8 ms·

An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

113 points by SmallBets 10y ago

mevile 10y ago
Kids are being advised by parents to get an expensive degree because when they were growing up that's how you made it. That's not how it is anymore. There's no free pass to success, no check all these boxes and then you've made it. You gotta use your brain early on, figure it out for yourself, because ultimately you're going to be the one having to live with the consequences of how you've spent your youth. I think there are actually good opportunities in vocational schools. Marketable skills that you can use to find a good job. Law, liberal arts and communication degrees maybe not as marketable.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  >That's not how it is anymore. There's no free pass to success, no check all these boxes and then you've made it. You gotta use your brain early on, figure it out for yourself, because ultimately you're going to be the one having to live with the consequences of how you've spent your youth. To be fair, the other pillar of "expensive degree leading to lucrative, high prestige career", medicine, is still doing well. As the population ages, there will be an even higher need for medical professionals. Of course, part of this seems to be a result of residency programs being restricted in the number of seats available.
  - davnn 10y ago
    Don't you think AI will have a big influence in the future of medicine?
    - godzillabrennus 10y ago
      Yes in diagnostics but for research social innovations will be far more impactful.
      - davnn 10y ago
        More researchers and less doctors sounds like a good plan to me!
    - gumby 10y ago
      > Don't you think AI will have a big influence in the future of medicine? People have been hoping so since the 70s and haven't made any progress. Having worked in both fields I realize that 1. Medicine as a discipline is still poorly understood so isn't really amenable to that many automated tasks and 2. Medicine, as a social phenomenon is structured such that automation won't itself reduce costs.
      - chii 10y ago
        lately, a lot of GP seems to be relying on an expert system to help diagnose/work out treatments for things. AI, as populeraized in hollywood pop culture, seems to only include things like human intelligence, where as in reality, AI encompasses things like expert systems, which is already very common.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Google has had a far bigger impact in medicine so far. Of course it also means I come to a doctor with 3 self diagnoses and he yells at me and tells me to stop googling.
  - taxicabjesus 10y ago
    Medicine has a few impossible problems. Family practice/internal medicine is arguably one of the most important roles, but many new doctors specialize so that they can better "cash in" on their M.D. degree. It's much cheaper to be proactive than reactive, but medicine doesn't think that way. Another problem is that Medicine spends a ton of money trying to keep old people alive for a few more days. For example, my grandfather was somehow talked into have his pacemaker replaced a few months before his 101st birthday. There were complications, infections, etc, and my aunt had to fight to get him on hospice care. Replacing this pacemaker was a mean thing to do to an old man who'd spent years hoping to die in his sleep. It would have been kinder to have never given him the pacemaker in the first place. He would've passed away 10 years earlier, but those last 10 years were of little value to him. Obamacare has only made "paying the bill" for medicine even more problematic.
    - chii 10y ago
      > talked into have his pacemaker replaced i don't want to sound callice, but it seems like the "sales person" was trying to get more sales (as they are wont to do). A car sales man would talk you into replacing the car you don't need to replace because that's his job. It's up to the consumer to be clear about rejecting, and if an elderly isn't of sound mind to do so properly, their relatives should've been there to do the thinking on their behalf.
      - taxicabjesus 10y ago
        > It's up to the consumer to be clear about rejecting, and if an elderly isn't of sound mind to do so properly, their relatives should've been there to do the thinking on their behalf. My aunt was his caretaker, and she would've been there... But her 'job', for the last ... 10+ years, was caretaker for her parents, and it was easier for her emotions to allow the doctors to keep her father going. My other grandfather had his defibrillator replaced when he would have liked to have been pushing daisies. I think his reasoning was that replacing the device would hopefully keep him from being even more of a burden to his daughter/caretaker.
  - rwallace 10y ago
    Is it still doing well? There are still jobs, yes, but everything I hear about the working conditions for doctors entering the field today is that their quality of life is not substantially better than that of a homeless drug addict.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  But there are plenty of glass ceilings that can only be breeched via formal education. If you want to be on a board of directors some day, you better either be a billionaire or have a masters or better, preferably more than one.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  > no check all these boxes and then you've made it. There never was such a time.
gozur88 10y ago
The legal profession has been in the doldrums long enough people should know better than to go to law school. If you can get into Harvard or Yale it makes sense. Otherwise you're wasting your money and time.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  What is the cause of this? Computer automation? More work can be done by paralegal? Fewer court cases?
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Peak legal. Automation is affecting discovery and the demand for the junior lawyers that used to do it, but there just isn't the demand growth to keep up with the supply growth of lawyers.
    - Animats 10y ago
      The junior work is being deskilled. Paralegals are doing some of the work junior lawyers used to do, and search and recordkeeping systems are doing much of the work paralegals used to do. A friend of mine is an attorney at a big Silicon Valley law firm, and she says that most of the low-level work is now automated.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      Yeah, it's the perfect storm of automation and an industry that assumed growth would go like gangbusters forever. And by "industry" I mean law schools - law schools were (and maybe still are) big profit centers for universities, so they were expanded as quickly as possible.
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        Law is relatively cheap to teach compared to the hard sciences and engineering. You can charge students a lot so it is not surprising that universities want to keep the lawyer production pipeline open and gushing.
hkmurakami 10y ago
It seems that the story is a that a once upwards spiral is now spiraling downwards, and people and institutions must adjust. At one point in time, law was lucrative, and there were not enough lawyers. Schools responded by growing in size and in tuition. Students could justify the loans because there was a high chance that the "investment" would pay off. Fast forward a few decades and law as an industry is contracting. Since the profession is not as lucrative, if you follow the chain, then schools should have contracted in response, minting fewer lawyers. But they can't easily adjust when they've built a bureaucracy and dramatically increased the number of tenured faculty. That lead to them misleading applicants by not having transparency with their true employment numbers. For a while, students were duped. But at this point, the cat is largely out of the bag. Applicants numbers are down, and the demise of debt-burdened law grads have hit national headlines numerous times over the last 5 or so years. So now, in uncoordinated fashion, schools must adjust and finally down size. Too bad students were caught in the crossfire for many years before the flares went up.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- wpietri 10y ago
  One thing I think is interesting here is the uncontrolled growth in costs. Paul Campos of Lawyers, Guns, and Money posted the average private-school law tuition [1]: All figures have been adjusted to constant 2016 dollars: 1956: $4,178 1974: $11,232 1985: $16,803 1995: $26,480 2005: $35,550 2015: $45,123 That just blows me away. [1] http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/end-game http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/end-game
  - hkmurakami 10y ago
    At least with respect to 2005 and 2015, that increase looks to be in line with private undergrad tuition increases. Of course, the top private undergrad institutions give much more in the way of financial aid than their legal graduate school counterparts.
  - cm2187 10y ago
sbardle 10y ago
I still think certain professional careers will always exist for the most passionate and high quality candidates (or, alas, the best connected).
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Regarding the best connected category -- lawyers eventually move up to become partners, who are rainmakers. Their job is to bring in deals and manage the client relationship, rather than drafting the paperwork. The work is very different from that of the associate level. WSGR takes a mix of top 5 law school grads as well as Santa Clara law school grads. The latter is seen as having a better local network through their family and upbringing (and have a better retention track record compared to their higher academically ranked counterparts), and are seen as effective future rainmakers even if their legal abilities are inferior to their peers.
  - pdshrader 10y ago
    I believe it's a misattribution to automatically equate lower-ranked law schools with "inferior legal abilities". Especially considering that law school coursework (1) is largely the same at various law schools, and (2) rarely covers the same subject matter as actual practice. The prestige is different, sure, but that is more an amalgamation of undergraduate GPA and LSAT scores than representative of actual legal ability. Disclaimer: SCU law grad
    - hkmurakami 10y ago
      Yeah this is just second hand information from those who went to the toppest of law schools, who are naturally rather insecure about themselves and are surprisingly condescending.
- onion2k 10y ago
  I agree, but I'd add that the amount of money people are willing to pay for that quality will fall dramatically if technology provides a cheap alternative. The cost of education will have to fall in accordance.
guelo 10y ago
That was such a frustrating article. I kept reading anecdote after anecdote hoping to find out why the American economy needs fewer lawyers than it used to. They never explained it. Is it a software automation thing?
- hibikir 10y ago
  At least a good part of it is. Looking for relevant jurisprudence, for instance, has gotten much easier. First everything was digitized, and in the 2000s better search engine tech got much better. What used to take a whole lot of experience, or many hours of search, now can take minutes. Similar things happen with the output of discovery: Before you'd have to pay people to read through every single document, make notes on what they contain, cull what is interesting... It was a huge amount of labor that nowadays computers can do. There are other fun advancements in the horizon: When computers start to gain some understanding of documents, they can read them for us, saving even more time. Eventually helping a non-lawyer understand a contract, and even provide basic advice, all automatically, becomes possible. There are other factors to the decline of our need of lawyers, but they are cyclical, and will perk up again. The technology changes are here to stay though.
- nikanj 10y ago
  Say we need three times more lawyers than we did in the 80s, but are graduating ten times more. This can lead to a lawyer glut even when we need more lawyers than ever. It also leads to people feeling like lawyers are no longer "in need", as there's plenty of competent ones available.
- damon_c 10y ago
  Speaking only from second hand anecdotal sources... I know that 10 years ago, the primary occupation of 1st year associates at large law firms was searching through boxes and boxes of case history for relevant citations. That has to be done instantly with a search engine now and therefore requires far fewer 150k/year 1st year associates.
  - sbardle 10y ago
    I know a few people who still do "box moving jobs", and who are on good pay. But like you point out, I can't see it lasting.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
Why are lawsuits so expensive if there are so many broke lawyers aching for a job? It seems like a company could pay them a middling salary of $70k/year to handle ongoing lawsuits, rather than the $300-$700/hour that other lawyers demand. Obviously not for your big Oracle vs. Google lawsuits or where the entire company is riding on it, but for anything less than that. For example, every public company gets sued by opportunists every time there's a merger or acquisition, or every patent troll expects nobody to fight their case because it's so expensive. There's lots of little things that come up where you just need someone to do the paperwork. It seems like you could hire a couple broke lawyers to fight patent trolls, and the cost wouldn't run into millions when your attorney books a ton of hours. I've considered using paralegals to write up paperwork to be reviewed by an actual lawyer. But it seems like there should be a 'cheap broke lawyer' option in between the two, who would probably do a fine job.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  I don't understand this, either. If there is a glut of lawyers, why are their rates so high?
  - rayiner 10y ago
    People don't hire lawyers without real-world experience. The supply of lawyers with experience is much smaller than the supply of JDs, because there are only so many opportunities to file briefing or argue in court.
    - tnecniv 10y ago
      Alternatively, if you are a participant in a hundred million or billion dollar loan, you aren't going to hire some green lawyer fresh out of law school to represent you. You're going to get the guy who has written dozens of these contracts.
- wp1 10y ago
  This is exactly what most companies do. They hire in house counsel for their baseline, routine legal needs. And then outsource to biglaw for peak law stuff (litigation, big transactions). In house counsel salaries are way less than those at a top law firm and you don't have to pay the difference between the firm's billings and what an associate--who's actually do the work-- gets paid.
sandworm101 10y ago
Blame the schools if you want, but I went to law school in the US and I blame the students. Once upon a time the typical law student had a useful undergrad degree. The JD was something valuable over and above the undergrad. But today's typical law student has spent the last four or five years carefully honing their undergrad to maximize GPA. Law school was always the goal and so everything else, everything useful, was skipped. (Hint: Good law schools don't care about GPA. Do well on the LSAT and all is forgiven.) Want to get a job? Law is all about selling knowledge. You have to show that you actually know something beyond the bar. Sit down and become an expert on something. Publish a few papers. Get your name out. That's what worked for me. Becoming a recognized expert in a very narrow law+technology field opened doors that were firmly shut to bare-bones law grads. And.. learn to speak properly. Too many law schools are letting grads slide through with poor grammar. It might sound trivial but is really important when you are claiming to actually know something.
- yompers888 10y ago
  That seems like it's on the schools if there admitting crappy applicants.
- tnecniv 10y ago
  What do you define as useful? Is a philosophy degree useful? They score among the highest on the LSAT.
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    The LSAT is a reading test. Philosophy majors do well because they are good readers, not because of any knowledge they picked up. You can be a good reader with other degrees too. The LSAT maps well onto law school performance because law school is also much about reading. Want to get a job as a lawyer, start with a compsci, biotech or engineering-related degree. But having some professional life experience also counts. Nobody wants to get legal advice from someone who doesn't have any realworld experience.
  - anoonmoose 10y ago
    A philosophy degree seems to only be useful with regards to getting a law degree...since we're in the comments on an article about how a law degree isn't as useful as it used to be, I think you could probably toss "not useful" on it.
bruceb 10y ago
Its hard to feel sorry for people graduating now. The lack lawyer jobs has been known for 5+ years, well before these students enrolled. I wonder if there are any stats on the wages of law professors? Seems they would trend down? Do recent grads teach first year law classes?
- sandworm101 10y ago
  >> Do recent grads teach first year law classes? No. Not at any reputable school. Getting a job as a law prof usually requires a degree above the normal law degree. And you better have gone to a top-tier law school. It's a real commitment.
  - richardfontana 10y ago
    While some US law schools offer what are termed masters (LLM) and doctoral (often 'SJD' or 'JSD' or the like) advanced degrees in law, few law professors (other than those with a first law degree from outside the US) have such degrees. (Edit: It's somewhat more common to see law professors with a JD and a PhD in some other field such as economics or history, but this is still not the typical profile of a law professor at any tier of US law school.) At least at the relatively elite law schools, law professors do tend to be hired not too many years out of law school, often following a prestigious federal judicial clerkship and perhaps a couple of years of a stint at a top law firm. (That's probably mostly because those are the relevant biographical characteristics of those doing the hiring.) It is relatively uncommon to hire very experienced professionals (apart from adjunct positions). As you move to less elite tiers of law schools you see more ordinary faculty drawn from experienced professionals not necessarily having the cookie-cutter star credentials new hires at the elite schools have. First year classes may be taught by either very experienced law professors or fairly junior ones.
- barry-cotter 10y ago
  The ABA has stringent standards for accreditation that include levels of tenured faculty and quality of library. This places an artificial floor on faculty wages and conditions that mean the adjunctification of university isn't going to happen to law schools. And most newly minted law professors have real research doctorates in addition to J.D.s or top tire law degrees or both. They have much better outside academia options than social science or arts academics and their salaries reflect that.
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
When I went to university (sometime in the 18th Century) the idea was not vocational training but "learning to think" - at least that's what I was told. Most of my courses had underlying principles that if had attended lectures or worked hard I probably would have picked up. And I would assume the same is true of a top law degree - you may not be a lawyer, but fast thinking hard working articulate graduates are valuable whatever.
- vasilipupkin 10y ago
  The issue is those graduates aren't able to pay back their loans
- lenkite 10y ago
  'When I went to university sometime in the 18th Century'- what ?? Did you discover the holy grail ?
programLyrique 10y ago
Is it possible to go to Europe, where law is usually taught at undergraduate level, in public universities, and in some countries, with very cheap tuition fees, and then pass the bar exam back in the US?
- barry-cotter 10y ago
  Yes, for at least New York. No correspondence degrees though. It's harder to get a job though with an unusual résumé.
- roel_v 10y ago
  Just passing the bar won't get you hired at a white shoe firm though; yes there are Loyola grads who actually, you know, practice law, but most likely at 'barely scraping by' rates.
dctoedt 10y ago
Lawyer and part-time adjunct law professor [0] here. In terms of root-cause analysis, some of the comments to the NY Times article are thought-provoking --- they suggest that perhaps the urge for prestige and income, on the part of both students and schools, resulted in an upward ratchet for law-faculty salaries and thus for law-school costs, resulting eventually in a mismatch with market realities. For example (all italics are mine): "The question many have asked is why is law school so expensive .... [O]ther than books and space to sit in lectures and small sessions, what is there? Medical schools need labs, cadavers, hospitals, and other expensive equipment. Physicists need telescopes, rockets into space and expensive equipped labs. ... But law school? Every time I hear that graduates are hundreds of thousands in debt, I wonder where the money went." --- from "Dale," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18872201 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "The schools have little in expenses ... physical plant, library and professors. Students buy the only 'equipment': texts and laptops." --- from "Billy Bobby," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18873149 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "As to the commenter who asked why law school is so expensive, try taking a look at the professor and dean salaries. [1] I was shocked when I learned what some of the professors and deans made at the third tier law school I attended. And, in my view, the school routinely admitted students who had no business being there, likely to pay the bloated salaries of the professors and deans." --- from "JJ," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18873540 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "But in the mid- to late 1980s, he said, the school put an increasing emphasis on legal scholarship .... Across the country, many law schools were undergoing a similar evolution. It’s no coincidence that the average law school faculty began to grow quickly around this time: Each professor was teaching fewer courses to make time for research. ... Every law school seemed to want to emulate Harvard and Yale." --- from the article itself, not the comments "I heard a lawyer say recently that in law school there were many students for whom the 'choice' to do law was more the result of a process of elimination. They are not able or interested in stem fields, but want the prestige and income of a white collar profession which the soft sciences don't necessarily provide, i.e. Sociology, social work, psychology. ... [T]his is why the field is saturated." ---from "Johanna," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18872847 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "Make no mistake, the American Bar Association created this mess. The ABA has certified too many law schools and has placed ridiculous standards on these school thus driving up tuition to back-braking [sic] levels. Now law schools are admitting unqualified students to keep their numbers up. It is scary to observe many of these recent graduates. They are poorly read, lack critical thinking skills and are loosely educated." --- from "Peter," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18872663 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "There are crushing unmet legal needs in communities across the country. Survivors of gender based violence lack representation. Police violence is uninvestgated. Predatory lenders prey on retirees." --- from "monte," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18873909 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "There is a genuine need for lawyers in this society. First, let's all get beyond the popular fantasy that they should all be upper middle-class. Yes, a minority can become well-paid attorneys. For the reset [sic], lower tuition, train them at public universities, and shut down the lawyer -mill expensive private places. Teach most to expect social worker-type salaries and conditions. Allow some loan forgiveness for those who work with the indigent. If nothing else, such an approach to legal training would attract people who would otherwise go into social work." --- from "Oceanviewer," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18876177 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... [0] Adjunct law professors are paid a pittance, so we're not part of the problem of escalating law-school costs --- we all have day jobs as lawyers or judges, and teach because we enjoy it and find it rewarding. [1] I looked up the faculty salaries at my alma mater law school, at UT Austin, as reported by the Texas Tribune. Supposedly, the dean makes $466K; 64 full professors get a median salary $212K; one assistant professor gets $172K; one associate professor gets $122K; 18 lecturers get a median salary of $91K. https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-austin/departments/school-of-law/ https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-aus...
gumby 10y ago
The supply/demand inflation phenomenon described in the article (and also referred to as having happened in Dentistry) is a good warning for coding bootcamps. In fact bootcamps seem to already been in full bubble even though they're only a few years old. You see so many hiring their own grads or using faux graduate-employment metrics, which unfortunately the 3rd and 4th tier law schools are doing too.
andy 10y ago
I have paid a lawyer on Upwork $125/hour for a few hours to create TOS, Privacy, DMCA policy for my apps and sites. In total, he has worked 1947 hours: $243K. edit: that's his lifetime earnings across 84 different jobs, not how much I paid him. I paid him total of a couple hundred bucks.
- leaveyou 10y ago
  1947 hours ?!? 1947/8 = 243,3 days or 48,6 weeks .. What exactly took him so long ? Wasn't it mostly a copy paste from somewhere else with some adaptations ?
  - andy 10y ago
    OMG, I haven't paid him that much. I mean his lifetime earnings on upwork. I paid him for a total of a few hours. That's all I needed.
mdasen 10y ago
I feel like the NYTimes missed that their data point is a school that simply isn't that good. They call it well-established to give you a sense that it's a mid-tier school. It isn't. The median student has scored at the 40th percentile on the LSAT, the 25th percentile student at the school has scored at the 33rd percentile on the LSAT. In 1600-point SAT terms, that means the median student is around a 933 out of 1600 on the SAT. The article notes that the person passed the bar on his first try. Indiana and Illinois (the two states grads from Valparaiso usually take the bar in) are 80.93% and 89.38% for first-time takers. So, noting that you passed the bart the first time doesn't seem to say much given the high pass rates in those states. Honestly, is the story more that they picked a case from a school that just has mediocre students? What is the comparison between students who go here for law school and students that go to undergrad institutions with 900 SAT scores? Are people who are well below median in tech really doing that well? For example, a friend of mine went to a top-50 school and has a BS in Computer Science. They can't find employment as a SWE because they're not that good (they got through the courses with a combination of a lot of TA help and sheer force of will). They're working for a tech company in a combination of a support and project management position. And that's someone who was smart enough to get into a top-50 ranked undergrad institution. Are people who are mediocre and attend an undergrad institution whose median SAT score is in the 900s getting jobs as SWEs with a BSCS? Are they taking adjacent positions where a BSCS might be seen as an "advantage", but not totally related to the work? Are they taking IT-related jobs? It just seems like the story here is that people who are below median don't magically become 75th-90th percentile by a certificate or degree - and that mediocre law schools have been promising that dream to people. In the tech area, we have these bootcamp schools, but at least they're not charging students a couple hundred thousand. Like, if you spend $15k on a bootcamp and come out with a $60k salary, that might seem low compared to the dream of six-figures at Google, but you aren't saddled with a lot of debt. http://report.turing.io/ http://report.turing.io/ - Turing has reported that the average salary is $74k for their graduates which is respectable, but if they were taking $200k from students and 3 years of missed wages and 25% of students were earning under $60k, I think it would be the same situation - they'd be saddled with debt and even if they're earning more than they used to be, they're not earning a lot compared to the debt. But Turing isn't taking that amount of time or money and so if a student comes out with a somewhat mediocre salary by CS standards, they didn't waste a lot of time/money and might be earning a reasonable bit more than before. And the thing is that places like Turing probably get people who might have done an undergrad at a good school, just not in CS. These are smart people who just lack a specific skill rather than below average people who also lack a specific skill. I mean, give me someone who studied at Boston College and I'm getting someone smart who just might not know any programming. Bootcamps might be getting a lot of those people - smart people who just don't know programming. Now, that doesn't mean that any smart person can make a great SWE, but it's a much better starting place than someone who is below average. A better story would have been trying to figure out how much value add schools provide. Are elite institutions taking people who would otherwise be successful and marking them as such? Are mediocre institutions not improving outcomes for their students? To what extent do degrees actually improve student outcomes? People who go to schools and graduate schools have historically been privileged people - those who are smart enough to get in and those who are rich enough that they can afford it. Today, loans, a delay in marriage and child-having age, a proliferation of schools, etc. mean that way more people can go to post-secondary institutions. I don't know how much schools improve human capital, but that's definitely a story. Maybe elite schools do improve human capital a lot because really smart people can use education a lot. Maybe mediocre schools do well for some students and not others. These are important questions. These are questions unanswered by a NYTimes article pretending a mediocre law school with mediocre students means that no one is hiring lawyers.
mcguire 10y ago
The author has buried the lead: "“People are not being helped by going to these schools,” Kyle McEntee, executive director of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, said of Valparaiso and other low-tier law schools. “The debt is really high, bar passage rates are horrendous, employment is horrendous.”" Less than 2/3 of Valparaiso's students can pass the bar. Even if everything else is good, why would anyone recruit there?
- Pxtl 10y ago
  Lede. Yeah, it's one of those words.
  - rev_bird 10y ago
    It's intentionally misspelled, ostensibly to avoid old-school newsroom confusion with "lead," the linotype separators that sat between lines on a printing press. It's debated whether it's a word that was actually used back then, though.
    - mcguire 10y ago
      Thanks, both of you.
cm3 10y ago
In Germany the consensus is that there are so many underutilized lawyers that they resort to shady business tactics like cease and desist as a model of income, looking for opportunities to threaten website operators or trick users with traps and later c&d. And then we have pedagogically incapable and unqualified teachers who only are equipped with field knowledge (math, history, etc.) but are in no way able to teach humans anything, making one wonder if more of the smart enough population should consider education, though that would require reasonable wages. I can't help but think there are not many societies that favor education as importantly as it should, if we consider what teachers and public researchers can make.
cm3 10y ago
Do movies and tv shows give the wrong impression and lure the wrong people to law degrees?
- internaut 10y ago
  This is a great question. My guess is that police, doctors, nurses, lawyers and crime scene forensics are over subscribed to because of television serials. If television didn't exist then those jobs would have higher rates of pay or at least less competition per job opening. I think the intersection between jobs which are not easy to outsource + not easy to televise is an interesting one. It reminds me of Warren Buffet's ideas about growth and value corporations. Growth jobs are obviously photogenic but may not pay as much in the long term as 'value' jobs.
wallflower 10y ago
My friends who went to law school said that the terms 1L/2L/3L are fixed in stone. It is impossible to take courses in an accelerated manner to graduate in 2 years instead of 3 years. Why? Because the law school and bar association make it that way. Milk the most tuition money out of the students.
Pxtl 10y ago
I once read that 70% of the world's lawyers live in the US. It was only a matter of time before something broke.
OliverJones 10y ago
This is an unintended consequence of the 2005 US bankruptcy "reform" act. That act made it impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. Because those loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, it's less risky to make student loans. Therefore, lenders don't have the same incentive as before to underwrite their loans. That is, it isn't quite as important to make sure their borrowers have a decent shot at repaying the money. So, it's easier to get a student loan. And, it's easier to borrow more money. So, it's easier for educational institutions to increase tuition and fees, and still fill up their classes. This turns into a vicious cycle increasing tuition and student debt. I don't want to pick on Valpo. I don't know anything about their law school. If the lenders were taking a close look at the Massachusetts College of Law (MCL, local to me, and struggling a bit) and asking whether their grads were getting decent jobs, they might make it harder to borrow so much money. That would put downward pressure on MCL's tuition and fees. But the lenders are not doing that. But why should the lenders bother? It's a hassle to underwrite an educational institution. Student borrowers can't declare bankruptcy and get out from under those loans, even if the education bought with that money turns out to be worthless to them. So the lenders risk little. It's time to repeal that part of the bankruptcy "reform." Until then people who sign student loan papers should realize they are literally signing away their lives. Student lenders are clever and dangerous predators, and student borrowers are their lawful prey.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  > lenders don't have the same incentive as before to underwrite their loans. That is, it isn't quite as important to make sure their borrowers have a decent shot at repaying the money. But the students' incentive to make sure they can pay back the money is much higher. If you're looking to underwriters to keep debt levels reasonable, you are looking in the wrong place. In any industry (school, real estate, etc.), their max is far higher than you should actually take.
ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
Here's hoping for a grellas comment on the matter, as in https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas.

113 points by SmallBets 10y ago

Kids are being advised by parents to get an expensive degree because when they were growing up that's how you made it. That's not how it is anymore. There's no free pass to success, no check all these boxes and then you've made it. You gotta use your brain early on, figure it out for yourself, because ultimately you're going to be the one having to live with the consequences of how you've spent your youth. I think there are actually good opportunities in vocational schools. Marketable skills that you can use to find a good job. Law, liberal arts and communication degrees maybe not as marketable.

hkmurakami 10y ago
>That's not how it is anymore. There's no free pass to success, no check all these boxes and then you've made it. You gotta use your brain early on, figure it out for yourself, because ultimately you're going to be the one having to live with the consequences of how you've spent your youth. To be fair, the other pillar of "expensive degree leading to lucrative, high prestige career", medicine, is still doing well. As the population ages, there will be an even higher need for medical professionals. Of course, part of this seems to be a result of residency programs being restricted in the number of seats available.
- davnn 10y ago
  Don't you think AI will have a big influence in the future of medicine?
  - godzillabrennus 10y ago
    Yes in diagnostics but for research social innovations will be far more impactful.
    - davnn 10y ago
      More researchers and less doctors sounds like a good plan to me!
  - gumby 10y ago
    > Don't you think AI will have a big influence in the future of medicine? People have been hoping so since the 70s and haven't made any progress. Having worked in both fields I realize that 1. Medicine as a discipline is still poorly understood so isn't really amenable to that many automated tasks and 2. Medicine, as a social phenomenon is structured such that automation won't itself reduce costs.
    - chii 10y ago
      lately, a lot of GP seems to be relying on an expert system to help diagnose/work out treatments for things. AI, as populeraized in hollywood pop culture, seems to only include things like human intelligence, where as in reality, AI encompasses things like expert systems, which is already very common.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Google has had a far bigger impact in medicine so far. Of course it also means I come to a doctor with 3 self diagnoses and he yells at me and tells me to stop googling.
- taxicabjesus 10y ago
  Medicine has a few impossible problems. Family practice/internal medicine is arguably one of the most important roles, but many new doctors specialize so that they can better "cash in" on their M.D. degree. It's much cheaper to be proactive than reactive, but medicine doesn't think that way. Another problem is that Medicine spends a ton of money trying to keep old people alive for a few more days. For example, my grandfather was somehow talked into have his pacemaker replaced a few months before his 101st birthday. There were complications, infections, etc, and my aunt had to fight to get him on hospice care. Replacing this pacemaker was a mean thing to do to an old man who'd spent years hoping to die in his sleep. It would have been kinder to have never given him the pacemaker in the first place. He would've passed away 10 years earlier, but those last 10 years were of little value to him. Obamacare has only made "paying the bill" for medicine even more problematic.
  - chii 10y ago
    > talked into have his pacemaker replaced i don't want to sound callice, but it seems like the "sales person" was trying to get more sales (as they are wont to do). A car sales man would talk you into replacing the car you don't need to replace because that's his job. It's up to the consumer to be clear about rejecting, and if an elderly isn't of sound mind to do so properly, their relatives should've been there to do the thinking on their behalf.
    - taxicabjesus 10y ago
      > It's up to the consumer to be clear about rejecting, and if an elderly isn't of sound mind to do so properly, their relatives should've been there to do the thinking on their behalf. My aunt was his caretaker, and she would've been there... But her 'job', for the last ... 10+ years, was caretaker for her parents, and it was easier for her emotions to allow the doctors to keep her father going. My other grandfather had his defibrillator replaced when he would have liked to have been pushing daisies. I think his reasoning was that replacing the device would hopefully keep him from being even more of a burden to his daughter/caretaker.
- rwallace 10y ago
  Is it still doing well? There are still jobs, yes, but everything I hear about the working conditions for doctors entering the field today is that their quality of life is not substantially better than that of a homeless drug addict.
sandworm101 10y ago
But there are plenty of glass ceilings that can only be breeched via formal education. If you want to be on a board of directors some day, you better either be a billionaire or have a masters or better, preferably more than one.
WalterBright 10y ago
> no check all these boxes and then you've made it. There never was such a time.

gozur88 10y ago

The legal profession has been in the doldrums long enough people should know better than to go to law school. If you can get into Harvard or Yale it makes sense. Otherwise you're wasting your money and time.

bbcbasic 10y ago
What is the cause of this? Computer automation? More work can be done by paralegal? Fewer court cases?
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Peak legal. Automation is affecting discovery and the demand for the junior lawyers that used to do it, but there just isn't the demand growth to keep up with the supply growth of lawyers.
  - Animats 10y ago
    The junior work is being deskilled. Paralegals are doing some of the work junior lawyers used to do, and search and recordkeeping systems are doing much of the work paralegals used to do. A friend of mine is an attorney at a big Silicon Valley law firm, and she says that most of the low-level work is now automated.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    Yeah, it's the perfect storm of automation and an industry that assumed growth would go like gangbusters forever. And by "industry" I mean law schools - law schools were (and maybe still are) big profit centers for universities, so they were expanded as quickly as possible.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      Law is relatively cheap to teach compared to the hard sciences and engineering. You can charge students a lot so it is not surprising that universities want to keep the lawyer production pipeline open and gushing.

hkmurakami 10y ago

It seems that the story is a that a once upwards spiral is now spiraling downwards, and people and institutions must adjust. At one point in time, law was lucrative, and there were not enough lawyers. Schools responded by growing in size and in tuition. Students could justify the loans because there was a high chance that the "investment" would pay off. Fast forward a few decades and law as an industry is contracting. Since the profession is not as lucrative, if you follow the chain, then schools should have contracted in response, minting fewer lawyers. But they can't easily adjust when they've built a bureaucracy and dramatically increased the number of tenured faculty. That lead to them misleading applicants by not having transparency with their true employment numbers. For a while, students were duped. But at this point, the cat is largely out of the bag. Applicants numbers are down, and the demise of debt-burdened law grads have hit national headlines numerous times over the last 5 or so years. So now, in uncoordinated fashion, schools must adjust and finally down size. Too bad students were caught in the crossfire for many years before the flares went up.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wpietri 10y ago
One thing I think is interesting here is the uncontrolled growth in costs. Paul Campos of Lawyers, Guns, and Money posted the average private-school law tuition [1]: All figures have been adjusted to constant 2016 dollars: 1956: $4,178 1974: $11,232 1985: $16,803 1995: $26,480 2005: $35,550 2015: $45,123 That just blows me away. [1] http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/end-game http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/end-game
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  At least with respect to 2005 and 2015, that increase looks to be in line with private undergrad tuition increases. Of course, the top private undergrad institutions give much more in the way of financial aid than their legal graduate school counterparts.
- cm2187 10y ago

sbardle 10y ago

I still think certain professional careers will always exist for the most passionate and high quality candidates (or, alas, the best connected).

hkmurakami 10y ago
Regarding the best connected category -- lawyers eventually move up to become partners, who are rainmakers. Their job is to bring in deals and manage the client relationship, rather than drafting the paperwork. The work is very different from that of the associate level. WSGR takes a mix of top 5 law school grads as well as Santa Clara law school grads. The latter is seen as having a better local network through their family and upbringing (and have a better retention track record compared to their higher academically ranked counterparts), and are seen as effective future rainmakers even if their legal abilities are inferior to their peers.
- pdshrader 10y ago
  I believe it's a misattribution to automatically equate lower-ranked law schools with "inferior legal abilities". Especially considering that law school coursework (1) is largely the same at various law schools, and (2) rarely covers the same subject matter as actual practice. The prestige is different, sure, but that is more an amalgamation of undergraduate GPA and LSAT scores than representative of actual legal ability. Disclaimer: SCU law grad
  - hkmurakami 10y ago
    Yeah this is just second hand information from those who went to the toppest of law schools, who are naturally rather insecure about themselves and are surprisingly condescending.
onion2k 10y ago
I agree, but I'd add that the amount of money people are willing to pay for that quality will fall dramatically if technology provides a cheap alternative. The cost of education will have to fall in accordance.

guelo 10y ago

That was such a frustrating article. I kept reading anecdote after anecdote hoping to find out why the American economy needs fewer lawyers than it used to. They never explained it. Is it a software automation thing?

hibikir 10y ago
At least a good part of it is. Looking for relevant jurisprudence, for instance, has gotten much easier. First everything was digitized, and in the 2000s better search engine tech got much better. What used to take a whole lot of experience, or many hours of search, now can take minutes. Similar things happen with the output of discovery: Before you'd have to pay people to read through every single document, make notes on what they contain, cull what is interesting... It was a huge amount of labor that nowadays computers can do. There are other fun advancements in the horizon: When computers start to gain some understanding of documents, they can read them for us, saving even more time. Eventually helping a non-lawyer understand a contract, and even provide basic advice, all automatically, becomes possible. There are other factors to the decline of our need of lawyers, but they are cyclical, and will perk up again. The technology changes are here to stay though.
nikanj 10y ago
Say we need three times more lawyers than we did in the 80s, but are graduating ten times more. This can lead to a lawyer glut even when we need more lawyers than ever. It also leads to people feeling like lawyers are no longer "in need", as there's plenty of competent ones available.
damon_c 10y ago
Speaking only from second hand anecdotal sources... I know that 10 years ago, the primary occupation of 1st year associates at large law firms was searching through boxes and boxes of case history for relevant citations. That has to be done instantly with a search engine now and therefore requires far fewer 150k/year 1st year associates.
- sbardle 10y ago
  I know a few people who still do "box moving jobs", and who are on good pay. But like you point out, I can't see it lasting.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

Why are lawsuits so expensive if there are so many broke lawyers aching for a job? It seems like a company could pay them a middling salary of $70k/year to handle ongoing lawsuits, rather than the $300-$700/hour that other lawyers demand. Obviously not for your big Oracle vs. Google lawsuits or where the entire company is riding on it, but for anything less than that. For example, every public company gets sued by opportunists every time there's a merger or acquisition, or every patent troll expects nobody to fight their case because it's so expensive. There's lots of little things that come up where you just need someone to do the paperwork. It seems like you could hire a couple broke lawyers to fight patent trolls, and the cost wouldn't run into millions when your attorney books a ton of hours. I've considered using paralegals to write up paperwork to be reviewed by an actual lawyer. But it seems like there should be a 'cheap broke lawyer' option in between the two, who would probably do a fine job.

WalterBright 10y ago
I don't understand this, either. If there is a glut of lawyers, why are their rates so high?
- rayiner 10y ago
  People don't hire lawyers without real-world experience. The supply of lawyers with experience is much smaller than the supply of JDs, because there are only so many opportunities to file briefing or argue in court.
  - tnecniv 10y ago
    Alternatively, if you are a participant in a hundred million or billion dollar loan, you aren't going to hire some green lawyer fresh out of law school to represent you. You're going to get the guy who has written dozens of these contracts.
wp1 10y ago
This is exactly what most companies do. They hire in house counsel for their baseline, routine legal needs. And then outsource to biglaw for peak law stuff (litigation, big transactions). In house counsel salaries are way less than those at a top law firm and you don't have to pay the difference between the firm's billings and what an associate--who's actually do the work-- gets paid.

sandworm101 10y ago

Blame the schools if you want, but I went to law school in the US and I blame the students. Once upon a time the typical law student had a useful undergrad degree. The JD was something valuable over and above the undergrad. But today's typical law student has spent the last four or five years carefully honing their undergrad to maximize GPA. Law school was always the goal and so everything else, everything useful, was skipped. (Hint: Good law schools don't care about GPA. Do well on the LSAT and all is forgiven.) Want to get a job? Law is all about selling knowledge. You have to show that you actually know something beyond the bar. Sit down and become an expert on something. Publish a few papers. Get your name out. That's what worked for me. Becoming a recognized expert in a very narrow law+technology field opened doors that were firmly shut to bare-bones law grads. And.. learn to speak properly. Too many law schools are letting grads slide through with poor grammar. It might sound trivial but is really important when you are claiming to actually know something.

yompers888 10y ago
That seems like it's on the schools if there admitting crappy applicants.
tnecniv 10y ago
What do you define as useful? Is a philosophy degree useful? They score among the highest on the LSAT.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  The LSAT is a reading test. Philosophy majors do well because they are good readers, not because of any knowledge they picked up. You can be a good reader with other degrees too. The LSAT maps well onto law school performance because law school is also much about reading. Want to get a job as a lawyer, start with a compsci, biotech or engineering-related degree. But having some professional life experience also counts. Nobody wants to get legal advice from someone who doesn't have any realworld experience.
- anoonmoose 10y ago
  A philosophy degree seems to only be useful with regards to getting a law degree...since we're in the comments on an article about how a law degree isn't as useful as it used to be, I think you could probably toss "not useful" on it.

bruceb 10y ago

Its hard to feel sorry for people graduating now. The lack lawyer jobs has been known for 5+ years, well before these students enrolled. I wonder if there are any stats on the wages of law professors? Seems they would trend down? Do recent grads teach first year law classes?

sandworm101 10y ago
>> Do recent grads teach first year law classes? No. Not at any reputable school. Getting a job as a law prof usually requires a degree above the normal law degree. And you better have gone to a top-tier law school. It's a real commitment.
- richardfontana 10y ago
  While some US law schools offer what are termed masters (LLM) and doctoral (often 'SJD' or 'JSD' or the like) advanced degrees in law, few law professors (other than those with a first law degree from outside the US) have such degrees. (Edit: It's somewhat more common to see law professors with a JD and a PhD in some other field such as economics or history, but this is still not the typical profile of a law professor at any tier of US law school.) At least at the relatively elite law schools, law professors do tend to be hired not too many years out of law school, often following a prestigious federal judicial clerkship and perhaps a couple of years of a stint at a top law firm. (That's probably mostly because those are the relevant biographical characteristics of those doing the hiring.) It is relatively uncommon to hire very experienced professionals (apart from adjunct positions). As you move to less elite tiers of law schools you see more ordinary faculty drawn from experienced professionals not necessarily having the cookie-cutter star credentials new hires at the elite schools have. First year classes may be taught by either very experienced law professors or fairly junior ones.
barry-cotter 10y ago
The ABA has stringent standards for accreditation that include levels of tenured faculty and quality of library. This places an artificial floor on faculty wages and conditions that mean the adjunctification of university isn't going to happen to law schools. And most newly minted law professors have real research doctorates in addition to J.D.s or top tire law degrees or both. They have much better outside academia options than social science or arts academics and their salaries reflect that.

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

When I went to university (sometime in the 18th Century) the idea was not vocational training but "learning to think" - at least that's what I was told. Most of my courses had underlying principles that if had attended lectures or worked hard I probably would have picked up. And I would assume the same is true of a top law degree - you may not be a lawyer, but fast thinking hard working articulate graduates are valuable whatever.

vasilipupkin 10y ago
The issue is those graduates aren't able to pay back their loans
lenkite 10y ago
'When I went to university sometime in the 18th Century'- what ?? Did you discover the holy grail ?

programLyrique 10y ago

Is it possible to go to Europe, where law is usually taught at undergraduate level, in public universities, and in some countries, with very cheap tuition fees, and then pass the bar exam back in the US?

barry-cotter 10y ago
Yes, for at least New York. No correspondence degrees though. It's harder to get a job though with an unusual résumé.
roel_v 10y ago
Just passing the bar won't get you hired at a white shoe firm though; yes there are Loyola grads who actually, you know, practice law, but most likely at 'barely scraping by' rates.

dctoedt 10y ago

Lawyer and part-time adjunct law professor [0] here. In terms of root-cause analysis, some of the comments to the NY Times article are thought-provoking --- they suggest that perhaps the urge for prestige and income, on the part of both students and schools, resulted in an upward ratchet for law-faculty salaries and thus for law-school costs, resulting eventually in a mismatch with market realities. For example (all italics are mine): "The question many have asked is why is law school so expensive .... [O]ther than books and space to sit in lectures and small sessions, what is there? Medical schools need labs, cadavers, hospitals, and other expensive equipment. Physicists need telescopes, rockets into space and expensive equipped labs. ... But law school? Every time I hear that graduates are hundreds of thousands in debt, I wonder where the money went." --- from "Dale," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18872201 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "The schools have little in expenses ... physical plant, library and professors. Students buy the only 'equipment': texts and laptops." --- from "Billy Bobby," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18873149 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "As to the commenter who asked why law school is so expensive, try taking a look at the professor and dean salaries. [1] I was shocked when I learned what some of the professors and deans made at the third tier law school I attended. And, in my view, the school routinely admitted students who had no business being there, likely to pay the bloated salaries of the professors and deans." --- from "JJ," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18873540 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "But in the mid- to late 1980s, he said, the school put an increasing emphasis on legal scholarship .... Across the country, many law schools were undergoing a similar evolution. It’s no coincidence that the average law school faculty began to grow quickly around this time: Each professor was teaching fewer courses to make time for research. ... Every law school seemed to want to emulate Harvard and Yale." --- from the article itself, not the comments "I heard a lawyer say recently that in law school there were many students for whom the 'choice' to do law was more the result of a process of elimination. They are not able or interested in stem fields, but want the prestige and income of a white collar profession which the soft sciences don't necessarily provide, i.e. Sociology, social work, psychology. ... [T]his is why the field is saturated." ---from "Johanna," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18872847 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "Make no mistake, the American Bar Association created this mess. The ABA has certified too many law schools and has placed ridiculous standards on these school thus driving up tuition to back-braking [sic] levels. Now law schools are admitting unqualified students to keep their numbers up. It is scary to observe many of these recent graduates. They are poorly read, lack critical thinking skills and are loosely educated." --- from "Peter," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18872663 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "There are crushing unmet legal needs in communities across the country. Survivors of gender based violence lack representation. Police violence is uninvestgated. Predatory lenders prey on retirees." --- from "monte," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18873909 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... "There is a genuine need for lawyers in this society. First, let's all get beyond the popular fantasy that they should all be upper middle-class. Yes, a minority can become well-paid attorneys. For the reset [sic], lower tuition, train them at public universities, and shut down the lawyer -mill expensive private places. Teach most to expect social worker-type salaries and conditions. Allow some loan forgiveness for those who work with the indigent. If nothing else, such an approach to legal training would attract people who would otherwise go into social work." --- from "Oceanviewer," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18876177 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen... [0] Adjunct law professors are paid a pittance, so we're not part of the problem of escalating law-school costs --- we all have day jobs as lawyers or judges, and teach because we enjoy it and find it rewarding. [1] I looked up the faculty salaries at my alma mater law school, at UT Austin, as reported by the Texas Tribune. Supposedly, the dean makes $466K; 64 full professors get a median salary $212K; one assistant professor gets $172K; one associate professor gets $122K; 18 lecturers get a median salary of $91K. https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-austin/departments/school-of-law/ https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-aus...

gumby 10y ago

The supply/demand inflation phenomenon described in the article (and also referred to as having happened in Dentistry) is a good warning for coding bootcamps. In fact bootcamps seem to already been in full bubble even though they're only a few years old. You see so many hiring their own grads or using faux graduate-employment metrics, which unfortunately the 3rd and 4th tier law schools are doing too.

andy 10y ago

I have paid a lawyer on Upwork $125/hour for a few hours to create TOS, Privacy, DMCA policy for my apps and sites. In total, he has worked 1947 hours: $243K. edit: that's his lifetime earnings across 84 different jobs, not how much I paid him. I paid him total of a couple hundred bucks.

leaveyou 10y ago
1947 hours ?!? 1947/8 = 243,3 days or 48,6 weeks .. What exactly took him so long ? Wasn't it mostly a copy paste from somewhere else with some adaptations ?
- andy 10y ago
  OMG, I haven't paid him that much. I mean his lifetime earnings on upwork. I paid him for a total of a few hours. That's all I needed.

mdasen 10y ago

I feel like the NYTimes missed that their data point is a school that simply isn't that good. They call it well-established to give you a sense that it's a mid-tier school. It isn't. The median student has scored at the 40th percentile on the LSAT, the 25th percentile student at the school has scored at the 33rd percentile on the LSAT. In 1600-point SAT terms, that means the median student is around a 933 out of 1600 on the SAT. The article notes that the person passed the bar on his first try. Indiana and Illinois (the two states grads from Valparaiso usually take the bar in) are 80.93% and 89.38% for first-time takers. So, noting that you passed the bart the first time doesn't seem to say much given the high pass rates in those states. Honestly, is the story more that they picked a case from a school that just has mediocre students? What is the comparison between students who go here for law school and students that go to undergrad institutions with 900 SAT scores? Are people who are well below median in tech really doing that well? For example, a friend of mine went to a top-50 school and has a BS in Computer Science. They can't find employment as a SWE because they're not that good (they got through the courses with a combination of a lot of TA help and sheer force of will). They're working for a tech company in a combination of a support and project management position. And that's someone who was smart enough to get into a top-50 ranked undergrad institution. Are people who are mediocre and attend an undergrad institution whose median SAT score is in the 900s getting jobs as SWEs with a BSCS? Are they taking adjacent positions where a BSCS might be seen as an "advantage", but not totally related to the work? Are they taking IT-related jobs? It just seems like the story here is that people who are below median don't magically become 75th-90th percentile by a certificate or degree - and that mediocre law schools have been promising that dream to people. In the tech area, we have these bootcamp schools, but at least they're not charging students a couple hundred thousand. Like, if you spend $15k on a bootcamp and come out with a $60k salary, that might seem low compared to the dream of six-figures at Google, but you aren't saddled with a lot of debt. http://report.turing.io/ http://report.turing.io/ - Turing has reported that the average salary is $74k for their graduates which is respectable, but if they were taking $200k from students and 3 years of missed wages and 25% of students were earning under $60k, I think it would be the same situation - they'd be saddled with debt and even if they're earning more than they used to be, they're not earning a lot compared to the debt. But Turing isn't taking that amount of time or money and so if a student comes out with a somewhat mediocre salary by CS standards, they didn't waste a lot of time/money and might be earning a reasonable bit more than before. And the thing is that places like Turing probably get people who might have done an undergrad at a good school, just not in CS. These are smart people who just lack a specific skill rather than below average people who also lack a specific skill. I mean, give me someone who studied at Boston College and I'm getting someone smart who just might not know any programming. Bootcamps might be getting a lot of those people - smart people who just don't know programming. Now, that doesn't mean that any smart person can make a great SWE, but it's a much better starting place than someone who is below average. A better story would have been trying to figure out how much value add schools provide. Are elite institutions taking people who would otherwise be successful and marking them as such? Are mediocre institutions not improving outcomes for their students? To what extent do degrees actually improve student outcomes? People who go to schools and graduate schools have historically been privileged people - those who are smart enough to get in and those who are rich enough that they can afford it. Today, loans, a delay in marriage and child-having age, a proliferation of schools, etc. mean that way more people can go to post-secondary institutions. I don't know how much schools improve human capital, but that's definitely a story. Maybe elite schools do improve human capital a lot because really smart people can use education a lot. Maybe mediocre schools do well for some students and not others. These are important questions. These are questions unanswered by a NYTimes article pretending a mediocre law school with mediocre students means that no one is hiring lawyers.

mcguire 10y ago

The author has buried the lead: "“People are not being helped by going to these schools,” Kyle McEntee, executive director of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, said of Valparaiso and other low-tier law schools. “The debt is really high, bar passage rates are horrendous, employment is horrendous.”" Less than 2/3 of Valparaiso's students can pass the bar. Even if everything else is good, why would anyone recruit there?

Pxtl 10y ago
Lede. Yeah, it's one of those words.
- rev_bird 10y ago
  It's intentionally misspelled, ostensibly to avoid old-school newsroom confusion with "lead," the linotype separators that sat between lines on a printing press. It's debated whether it's a word that was actually used back then, though.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    Thanks, both of you.

cm3 10y ago

In Germany the consensus is that there are so many underutilized lawyers that they resort to shady business tactics like cease and desist as a model of income, looking for opportunities to threaten website operators or trick users with traps and later c&d. And then we have pedagogically incapable and unqualified teachers who only are equipped with field knowledge (math, history, etc.) but are in no way able to teach humans anything, making one wonder if more of the smart enough population should consider education, though that would require reasonable wages. I can't help but think there are not many societies that favor education as importantly as it should, if we consider what teachers and public researchers can make.

cm3 10y ago

Do movies and tv shows give the wrong impression and lure the wrong people to law degrees?

internaut 10y ago
This is a great question. My guess is that police, doctors, nurses, lawyers and crime scene forensics are over subscribed to because of television serials. If television didn't exist then those jobs would have higher rates of pay or at least less competition per job opening. I think the intersection between jobs which are not easy to outsource + not easy to televise is an interesting one. It reminds me of Warren Buffet's ideas about growth and value corporations. Growth jobs are obviously photogenic but may not pay as much in the long term as 'value' jobs.

wallflower 10y ago

My friends who went to law school said that the terms 1L/2L/3L are fixed in stone. It is impossible to take courses in an accelerated manner to graduate in 2 years instead of 3 years. Why? Because the law school and bar association make it that way. Milk the most tuition money out of the students.

Pxtl 10y ago

I once read that 70% of the world's lawyers live in the US. It was only a matter of time before something broke.

OliverJones 10y ago

This is an unintended consequence of the 2005 US bankruptcy "reform" act. That act made it impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. Because those loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, it's less risky to make student loans. Therefore, lenders don't have the same incentive as before to underwrite their loans. That is, it isn't quite as important to make sure their borrowers have a decent shot at repaying the money. So, it's easier to get a student loan. And, it's easier to borrow more money. So, it's easier for educational institutions to increase tuition and fees, and still fill up their classes. This turns into a vicious cycle increasing tuition and student debt. I don't want to pick on Valpo. I don't know anything about their law school. If the lenders were taking a close look at the Massachusetts College of Law (MCL, local to me, and struggling a bit) and asking whether their grads were getting decent jobs, they might make it harder to borrow so much money. That would put downward pressure on MCL's tuition and fees. But the lenders are not doing that. But why should the lenders bother? It's a hassle to underwrite an educational institution. Student borrowers can't declare bankruptcy and get out from under those loans, even if the education bought with that money turns out to be worthless to them. So the lenders risk little. It's time to repeal that part of the bankruptcy "reform." Until then people who sign student loan papers should realize they are literally signing away their lives. Student lenders are clever and dangerous predators, and student borrowers are their lawful prey.

paulddraper 10y ago
> lenders don't have the same incentive as before to underwrite their loans. That is, it isn't quite as important to make sure their borrowers have a decent shot at repaying the money. But the students' incentive to make sure they can pay back the money is much higher. If you're looking to underwriters to keep debt levels reasonable, you are looking in the wrong place. In any industry (school, real estate, etc.), their max is far higher than you should actually take.

ezequiel-garzon 10y ago

Here's hoping for a grellas comment on the matter, as in https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas.