The Problem with Law School
Last week, we talked about what some of our biggest financial mistakes were, and a few of you mentioned grad school, specifically, law school.
The Times is taking a look at the economics of going to law school, and points out that attending veterinary school can cost more than attending law school, and veterinarians earn less on average than lawyers do. The question is: Why has everyone been calling law school a scam, while veterinary school has remained relatively unscorned?
It has a lot to do with rankings and what school you attend. Less expensive law schools draw “less qualified staff,” meaning an all-star practitioner can earn a lot of money working in the private sector, or by being courted by big name schools with more money to throw around, so there is an instant imbalance among schools and the quality of education that will land a graduate a job. And then there’s this:
Duke, for instance, which was No. 11 on the U.S. News rankings, said its graduates had a 95 percent employment rate last year, with an average private sector salary of $160,000.
Is this true? Is the No. 11-ranked law school landing jobs for 95 percent of its graduates? And if so—this is important—what percent of them are working non-legal jobs? What percent are only employed part-time, or as temps and are struggling to find full-time work? If we want people to make informed decisions about putting themselves into debt for a degree, accurate numbers should be provided.
Photo: Harvard Law Record
Win on the perm tag. Win, Mike Dang.
Law schools are definitely hiding the ball, as they say in … law school. But the market was hugely inflated prior to 2008, with large law firms hiring huge classes of freshly-graduated 24-year olds and paying them $160k to do a job they were not specifically trained for (law school is infamously disconnected from practice) and mostly don’t like. THE LAW!! is purported by academia but also popular culture to be this passionate, intellectually-stimulating labor of love, when in fact it’s largely a tedious desk job that does not require much more than good organizational skills and common sense. So before, people were bitter and overpaid, and now they are bitter and unemployed. Far worse. When the job market contracted so very sharply in 2008-2009, it caught a lot of people way off-guard, and schools are scrambling to figure out the new terrain in a profession that is very conservative and slow to change. I think law schools need to change how they teach (more emphasis on writing and practice; probably should only be two years!), but also the market just is not going to support the number of graduates it was a few years ago at the salaries people drifted into the law to attain. Ironically, as a public interest lawyer, I know that there are many more poor people who need and cannot afford lawyers now because of the recession. But not everyone wants to do this kind of work, and not many people can survive on $35k when they have massive law school loans to pay back.
@charmcity So, UMB or UB by any chance?
@bgprincipessa Nope! I just grew up in Baltimore. I’ve actually heard really good things about UB’s clinical program, but I don’t know anything first-hand.
@charmcity but for consolidated federal loans, you can make income-based repayments – and I understand that they will still be relatively high BUT they will not be over $1,000 as they would be on a normal repayment scheme – so the $35K/year thing isn’t really objectionable. plus, if you work in public interest and make 10 years of consecutive payments, on any repayment scheme, the rest of the debt is forgiven. (again, i understand the government can do away with this program as quickly as they did away with subsidized federal loans for graduate students.) or perhaps you can enlighten as to why these are not sufficient to persuade more people to go into public interest law?
@tea for all One point that I didn’t make in my original post, and should have, is that despite the low pay, there are very few entry-level public interest positions available and competition is unbelievably fierce. I graduated before the big crash, went through the typical OSI process 2L year, and after working at a big DC firm as a summer associate decided that I hated it and really didn’t want to do it even for a few years. I was shocked to discover that the 3L public interest job search process is MUCH harder-I thought nothing could be shittier than law firm hiring-with fewer positions, very early fall deadlines for the big fellowships that require significant connections to an organization that will hire you after grad, and you’re largely on your own because (at least at that time) career service offices are not set up to help with the very different world of non-profit hiring. Since 2009, legal aid/PD/etc. offices have been bleeding staff because of funding problems. Not just stagnant funding or hiring freezes, but significant cuts and big layoffs. The Legal Services Corporation director just estimated that offices are turning away half of the clients who are financially eligible to receive their services because of insufficient staff capacity.
Also, IBR and LRAPs are fantastic options for people like me who are single and can make ends meet on a public interest. I went to law school with a lot of folks who were there working their tails off in order to get jobs that would allow them to support families.
Finally, this is really demanding work. Not everyone is cut out for it or interested in doing it. I do think many more people would try it out if given the chance and training, though.
@charmcity Re: public interest positions – also that many of them were being temporarily “taken” by deferred associates from large law firms and they didn’t have to pay the associates. At least that was the case when I graduated – are law firms still deferring people?
Also, public interest positions are expensive to get work experience for, at least during the summer. I went to law school intending to do public interest work, but I did the firm thing 2L summer primarily because I couldn’t afford to work for free for two summers.
@CubeRootOfPi Totally. Not sure if firms are still deferring (I think they might just be “not hiring” at this point), but that was a problem for a couple of years. Hard for non-profits to turn down free attorneys and a chance to build a relationship with a firm. And I was in a similar position re: 2L summer.
@CubeRootOfPi Exactly yes to what you and charmcity said. Public interest positions are incredibly hard to get now, and they have always been hard to get, because they generally want you to show a specific commitment to their specific area. If you want a domestic violence position, you’d better have done specific internships in that field, and not anything else. And yeah, those internships are going to be unpaid, especially nowadays. Plus, if your job is in a high cost of living area, good luck paying what IBR wants you to pay on your public interest salary. I work for the government and live in NYC and guess what! I have other debt beyond my government debt that is eligible for IBR. I can’t come close to making the IBR payment right now, on my very good government salary, and I’m single/no kids. If I could somehow get an apartment that cost $1500 a month less than what I pay now to live in Brooklyn, I could mayyyybe eke it out, but it would be hard. IBR sounds great in theory but in practice it’s nowhere near the glorious panacea many are making it out to be.
I think the Times article misses the point. Online learning? No. The solution is to stop producing so many lawyers. There are not enough jobs for the number of lawyers being produced. That’s it. Many law schools should close, not try to cut costs by doing stuff online. Even if a law school could lower its cost to, say, 30,000 dollars total, what’s the point of having relatively minimal debt when you still can’t find a job? And citing the 95 percent employment statistic without even inquiring into the accuracy of that statistic? C’mon, Times.
@WaityKatie
Only a law school grad would call $30k “relatively minimal debt”!
To be clear, I would be thrilled to have only that level of debt. Happily, my interest rates are mind-bogglingly low.
@WaityKatie
Oooh, just read the article. Yeah, it’s kind of insane that the writer misses the point that lower-ranked school should just go away if they can’t offer better employment outcomes!
@josiahg Haha, I thought that as I was typing it. I graduated from undergrad with around 25k in debt and thought that was so much, but now that seems like quaint horse and buggy times to me. (Aww, look at that cute lil debt pile). You’re lucky to have the low interest rates, mine are mindbogglingly high! (and permanent! yay!)
Sometimes I fear that online classes + unpaid internships for credit will be the dystopian future of all tertiary education, but I feel like it could actually work for law school.
Paul Campos at Lawyers Guns and Money (http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/author/paul-campos) has been on this subject for awhile now. It’s probably worth it to read some of his thoughts on the subject.
Also, I’m very glad to have graduated law school in 1997 and have a decent job (but not a very high paying one by Biglaw standards). I make every effort to talk people out of following my path.
@stinapag “The” problem with law school, like there’s only one.
I’m incredibly lucky, I graduated in 05 and have managed to find a job that I like pretty well. But I do my best to talk people out of going to law school, too.
@themegnapkin Oh, I’d never ever say that there’s only one problem with law school. I was fortunate enough to also work on a graduate degree in public health while I was in law school. The MPH kept me sane.
@stinapag — I’m surprised you don’t link to Paul Campos’ blog, Inside the Law School Scam. It will provide you with a MUCH better picture of the realities of finding a job after law school, the huge tax burden that will wallop you if you ARE fortunate enough to utilize IBR, the chances of finding a job in “public interest” law, and the wages therein, and general subjects related to law school.
The fools at the NYT who continue to write misleading gripe on these subjects have no idea what they’re talking about.
One of the reasons you don’t hear people calling veterinary school a scam is probably that you don’t know many DVM graduates, because there aren’t nearly as many. Several recent DVM grads that I know have had LOT of trouble landing jobs, any jobs at all, that require their degrees… but it’s a lower absolute number of people in that situation.
Plus, I suspect there’s something about the kinds of prep work it takes to get into each of those types of schools. There are always LOTS and LOTS of law school applicants, because, well, you can apply it with nearly any undergraduate degree and a good LSAT score (or probably an OK LSAT score if you’re not picky about where you go to school). It’s why law school is a backup plan for so many English majors (and others, of course, I’m not trying to pick on English majors). There is also probably a law school close to wherever you live in the US. Meanwhile, to get into even the not-so-good vet schools you have to take years of pre-requisites and also commit to moving to one of the (many fewer and farther between) vet schools. Most of the people who do that have a deep passion for it and a realistic idea of what they might make and the employment odds they might be up against, in part because it’s almost never a backup plan. Plus, you know, nobody thinks vets make the big bucks compared to their loans, whereas people do think that about attorneys and may not carefully research the current reality before going to law school as a backup. Plus, you know, it’s always even worse when your backup fails, too.
Anyway, that was a minor point in your article, and absolutely none of it is meant to minimize the problems with law school, but it got me thinking, and I’m high on sudafed (my doctor said I had to take it so shush), so you got a long-winded comment about it.
Related blog post I read about this the other day.
The whole thing is like a train wreck you can’t look away from.
I started vet school this year, so I’ve spent the last few years thinking about the economics involved. There are a couple (very relevant) differences between the economics of vet and law schools:
1. Private status and ranking. There really isn’t a “private” vet school market. There are fewer than 30 vet schools in the whole US and only one (Western) is strictly private. The rest belong to state university programs. So no matter where you live, there is probably an in-state vet school for you, and if you go there your tuition will be about half the out-of-state tuition. And really, with only a few exceptions, there isn’t a wide enough quality gap between any two vet schools to merit spending twice or 2.5 times as much going to an out-of-state school if you get into your in-state. Compare that to law school, where the difference between a Tier I and Tier II school is pretty much employment vs. unemployment (or so I’ve heard). Law school applicants have way more pressure to take on an impractical debt burden than vet school applicants do.
2. Market saturation. Obviously the law market is supersaturated. However, you CAN find a job as a vet if you don’t have qualms about going into meat inspection or moving to the middle of nowhere. Class size of vet schools is fixed between 80 and 120 and there aren’t many new schools popping up. Supply is pretty constant – you just have to find the demand. Not to minimize how hard that can be if you have a passion for zoo medicine or roots in Ithaca or St. Paul.
Is any of this relevant? No? I have an anatomy exam tomorrow, so I am probably too tired to read the article correctly.