http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?scp=4&sq=law%20school&st=cse

Read this. Makes me feel bad for all the people I know who are attending/applying law school.

1/19/2011 6:06:46 PM

Yeah, that's not a surprise. My girlfriend went to Seton Hall and punches me every time I say that I've repaid all my school loans. She's going to be paying her loans down for a long, long time.

1/19/2011 10:58:27 PM

yeah shitty law schools need to close, how do those people expect to find jobs when their are people with degrees from harvard?

1/20/2011 12:21:20 AM

It's "there," you troglodyte. Do you seriously turn your brain off when you post here? And why wouldn't people be able to find jobs simply because Harvard exists? It might also have to do with the fact that there are seven law schools just in North Carolina (UNC, Duke, NCCU, Campbell, UNC Asheville, and Elon).

1/20/2011 1:13:01 AM

no, you are the one who turns off your brain. i was obviously exaggerating to make a point, you Numbskull. what i'm saying is why bother going to law school at all if you can't even go to a respectable one? (harvard, duke, etc.) the schools that are on the top 20 lists, etc. I mean if someone goes to a shitty law school no one's even heard of, they deserve to not get a job, they should have known better than to even apply in the first place.

1/20/2011 9:47:49 AM

wake, not asheville, b

1/20/2011 10:29:55 AM

^that post needs some underlining so we can read the relevant bits

1/20/2011 10:30:07 AM

wake, not asheville, b

1/20/2011 11:15:13 AM

PLEASE LOG IN

how about a tl;dr?

1/20/2011 12:19:00 PM

i go to law school. i'm not worried. hard work (and i don't mean graduating) still pays off. these articles are probably written about the people who would have a hard time finding a job out of undergraduate too. don't think a JD will magically open doors for you.

1/20/2011 3:02:44 PM

i wrote that before i read the article in question so id just like to point out a few quotes

Quote :

"WHEN he started in 2006, Michael Wallerstein knew little about the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, other than that it was in San Diego, which seemed like a fine place to spend three years. “I looked at schools in Pennsylvania and Long Island,” he says, “but I thought, why not go somewhere I’ll enjoy?” Mr. Wallerstein is chatting over lunch one recent afternoon with his fiancée, Karin Michonski. She, too, seems unperturbed by his dizzying collection of i.o.u.’s. Despite those debts, she hopes that he does not wind up in one of those time-gobbling corporate law jobs."

no surprises there

Quote :

"WHEN Mr. Wallerstein started at Thomas Jefferson, he was in no mood for austerity. He borrowed so much that before the start of his first semester he nearly put a down payment on a $350,000 two-bedroom, two-bath condo, figuring that the investment would earn a profit by the time he graduated. He was ready to ink the deal until a rep at the mortgage giant Countrywide asked if his employer at the time — a trade magazine publisher in New Jersey — would write a letter falsely stating that he was moving to San Diego for work."

holy shit red flag

Quote :

"Instead, Mr. Wallerstein rented a spacious apartment. He also spent a month studying in the South of France and a month in Prague — all on borrowed money. There were cost-of-living loans, and tuition of about $33,000 a year. Later came a $15,000 loan to cover months of studying for the bar. Today, his best guess is that he should be sending $2,000 to $3,000 a month in total, to lenders that include Wells Fargo, Citibank and Sallie Mae. “There are a bunch of others,” he says. “I’m not really good at keeping records.” Mr. Wallerstein didn’t know it at the time, but Thomas Jefferson leads the nation’s law schools in at least one category: 95 percent of students graduate with debt, the highest rate in the U.S. News rankings."

my heart both breaks and laughs at this kid

Quote :

"“This idea of exceptionalism — I don’t know if it’s a thing with millennials, or what,” she says, referring to the generation now in its 20s. “Even if you tell them the bottom has fallen out of the legal market, they’re all convinced that none of the bad stuff will happen to them. It’s a serious, life-altering decision, going to law school, and you’re dealing with a lot of naïve students who have never had jobs, never paid real bills.”"

THIS. YES TO ALL OF IT.

Quote :

"Jason Bohn, who received his J.D. from the University of Florida, is earning $33 an hour as a legal temp while strapped to more than $200,000 in loans, nearly all of which he accumulated as an undergraduate and while working on a master's degree at Columbia University. “I grew up a ward of the state of New York, so I don’t have any parents to call for help,” Mr. Bohn says. “For my sanity, I have to think there is an end in sight.”"

this shouldnt even BE in the article since the correction has noted that this was nearly all accumulated in undergrad

Quote :

"After a few years of warnings by concerned professors, the American Bar Association is now studying whether it should refine the questions in its surveys in order to get more realistic and useful statistics for the U.S. News rankings. In mid-December, the organization held a two-day hearing in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., about the collection of job placement data."

i would love a followup to this section, namely the resort the "hearing" was at.

Quote :

"And what about U.S. News? The editors could, but won’t unilaterally demand better data from law schools. “Do we have the power to do that? Yes, I think we do,” said Robert Morse, who oversees the law school rankings. “But we’d have to create a whole new definition of ‘employed,’ and it would be awkward if U.S. News imposed that definition by itself. It would be preferable if the A.B.A. took a leadership role in this.”"

it would be awkward?! how about it would be courageous, nay, earth-shattering fantastic if you did this sir. that's what leadership takes: balls. you sir have none.

Quote :

"MR. WALLERSTEIN, for his part, is not complaining. Once you throw in the intangibles of having a J.D., he says, he is one of law schools’ satisfied customers. “It’s a prestige thing,” he says. “I’m an attorney. All of my friends see me as a person they look up to. They understand I’m in a lot of debt, but I’ve done something they feel they could never do and the respect and admiration is important.”"

i am absolutely embarrassed that you hold a degree i very much look forward to receiving. by the description of your friends you've given me i can only conclude that they are idiots and you are their king.

Quote :

"Unless, somehow, the debt just goes away. Another of Mr. Wallerstein’s techniques for remaining cool in a serious financial pickle: believe that the pickle might somehow disappear. “Bank bailouts, company bailouts — I don’t know, we’re the generation of bailouts,” he says in a hallway during a break from his Peak Discovery job. “And like, this debt of mine is just sort of, it’s a little illusory. I feel like at some point, I’ll negotiate it away, or they won’t collect it.” He gives a slight shrug and a smile as he heads back to work. “It could be worse,” he says. “It’s not like they can put me jail.”"

i'm depressed now because i know you exist. thanks for that.

1/20/2011 3:55:40 PM

^While this article does get into that^^, it seems more about the lower level law schools partaking in deceptive practices and having little reason stop without some sort of outside intervention. You basically have clueless people like that lined up but also along with all the other people that will eventually have mediocre grades, or even have high grades that aren't quite good enough for a lower tier school, that will struggle with the debt for years... even to the point of not being able to pay down the interest enough to keep it from growing... even if you have a decent job. I also find it pretty funny that the article is basically suggesting that the first part to becoming a lawyer involves getting screwed over/lied to by lawyers. FTA:

Quote :

"Tuition at even mediocre law schools can cost up to $43,000 a year. Those huge lecture-hall classes — remember “The Paper Chase”? — keep teaching costs down. There are no labs or expensive equipment to maintain. So much money flows into law schools that law professors are among the highest paid in academia, and law schools that are part of universities often subsidize the money-losing fields of higher education. “If you’re a law school and you add 25 kids to your class, that’s a million dollars, and you don’t even have to hire another teacher,” says Allen Tanenbaum, a lawyer in Atlanta who led the American Bar Association’s commission on the impact of the economic crisis on the profession and legal needs. “That additional income goes straight to the bottom line.” "

Quote :

"But the legal market has always been obsessed with academic credentials, and today, few students except those with strong grade-point averages at top national and regional schools can expect a come-hither from a deep-pocketed firm. Nearly everyone else is in for a struggle. Which is why many law school professors privately are appalled by what they describe as a huge and continuing transfer of wealth, from students short on cash to richly salaried academics. Or perhaps this is more like a game of three-card monte, with law schools flipping the aces and a long line of eager players, most wagering borrowed cash, in a contest that few of them can win. "

Quote :

"“You’re beginning your legal education at an institution that is engaging in the kind of disreputable practices that we would be incredibly disappointed to discover our graduates engaging in,” he says. “What we have here is powder keg, and if law schools don’t solve this problem, there will be a day when the Federal Trade Commission, or some plaintiff’s lawyer, shows up and says ‘This looks like illegal deception.’” "

Quote :

"The most recent survey says 92 percent of Thomas Jefferson grads were employed nine months after they earned their degrees. Beth Kransberger, associate dean of student affairs at Thomas Jefferson, stands by that figure, noting that it includes 25 percent of those graduates who could not be located, as well as anyone who went on to other graduate studies — all perfectly kosher under the guidelines."

Quote :

"Certain definitions in the surveys seem open to abuse. A person is employed after nine months, for instance, if he or she is working on Feb. 15. This is the most competitive category — it counts for about one-seventh of the U.S. News ranking — and in the upper echelons, it’s not unusual to see claims of 99 percent and, in a handful of cases, 100 percent employment rates at nine months. A number of law schools hire their own graduates, some in hourly temp jobs that, as it turns out, coincide with the magical date."

Quote :

"Critics of the rankings often cast the issue in moral terms, but the problem, as many professors have noted, is structural. A school that does not aggressively manage its ranking will founder, and because there are no cops on this beat, there is no downside to creative accounting. In such circumstances, the numbers are bound to look cheerier, even as the legal market flat-lines. "

Quote :

"Solving the J.D. overabundance problem, according to Professor Henderson, will have to involve one very drastic measure: a bunch of lower-tier law schools will need to close. But nobody inside of the legal establishment, he predicts, has the stomach for that. “Ultimately,” he says, “some public authority will have to step in because law schools and lawyers are incapable of policing themselves.” "

It was actually a pretty interesting read and I really don't care about law school, lawyers, etc.

[Edited on January 20, 2011 at 4:18 PM. Reason : ]

1/20/2011 4:15:41 PM

i'm going to walk into the dean's office tomorrow and ask him if he would like to be the first school to use more realistic results. will post results after.

1/20/2011 4:33:36 PM

those people should just declare bankruptcy

i know it would be hard, but they just got out of law school, they should know the tricks to get it done

1/20/2011 10:23:53 PM

bankruptcy does exactly nothing for school loans, they are non-dischargeable

1/20/2011 10:47:38 PM

damn, that does suck then

1/21/2011 1:38:11 AM

they just released a figure that about 20% less people are signing up for the LSAT so i think instead of changing the way schools are run they'll just go along with articles like this scaring people away from applying. you can't have problems finding jobs if there isn't a flood of graduates.

treats the symptoms but not the cause

1/22/2011 2:36:50 PM

Quote :

"“It’s a prestige thing,” he says. “I’m an attorney. All of my friends see me as a person they look up to. They understand I’m in a lot of debt, but I’ve done something they feel they could never do and the respect and admiration is important.”""

wow

1/23/2011 9:55:51 PM

Law school outlook comes in waves. There have been many times over the past 3 decades where there have been too many students, followed by not enough. Recession tends to drive more people into law school (particularly recent grads who might not have otherwise considered it).

If you want to be a lawyer, go to law school and you'll do well. Ignore the stories about having too many law students, because the pendulum will swing before you get out in three years. If you are just aimless and have no idea what you want to do, so why not law school, you're in for some bitter disappointment. Lawyers work punishing hours and many never step foot in a court room their whole career. Only do something you love or you're going to fail and/or be miserable.

Lastly, not all lawyers are created equal. If you have a niche, you'll be in great shape. Maybe you have an engineering or science background, which will open certain opportunities that the guy who majored in English Lit may not have.

1/26/2011 1:14:39 PM

Quote :

"bankruptcy does exactly nothing for school loans, they are non-dischargeable"

for reals? i've never heard that before

2/4/2011 10:56:16 AM

^Make sense.

Why pay back your loans for 10 years when you can file bankruptcy and its off your record in 10 years?

2/4/2011 3:21:34 PM

The "work hard and you'll make it" line only goes so far, really. The people graduating in the bottom half of their class, when their school isn't even top tier to begin with, are pretty much screwed.

I think this speaks to a broader problem, though. Kids graduating from undergraduate that haven't actually worked and been independent usually have no problem taking on a huge amount of debt. The significance of their decision rarely becomes evident until sometime later.

2/4/2011 9:43:55 PM

Quote :

"for reals? i've never heard that before "

It's not impossible to get rid of them but it's pretty rare.

2/6/2011 10:25:20 PM

Quote :

"The "work hard and you'll make it" line only goes so far, really. The people graduating in the bottom half of their class, when their school isn't even top tier to begin with, are pretty much screwed."

I'm not sure how the second statement is supposed to support the first. If they graduated in the bottom half, they didn't work as hard as the top half folks, now did they?

2/8/2011 1:54:34 PM

It's essentially stating that people in the top half didn't have much of a shot to begin with since it was a mediocre school so if you're in the bottom half you're royally fucked.

2/8/2011 2:05:49 PM

Law of Averages
Why the law-school bubble is bursting.
http://www.slate.com/id/2288751/

3/21/2011 4:28:05 PM

I know some large companies are making significant cuts to their legal staff, especially those that are in the business of dictating internal policy.

Thank God.

It's about time companies realize that there's very little benefit in having revenue consuming parts of a company dictate arbitrary policies without regard to the needs of the revenue generating parts of a company.

3/22/2011 3:46:21 PM

Further proof of the scam in action:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/law-school-grants.html?src=me&ref=general

5/1/2011 7:51:08 PM