New York Times; Is Law School a Losing Game?

Amazotheamazing

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me

Interesting article, the numbers are staggering and naivety stunning, imo.

johnnyskeleton

What exactly is interesting about it?

1. Student loans make US universities very expensive and hard to pay back if you don't get a job.

2. More people want to be lawyers than there are jobs for lawyers.

3. The blame for this is put on the law schools but not on the people who go to them? As though by paying $250k to an academic institution means that they have guaranteed you a job for life?

Of course, if you compare the US to Ireland, it makes Ireland seem like a much better place. Small fees (2k is it these days?) plus grants, short hours and relatively easy exams and you've got a law degree. Harder to get a professional qualification, but even still €10-15k for KI or LS v. $250k for US is a favourable comparison.

Plus, the blame that is applied to US law schools isn't as severe as that towards the Irish professional training institutions - one guarantees that you can enter your chosen profession and secure devilling, the other will only take you on if you have already secured a place. Granted, there is no guarantees after that, but nor is there in any profession.

One final point - that article is biased towards those graduates who got into it for the money and are bitterly dissappointed. However, it doesn't take into account the significant number of people who want to be lawyers for other reasons e.g. interesting work, protecting rights etc.

The guy who is unemployed, has he considered giving pro bono legal advice to people, with a view to getting some work experience and moving up? Or is he just waiting for someone to give him a 100k a year job?

Amazotheamazing

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

What exactly is interesting about it?

1. Student loans make US universities very expensive and hard to pay back if you don't get a job.

2. More people want to be lawyers than there are jobs for lawyers.

3. The blame for this is put on the law schools but not on the people who go to them? As though by paying $250k to an academic institution means that they have guaranteed you a job for life?

Of course, if you compare the US to Ireland, it makes Ireland seem like a much better place. Small fees (2k is it these days?) plus grants, short hours and relatively easy exams and you've got a law degree. Harder to get a professional qualification, but even still €10-15k for KI or LS v. $250k for US is a favourable comparison.

Plus, the blame that is applied to US law schools isn't as severe as that towards the Irish professional training institutions - one guarantees that you can enter your chosen profession and secure devilling, the other will only take you on if you have already secured a place. Granted, there is no guarantees after that, but nor is there in any profession.

One final point - that article is biased towards those graduates who got into it for the money and are bitterly dissappointed. However, it doesn't take into account the significant number of people who want to be lawyers for other reasons e.g. interesting work, protecting rights etc.

The guy who is unemployed, has he considered giving pro bono legal advice to people, with a view to getting some work experience and moving up? Or is he just waiting for someone to give him a 100k a year job?

It's interesting to read about the sheer numbers involved, the scale of discord between people's expectations and the reality (particularly people who go to low ranking colleges) and the level of indebtedness some people will accrue without ever really considering how they'll spend it (months in Prague and France?) and how'll they'll repay it (the bail-out generation?).

Course, if you want to see it as a comparator with the Irish system you are free to do so but you're answering an argument that no one posed.

brian__foley

Amazotheamazing wrote: »

It's interesting to read about the sheer numbers involved, the scale of discord between people's expectations and the reality (particularly people who go to low ranking colleges)

This wouldn't be entirely alien to Ireland either. [Emphasis added to quote]

chopser

Interesting and very depressing article showing the saturated market of Lawyers in a city I would love to practice in. It seems to ring true in this country too and I'm sure many other countries around the world are facing a similar amount of surplus Lawyers.

However it seems encouraging that they appear to dismiss $65,000 as a poor salary and insufficent to pay back the astronomical college loans.
I would imagine that a foreign educated(Ireland, etc) Lawyer with only about €20,000 at the very most in debt from their education would probably be very happy to start off on $65,000?

johnnyskeleton

chopser wrote: »

Interesting and very depressing article showing the saturated market of Lawyers in a city I would love to practice in. It seems to ring true in this country too and I'm sure many other countries around the world are facing a similar amount of surplus Lawyers.

You'd think that no law grad in the entire US secured a job last year from reading that article. Yet I'd wager that many of them did. To look only at those who have failed to secure a full time position is not really that helpful and, despite criticising the statistics produced by the universities, they haven't done anything to counterbalance this by, for example, doing a survey of graduates to see what % got a job in a top firm, what % got a job in any other firm, what % got temp or legal exec work, what % went to work for an NGO, what % went abroad, what % went into full time academia, what % work in in-house legal adviser roles etc.

Then we would have an accurate picture.

The same is true for Ireland. However, the most vocal opinions on the Irish legal professions are nearly always the highly negative ones. Hardly representative samples.

metrovelvet

The reason the JD became so popular was because the BA means nothing. So since the mid 1990s tons of arts graduates come out with their humanities degrees and piss fart around and cant get a job and then decide to go to law school because its the only professional degree you can get without a technical, math, or science background.