Monday, January 10, 2011

THE PIE-EATING CONTEST:  We don't talk a lot about lawyering and law school here despite how many of this blog's writers and commenters are in this world, but the opus in yesterday's NYT business section is a useful starting point.  We all know what the entry-level market is like, and we know that many law schools massage their US News data, and I want to focus on this:
“Who’s to say to any particular student, ‘You won’t be the one to get the $160,000-a-year job,’ ” says Steven Greenberger, a dean at the DePaul College of Law. “I think they should have all the info, and the info should be accurate, but saying once they know that they shouldn’t be allowed to come, that’s predicated on the idea that students are really ignorant and don’t know what is best for them.”

Based on the seething and regret you hear from some law school grads, more than a few wish that someone had been patronizing enough to say, “Oh no you don’t.” But it’s often hard to convince students about the potential downside of law school, says Kimber A. Russell, a 37-year-old graduate of DePaul, who writes the Shilling Me Softly blog.

“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.”
I'll phrase the question differently:  assume the law schools told the unvarnished truth, that if you are not in the top (10-25)% of the class (outside the top-10 schools), you will find the job market to be exceptionally difficult, even both in our city and in your hometown, and you may well not be employed after graduation.  My fear is that even providing accurate information is irrelevant because however narrow that window is, most matriculants will assume that they're smart and hard-working enough to fit through it.  I don't quite know how to describe this heuristic -- I'm sure there's a formal term for it -- but don't most people assume "if they've admitted me, that means the school believes I'll do really well there"?

So I don't know how law schools can design the "warning label" accurately enough to provide the necessary message to overcome the denial (though at least with the blogosphere and articles like this one the message is getting out there).  A law school's primary job is to teach people about the law, but it also has a duty to be clear as to what one can do with a J.D. in this economy.  I'm interested in your thoughts as to what needs to change.

48 comments:

  1. Paul Tabachneck9:38 AM

    I'm a complete outsider to this, but I know a lot of law school graduates that aren't lawyers. 

    From what I understand, a law degree is like any other kind of degree -- it speaks not only to a section of your expertise, but to a work ethic and an ability to process information in a way unique to that breed of student.  If you can pass the bar, and learn the ins and outs of the legal system, you probably possess a wealth of other translatable skills -- the question in these times is more how you position those skills, and what kinds of jobs you'll allow yourself to have.   

    (NOTE: It's ironic to me, after a lifetime of parental beratement as a career artist, that I'm now talking to my law school friends and asking "what (they) have to fall back on.")

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  2. The term you're searching for is "Dunning-Kruger effect."  

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  3. carried10:19 AM

    I don't have a suggestion, but I was pleased to see the article about the problem.  My husband and I are both lawyers (he at BigLaw, me at the Government), and we can't stop talking about this issue.  He is particularly outraged at the way that law schools are raising tuition and people are taking out loans with no end in sight.  Recently a paralegal at his firm left to go to a middling law school, taking out huge loans, and he can't get over what a huge gamble that is.  I hear you about millenniel exceptionalism, but I think the fact that law schools are run by lawyers, who do have ethical obligations, is particularly problematic.  The schools themselves should have some obligation to the profession, if not the students to rein some of this in.  Or, you know, "I dunno what to do, but we ought do something."

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  4. Vanessa H10:26 AM

    I have always thought that the problem isn't that the schools need to do better to communicate the lack of jobs in big firms, but that they need to do a better job educating students regarding alternate types of legal jobs.

    I started law school when I was 35. I went to a second or third tier school and had no desire to work in a big firm. The law school started as a night school (producing a Supreme Court Justice along the way) and promoted itself as a law school that would not only teach law, but would teach how to practice law. My biggest complaint to this day is that the only programming career services ever put on was for the big firms.

    I was in the top 10% of my class and didn't go through the interview process by choice. I strongly believe if law schools spent time proportionate to the jobs law students actually get, like being a solo practioner, what in house counsel jobs entail, managing ediscovery, working for the government, etc., more students and prospective students would get the message.

    And they should also provide students with a heck of a lot more knowledge about what to do if you don't pass the bar. Like at orientation they should say - 1 out of ten won't graduate and another x out of ten won't pass the bar, ever.

    I don't litigate and I'm doing way better than if I weren't a licensed attorney. I don't regret my choices for a moment. I think the problem is the focus on big firm jobs being the pinnacle.

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  5. At a certain point, "caveat emptor" kicks in.  Before we were worried about all the people going into debt for non-existent law-firm jobs, the concern was that law students were going into debt for law firm jobs and would have golden handcuffs that wouldn't let them quit their $160,000/year jobs.  And people going to law school and deciding they didn't really want to be lawyers.

    I agree that most people who go to law school are making poor financial decisions, but I don't see the problem here as substantially different than the people who go into $100,000 of debt to get a women's studies degree at NYU and act surprised that the only job they can get is a $20/hour photography assistant job.  

    At this point, the word is out.  Anyone still going to law school isn't going to be dissuaded by additional disclosure.  The solution is to teach high-school kids basic financial competence.  

    And I'd hire some of these law school grads if they knew what a paragraph was, but they don't, so I don't want to waste my time and money training someone who didn't go to University of Chicago.

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  6. One positive side of this is that more and more top-tier law school folks are going into public service.  (There are arguably some additional political/social factors at work as well--it's a lot "cooler" to go to work for the federal government now than it was when I graduated law school in 2002.)

    A very real problem remains that some markets are oversaturated with law schools.  In particular, there are WAY too many in Calfornia (especially ones iwth only limited accredidation), and I'm not sure NYC needs 7 law schools in the 5 boroughs.  (Contrast with Texas, which has a total of 9 law schools statewide, and may be one of the very few markets that's underserved on this front.)

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  7. Ted, above, echoes my thoughts on this subject.  I'm not a law-school grad so my knowledge is limited but there are hundreds of thousands of "college graduates" walking around out there wondering why they can't find a job that even requires a degree, let alone one that would pay what they were fooled into thinking they are worth.

    <span>This doesn't just go for grads of the so-called diploma mills, either.  I was admitted (25 years ago) as a freshman to a "prestigious" institution, one that routinely places #1 in its class and region in the U.S. News survey, but I was horrifically ill-prepared academically for even the simplest 101-level freshman work.  This was painfully evident to me within weeks of the beginning of my first semester and I wish wish wish that somebody, anybody (like, my academic advisor.  Hello?) had said something like, "You're obviously a smart kid but you haven't had even the most basic preparation for the kind of work that's expected of you here.  You need to go home, take some classes at a cheap state school and and least get your feet wet.  Do well and I'll recommend you be readmitted here.  Nothing personal, you're just not ready.  Do that, otherwise you're just wasting your time and your parents' money."</span> <span>I managed to squeak through four years and get my sheepskin but I don't even want to know what my class-standing was and to this day I have never held a job for which a degree would have been necessary.  In many situations, I do my best to downplay the fact that I even have a degree.  I've done OK, on the whole, but the damage to my self-image had long-asting repercussions.  I'm mostly over it but not 100% - otherwise I would not have skipped my 20-year reunion.</span>

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  8. I think the more apt comparison is to graduate school, at least in the humanities. Granted, the debt load is far smaller, but the opportunity costs of spending 6-12 years in graduate school are that much higher. It at least fosters/encourages the same magical thinking - "it won't be like that for me."

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  9. Trust me, the word is not out. At least not to parents pushing their kids into law school, any law school, rather than let them be unemployed. As I like to ask students, "would you rather live in your parents' basement now, or after law school?"

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  10. Pseudonym for obvious reasons11:46 AM

    At what point are we going to lay some of the blame at the feet of someone who borrowed a quarter of a million dollars without doing the most basic due diligence? He went to a fourth-tier law school (for those not familiar with this area, that's 4th of 4 tiers), a school where even when the market is good the top 5% of the class has difficulty getting high-paying jobs, and he chose the school because, "'I looked at schools in Pennsylvania and Long Island,' he says, 'but I thought, why not go somewhere I’ll enjoy?"' He "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."

    So this kid (a) borrowed a ton of money that a small amount of googling would have told him would be unlikely to return his investment in under 20 years, (b) chose where to go to school not based on his prospects but on tourism, (c) lived way above his means and borrowed extra money to support his lifestyle, (d) chose to borrow way more money than any human being should need to support living for two months while studying for the bar. But it's definitely the fault of the brochure he read from the school that he's $250K in debt.

    Yes, I'd like it if law schools reported their employment statistics ethically, but what makes anyone think that this guy, or the thousands of others like him every year who enter low tier schools on borrowed money and choose to live it up on their loans, would change one whit of their behavior if the law schools did? There are lots of ways to get a law degree without ending up drastically in debt and unemployable. Lots of people work during the day and go to school at night so they don't have crushing debt when they graduate. Lots of people get practical experience instead of going to Prague. Lots of people live at home or share small apartments with multiple people and eat ramen noodles to realize their dreams. Oh, and lots of people don't go to graduate school if they can't get into a program that will allow them to earn back their investment.

    Law schools counsel people about career prospects during the admissions process, but law schools are trying to sell you on going to their school. That's the point of the brochure - of ANY brochure selling anything. They shouldn't outright lie, but they report only what they have to because that's their job. That's why there are a lot of independent resources out there for those willing to do their homework, and that's why the ABA is looking into making this a systemic change, not a school-specific one. US News is as much to blame as anyone else, but no one seems to lay at their feet the problem that they base a good chunk of their all-powerful ranking on placement results.

    And law schools counsel students extensively about their debt and their career options - begging students not to take on more debt for things like apartments, iPads, fancy trips, and the like. Law schools put on dozens of programs about managing your finances, non-law-firm career options, internships and scholarships, and a myriad of other ways to help with this problem. No one attends. But a law firm panel? That'll pack the house.

    Look, it's a complicated issue, to be sure. But the New York Times article is silly, and the kid portrayed in it has no one to blame but himself.

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  11. Pseudonym for obvious reasons12:51 PM

    An interesting, nuanced response to the NYTimes piece from the Chronicle of Higher Ed: http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-ethics-of-law-school-tournaments/30935

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  12. Heather K1:07 PM

    I have an MFA in acting.  From the University of Idaho.  Yeah, super memorable I know.  And when I researched going to get my MFA, I looked into a lot of things including that if I should maybe not go to a school that I have to pay a lot of money for an MFA (ie one of the ones that stipend or teach away your tuition) and that I really should only pay for it if it comes with serious connections to regional theatres or faculty that have serious connections so I will get seen by people who will look for me/cast me later.  I knew that when I applied and applied and prepared accordingly.  I got wait listed by a fantastic school that would've paid for my tuition and given me a decent stipend to live on and given me great access to the regional theatre casting wheel.  But I didn't get in.

    I went to Idaho because as the rejections piled up from wonderful school after wonderful school, I panicked.  I had no back up plan to get out of my parents basement, and I surely couldn't NOT get into graduate school.  So I applied at the last minute to Idaho--which I had previously written off as not at all what I was looking for--and I got in and I went and I now have a crapload of debt the only use of which seems to be fitting into the family I married into which is a lot of people with advanced degrees.

    I did the research, I knew what I wanted and how to get it.  And I still managed to make the wrong choice when it seemed in my first approach, that I wasn't going to get it.  

    Correct reporting isn't going to help those kids.  

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  13. tortoiseshelly1:41 PM

    I agree that most of the people entering law school delude themselves into thinking they will graduate in the top 10% to 25% and that landing a job won't be a problem. I know I did. I also knew that I didn't want a Big Law job, however, so I chose to go to a Top 50 public school that didn't cost an arm and a leg. I still have loans, but they're not unmanageable.

    I don't think a law school warning label regarding finances/employment is going to work, because I think the bigger issue is the romanticization of law practice. People still view the job is exciting, important - never a dull moment sort of stuff. I think if more applicants had a true sense of the job and its pitfalls, that there would be far fewer people competing for law jobs. I didn't go to law school believing real world practice was Ally McBeal or L.A. Law type of stuff, but I also didn't really have many references for what it would really be like. I wish I had, because I'm not so sure I'd have been jumping through hoops to do this.

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  14. With no offense intended, this discussion is exemplifying something that bothers me a lot in Internet discussion more broadly.  Person A says "We should do X."  Person B says "No, X won't help because not everyone will heed X."  But that's really not the issue.  The issue is whether X will help push SOME people in the right direction.  If X helps SOME people -- say, the most analytical of the students who would be unable to earn the big bucks after attending a third- or fourth-tier law school -- avoid incurring tons of debt, then it's a good idea, unless the costs of X are so high as to not be worth it.  And in a case in which X involves making certain information more transparent to consumers (i.e., the would-be students), it seems like an easy call.  X won't fix the world, but it will make the world better.  Law students need to know that there is oversupply (Andrew McCarthy tried warning us about this as far back as St. Elmo's Fire), and that the life is NOT what they see on tv.  Should they know that already?  Maybe, maybe not.  But more information can't hurt.

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  15. I got into Yale Law School in 1991 by writing an essay about how I already knew that being a lawyer was nothing like "LA Law," and had classmates who fled BigLaw to go into theater and children's photography.  This isn't a new issue.  

    The analytical people already have access to the information they need; the people suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect are going to ignore it.  I don't think anyone's arguing that information shouldn't be provided, just that the difference at the margin is pretty small -- and I would further argue that anyone "saved" by new disclaimers is just going to be replaced by someone even less qualified to make a living as a lawyer at the margin.  Not even the lamest for-profit non-accredited California law school is short of applicants.

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  16. anonymous2:35 PM

    What responsibility should loan providers have?  Despite going to law school and taking out loans, I don't really know how the loan business works.  But it seems like loan providers could hold applicants to a higher standard, or that law schools could refuse to sponsor loans above a certain amount without substantial justification.  I dimly recall that I had to provide some sort of a written statement to get even a small additional loan from Access Group. 

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  17. I don't know.  I've been able to dissuade quite a few people myself.  (And I'm more concerned with the good people than the morons who you claim will replace them.)  Odd for a free-market advocate to be arguing that information is useless and that demand is irrelevant.

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  18. The people you dissuaded are the people who are doing their due diligence. I'm not arguing information is useless; I'm arguing it already exists, as demonstrated by the fact that you're out there dissuading people.

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  19. <span>The people you dissuaded are the people who are doing their due diligence. I'm not arguing information is useless; I'm arguing it already exists, as demonstrated by the fact that you're out there dissuading people.  The problem isn't the lack of information; even if more information would have a tiny marginal effect, there's going to be lots of idiots with $250,000 of debt and no legitimate legal job hoping for a bailout.</span>

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  20. The problem is that loan providers have no incentive to ensure that the loans make financial sense, because the loans are subsidized and guaranteed by the federal government.  If we want loan makers to engage in due diligence, we need to remove those guarantees, and then loans will only go to the people who are generating enough human capital to repay the loans.  Of course, then there will be complaints that some people who want higher education can't afford it.  (Which is true now, but we wait until after they pay for that to tell them.)

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  21. With student loans now being in many instances non-dischargable debt, they're quite possibly the lowest risk loan one a bank can make.  The real issue is the combination of various debt--not just the student loan debt, but credit card debt and other line of credit type debt.  At least at NYU, the general assumption seemed to be that either (A) you would go into BigLaw and quickly make money to repay the loans (maybe leaving BigLaw promptly thereafter) or (B) you'd go into a public service gig and be able to take advantage of the generous LRAP programs offered by the institution.  As the opportunities for (A) have decreased and LRAP programs have changed their guidelines, it's become even harder to justify it.

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  22. J.O'Connor3:11 PM

    I thought the Times article unhelpfully confused two different issues.

    The first is the tightening job market as it affects graduates of the top hundred or so highest ranking lawschools.  Going to one of those schools (which I did a decade and a half ago) has always been a pie-eating contest with winners and losers.  The "winners" in the top 10% or 25% or 50% or 75% of each class got to eat more pie at a big lawfirm for a big salary and pay off their loans relatively easily and the "losers" get to take small-firm or non-law jobs and struggle with their loans.  Although the current recession has lowered the chances of "winning" and reduced the value of what you get when you "win," it hasn't fundamentally changed the nature of the game.  The disclosure issue for these students is whether they properly understand how long the odds have become and whether the game is now worth the candle.

    It's a different issue entirely for lawschools outside the top 100 or so.  Graduates of these schools have essentially no chance of a job in BigLaw and very little chance of ever getting a legal job sufficient to pay off their loans.  For students at these schools, the issue isn't whether they understand the odds, but whether they're getting anything of value for their tuition money.  

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  23. No, I don't reach nearly enough people.  As Adlai says above, the word is not out.  The folks I dissuade are generally the children of parents who don't have college educations (or who have college but no advanced degrees) and who still believe that law school = life of comfort.  We can help more of those people if we provide more systematic information.

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  24. As a general rule, aren't law school loans wholly private, and not subsidized/guaranteed by any government?  (Contrast with undergraduate loans, which may be subsidized/guaranteed--Stafford and Perkins loans being the big two.)

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  25. Pseudonym for obvious reasons4:47 PM

    It reminds me of the constant discussion at my synagogue about what to do about parents who are oblivious when their children are disrupting the service and don't take them out of the room. We're afraid to make a blanket announcement because the 85% of parents who DO know when the kids have crossed the line and DO take them out will now get all the more paranoid and keep the kids out entirely (which we don't want - we want the kids there as much as possible), but the 15% of parents who ARE the ones we're actually talking to will never hear the message in the first place because we couldn't possibly be talking about THEIR perfect children. So you end up discouraging the ones you weren't trying to discourage, and have no effect at all on the actual problem at hand.

    It's not a perfect analogy, of course, but there are people for whom it is the right decision to go to law school. Indiscriminately scaring the crap out of people is much more likely to turn them away than it is to turn away the idiots who go $250K in debt to go to a fourth tier school with no plan.

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  26. Pseudonym for obvious reasons4:56 PM

    So much of this is about incentives and regulation, as always. As noted above and elsewhere -

    - loan providers and banks have every incentive to get people to take these loans, as they are low risk to the bank.
    - law schools have no incentive to discourage applicants or matriculants, whose tuition is the only thing that allows and justifies their existence. The lower ranked the school is, the bigger their incentive to hide the truth.
    - the ABA can't do the thing that really needs doing (getting rid of low tier law schools and not allowing new law schools to open) because they get threatened with an anti-trust suit if they even blink in that direction.
    - the media has no interest in the nuance of all this, lumping all schools together in one big "lawyers can't get jobs" because the story is much more senstational than if they report "lawyers from weak law schools and at the bottoms of their classes can't get jobs."
    - college graduates can't get jobs anyway, and their career counselors in college have nothing useful to tell them, so both sides view "wait out the recession in graduate school" as a panacea.
    - the government doesn't want to be in the business of killing people's hopes and dreams, and anything they do to solve the problem will either cost them money, or open them to the charge that they're making law school available only to rich people, or both.
    - US News only wants to sell magazines, and the more people who want to go to law school, the more rankings issues they sell.

    There's no one here with both the incentive and the power to solve the problem.

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  27. Anonymous4:57 PM

    I was glad to see the NYT focus on this issue, as I feel very strongly that accurate info should be available for kids considering law school.  Sure, as one semi-humorous essay I read before starting law school noted, it can be difficult to explain to a class of law students, each of whom has always been in the top 10% of his/her class that, in fact, the entire class cannot be in the top 10%.  Some may (shocker) be in the bottom 50%.

    But the simple fact is that someone doing due diligence and trying to figure out if school x is a safe investment bet cannot find accurate info on it.  Unless by "accurate info," we mean "inflated average salaries that assume that everyone goes to BigLaw in the best-paying cities" and "percentage of grads employed" should include "people we can't find, people who have chosen, for whatever reason to go back to school, and people working at McDonald's."  Things are so different now that I sometimes ponder that I can't really comprehend what it means to be at a top 20 school on law review, working your ass off, with good grades, and still not sure that you'll be able to get a job that covers your loans.  That was not what we experienced in the timeframe when many of us graduated.  Plus the loans have skyrocketed to such an extent---I realistically could have paid off my loans while doing a government or public service job post-law-school.  For many law students, that is not the case.

    I'm sure that there are plenty of people that would still grab the 250K lottery ticket.  But I'd like for them to have more accurate info:  what are the real employment figures for a given school, including percentages in legal jobs, at various stages post-law-school?  What kinds of jobs do those grads have---big firm, small firm, government, public interest, in-house, academia?  What kind of salary ranges?  The fact that it might not persuade x percent of the people does not change the benefit of making sure that people at least have the info available, and maybe fewer folks will go to law school who don't want to be there, or will avoid diploma farms that don't give them much of a chance to get a job, or to get a job that will provide enough income to cover loans and life expenses.

    I really wish that the NYT had not focused on the kid it highlighted.  (And I use kid purposefully.)  I'm sure that his ability to engage in magical thinking (and skillful use of being judgment-proof) is helping to prevent him from panicking, but ugh.  I think that having some acknowledgement of the number of people who engage in the "maybe I'll be the one to win!" thinking was reasonable, but not the amount of space given to that kid.

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  28. Jenn.4:58 PM

    That was me.  Traveling for work, and the netbook did not have my info.

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  29. Emily5:03 PM

    I agree. I had many people tell me that I'd never make any money as a professor and that the likelihood of finding a job after grad school was slim-to-none. I still signed on for my six (extra) years of school. However, I worked full-time to put myself through undergrad and received a full fellowship for my PhD. The only degree I have loans for is my MA, and that was worth it in my opinion (the loan relatively small and I still worked part-time). Some humanities grad programs have greatly limited the number of acceptances a year, but only for PhD programs. The same schools accept far more MAs in order to pay for the PhD students. I have been lucky to work in my field, but I have also always worked while in school to avoid extra loans.
    While schools could always do more to make their students or potential students educated consumers, I agree with the comment that most students who need it won't take advantage of workshops aimed at how to get through grad school without massive loans. I think, in part, the problem might be  a broader issue with financial responsibility and unreasonable expectations.

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  30. spacewoman7:08 PM

    Agreed.  That kid sounded like an entitled moron.

    While we're on the subject, might I suggested that law schools add a required 1 credit course on Being a Professional (or, more to the point, Not Being a Dipshit)?  It's amazing how many of the kids today who do manage to get Biglaw jobs, even in this economy, could really use such a class.

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  31. Jennifer7:32 PM

    The law school thing sounds like the same problem with all advanced degrees, really: (a) the decision HAS to be made by a (most likely) early 20something who may not have much in the way of work experience (or at least, probably not of the 8-5 variety), but has spent their entire life in the educational system being told that MOAR EDUCATION is better, (b) student isn't ready to stop being a student and become a drone like the rest of us, (c) student can't find a job/can only find a job at Pizza Hut/can't even manage to find a job at Pizza Hut and is stuck at home with parents, (d) student thinks, MOAR EDUCATION, "and then I won't have to worry about it for years!" The kid's already used to racking up debt, they can't even imagine dealing with the debt afterwards, and they think that advanced degree = MOAR MONEY because that's what society tells them. The only difference to me between most graduate degrees and law is that law is more specialized + it's always had the promise of MOAR MONEY.

    People think it's really strange that I've never wanted to go to grad school, but what's the point? Unless you're becoming some sort of scientist or medical doctor, most of them don't pay off any more.

    We should probably be sending everyone off to plumbing or hairdressing school these days, really.

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  32. Jenn.8:36 PM

    I'd love to see something taught in law school about the realities of practicing law.  I suspect that some folks got the sort of thing that I'm thinking about through clinic, but professionalism, as well as simply what you do while practicing law, would be a huge help for a lot of kids.  I've got to think that many law schools have alums who would be willing to help with that sort of thing.

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  33. tortoiseshelly9:24 PM

    I don't have a problem with the consumer having more information on which to base his/her decision. I certainly think financing and employment statistics are an important consideration and agree that if more transparency helps at least some potential applicants weigh that decision more carefully, then it's worthwhile.

    That being said, my comment was more in response to Adam's question of how you overcome the applicant's denial. If we're going on the assumption that law schools tell the unvarnished truth, and people are still willing to risk it, I think you have to make them assess whether the job is worth it aside from financial considerations. It's there that I think law schools, practicing attorneys, and media outlets have to be more forthcoming. I spoke with a several attorneys, a judge, read books about law school and the variety of legal careers and practice, but most of the time what you get is the "it will be difficult and challenging, but ultimately rewarding" version of the cons of practice, as opposed to "half the time your job will have all the sex appeal of an IRS audit" version. I wish law schools required an undergraduate internship with a law firm prior to acceptance.

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  34. You can get Perkins and Stafford for law school.

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  35. I have to say, that "law school tournament" post irritated me.  Plenty of us didn't make it into the top 10% of our classes or onto law review editorial boards, and it wasn't because we didn't do all of the reading or work hard.  It's because other people beat us out.  The difference is that the penalty for not making the top 10% or law review board are harsher now than they used to be.  

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  36. Pseudonym for obvious reasons11:10 PM

    Those things increasingly ARE taught in law schools. Mostly to empty rooms. Hindsight is of great benefit here - once you're out in the world, you wish you'd learned this stuff in school. But while you're in school, you don't have any idea how much you need it, nor do you listen to the people who are telling you you need it.

    Making these things mandatory isn't much help either - if a school makes them mandatory, students will turn down the school because they (a) don't want anyone telling them what they have to do and/or (b) don't want to be forced to take those particular courses (see paragraph 1 above). Cf the all-important US News rankings, which have made itso that schools can't afford to differentiate themselves, because they can't afford to be anything less than all things to all people for fear their yield numbers and medians will decline. Law schools could only get away with this if *all of them* required these sorts of courses, as with the ABA-required mandatory ethics course in 2L or 3L year, because it levels the field again.

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  37. GoldnI11:14 PM

    I'm a 3L at a T20 (which I now know doesn't mean anything if it's not T10 or T14) law school.  I actually don't have a debt problem right now--I got a big enough scholarship that my parents were able to cover the rest.  I realize I have it a lot better than many of my classmates.

    But still--it's January.  I haven't the slightest clue where I'm going or what I'll be doing after May.  I have to decide fairly soon where I'm going to take the bar--either in my home state, where there are less prospects but I have better connections, or in my boyfriend's state, which has decent prospects but for which I have to do all my networking remotely.  I'm getting the impression that there will be jobs--but they won't know for sure until after I pass the bar.  And then there's the pesky little problem of having a grand total of two summer's worth of relevant experience.  So I'm staring down the prospect of graduating unemployed right now, and even without the debt problem, it scares me to death.

    Had I known all this, would I have still done it?  Probably.  But I would have taken time off to work first, and majored in something more useful than Political Science.

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  38. Pseudonym for obvious reasons11:16 PM

    Fair enough, but I think he was going for the broader point that the NYT entirely ignored - it'd not random who is getting these high-paying jobs in this economy. Your point is true, of course, and part of the standard law school advice - go to the best school you can, because there's no guarantee that going to a lesser school will put you at the top of the class.

    Other people beating you out no matter how hard you work is part of the game at elite schools, because you rarely have a slacker contingent who doesn't much care, and everyone is already well-educated and highly intelligent. But I'm sure you can think of many people that you beat out on sheer hard work, especially in the 2L and 3L years when a lot of people (having secured their high paying jobs) stopped caring so much.

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  39. The Pathetic Earthling1:04 AM

    How did T14 become a category?  I see T14 in many blogs -- Above the Law, most notably.  It strikes me as strange as those folks who have on their resume that they were in the 'Top 17%' of their class.  

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  40. The Pathetic Earthling1:08 AM

    And you'd be surprised how much just well-aimed phone calls to a remote location can open up doors.  I got a call out of the blue from a kid at Washington University (St Louis) Law School.  Not a bad school by any stretch and the kid is in pretty good shape, class-rank wise.  He wants to do something very specific (water law) and it's something I know quite a bit about.  I put him in touch with most everyone I know in the business and he's got a couple of interviews lined up now here in California next week.  So, doing stuff remotely is often rewarded if you just show the initative.  So, get to it and good luck!

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  41. victoria7:19 AM

    Even being a scientist doesn't necessarily pay off anymore -- government research grant funding got slashed pretty dramatically under Bush II and I know PhD scientists who are scrambling. And medical student indebtedness has risen to an unbelievable degree while salaries have (at least from what I've been told) declined at the top end. It's my understanding that newly minted physicians are doing OK by and large but I wonder how much longer that will continue.

    If I were counseling someone who had good all-around academic ability, had no idea what they wanted to do, were willing to work hard and just wanted job security and earning potential with as little indebtedness as possible I'd probably tell them to go into nursing.

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  42. I agree, tortoisehelly, and was trying to incorporate your point by including "<span>the life is NOT what they see on tv" as part of the advice that applicants needed to hear.  Sorry if it seemed like I was disagreeing with you. </span>

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  43. tortoiseshelly11:09 AM

    No worries - I didn't take it like that at all and understood your comment. I was just clarifying why I chose to focus on the job duties as opposed to salary/employment and how I think even if you do the research, sometimes you don't get the full picture.

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  44. According to Anna Ivey, the T14 are the ones with nationally portable degrees: 

    "<span> A degree from a top-14 school will be portable nationally, so that degree would have value whether you ended up in the region you think you'll prefer down the road (which is always guess-work to some extent) or whether you end up someplace else entirely. I discuss this issue more fully in chapter 8 of my book (The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions), and there I also talk about some exceptions to that general rule."</span>

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27714-2005Apr5.html

    Wiki says they are: H/Y/S, Chicago, the two NYC schools, Penn, Cal/UVa/Mich, Duke, Northwestern, Georgetown, Cornell.

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  45. Adlai2:20 PM

    I think TPE is asking a more specific question - who were  #14 and #15 the year that "top 14" became a thing? Because, good for you, #14.

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  46. Wellred3:07 PM

    The problem is that is so much "cooler" to go into public service that you now can't get a job with the federal government or, indeed, many state government jobs.  

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  47. Pseudonym for obvious reasons3:25 PM

    T14 became a thing because no matter what has happened in the US News rankings in the 20 years they've been around, those 14 schools have been the top 14 schools. they've shifted order, but nothing below them has knocked any of the out. The top 3 have had schools move in and out, ditto the top 5, the top 10. But 15 and down have moved around, and the top 14 have always been the top 14. It's stupid, but it's become entrenched.

    @Adam - there are more than 2 law schools in NYC (and some of them are pretty good), so you should just call the two in the T14 NYU and Columbia. Also, many schools below the top 14 have nationally portable degrees, and not all the degrees in the top 14 are equally nationally portable.  I don't think anna means that characteristic to define the Top 14.

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  48. The Pathetic Earthling4:28 PM

    thanks. p.f.o.r.

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