
Law schools: Still hiding the sad truth from students - DanielBMarkham
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/20/law-school-misrepresentation/
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rayiner
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
> 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>

~~~
randomdata
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.

~~~
Evbn
Do run those numbers on a per-major basis, though. And try (though is is hard
to get data) to separate the cohort who went to study and the cohort who went
to party for 4 years.

~~~
_delirium
There are also some issues around job preferences not being solely based on
pay. The kinds of low-ish pay jobs worked by degree holders aren't identical
to the distribution of low-ish pay jobs worked by non-degree holders, and
skew, I believe, more office/white-collar rather than manual labor. Some
people implicitly attach a significant value to that, whether due to working
conditions or status, enough that they're willing to take that route even if
they knew up front that it's not a net-positive financial decision. E.g., if
attending college means you effectively make $10k/yr less, taking all costs
into consideration, but you have a 60% greater chance of it being at a desk in
an air-conditioned office, that might be worth it to some people.

In other words, some data on job-type mix rather than solely median salaries
would be interesting.

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nhebb
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
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.

~~~
Evbn
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.

~~~
khuey
People don't go to law school to become billionaires. They go to law school
because it used to be a pretty good odds ticket for a lifetime in the upper-
middle class.

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jacques_chester
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.

~~~
rayiner
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_chester
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_.

~~~
rayiner
I was thinking of going abroad to study, though I don't know if they are as
accepting over in Asia of Anglos as we are of Asians.

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fnayr
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.

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

~~~
the_watcher
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.

~~~
rayiner
It would save everyone a lot of money and cut out the middle man if all
employers could just look at SAT scores and LSAT scores along with high school
GPA. There would be no more need for academia as we now know it.

~~~
_delirium
If high SAT scores meant that someone had learned the equivalent of a 4-year
CS degree, sure, I'd be willing to consider them equivalent when hiring for a
technical position. But high SAT scores just mean that you know basic, high-
school-level arithmetic and reading comprehension, which is not quite the same
thing.

It would be interesting to have some kind of exam showing equivalent
knowledge, but I haven't seen attempts in that direction that aren't worse
assessments than the degree/GPA. For example, as weird as law-school is, the
bar exam is even weirder (deliberately so), and generally a terrible model to
follow.

~~~
Evbn
Some states allow legal apprentices (paralegals) to sit for the bar without
going to law school, if their mentor approves.

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RougeFemme
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.

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the_watcher
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).

~~~
Evbn
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.

------
smoyer
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.

~~~
antiterra
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.

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
rayiner
It's not a new phenomenon: <http://www.nalp.org/uploads/0812Research.pdf>.

As for what keeps the upper peak going, ironically law is supply constrained.
Not by the number of JD's (if you just need legal services you can get them on
Craigslist for $10/hour), but by available training opportunities. You're not
going to hire a lawyer to do a $100 million bond offering who has never worked
on one before, and there are only so many of those that are done each year
which gates the number of new lawyers that can be trained to do them. This
gating is the same reason you see similar or higher salaries in consulting or
finance. There is no shortage of fresh BBA's and MBA's who'd love to be doing
M&A deals, but MS/JPM/GS only need so many people each year to handle the
deals they have.

------
coditor
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).

------
Evbn
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.

~~~
rayiner
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.

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

~~~
rayiner
The public sector has never paid well, but now it doesn't pay at all. I know
more than several people who could've easily gotten six-figure jobs in private
practice that can't get $30k/year jobs in the public sector. Even if they were
willing to work for free, public organizations don't even have the capacity to
train people right now.

