
Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering - pshaw
http://qz.com/358929/law-school-enrollment-decline
======
geebee
Interesting data, but I'm not sure the title is supported by the conclusion.

The title reads "US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into
engineering." This is backed up by data that shows law school enrollment
declining and engineering graduate enrollment increasing.

However, it's not exactly a secret that engineering graduate programs have
higher international student enrollment than law schools. So we'd need to know
where the enrollment growth is coming from before we can conclude that US
students are fleeing law for engineering.

~~~
kylestlb
This is my thought. What percentage of the engineering grad school bump is
non-US citizens? What percentage of people who go to law school are non-US
citizens?

From purely anecdotal experience, I would guess that a significant portion of
the rise in grad school attendance is from international students.

~~~
objclxt
> _What percentage of people who go to law school are non-US citizens?_

Significantly fewer than engineering schools, because engineering degrees are
applicable worldwide, and law degrees are applicable only to the jurisdiction
you wish to practice in.

------
geebee
Another factor to consider here is a rise (if any) in engineering
undergraduate degrees. I know that grad engineering degrees to law degrees
seems like more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but there's a big
difference. A history major who goes to law school goes from not lawyer to
lawyer (assuming he or she passes the bar).

Engineering graduate students, on the other hand, almost always have a
background in their field of graduate study. This is often very substantial -
for instance, an EE major doesn't need a grad degree in EE to get to work. And
even if a student is using grad school to build some general knowledge of a
new field (such as a physics or math major going to grad school in CS),
they're much closer than a history major would be to law [1].

In this case, the growth in grad enrollment might understate the transition,
since a student who wanted to be a lawyer who instead decides to become an
engineer might just change majors and avoid grad school altogether.

[1] I actually think that if people were allowed to take the bar without
attending law school, you'd find that a lot of people could become extremely
talented lawyers without the graduate degree.

~~~
theVirginian
Actually, engineering students statistically score highest on the LSAT out of
any undergraduate degree

~~~
arjunnarayan
I'm not surprised. The "logic" section of the LSAT (traditionally said to be
the hardest part of the test) is much easier if you know some computer
science/discrete math. A lot of questions can be quickly parsed into some sort
of constraint satisfaction problem, and using the right tool (drawing truth
tables/constructing a directed acyclic graph) means you can get to the answer
much faster.[1] Since the LSAT is a time-pressure based test, this gives you a
big advantage. Of course, the reading comprehension parts are still hard, and
engineering gives you no advantage there. There's also lots of selection bias
potentially going on - engineers who go on to take the LSAT are _rare_. Who
knows how that prior correlates with ability.

Somewhat relatedly, it's been well known that for CS PhD admissions, at least
with native English speakers, the GRE Verbal is a better predictor of PhD
performance than the GRE Math. It's unclear how much of this is top-end
compression in math though (almost everyone going to a top CS PhD school gets
a 790 or 800 on the GRE Math, so there's no signal left there, whereas verbal
has a higher spread. A 720 on the verbal is 98th percentile).[2]

[1] I know this because in 2009 as a college senior, I took some practice LSAT
tests, and found the logic section endlessly delightful and challenging in a
timed setting - I was _this_ close to applying to law schools before I changed
my mind and did a CS PhD instead. I know it sounds like a weird choice, but
2009 was a weird soul-searching year for me for various personal reasons.

[2] All of this has changed since 2011 when the GRE scoring system changed to
a 130-170 scale from the old 200-800 scale, along with changes to the test
itself. All of my points are probably obsolete.

~~~
theVirginian
Interesting to read that. I have always thought of CS as a discipline that
involves creating and testing competing explanatory models of the world
similarly to the way that a lawyer might construct an argument to represent a
series of events or a mathematician might construct an equation to represent a
set/series of data.

~~~
amyjess
You could also think of law as a form of code.

~~~
big_youth
I think it's more like an api. You hack it to get what you want.

------
graeme
One thing these stats don't capture is the _effective_ tuition charged by law
schools. Schools are raising sticker prices, but handing out more
scholarships. From discussions with someone who tracks these things, effective
law school tuitions have been dropping.

Law school attendance for most students is being subsidized by richer students
and by those who haven't figured out that law school at sticker is generally a
scam.

The higher the sticker price, the more impressive a scholarship can seem.

As enrolments drop, schools are pretty desperate for students at present. LSAT
median scores and median GPAs are dropping at many schools. Eventually, some
schools will have to close; they're in a bubble.

~~~
josaka
As a product of the system, agreed 100%. Also, the true cost should account
for lost income while in law school. As opportunities improve for those
students who could excel in other areas, the lost income exceeds the tuition
cost.

~~~
graeme
If you know anyone thinking about applying, this site does a good job breaking
down true costs:

[http://www.lstscorereports.com/national/](http://www.lstscorereports.com/national/)

A bit under $300,000 for most schools when you consider tuition and living
expenses. That doesn't include interest on the debt.

It also doesn't consider the opportunity cost you mention. Finally, one thing
most young students ignore is that they have to pay the debt back in AFTER-TAX
income.

$300,000 in debt takes $450,000 in before tax earnings, assuming a 33% average
tax rate.

------
imcrs
Law has changed since the 80s and 90s.

The profession was much more of a bloodsport. Less cases settled, far less
went to arbitration, and more money was spent when a case did go to trial.

Nowadays the culture has shifted almost completely to keeping costs down and
settling things outside of court -- either settling outright or through a
mediated arbitration (much less expensive).

It's no surprise to me that law school grads are out of work these days.

~~~
theVirginian
I interned in a law firm my entire senior year and now hold a BA with majors
in Government and Philosophy. These experiences would leave me well primed to
go to law school which was my original intention after graduation. After
spending time in the firm however it is really eye opening to see how the
business is rapidly changing. There is an over supply of young lawyers these
days for a number of reason.

First, there are too many low quality law schools churning out people who can
barely pass the bar. Those schools take home the tuition money and the young
graduates have a mountain of non-dischargable debt with nowhere to turn. The
rate of unemployed young graduates is actually probably even higher than
figures show because schools will pay a small stipend to recent graduates so
that they can say they are "employed" when the yearly figures for former
students employed 6mo out are released. It's all about taking home the tuition
for these schools and they shamefully advertise how demand for lawyers will
increase and job prospects will remain high.

Second, the business has become vastly more efficient as firms begin to adopt
digital case management systems and can now conduct research online instead of
having to sort through volumes of old books. You know when you see the generic
shelves of law books in offices? Yeah those just sit there collecting dust
now. They are for show because all of that information has now moved onto the
computer. The legal industry has been slow and late to adopt technology but it
has made lawyers vastly more efficient than they could have been before. Even
things like being able to email scans of documents can speed up the process
astronomically. As older lawyers who cannot use computers begin to exit the
workforce and younger ones who can move up in the ranks, firms just do not
need as many people working as they did before. The vast majority of legal
work is not what you see on TV or in the Ellen Pao case where it is a battle
of the brains in real time for a court room. It is mundane routine paperwork
that can be automated or done by assistants.

A lot of this stuff can even be done at home by your average person with
products like turbo tax that enable the average person to not need
representation for basic needs legal needs anymore.

I no longer plan on going to law school and have been taking online courses in
programming/reading a ton of programming books since I graduated in hopes of
turning what has been a long term hobby of mine into a career, hopefully
combined with politics or law. (I am thinking campaign research/advertising
online or legal software on the law side.)

~~~
doktrin
> It is mundane routine paperwork that can be automated or done by assistants.

In my experience, this is 100% true. I spent a few years working in "legal
technology", which is just industry parlance for categorizing documents into
"databases" (really just proprietary applications that compete over how best
to read data from a flat file).

At the time (2009 - 2011), a ton of work was being done by teams of contract
review attorneys. Entire rooms would be filled to the brim with these guys,
paid anywhere between $20-$40 an hour to tab through page after page of
document metadata and images.

The entire industry was on the verge of being completely upended, and this is
in fact starting to have effect. The article on topic modelling and LDA that's
also on the front page today is particularly germane, as there are in fact
implementations of topic modelling and LDA for the legal technology world.

~~~
kjs3
This is my experience as well. If you look at just the "e-Discovery" product
space, corporations are saving literally millions of dollars by implementing
digital tools instead of retaining outside council to trawl through files
looking for discoverable data. This alone is costing a lot of lawyers and
paralegals their jobs.

------
emodendroket
If recent trends are anything to go by, this will lead in ten years to an
oversupply of engineers and then an attendant rise in unemployment and dip in
wages, like what's starting to happen with nursing.

~~~
stephengillie
So you're saying this is a good time to start a law career?

~~~
TaylorAlexander
In ten years, a huge amount of legal work will be done with software. A
gigantic codified legal system is a job almost tailor made for machine
learning.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Could you elaborate? I think a better approach would be to revise the legal
codex so that it becomes simple enough for individuals to research and lower
dependency on professional lawyers.

Moreover, I disagree with the common analogy made in circles like HN that laws
resemble code. Perhaps in some esoteric probabilistic language they might,
though I don't believe thinking such as "ML will fix this" will yield a proper
correspondence.

~~~
adventured
Well, to step back from even the future the parent is describing, consider
what's already taking place.

LegalZoom type services are wiping out entire segments that pricey lawyers
used to occupy. Need to incorporate? Don't spend thousands of dollars, spend
$150 to $200 + state fees. Need a trademark? $150 to $200 plus govt fees. Need
a basic will? $50 to $100, no hassle.

There are somewhere around 3 to 4 million corporations in the US. Most of
those will fail and die over ten years. The new corporations that get started,
will increasingly use easier and cheaper web services to incorporate. That's
billions of dollars in lawyer revenue wiped out every ten years, from one
example service.

------
kevin_thibedeau
Engineering has exploded with foreign students who will leave the US with a
degree that prints money in their home country. Not so much in America. They
need to look at the numbers closer to see where the US students are actually
going.

~~~
conanbatt
Can you elaborate with some stats or articles?

The US, as far as I know, is by far the highest paying country to software
engineers in the world, starting by 2-3x to rich countries. I seriously doubt
ANY software engineer can make more money in China than in the US for any
similar position of responsibility.

~~~
a1a
US is not the highest paying country. Not in the absolute sense -- and
definitely not in a relative to living cost sense.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-
worst//highest...](http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-
worst//highest-paid-software-engineers-countries)

~~~
conanbatt
I have my doubts about this ranking, starting for taxes implications which are
probably severe for several of the top 10 countries in the rank.

And Switzerland and Israel are very small countries, where the engineering
sample is probably very low and so are th work opportunities.

------
mcantelon
I guess all the "everyone must code" propaganda, to lower labor prices by
increasing supply, is working.

~~~
patio11
For definitions of "working" which include "We have almost recovered to the
number of CS degrees issued in _1985_."

~~~
iak8god
Tangential, but I'm curious: your comment seems to imply that that are now
fewer CS degrees issued per year than in 1985. Is that what you meant? Can you
point me to the numbers?

~~~
patio11
Seems my joke is out of date: we've actually hit the 1985 number again! Whee!
Granted total degrees doubled over the interval and CS is virtually flat but
whee!

[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_322.10.as...](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_322.10.asp)

~~~
iak8god
Thanks. I'm surprised to see that _computer and information sciences_ and
_engineering_ have dropped quite a bit since then as the percentage of
degrees.

~~~
tsotha
But has it dropped as a percentage of high school graduates? My impression is
a lot of people who wouldn't have been able to get in to a university twenty
years ago are going now, but they're getting the kinds of degrees you'd expect
for people who barely made it in.

------
guyzero
So... a lot of comments in this thread seem to equate "engineering grad
school" with CS or EE.

There are some other branches of engineering too and the non-EE types
outnumber the EE's. Pretty sure the programs in questions are mostly civil,
mechanical, chemical, etc.

------
dylanz
I used to contract at a company and worked beside David Pollack (of the Lift
framework), who came to the software world after being a lawyer (I think for
most of his life). I'm sure he explained the "why" when I asked, but all I
could think of was "Very cool! A lawyer likes this stuff too!". I still have a
blast at my job, and one factor of people taking up engineering from other
trades could be their found passion for it.

------
voteapathy
Well, I guess this is me?

I had the ideal of going to law school several years ago, studied history and
economics in college, with loads of public policy knowledge. Ultimately I
determined that these fields actually don't interest me all that much. I mean,
I had been reading texts on formal logic in my spare time because I found such
subjects to be far more engaging.

I enrolled for another Bachelor's degree a while ago to help build up my chops
for a career in development; effectively swapping one applied logic for
another. Yet I have a lot of catching up to do to meet up with peers who have
been working in the industry for nearly a decade. There's a nagging feeling of
dread within me that I might just be naive at best, a fraud at worst, and end
up a failure. Still, I enjoy working on projects for hours at a time (when I
manage to find the time to do so) and find the subject matter I'm studying
engaging. In that sense, I can at least say I don't regret the shift.

~~~
ptmcc
I did a BA+BS in History and Economics in undergrad intending to go to law
school. Did undergraduate law review and everything. About junior year or so I
realized I actually did not want to do that.

Now, 5-6 years out of undergrad I am a professional software developer without
a formal CS education. I took a few CS classes and plenty of hard math as part
of my Econ degree, but I don't hold a CS degree (or even a minor).

But I was always a computer geek from a young age. Through many years of
interest, motivation, and self-teaching I worked in IT, then QA, and now
development. I also work with many other non-CS-degree developers that are
great.

You can definitely make a successful transition.

------
mmanfrin
[Anecdotally] I was on my way to Law School but decided to start a job in QA
at a startup. Three months later I was writing code, and 9 months after that I
left to find my first truly-engineering spot. Haven't looked back.

------
smegel
And I always complain that sodtware engineering, while having a decent initial
salary progression, is a dead end career path (gaant charts anyone?), and I
should have studied law instead.

Maybe the grass is always greener...

~~~
CmonDev
Being a very successful lawyer is probably comparable to being a very
successful developer. Unless you wanted to be "a lawyer"?

------
stone2020
Should it be called the Minecraft effect or Zuckerberg effect?

~~~
guyzero
It's called the "new grads in petroleum engineering earn $90K" effect.

------
charleystr
Sheep before, sheep now. Always too late.

------
fnordfnordfnord
The joke is going to be on them.

------
rayiner
Suggest changing to the title in the article, which is more relevant to HN:
"US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into engineering."

~~~
dang
Done. Thanks.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Thanks!

------
woah
We'd better improve our interview techniques before the flood of lawyer-like
engineers who are only in it for the money arrives. My recommendation- avoid
brain-teasers that can be crammed for. Assess based on open-source
contributions, which show craftsmanship, architecture, and love of coding.

~~~
krschultz
Believe it or not, there are already large swathes of people that get
engineering degrees because it is a good paying, stable, respected job.
Probably 1/3 of my graduating class would have said their primary motivation
for getting an engineering degree was the solid salary.

~~~
rayiner
Historically, the solid pay and good prospects have been a primary driving
criterion for people going into engineering. The Silicon Valley idealists who
want to "change the world with food delivery" is the new phenomenon, not the
other way around.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food
> delivery" is the new phenomenon

The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery"
are (as a broad class, not every specific instance) largely PR faces created
for marketing purposes by and for people who want to make lots of money, and
know that having some kind of compelling mission (even if that "compelling
mission" might change to something radically different later on) is important
both for attracting customers and for attracting investors.

~~~
spacehome
Employees, too.

