promising interviews) and leaving after 1 year with only 30K in debt.

Law schools: Still hiding the sad truth from students

Related Stories