Law School Grads Struggle

20% of law grads from 2010 are working at jobs that do not require a law license.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/business/dealbook/burdened-with-debt-law-school-graduates-struggle-in-job-market.html?hpw&rref=education&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

 

Interesting read - yet there doesn't appear to be a slow-down in law school admissions. One would think that there is a moral obligation here from the Universities - they are knowingly churning out grads who carry heavy student loan burdens with poor / no job prospects after graduation. Why not stop intake for a few years until the market can regain its footing?

 

Per these article examples: Attorney glut, technology, persistent stressed economy, and therefore the marketplace are dictating the adjustment/s in overall law school applications (declines)…

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/law-school-enrollment-falls-to-lowest-level-since-1987/?_r=0

Law School Applications Nearing 30 Year Low

Law School Applications Are Collapsing (as They Should Be) - The Atlantic

 

Better idea: why don't we stop the nonsense that is a 7-8 year education to become a lawyer, go back to the LLB and make it an actual undergrad degree. Want to practice law? Great. Get an LLB and then clerk for an attorney or judge for a year or two.

Student loans would plummet. Some LLB grads would go on to practice law. Many would use their law degree as a business degree (as is fairly common in the UK). And I would wager that, of those who went on to practice law, the quality of lawyers would go up drastically.

Right now you could graduate from Touro Law on Monday and open up your own law firm by the end of the week and represent someone in a capital murder case the following week (probably not a good idea). In many other countries, you need to clerk to become a lawyer. Just passing a written exam isn't a sufficient condition to become a full attorney.

So, we end up with a lot of hacks who are desperate to pay off a mountain of student loan debt. Over time, we established an expectation that a lawyer should be making mega-bucks.

Treat it like a B.S. in Business. Can you make a lot of money? Sure. Might you also make not very good money? Very possible. But a $30k salary is easier to swallow at 22 with a bachelors degree than at 25 with seven years of schooling under your belt and a head full of outdated ideas about your market value.

 

It could furthermore indicate the plus notion that the pull back in total law school applications /enrollments are attributable to prospective applicants improving with their scrutinizing the very low to likely negative JD degree ROI through the synthetically funded and very likely harsh student loan trappings…?

 

When presented with the two possibilities of:

1. People, as a whole, are wising up or
2. Less apparent economic factors are impacting decision making (a la "invisible hand")

I generally feel like it is a safer bet to go with option 2. There is, after all, pretty irrefutable data that smoking is bad for you and others around you. And yet, people still buy a lot of cigarettes (and continue to dispute that second hand smoke is "that" bad for others).

I can get student loans for any degree. I have no question of that. I can go out and put myself six figures in the hole for a JD and someone, somewhere will bankroll me. If I wanted an MD from a Caribbean medical they would give me the money even though the odds are stacked against me that I would ever get a residency (and thus, ever get a license). And even if I DID get a residency, the odds would be stacked against me getting a residency in a field that paid the big bucks (cardiology, neurology etc).

It's the new sub-prime. Let me rack up $250k in student loans even though I'll likely be making $70k working at a walk-in. Meanwhile I, as the student, might observe that I could rack up less debt and probably make more money than that if I became a physician assistant.

I don't believe there is a tuition bubble, per se. I think tuition is inflated because of financial aid. If a school can guarantee to get X dollars per student from the government, anything you charge above that is pure profit (even if you're a non-profit school).

The "bubble," as I see it is going to have a two-fold impact:

1. Schools that rely solely (or primarily) on tuition are likely going to collapse. Not all of them, mind you. There will still be schools collecting GI Bill and corporate tuition assistance. But I think the herd will be thinned out.

2. A lot of that bad stuff that happened with the mortgage crisis will happen again. Companies will be left with toxic debt securities. Banks, thought to be too big to fail, will fail.

For law schools that means they are going to need to think on their feet if they want to survive. I suspect the top tier will remain untouched (as it has through this current crisis since the remaining jobs are going to the top law school grads). But we may see smaller law schools closing or new approaches to the practice of law cropping up.

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised no other state has basically extended a giant middle finger to the ABA besides California. Standardization is nice but the whole model doesn't really make much sense today.

All of that said, a JD holder isn't really as screwed as they make it out. People routinely use a JD as an MBA (i.e. applying to non-law positions which would typically require an MBA). A three year residential JD is only slightly longer than a two-year residential MBA. And, depending upon the program, the six figure price tag isn't terribly far off either. For the mid-career professional who gets a JD, this is an obvious answer to the employment problem. The problem is that MOST JD holders are around 25 with no prior work experience. You end up with the same problem as graduates of non-ranked 5 year BS/MBA programs. You have an MBA and no work experience? I hope you know how to answer a phone or make a latte. It's just spilling over here. You want to use your JD to get a job as a lawyer? I hope you graduated from a top tier school. Want to use your JD to do something else? OK, but you still have to pay your dues in the corporate world. MBA programs which require prior work experience are capturing students who already paid their dues. The five years and the law schools are not doing that. The problem is that the JD, unlike the MBA, is a first professional degree. But right now it's the only post-bachelors first professional degree that pretty much guarantees you won't work in that field (besides, possibly, the MLIS).

So the legal community can start marketing the JD toward mid-career professionals (thus making it the new MBA), they can drastically reduce the cost and hope that people are still willing to take $30k per year public defender jobs after 7 years of school, or they can turn it back into an undergrad program so that it benches against other first professional bachelors programs like nursing and accounting.
Consider the MBA at the University of Scranton costs over $50k. When I applied to Syracuse Law, they offered me a financial aid package which took the total tuition down to $60k. Heck, even Touro (I applied there just because I was curious) offered me enough financial aid to knock the price down to around $70k.

I really feel like a lot of stuff in this country is driven more by ego than common sense.

 

Completely anecdotal but when I sat for the LSAT in 2013 I was unpleasantly surprised by the motivation for some to attend law school. For me it was/will be the culmination of a life-long aspiration and I would not ever attend if I incurred debt to do so. The people I chatted with outside before the test were people that had hopes that their undergrad would propel them to success, were unemployed or working in non-related jobs (Home Depot), and were going to go to law school for the aid money and as an option to do better.

So, life sucks and hasn't worked out so far, let me incur an astronomical amount of debt because i can and hope that after 3 years it makes a difference.....

 

I'm not surprised. Years of parents and guidance counselors telling you that you NEED college to avoid working retail coupled with the mediocre ability to make sound judgment calls (a problem, I believe, much of the population suffers from) causes people to throw "good money" (or in this case, debt) after bad. Every month I get a call from someone who never got an interview at our company. One guy applies for EVERY (professional level) job we post. He has been doing it religiously for nearly a year. He doesn't get called.

Why?

A B.A. In Political Science and only two years of work experience. One year selling cars and one year working in a Verizon store. He has applied to be our Vice President of Operations, an Engineer, a Marketing Manager, a software engineer, a network administrator and a VP of Sales.

Then, when he doesn't get a call, he calls me and wants to know why, with his "impressive credentials" we aren't calling him. At one point I told him point blank that he was unqualified for virtually everything he applied for. I told him to apply for some of our entry level jobs. Even an entry level analyst will pay significantly more than working at the Verizon store. He got indignant. He told me he wasn't applying to an entry level position like "some sort of intern."

I'm not saying all of the unemployed college grads are unemployed (or underemployed) because they are colossal tools like this guy. But it does indicate to me that something is wrong. That something is most likely that, years ago, it wasn't unheard of to get a "mailroom job" post college to get your foot into the door of a company. Now, the idea seems utterly offensive to people just hitting the job market. Maybe the mailroom gig was largely myth and nobody ever really did it in any significant numbers.

I know when I got out of the Navy I shot for HR work. But I was fully prepared to accept a low level position in a company where I might have a future. It just seems like people are willing to work retail and hope that another degree will propel them to the top. That just gives us over educated and under skilled workers.

 

Here's that story of the woman suing her law school, alleging they inflated their employment stats, etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/business/dealbook/court-to-hear-suit-accusing-law-school-of-inflating-job-data.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Feducation&action=click&contentCollection=education&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

 

at least her legal training will be put into good use.

 

I'm surprised the numbers are this good, expected them to be lower.

The field of law can be great for the right person, but too many people go to law school because they have a reasonably high GPA but don't have a great mind for the hard sciences or mathematics and couldn't do the doctor, nurse, accountant, finance professional or engineer route, so they figure "Hey, law school, lawyering...that's it, that's what I can do for a prestigious profession!"

Many who aspire to go to law school figure since the average starting salary is $80K+ and people who make big law start at twice that, it'll be a great career from the get-go. What they don't realize is those starting salary figures are bimodally distributed and 85% of graduates are centered around $45K, while the few at the top are the ones making $160K, so the average is meaningless, nobody makes it. But they bone up for the LSAT and head off and three years later they have over $100K of student loan debt and all they can find is a job as an assistant county attorney for $40K a year and they're trying to service student loan debt as large as a mortgage--good luck (with apologies to assistant county attorneys, an honorable career, but a heck of a hard way to pay off law school debt!)

No wonder so many lawyers quit in frustration and go into sales or what-have-you.

 

I went through a phase in life about a decade ago where I really wanted to go to law school. I put in many hours studying for the LSAT and even visited one law school.

I got over it.

Not going to law school was one of the best decisions I ever made in life. The days of a law degree being a golden ticket in life are no more. It can still be true if you graduate from an elite law school, but not so much for most others.

 

Yes, elite law grads (as in T7) will typically have their pick of plum big law jobs, as will the top 10% of the graduating classes of other law schools. The rest must slog along for years before they get out from under the debt. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, who both graduated from a top 20 law school, are now in their mid 30s, and only now, after many years of fighting the law fight, have they scraped enough together to move out of their dingy apartment and buy their first house, which is in a less-than-tony neighborhood--and they still haven't paid off all their student debt.

On the other hand, my brother, a top 25 undergraduate b-school grad, has less debt and, though still in his 20s, is making around $100K a year and just got a transfer from his company to London.

 

Years ago, I had a trial where the defendant had a public defender, who was actually a good courtroom lawyer. During lunch break, I was at a KFC near the courthouse, and since the place was packed, he asked if he could sit with me. I said that was fine, as long as we didn't discuss the case.

He told me that he graduated from the New England School of Law, a very respectable, ABA-accredited law school in Boston. He had graduated and taken the Bar exam, and while waiting for the results, was working as a waiter at a hotel restaurant in Cambridge. One night he was waiting on a recruiter from a white-shoe law firm who was courting a 2nd-year Harvard Law student for a summer internship. The numbers being thrown around for salary were more than he would make in 5 years as a waiter.

So yes, it does seem that it matters where you go to law school.

 

I have no experience with this but it fits in with what I've heard. Some firms won't even look at your resume unless you're coming out of Harvard (or substitute the prestigious school that's relevant)

 

This feels more true today than ever before. There was a huge growth in the number of law schools (and, thus, lawyers) for a long time, but so much of what lawyers used to do (and bill for) is being automated. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but the outcome is the same: lowered demand, creating increased competition among graduates. One can see where a pecking order is formed from there.

 

In the same vein, I had another trial more recently with a student prosecutor, who are 3rd-year law students that prosecute criminal cases under the supervision of an assistant district attorney (sort of like an internship). My student prosecutor was from Boston University Law School, and was as gung-ho as they get. He was visibly excited when he got a conviction, and said "Yeah, this is what I want to do, put away the bad guys!!"

I asked him what kind of job offers he had already received from law firms, and the lowest starting salary as a first-year associate he'd been offered was over $150,000. I told him to go out and make some money, and if he really wanted come back to hump gun and drug cases after a few years, we'd still be there.

 

It might not be a bad idea to be on the other side of the table for a few years to gain some perspective as well. We are starting to see prosecutors being put behind bars themselves because they, in their zeal to win convictions, take shortcuts that end up putting innocent people in prison. I wouldn't want a defense attorney who believed that everyone was innocent. And I wouldn't want a prosecutor who thought everyone was guilty (or a "bad guy"). I'd want someone whose desire was justice not the thrill of the win.