The New York Times ran a much emailed piece talking about the declining value of a top-tier law degree, and now law professor Sarah Waldeck has followed up at Concurring Opinions with a blog post urging potential law students to be very tough-minded in deciding whether to go to law school:
Forty-five thousand dollars per year (plus other costs) seems like a lot to pay for such uncertain prospects. But the number of people sitting for the LSAT this year suggests that quite a few will be willing to pay it; soon we’ll have a clearer picture of how many LSAT scores will materialize into actual applications.
Of course, this year law school applications will be partly driven by the lack of opportunity costs. Graduating college students face generally dismal employment prospects regardless of what field they want to enter. But I suspect that optimism bias plays just as large a role in student decision-making. No matter what the economy, some lawyers will be wildly successful. Many prospective students are inclined to think that they will be part of this group, no matter how daunting the odds against it. On the more rational side of the analysis, it’s also true that law school historically has proven itself a relatively good place to weather out bad economic times.
What is different this time around, however, is that no one is yet sure whether the changes in legal markets and in law firms are permanent, or whether things will eventually return to what we had come to think of as normal. If you haven’t always wanted to practice law, or if you’re considering a law school that is not one of the best in the nation, or if the law school isn’t offering to pay for you to attend, my advice is to wait to see how this plays out.
Law schools know that many prospective students will ignore this kind of advice, at least for now. The decision to admit students—and to encourage them to attend—has a moral component, especially when law schools know that some students (many? most?) will face diminished prospects upon graduation. Law schools, the ABA and the AALS have a continuing dialogue about what constitutes a quality legal education. Now they should be talking about concrete steps that are responsive to the changing legal market. In the short term, and at a minimum, law schools would seem to have the obligation to hold tuition steady. In the long term, and if these market changes are permanent, universities need to ask hard questions about whether the number of law school seats should be determined by how many people want to go to law school or how many lawyers the market can absorb. This, in turn, would raise a series of questions about class size as well as the propriety of establishing new law schools.
Nunzio says:
Maybe schools could lower tuition. Yale’s worth $50k a year. But most other schools are greatly overpriced.
January 20, 2010, 11:42 pmSkyler says:
One of the odd things I’ve found when I was deciding to go to law school and researching which schools to attend is that almost all discussion presumes that every applicant is going to be in a first tier law school and is vying to join some big law firm. I still see that bias. Anyone not getting all A’s at Harvard or wherever is just not a real law student, it would seem from the literature and on line discussions.
The fact is that there are a lot more lower tier schools and most lawyers don’t work in big law firms, so why is the logic always focused on them?
Some of us have no intention of joining big firms and have no expectation of becoming rich in the first year out of school. There are other reasons to become a lawyer.
Some people have romantic and yet very realistic dreams of defending the poor and oppressed. Some just want to start a business and strike out on their own. Some have a family business to join. Becoming rich would be nice for either of these but that is not the driving concern.
Becoming a lawyer is an expensive cost that must be born even if it is not the goal to be chained to the desk at some law firm for the best years of one’s life. The equation is not always strictly monetary. There are other values that come into play and I don’t think they’re that unusual. In this case paying the additional entry fee to some high falutin organization named on your sheepskin is wasted money, but the decision to go to law school is still appropriate.
January 21, 2010, 12:02 amSuperSkeptic says:
“This, in turn, would raise a series of questions about
January 21, 2010, 12:28 amclass size as well as the propriety of establishing new law schoolshow much money we’ll lose if we keep letting in too many law students.”ChrisTS says:
Skyler:
We see similar presumptions in graduate school discussions: of course everyone wants to land a job in a ‘top tier’ research university. Meanwhile, most jobs and many scholars are genuinely interested in teaching undergraduates. You would be hard pressed to learn this from the dominant discourse.
January 21, 2010, 12:38 amfooburger says:
I can’t believe they’re advocating law schools manipulatee the legal labor market deliberately. For all I know they already do that, but it really shouldn’t be advocated as a reason for admitting or not admitting students. Find an objective measure. Apply it.
January 21, 2010, 12:51 amMike McDougal says:
Recognizing that doesn’t make an economic analysis less useful. It can even be enabling. If a prospective law student can say, “you know, I’d be willing to take a NPV hit of $30,000 to do what I love,” that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
January 21, 2010, 12:53 amD says:
Maybe I read it here, but the governing body dealing with dentistry schools has the clout to actually shut down dentistry schools for a year to keep from flooding the profession. The ABA and AALS have just not shown that they are interested in preserving the economic safety of those who are already lawyers.
We already view law school as regimented: top grades, go to a 2L summer, get hired from that summer position. It is sad but practicing law has always been very different from the teaching of law and lawyers often don’t want to hire law graduates.
Remember the days when the people that went to college were the children of moneyed parents who were sent to get an education and then return to run the family business? Well, today with the advent of the diploma mill that is our 4-year baccalaureate degree system we are churning out “educated” people, many of whom have no business to return to. So the graduates go start at the bottom of the totem pole and the lucky ones find organizations that value leadership and cultivate it.
January 21, 2010, 12:53 amMike McDougal says:
Solution: Kill government-backed student loans. PRESTO! All of a sudden the risk of going to Cooley is made incredibly clear in the interest rate of the loan.
January 21, 2010, 12:55 amD says:
Do you mean make the loan dischargeable in bankruptcy? How would that help?
January 21, 2010, 1:26 amAnon21 says:
It doesn’t seem especially outrageous to me. It may not be a good policy prescription, but I don’t see how it’s inherently wrong to suggest that institutions serving as gatekeepers to a profession should take into account how much work is available in that profession in determining how many people to let through the gate. The current system may not be manipulating the market, but it is siphoning off a lot of money from students who will have little to show for it at the end of 3 years.
January 21, 2010, 1:34 amneurodoc says:
You say Yale is worth $50K a year, meaning you see that as the value of the product they deliver, whether the actual educational experience and/or the or the diploma they award. What does it cost Yale to produce that product, though? What about the cost of “production,” all components taken into account (capital costs, faculty salaries, administration, library, etc.)?
I know next to nothing about law school economics, but I’m pretty certain the costs to graduate a law student are much less than those to graduate a medical student, and law schools are on much sounder economic footing than medical schools. A few years back, the president of Georgetown tried to squeeze the law school for more tribute to subsidize the less economically successful parts of the university, and the law school dean was able to face him down with the help of prominent law school alumni like Robbert Bennett. I never heard of extra money sloshing around in the coffers of other grad schools, save perhaps B schools. (Harvard Divinity School desperately wanted to keep the $2M it was given by an out-and-out antisemite because it isn’t so well endowed, but finally had to give the money back.)
So how much do law schools need to charge to educate students to be competent practitioners?
And the idea of letting school debt be discharged in bankruptcy is a very interesting one. What would the effects be? If law schools would bear the losses from loan defaults, would they adapt more than they have to the marketplace for newly minted attorneys?
January 21, 2010, 2:24 amBruce Hayden says:
I have a different take on this. Law schools turn out lawyers. Lawyers know the law. So to some extent do law students. Law professors like to keep their hand in practicing, and that often means litigation. Some of those laws involve anti-trust.
The ABA does have an out-sized control over parts of legal education. In particular, they do control ABA accreditation, and it is really nice to have graduated from an ABA accredited LS. But they can really only control things indirectly, through published standards. If they are ever as arbitrary as those controlling medical (and apparently dental) schools, they get sued. Besides, there have always been other ways of getting licensed to practice law, including attending non-ABA accredited law schools.
From the point of view of a lawyer, I was appalled a couple of years ago, when a physician friend of mine explained that we had a shortage of American doctors partially because the AMA misjudged demand and had eliminated slots in medical school at a time when they should have been expanding them. He went on to tell me that they not only determined what medical schools could exist, but also how many slots each had.
But also keep in mind that law schools and business schools are typically cash cows for universities. Doubling law students will often more than double profits in the long run, due to economies of scale. Business schools are even worse, since they don’t have the ABA mandated libraries. Medical and dental schools are not. They often cost as much, if not more, than the tuition charged for them. And maybe the need for subsidies has some effect on how many medical and dental students can be accommodated.
January 21, 2010, 3:17 amJohn Noble says:
What a dismal view of law school. One expects a professor of law to have some appreciation for the enjoyment, even thrill, generated by a legal education’s entree into the disciplines of logic, rhetoric, philosophy, and politics– by the intellectual engagement in learning to “think like a lawyer.”
Law school is too expensive and the best schools are way too expensive, but in considering whether a legal education is worth the price, students should look beyond the value of avoiding the drudgery of the work-a-day world for another three years and appreciate law school as shear intellectual adventure. Students should also look past the anticipated market for first-year associates and bear in mind that law school opens more doors than any other post-graduate path.
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January 21, 2010, 5:37 amAvatar says:
Sure, you can set whatever barriers to entry of ALA-accredited schools you like. In return, we’ll eliminate the requirement that bar applicants have a degree from such a school. If you want to enjoy the benefits of a legal monopoly, realize that your decisions are inherently public policy decisions; that the ABA has to serve the public interest alongside, if not before, the interests of its member lawyers.
Lawyers benefit from fewer lawyers entering the profession, because they have a legal monopoly on many kinds of legal work. The public, however, benefits by having more trained lawyers; not only are legal costs cheaper, but with more lawyers comes an increased number of trained lawyers in other professions besides the law. (Think about how many lawyers are utterly clueless about topics that are generally connected with the practice of law. If I had a dollar for every lawyer who didn’t know anything about electronic discovery… Now think about how much those lawyers don’t know about science, about math, about industry. A lawyer who’s both an expert in the law and also in a particular non-legal field is worth a great deal; encouraging more such lawyers is a public good.)
There are a great number of legal positions that must be filled to ensure the smooth operation of society. In particular, the justice system needs prosecutors to represent the state’s interests, and lawyers willing to represent defendants (who are, by and large, indigent, or at least to the effect of not being able to afford market rate for a lawyer). We know that there is, if not a shortage of prosecutors, a shortage of criminal defense attorneys. One of the reasons for that is the enormous cost of law school and the relatively low compensation available in the criminal defense field. An increased number of lawyers means that the difference between the compensation available for private practice and the compensation available for public servants will be, not equal, but at least not quite as separated. It’s not unreasonable to assume that more lawyers would be willing to accept the lower compensation (or, if you want to put it more baldly, find themselves pressed into the role for lack of other opportunities.)
I’ll admit that having some sort of license to practice law is a public good, but that doesn’t mean that the bar association ought to conduct its business in the manner of a 14th-century guild hall. (Nor are comparisons with the medical field flattering – there’s another area in which the public good would be served by stripping the gatekeeper role from current practitioners…)
January 21, 2010, 5:47 amSP says:
I don’t believe law school “opens doors” to anything but jobs as licensed attorneys, at least insofar as one’s first job is concerned. The idea that it does more than this is a myth that has helped create this situation. People who are not terribly interested in careers as attorneys still believe that law school is a good decision, because it will increase their marketability in a wide variety of career paths.
Perhaps this was true some time ago, but it is not true anymore. It was not true in 2005 when I graduated. Nobody was particularly impressed with my degree and quite a few didn’t understand why I wasn’t pursuing a career in law. That I couldn’t find a job in law wasn’t a very impressive answer, either.
January 21, 2010, 6:00 amSP says:
Speaking on behalf of law school failures everywhere, I don’t think that any heavy handed regulation of the supply of lawyers is necessary. I think it would probably be enough simply to regulate the way in which law schools prepare their job market statistics. There should be uniform standards and they should be regularly audited. Currently, the decision to enter law school is a transaction with a tremendous asymmetry of information. Some regulation along these lines would probably go a very long way towards exposing the terrible investment law school ends up being for most people before they make the big mistake.
January 21, 2010, 6:18 ammarkm says:
Why are you assuming that the job market for lawyers will be as bad in three years as it is now? By the time someone starting law school this year graduates, if the economy follows the usual cycle, it will have recovered and began another boom. Or Obama will have stifled the recovery with a mass of regulations, and everyone still in business will need to hire more lawyers to sort them out.
January 21, 2010, 6:43 amSP says:
The legal market has been bad for at least the last decade. I graduated in 2005 and it was terrible then, even while the larger economy was in boom. It is only now that people are starting to take notice, because of the recession. The recession has caused the situation to worsen to the point that the elite law schools and elite graduates are now themselves threatened. A return to “normal” in 3 years might be fine for the elite students at the top of their classes or from elite schools, but normal will still be very rough on your average grad from your average school.
However, the old ways may never return. The recession has forced biglaw clients to become more cost conscious, and this has included a refusal to pay for first year associates. Such changes could change the employment landscape during and after the recession. As the number of lucrative biglaw jobs shrink, expect the elite graduates to begin taking the previously less desired jobs, pushing the average grads further down the ladder.
January 21, 2010, 6:55 amAndrew says:
I have read this article and comments with a wry sense of irony.
January 21, 2010, 8:36 amAs a farmer, I know the following:
Today in the United States there are more lawyers than farmers.
Universities’ ag divisions are begging for young men and women to enter masters and Phd level with full scholarships available.
At this point in our recession/depression there is only one major industry that has weather the financial storm and that is agriculture.
The average age of farmers is 56.
And, of course, the obvious issue is that one profession produces and contributes and the other consumes and obfuscates for no real purpose except for self survival (you are welcome to guess which one is which).
Oh well, I guess we can all eat paper briefs when we get hungry
Frank Drackman says:
Wow, my State Medical School was only about $6k a year, of course that was alot of money in 1985…And then they hit you up for Microscope Fees, Lab Coats, even had to pay an “Activity Fee” for the damn Gym I never went to…
January 21, 2010, 9:22 amNice thing was I got a Military Scholarship the 2d day of classes…seems some other sucker got cold feet at the last minute, drove like Steve McQueen in “Bullit” to stop payment on my tuition check…
Bryan Gividen says:
The original comment recommended getting rid of gov’t-supported loans. The reason that would be “helpful” is because without the government to step and require that lenders give money to a 2.5 student with a 150 LSAT, lenders would deny loans to high-risk individuals. If a bank sees, “Podunk College Law,” they will be less likely to grant a loan than if it says, “Harvard Law.” Without those high-risk individuals receiving loans, the supply would likely go down.
January 21, 2010, 9:32 amEric S. says:
Remember this isn’t just a law school problem but a college problem. Post-secondary education is massively inflated and overpriced and is surely the next bubble to pop. It is going to be ugly.
January 21, 2010, 9:43 amCalderon says:
I agree that the best solution may to remove all government support and subsidies for law school loans. Leaving aside libertarian arguments about whether any activity should be subsidized and assuming that subsidies are sometimes beneficial, I can’t see why the US people should be subsidizing the education of more attorneys at the moment. To the extent there aren’t enough public defenders, public interest people, etc., there can be more targetted subsidies for attorneys who go into those professions (such as a federal government version of loan forgiveness programs).
The result should be to effectively prevent less qualified potential law students from getting loans that they’ll have difficulty paying back. This should also eventually lead to the closure of many lower ranked law schools.
January 21, 2010, 9:55 amMatthew Dundon says:
It’s not the best law schools that are too expensive, but (arguably) the worst.
The return on tuition investment at highly-rated law schools is terrific. The kind of person who typically goes to top law schools — smart, but lacking the math, science, creativity, and/or aggression required of success in the business world — gets multiples of 5x and 10x in present value of incremental lifetime income over their tuition. Make it 15x if you’re paying in-state at Boalt or UVA. Indeed, when it comes to good law schools, what needs to be justified is the massive tax-payer subsidies (guaranteed loans, tax deductions for donations to the school, property and other tax exemptions for the school, etc.) which permit the tuition to be low enough to generate those sorts of out-sized returns.
The over-pricing of the lower-ranked law schools becomes remains debatable when you consider the disparity in incremental income. If a “typical” 23-year-old top 14 1L raises his expected income at age 30 from $80,000 to $200,000, I’d guess the typical 23-year-old Tier 3 1L raises his expected income at age 30 from $50,000 (he has a college degree and IQ permitting an acceptable LSAT, after all) to $100,000. Now that $100,000 is a lot less than the Top 14 guy’s $200,000 — but the impact in terms of happiness is pretty extreme. Someone making $200,000 has a pretty similar consumption profile to someone making $100,000 — fewer dinners out, less lavish vacations, a 2,000 square foot house rather than 3,000 — but basically the same lifestyle neighborhood. Someone making $50,000 has a very different lifestyle from someone making $100,000 — in a major metropolitan area, it means fundamentally worse housing, transportation, education for your kids, ability to build up a reserve fund of savings, etc. That Tier 3 school might still be a huge win for its typical student…
January 21, 2010, 10:54 amneurodoc says:
Your physician friend is fundamentally misinformed as to how things are post-WWII in medical education. The AMA has no control of the sort he imagines over medical school slots, and a fraction of the influence on medical schools generally that the ABA has on law schools. If he insists that he is correct, then ask him to cite some authority. (Read Paul Starr’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine.)
January 21, 2010, 11:42 amMark Field says:
Law students (and lawyers) lack aggression? That would be news.
January 21, 2010, 12:01 pmGuest14 says:
American University Washington College of Law has a single year cost of attendance of $62,000. But the median graduate will review documents in a basement for $13.50/hour. This seems a bit off.
January 21, 2010, 12:15 pmDan in Euroland says:
The law should simply be an undergraduate degree. There really is no reason to have an additional three years that, contra John Noble above, contains hackneyed philosophy and economics. Law professors do not have comparative advantage in these disciplines, even as they relate to law, and should not be teaching them.
The only subject with which law professors have a comparative advantage is statutory interpretation. That could be a two semester class tops.
January 21, 2010, 1:02 pmSkip says:
It’s not about job markets. Law schools are full of students who are there only because they didn’t know what else to do after three or four years of college, and law schools required no specific preparation for admission. All too many of them become disenchanted too late (in their view) to go elsewhere.
January 21, 2010, 1:33 pmSP says:
True that many (most?) law students go to law school because they don’t have any idea what else to do with themselves. But even if every single one of them had a burning desire to practice law, and enrolled in law school as part of plan to do just that, there would not be enough employment opportunities beyond graduation to support them all. As currently situated, law school is a game that necessarily makes losers out of lots of people. We can blame those individual losers for not being winners (and we do!), but somebody HAD to lose.
January 21, 2010, 1:38 pmIan Watson says:
If you sincerely believe the above comment then either you haven’t been to law school or you had a very poor experience. I think that law school should be knocked down a year, people should be more cost conscious about it, and that it should be more practice oriented… but the idea that professors know little other than statutory interpretation, which could be covered in a two semester undergraduate course, is inaccurate.
Oh, and Dundon’s math on Boalt is wrong. We are 10% below private now, we are not getting anything from CA government now.
January 21, 2010, 1:38 pmdfb says:
The best way to lower law school tuition is to allow competition. Bring back undergraduate law degrees and the price will come back to reality, or at least on par with undergraduate education. In addition, it will make a legal education and career accessible to the lower socio economic group. All of the arguments I’ve seen against undergraduate legal degrees is bunk. In addition, perhaps the profession will be better regarded if anyone can learn to think like a lawyer and can likewise understand what it is their lawyer is charging them too much to do. :-)
January 21, 2010, 2:04 pmRE Ramcharan says:
I got out of print media 20-some years ago and went to law school because my LSAT score was good enough to get in. That, and newspaper reporters were going the way of gandy dancers and COBOL programmers.
January 21, 2010, 2:27 pmLooking back on it, I probably would have done better to become an engineer or a registered nurse.
Unfortunately, I don’t understand fractions and mucus is icky.
Ian Watson says:
Judging from the comments on this board, the average law student:
1. Doesn’t know why they are at law school.
2. Doesn’t understand they will make “babysitter” money.
3. Doesn’t understand that the job is horrible / miserable / etc.
4. Doesn’t understand that law school won’t teach you anything useful.
5. Doesn’t understand that a law degree will take them nowhere outside of the law.
6. Can’t do basic cost-benefit analysis.
This sort of anti law school rant is easily available with any google search. Hell, before I went to school I read it over and over. Yet people keep signing up. There seems to be a huge disconnect between what is apparently common knowledge, and what people actually do.
I think it is because the above 1-6 points are widely exaggerated, particularly by a small, vocal group that feels like the system plotted against them on some level. This group exists in virtually every profession these days. Researcher grad students see their 7 years of no pay as virtual slave labor, medical students pay off their bills for the rest of their bloody lives, etc. etc. The negativity strikes me, and many others in law school, as general bitterness. Make the choice with open eyes, but hell, the world isn’t plotting against you.
Other than subsidized school loans (which I am against), can someone explain to me why it is that people keep pouring into law schools, paying these horrible prices, if 1-6 are true? Is everyone just ignorant due to some epic market failure? I just don’t get it.
January 21, 2010, 2:52 pmMAS says:
So what do I tell my daughter that is going to graduate this year (from highschool) and has wanted to be a lawyer since I can remember? Well, she actually wants to be a judge but I guess you have to start somewhere? Should I tell her that it is a bad idea to go? We can’t afford to send her to Harvard, Yale or Columbia or whatever Ivy league school that seems to be requirement to even be considered for a job. I am lost as I don’t want her to give up what she wants but I also don’t want her unemployed.
January 21, 2010, 2:59 pmRyan » Blog Archive » More Discussion on Whether You Should Go to Law School says:
[...] Volokh links to the same article. Characteristically there’s great info and discussion in the comments section). [...]
January 21, 2010, 3:06 pmIan Watson says:
I would tell her the following.
1. Intern everywhere she can in the legal field, which will most likely be unpaid and not thrilling. This will give her some feeling of what she is getting herself into, and will build her resume.
January 21, 2010, 3:11 pm2. Learn to write. It is really easy to come out of undergrad with no idea how to construct a sentence.
3. Tell her to get good grades.
4. If, after working several legalish internships, she hasn’t been dissuaded, tell her to study for the LSAT until her eyes bleed. It is unpleasant, but not that difficult if you put in the time.
5. See where she gets in.
SP says:
Yes, it is an epic market failure and hard to explain, but still real.
I’m now almost a decade removed from my decision to enter law school, but I can remember that I was extremely ignorant going in. I believed that law school was a golden ticket to a 6 figure salary. This is/was the conventional wisdom about law school, and I believed it the same as anybody else. I did not attempt to do any particular research into whether or not this was true, a failure that I blame on immaturity. 20 year olds who have never been anything but students for their entire lives are not, usually, very savvy about investments or career planning. Some of them are fortunate to have savvy parents or other mature influences, but I was not.
Once I was in law school, it became clear that the golden ticket story was not exactly true. I can recall assemblies in our first year where the placement office would present their job market and income statistics. The “average” salary my school reported was about 70K, although I didn’t find out until later that this average is produced by averaging very high with very low starting incomes, and that few people actually make this amount.
At some point around the end of my first year, I knew that I wasn’t going to be at the top of my class and that I wasn’t going to get a job with biglaw. At that point, I wish I would have dropped out and saved myself the time and debt, but I did not. There were a number of contributing factors to this. Partly, it was due to advice that finishing was better than “quitting” and that the law degree would be valuable no matter what I did. Partly, it was due to a state of denial about the future, the belief that things were going to work out for me “somehow”. I did not have to worry right away anyway. It was only until graduation was looming that I had to seriously consider just what sort of sitaution I was in.
I think the sunken cost fallacy probably plays a large role here. It is hard for law students on the path to loserdom to cut their losses.
Personally, I never found a job in law other than document review. Most of my friends who did find real jobs make so little money that they consider law school to have been a mistake, if not a disaster.
That this problem is real, and not simply being overreported by a bitter minority is something that will be shown in the coming years as the problem gets worse and worse. Until then, I assume many people (and ironically many current law students) will prefer to blame the losers for being losers.
January 21, 2010, 3:13 pmSP says:
Clearly, I was not ready for law school. I was not mature enough, did not take it seriously enough, and wasn’t informed enough to make it work.
If I had known everything that I know now, I never would have gone. It requires a lot more work and dedication than I was prepared to give it.
I do think that there is something wrong with the system that a person like me could so easily get into law school. Certainly some sort of filtering mechanism should exist to keep people like me out, but none did. Instead I was welcomed, encouraged, and even financed. That is a problem.
January 21, 2010, 3:21 pmSP says:
Ian Watson’s advice is very good and I wish my father had given me the same.
Perhaps my view of what is “typical” is skewed by my own experience, but my parents had no advice at all to give me. They thought it was great that I got into law school at all, they thought I had won the golden ticket. My parents were not very sophisticated and just didn’t know better.
How common is that? I think its quite common. I did not go to an elite law school and most of the kids there were not from elite backgrounds, many were of the sort where the parents couldn’t stop bragging about how their kid was “a lawyer” because where they come from, that alone is a big, big deal.
These kids, the ones who have nobody to steer them through this process, they are the ones who end up screwed over. Most of the 20 year olds capable of doing a “cost benefit analysis” really just have better guidance.
I do think the schools have a moral obligation here, as the original linked article was suggesting. They’ve made it easy for unqualified people (like me) to get into law school and I think common decency should compel them to take some steps to mitigate the damage these dumb kids are doing to themselves and their futures.
January 21, 2010, 3:29 pmCalderon says:
At least now, a student can get loans that cover basically all of his/her law school costs (the limits on subsidized loans are much higher for law school than undergrad). Thus, what you can afford isn’t a barrier; she can go to Yale, Harvard, etc. The flip side is she’ll likely have $120,000 in law school debt, plus whatever she has from undergrad, when she graduates. The debate over too many lawyers is a debate about whether it makes sense for all law students to take on so much debt.
My serious advice is that she should do as well as she can in undergrad (preferrably in engineering, a hard science, or something else that can lead to a good job right out of college), study hard for the LSAT, and apply to well-regarded law schools with a non-law back-up plan. If she gets into a “Top 14″ law school, then by all means she should go. If she gets into a tier 1 or tier 2 law school (as generally defined by US News), then there’s a lot more risk but if it’s still her dream to become a judge, good luck. If she can only get into a tier 3 or tier 4 (basically bottom half) law school, then she should do something else.
Also, getting a judgeship is a highly political process, so she’d be well-advised to start schmoozing with the governing political machine in whatever locale she ends up practing law as soon as possible.
January 21, 2010, 3:42 pmAlex says:
If you won’t be first in your class at Harvard, there is no reason for you to even think about being a lawyer. Go work at McDonald’s.
Geez, so much negativity, no wonder no employer wants to hire some of these law grads.
January 21, 2010, 4:29 pmSP says:
Nobody is saying that. But you should try to get into a top school and if you don’t, you need to seriously consider the consequences of going to a lesser school and not being at the top of the class.
The main consequence is simply a lack of choice in one’s ultimate job. Top graduates from top schools have the most options. They can become wealthly biglaw associates, or hold prestigious government positions, or become judges or academics, etc.
Students not in the elite have very limited ability to choose their path. They generally have to take whatever job is available, in whatever field that happens to be. Most of my classmates were forced down paths they never had any particular interest in simply because that was the job that would take them.
And for those who can’t get a job at all, there is document review.
It isn’t about “negativity”, its about a saturated job market that necessarily creates winners and losers. The losers aren’t going to be happy, that’s for sure.
January 21, 2010, 4:35 pmIan Watson says:
I have a general understanding of where you are coming from. I have several friends that are in a nasty situation right now, and I am well aware that several of them are not going to be thrilled about their position in a couple of years. My comments are not specifically directed at you, but at the general theme coming from articles like the NYT one / above the law crowd / “upset 1L”, etc.
What I find frustrating about people complaining about the value of law school is that the source of their anger and dissatisfaction comes from unrealistic expectations, a sense of entitlement, and ignorance. Law students, for whatever reason, seem particularly infected with these problems. Other grad students, from medical school to researchers, have similarly horrid economics behind their education decisions. They ranks are also rife with disappointment. Just ask a wannabe surgeon who is now a general practitioner paying off their bills, a PHD lab worker that never becomes a PI, etc. Their cost-benefit math sucks just as much as many law students. Yet many of them are not going into their profession with the golden ticket six figure salary as their primary motivator, so they deal with it.
We should push more and more information at undergrads, that much I certainly agree with. I just don’t think we should heap a lot of sympathy on those with a sense of entitlement borne of ignorance. I mean really, at what point should we decide people are adults and can make life altering decisions? After undergrad? 2-3 years after undergrad? At 30? The real information isn’t that hard to come by.
Law schools sell a service, they make lawyers. They make their product more attractive than it otherwise is economically. I really don’t think it is too much to ask for a college graduate to realize this and do independent research on how to spend 100k+ and 3 years of his or her life.
Then again, I am biased and a bit of an ass, so I am likely being overly harsh.
January 21, 2010, 4:52 pmSP says:
Well, I don’t personally ask for anybody’s sympathy. I made the choice and I am responsible. I am a law school loser. I wanted a path to easy money and now I’m being punished for that arrogance.
That said, should the system continue to exist as is, so that this continues to happen to future losers like me? I don’t see any good argument why it should.
We could fix this in a few ways, as people have suggested above. We can stop the easy money financing that allows unqualified idiots like me to borrow the money to get into law school. Or we could mandate that the schools be more up front about employment and salary prospects.
I don’t see any reason why we can’t laugh at the law school losers and also support these reforms at the same time.
January 21, 2010, 5:02 pmRon Coleman says:
Ian Watson has really done a great job with the issues here. I wrote a whole book on this topic, which doesn’t make me any more of an expert than most people who have thought about it, but which I raise merely to point out that one of the reasons it flopped was that everyone from the publisher to the bookstores didn’t want a book that helped you decide whether or not law school was for you. They wanted a book that “got you into Harvard,” and forget the fundamental question of “why” (much less, how about everyone else?).
Generalities about lawyer supply and demand are inevitably overbroad. It is necessary to understand the submarkets comprising the notional “markets” for legal services, legal employment and legal education. These are not intuitively obvious or readily grasped by either outsiders or even most participants. Reading the comment section of Above the Law would not be a bad start to gaining some insight into the Big Law piece, but keep in mind you will need a shower afterward.
There is an acute “shortage” of lawyers, which is to say, of lawyers who can do what the clients who have the most at stake, financially or otherwise, need done. That’s why the very best ones make so much money — mostly. (At least, I read that they do.) There is, however, no shortage whatsoever of law school graduates or unemployed young and not-so-young attorneys with no real prospect of fulfilling even the most sober concept of a fulfilling, meaningful legal career. Regardless of their drive and ambition and worth as human beings, they are either never going to have what it takes or never going to be given the opportunity to demonstrate that they have what it takes to become either a (financial) star or even a successful journeyman. God bless those few who, without engaging in fraud or sharp practices, can succeed outside of this system.
Eric S.’s point is also very valuable: There’s a general post-secondary-education crackup under way. For the vast majority, college mainly arrests adolescent development, or — take a look at the pictures on Facebook — actually rolls it backward. The skills once expected of an “academic track” high school graduate are found among only a sliver of non-science college graduates, and I am still astonished at the inability of younger law students and even lawyers to master the basics of expository punctuation, much less composition. Grim tidings lay ahead, but it’s no wonder that people who can afford it, or who can write enough to sign loan documents, are prepared to delay the inevitable and sign up for three more years of… whatever.
January 21, 2010, 5:39 pmSP says:
I agree with everything Ron Coleman says above, but want to comment further on the “shortage” of real lawyers vs. the abundance of JDs.
There is really no tension between the public interest in a large supply of lawyers (to keep prices down) and attempts to reduce the number of law school losers produced each year. Law school losers are lawyers in name only. They’ve jumped through two important hoops, they’ve acquired a JD and they’ve passed the bar. But this doesn’t mean they can represent clients. I’ve jumped through both of those hoops and I admit I am not qualified to represent anybody. Before I can do that, I need training. And to get training, I need a job.
So the supply of nominal lawyers, as he indicates, is not going to have much effect on the price of competent legal representation. We losers don’t help curb the price of their services because we don’t really compete with them for clients.
I’ve seen it argued elsewhere that this glut of lawyers is actually good for the consumer. That is not entirely correct.
January 21, 2010, 5:53 pmHomeBasedAttyNow says:
Another problem with attending a second tier law school isn’t so much that you won’t find a job locally, but if you move, nobody will have heard of your school, and it’s hard to get your foot in the door.
January 21, 2010, 8:03 pmRE Ramcharan says:
One thing you can tell her is that being a lawyer doesn’t have to be about going to Harvard or Boalt Hall, and “unemployment” isn’t necessarily defined as “making less that $zillion a year out of law school”. You might have a conversation about whether people who want to make an honest living by doing the lawyering necessary to have a legal system in this country are all law school losers. Or about whether a JD from Yale makes you a better person than a JD from Washburn Law. Or about what she thinks a judge does and why she wants to be one.
January 21, 2010, 8:09 pmYou might also have a conversation about your ability as parents to finance her expectation of going to undergraduate and graduate programs priced well beyond your means, and whether and how much of that cost should be borne by your daughter (or failing that, by the taxpayers through the US Army).
On the other hand, if you can’t imagine a life different from the one you expect, there’s not much to say to her.
I do recall having a lot of classmates with Bachelor of Science, Nursing, degrees when I was in law school. But then, there’s that business with mucus.
ex parte animal says:
Go to state school, study hard and commit yourself to performing at the peak of your ability once on the job.
I graduated from state school, went to work at a top NYC firm, hustled for work while others hid from partners in the offices, made damn sure that my work product was as perfect as I could make it and watched unsurprised through the 2008-09 crisis as my colleagues from “top tier” schools were laid-off en masse when the ax fell.
Top schools are for would-be academicians and public interest / government lawyers who want to practice with chips on their shoulders.
“Big law,” by contrast, is a shark tank. Academic pedigree may get you in the door, but it won’t keep you there. The partners at these firms recruit heavily from top-rated schools but have a knack for sniffing out talent from “lesser” schools as well.
Distinguish yourself as a student at a second tier school and you *will* be noticed. Distinguish yourself as an associate at a law firm and you *will* be rewarded, regardless the reputation of your law school.
January 24, 2010, 9:39 pmalwaysanobie says:
Law schools are still operating as though the boom times never stopped. They charge multiples of what they did when I went in the mid 80′s. It’s greed. They’re raking in the big bucks, all the while knowing a huge percentage of the students going into hock for law school now will never get the jobs they need to pay their huge loans back. But what’s that to them – they have the students’ money & that’s all they care about. Honestly, they’re as bad as Goldman Sachs!
PS There is absolutely no reason for it to drag on for 3 years, either!
April 28, 2010, 5:57 pm