PS There is absolutely no reason for it to drag on for 3 years, either!

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.

MAS:
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.

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.
You 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alex: 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.

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.

Geez, so much negativity, no wonder no employer wants to hire some of these law grads.

MAS: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MAS: 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.

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.
2. 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.

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.

Dan in Euroland: 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.

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.

The only subject with which law professors have a comparative advantage is statutory interpretation. That could be a two semester class tops.

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

Law students (and lawyers) lack aggression? That would be news.

Bruce Hayden: 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. 

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.)

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…

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.

D: Do you mean make the loan dischargeable in bankruptcy?How would that help?

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.

markm: 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.

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.