Dear Law School:
This candidate's family wants to donate lots of money to the school.
Please have the Development office contact them asap.
Avoid any mention of Hitler in the letter, even if you are saying the referent is unlike Hitler.
"Not as bad as Hitler" does indeed come across as lukewarm at best.
I'm glad that ATMers continue to follow the unwritten rule that all queries should be directed to the front page poster least likely to have anything useful to say on the subject.
Sometimes recommendation letters mean guessing at the politics of the relevant committee, or the possibly incoherent demands of the position and the flawed candidate's OK fit to these, and so take a lot of careful wording. Not here.
She volunteers for a good cause, shows up, and is effective. I would say write that, look at teacher's websites for useful templates. Here's one.
http://www.suite101.com/content/sample-college-recommendation-letter-a82975
If you spend more than 19 minutes, you're not doing it right.
Has an effort been made to talk her out of it? Has she been directed to the Campos blog?
This can be done, along with the letter, within lw's 19 minutes.
Law clerk? Law clerk? No one's making you be a law clerk -- it's a one or two year gig that teaches you a lot and makes your resume wildly more impressive. If law clerks are bitching about working conditions, something's really really wrong with the survey.
Damn, wrong thread. My outrage confused me.
I've never reviewed a law school application, but I've been to law school (and have reviewed recommendation letters for law students in another job). My general impression is that (assuming the academics are there from the grades, test scores, and probably the other recommendations), you can probably do a lot of good for this person by talking about her genuine commitment to community service generally and [mission of your organization] specifically. Demonstrated leadership ability in those capacities, an additional plus.
This is mostly because law schools want to think of themselves as preparing people for careers in public / nonprofit service -- or, at least, people who take things like pro bono service really seriously. Do they actually do this? Often, not so much. But that's how they like to feel.
Also, in case you haven't done recommendation letters before, my understanding is that you should generally boost the adjectives and the like to about two levels of praise more than you're actually comfortable giving. Not "committed," but "tireless"; not "intelligent," but "brilliant"; and so forth. "The most dedicated and enthusiastic volunteer we've had in five years" if that's remotely close to being true. Anything less and it may be taken as a sign that you don't really like the candidate.
My outrage confused me.
This is why liberals are losing. Conservatives just run with it.
Recommendations are worthless.
Only scores matter.
"Not as bad as Hitler" does indeed come across as lukewarm at best.
Recommendation letters are supposed to be full of hyperbole, so you should say "not nearly as bad as Hitler."
I generally do:
Paragraph 1 - Justify to what extent I know the candidate, and why.
Paragraph 2 - evidence of their strengths, as specific as possible.
Paragraph 3 - a word about their interpersonal skills, and I strongly/mediumly/half-heartedly recommend this candidate for X.
The end. Under one page.
Under one page.
Many people who have to hire other people on a regular basis have told me how important this is. The diligent ones who don't simply bin documents that are tl;dr admit they still feel resentful towards people who waste their time with them.
I was trying to think of law school shibboleths to hit, and if "scrupulously ethical" is something you've got any basis for saying, I think it's a good one to throw in -- that sounds not just bright and hardworking, but lawyerly.
Which is kind of redundant of 9, but not exactly -- commitment to doing good is distinguishable from punctilious resistance to doing wrong, and they're both good notes to hit.
On the exaggeration point, I try to only exaggerate adjectives not numbers. That is, if I want to say "nth best in this class" I use the correct value of n.
(I haven't always fully followed this. If someone is applying for something that I think they should get into, but I don't think they're in the top quarter of majors here, I'll still lie and say that they are. Because "top half" actually means "sucks.")
I'm looking forward to this year getting to write a really enthusiastic recommendation, which is way easier than calibrating exactly how enthusiastic to be about a solid candidate.
I'm glad that ATMers continue to follow the unwritten rule that all queries should be directed to the front page poster least likely to have anything useful to say on the subject.
We should spread a myth that some past, possibly utopian, constitution required this, and that's why we do it. "Did you know that [whoever] believed that all queries should be directed to the member least likely to have anything useful to say, in order to get a broad spectrum of opinion and prevent a technocratic elite from emerging?"
WE'RE GOING TO FIGHT OUR WAY TO THE SURFACE EVENTUALLY.
The structure in 13 is solid.
I've gotta guess that organizational skills, ability to communicate, commitment to a cause, tenacity, and mental agility (any or all of which may come into play in a volunteer position) are somewhat relevant to someone's potential for sucess in law school.
Added bonus: your boss can always revise the one-page letter, which doesn't seem like a heavy lift.
I strongly/mediumly/half-heartedly recommend this candidate for X.
I put this in the first sentence, not the last. (And use enthusiastic/strong/no-adjective to mean strong/medium/half-hearted.)
Like Hitler, the candidate is a big-picture thinker, unafraid to mobilize vast resources in order to achieve long sought after goals. Few people in history have had such drive and tenacity, but the candidate is one of them. In our adversarial system, a lawyer is sometimes asked to advocate to the best of their abilities what many non-lawyers would see as lost causes; but like Hitler, the candidate is more than willing to fight to the very end.
P.S. The candidate is not evil.
Total waste of time.
Due to the rankings (U.S. News and World Report??), very little matters other than the statistical information.
Ok. Maybe to break a tie, a letter of recommendation might catch someone's eye. But, chances are the recommendation is a waste of everyone's time.
if "scrupulously ethical" is something you've got any basis for saying, I think it's a good one to throw in
This is law school we're talking about. Shouldn't it be "scrupulously ethical where appropriate"?
We take care of that by maintaining an arcane private definition of 'ethical'.
Has an effort been made to talk her out of it? Has she been directed to the Campos blog?
Seconding this. Lurker, is it too late for you to follow Teo's good example and shun law school?
I wasn't kidding about sending her to the Campos blog. Today's post, Prof C takes on Pittsburgh: http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2011/09/and-now-word-from-our-sponsors.html
I too shunned law school, and look where I am!
I wasn't aware that the law school scam author had been identified (whether by himself or others).
27: Is the national legal market that bad that grads of first tier schools are pushing to take $60k jobs in Pittsburgh or is Campos saying the Pitt and whatever Penn State calls its law school are taking all those jobs?
"Pittsburgh" s/b "the dean of the Duquesne law school"
A bunch of broke Ivy Leaguers might explain why shitty driving of the kind that doesn't even help the shitty driver get somewhere faster seems to have increased so much.
It also might explain all the NY and NJ plates.
Holy crap, I clicked through to the article, and the Dean of Duquesne Law School really is claiming the fact that Art Rooney II is now the President of the Pittsburgh Steelers as an example of the kind of success you can obtain by going to law school. Christ, what an asshole.
So nobody here is going to cop to having the applicant prepare the letter for the recommender's signature?
Surely "Dean Gormley" is a made-up name.
Yes, originally it was Dean Gormless.
I guess gormley has to be the opposite of gormless.
I agree with Will and Carp. To the OP:
(1) For law school admissions, the recommendation letter won't matter, unless you are a Senator or President of the US or managing partner of the biggest local law firm or happen to be good friends with several professors at the school.
(2) Absent very unusual circumstances, really encourage her to not go to law school, or at a minimum to avoid taking on substantial debt to go to law school.
38: I should chime in and agree with this -- I was thinking about the post in terms of 'what's a good recommendation letter', but of course the law school doesn't really care, and no one should be going to law school these days unless they have very good reason to believe they'll be employed on the other end. (That is, I think Bave and his classmates are probably fine. Everyone else should watch out.)
at a minimum to avoid taking on substantial debt to go to law school.
This is an important aspect. If mom or dad or some other funding source is paying for it, go to law school!
What if your mom will pay you to go be a plumber?
Then your mom(ma) is making a smart investment in a skilled trade.
30 is correct, of course. The problem, though, is that the PG is printing this kind of piece because it's what the readership wants to hear. There's a whole set of social expectations that are a part, maybe a bigger part than the misleading stats published by the schools, in hordes of kids making really bad decisions.
unless they have very good reason to believe they'll be employed on the other end
And understand what that job is actually going to entail, and really think they're going to like doing it.
Scanned the article. Gormley seems an ass, the writer seems a bigger one. Perhaps I am not aware of how bad the employment picture is, but holy fuck the baseline sense of entitlement running through the thing.
45, yes, although it's the debt that turns law school from "maybe not a great idea" into "potential horror story." With no debt, it's not the worst place in the world to be in to have gone to law school and decide that you don't much want to be a lawyer.
With $150,000 in nondischargeable debt that you simply can't repay based on the job options available to you, things are hellish.
46 -- I have other problems with Campos, but he is really doing a heroic service with that blog. It's not that the employment picture is bad or that law students and lawyers are whiners (though all of those things are true); it's that lots and lots of people pay huge amounts of money to go to law schools (which are money makers for the universities) and then can't find jobs while being loaded permanently with huge debts that bankruptcy can't take care of. While the schools more or less deliberately lie to new students about this.
Breaking through the wall of bullshit surrrounding law school is a very very good thing.
46 -- It's really bad for a huge chunk of new grads, and unlikely to get much better. And lawyering is much worse at the lower end than it used to be.
I don't understand what "entitlement" means in 46. The writer's message seems to be "This statement by Gormley is a lie. This statement is also a lie. Here are some more lies."
I'm glad I decided not to go to law school, though I have gone in a professional schooling/profession area that has its own share of debt and lies.
I haven't paid much attention to the situation in the legal profession until recently. How long has it been bad? I mean, not how long has it been nightmarish, that seems to be since 2007 or so, but how long has the belief "a law degree is a good route to a secure UMC existence" been ill founded?
My vague impression from acquaintances is that it was already becoming a dicey proposition back in the 90s.
Which leads to the question of how long the belief that a law degree is a solid path to well compensated employment will persist in the face of evidence to the contrary. The belief seems to be hanging on pretty stubbornly.
I guess I'd want to know how much worse things have gotten since 2009, because I followed a link to the law school transparency site the salary figures didn't look bad for the area*. Duquesne isn't that much pricier than Pitt for law school and, at least in the past, it was the only one you could attend while working a daylight job.
*That is a confusing layout, but I think I understood it. There is a great deal of missing data, but there was also for Pitt.
23: I heard that University of Michigan dropped the LSAT or something. Plus, ties to rich people who have donated tons would help. I could have gone to a top school that way. I just didn't like that school much.
Anyway, I don't think the solution to the over supply of lawyers is to kill the regional schools and let the top tier keep punching out as many as they want.
53 -- Key changes: (a) the disaster has moved very substantially up to the very top tiers of schools (I was talking to a current UCLA law student, and they are all freaking out -- totally unthinkable a few years ago. If going to UCLA law school isn't a reasonably safe path to a middle class existence, things are scary); (b) both tuition and the number of law schools expanded dramatically in the 1990s-2000s, making the possibility of going to a relatively cheap law school harder and affecting more people.
38.1: Don't those people call rather than write. I knew someone with a named chair at a very highly ranked school who always chaired fundraising committees and whose firm ran a law school clinic. He always told my parents to let him know if I wanted to go to that law school. But I'm quite sure that he would never have written anything down, just called the dean.
53: It depends on where the law degree is from, doesn't it? I had the impression that a Yale law graduate will make $200k/yr if they want to. (The recent Yale law graduate I know quickly decided she didn't want to work for the kinds of places that would pay her that, but the jobs were there nonetheless.)
59 is right, but the tier of schools for which it is true is now, I believe, three (H,Y,P) with maybe 4 more or so providing reasonably OK, if not safe, bets. Anywhere else, do not take on debt.
Aggh, that should be an "S." Force of habit from somewhere or something.
I don't think it's the case that any Yale graduate who wants one can get a job paying 200k. I do think it's the case that some Yale grads can get jobs that pay 200k.
61: Havard, Yale, Southern Illinois University School of Law.
61: I was like, P? What? Do they have a law school so elite and exclusive that I have never even heard of it?!
I can only assume that somehow lawyers sense the upcoming revolution and are attempting to survive it through sheer numbers.
Stormcrow, how the fuck does describing how the job market for lawyers works, and pointing out that at a lot of places (such as Duquesne Law School) there is effective scamming of students going on) reflect "entitlement"? The point is that even if there are some grads of absolutely the top schools who can make $200k, taking on boatloads of debt to go to law school is a really terrible bet for almost everyone else, and that law schools have been lying to people about this for a long time (while profiting heavily from the expensive tuition).
Firm salaries. Not sure if this is adjusted for 2011, or is 2010 numbers. Or earlier -- the numbers look no different from 2009 to me.
68 is probably the best demonstration of entitlement yet.
And here's a chart for Pittsburgh. Note that none of these firms will consider anyone from the bottom 98% of the class at Duquesne.
71: That still leaves the entire public sector, nearly all the criminal defense work, 95%* of the trusts and estates business, divorce court, family court, and people who don't intend to practice**.
*rough guess.
**ambitious cops, etc.
I'm old that there's really only one law school you can go to if you want to become an ADA in Suffolk County (Boston and Chelsea), and it isn't H. That job is sought after, but it does not pay well.
70 gets it absolutely right, entitlement boy. If you could fucking here yourself in anything but a lawyer thread. . Sure the law school behavior sounds crappy., but my God. No time now. Or probably ever.
Yeah, $200,000 is a little high for even the super lucky ducky first years, except for a very extraordinary few. But essentially any Yale grad who wants it can get a job that pays $145k/year out of law school.
On the other hand, this is not true at all outside of the very top tier of schools; if you go to, say, superpresitgious and superexpensive Duke Law School, you are very likely looking at a situation in which you have a 60% chance of failing to secure such a job and a substantial minority finds no legal work at all. If you go to nonprestigious but expensive Duquesne Law School, you have a 97% chance of failing to secure such a job. Which, boo hoo hoo, except that these kids are taking on $150,000 in nondischargeable debt for this opportunity.
72 -- sure, but taking on $150k in debt for those jobs is a terrible, terrible idea, and many of them are increasingly unavailable to law school graduates.
I also recently discovered that California public law schools charge higher tuition than a couple of private schools in the Boston area.
65 61: I was like, P? What? Do they have a law school so elite and exclusive that I have never even heard of it?!
Well, maybe there is some 180-year-old around who has a law degree from P.
||
OT: I saw a line by Charles Barkley (talking about Sarah Palin) which made me smile.
I always vote democratic because I think you have a better chance of helping poor people if you vote democratic.
Note how neatly he avoids raising unreasonable expectations. "Vote democratic, it's entirely possible that they'll be better than the other guy."
I'm tempted to make that my new sig quote.
|>
Pharmaceutical chemist used to be awesome. Good pay and really secure. It's much less secure now.
To put it another way, in terms that even hero of the working class comrade JP Stormcrow can understand (if his delicate proletarian ears can stand the mention of a private law school), no one is crying over the fact that some lawyers might have to earn $40,000 a year. That's fine. Nor is the problem that some law school graduates aren't getting employed at all. That's no worse than anything else in this shitty economy.
What is not OK is the cost/benefit ratio of law school in the current climate given the amount of the tuition and the nondischargeability of debt. Nor are the marketing practices of the law schools, which lie about the economic facts in order to bring in tuition, OK. Nor is the folk belief that going to a mediocre law school will be your ticket to a sustainable middle class life OK. And it is a bad decision for many -- probably most -- of the people at actual American law schools to be there.
72 -- Public sector jobs are very competitive right now as well. It's true that a new grad can try self-employment, and many do. Just last year, I had lunch with a new lawyer working out of the back of his wife's flower shop.
Really, our society hasn't needed much in the way of new for-profit lawyers for a long time now, and technology is accelerating this. And yet, as noted in comment 53, the social expectation that it makes sense to go this route, and even to incur very substantial debt to do it, remains.
I'm not asking Stormcrow to feel sorry for anyone. I do think, and have practiced this for 20 years, that when one knows someone thinking about law school, a frank conversation is called for.
I have friends, Friends, I tell you, who went to Penn. A small college and yet there are those who love it.
76: Pitt is $30k a year. Duquesne is $33k. Pitt has a better reputation and would be the better choice as you could leave the area (if you did really well). I do tell people not to consider it without a scholarship, but if you want to be a lawyer in this area and don't have 98 percentile LSATs, those are your choices.
Any of them will leave you with $150k in loans, which would be around $1,000 a month. If you made $50k on graduation, you rent/buy a house for $800 a month and have maybe $1,000 to $1,500 a month left to live on while you try to advance. Assuming you don't want to leave Pittsburgh (and there is a great deal of that going around), you've got a start with some potential.
I'm having a little trouble with the 'entitlement' accusation. If the idea is that student loan debt sucks for everyone, so law students and people who worry about them should quit bitching, that's straightforward crabs-in-a-bucket behavior. Someone with six figures of debt and either no job or a job that pays in the low/medium five figures is screwed, and while it may be amusing to look at someone who thought they were going to be able to parlay academic skills into a comfortably affluent life who was instead so badly mistaken that they may never get out of debt, I don't think the impulse to cheer over their misery is a good one.
83: I thought that was Dartmouth.
that's straightforward crabs-in-a-bucket behavior.
I don't really think so. Aside from people who went to top law schools, doctors, and people with really rich parents, nearly every one I know went through a couple of years of wondering how they could possibly make the money work. Then you sell out or figure out your niche or whatever.
I'm utterly bewildered by the entitlement accusation. Is the idea that people who have the good fortune to go to law school, even if they're doing so by going deeply into debt, are so clearly catapulted into the top of the status hierarchy that they shouldn't complain? A merry bit of question-begging if ever a question was merrily begged.
87: But $150K in debt, with the interest accumulating and no job or a job that doesn't let you pay down the principle, really is worse than the money problems everyone deals with. Buck had a sucky, difficult time as a young journalist in NY, making very little, renting a room in someone else's apartment (who eventually introduced him to me, so that worked out well), and thinking of his big self-indulgence as buying the expensive brand of baked beans rather than the cheap ones. That's perfectly normal hardship, that people go through. But he was paying off somewhere around $20K in student loans, not seven to eight times that much.
Principal. Principal. I'm so ashamed.
every one I know went through a couple of years of wondering how they could possibly make the money work. Then you sell out or figure out your niche or whatever.
Right, but the six figures of debt stays with you regardless. And, mostly, when you start practicing, you've already "sold out and found your niche." Note that your example in 184 will describe roughly the salary and existence first 15 years of the existence of a lawyer in a public sector job, with the debt being nondischargeable. And that there is a strong likelihood right now of failing to secure that job at all.
(And, of course, that the person in your example could have done financially just as well, almost certainly, by failing to attend law school at all.).
I mean, sure, there are worse problems in the world, but pretending this isn't a problem is just straight up faux-populist assholery.
I'm a faux-populist, but a real asshole.
I have had conversations with people in this thread.
They are excellent conversationalists, top half definitely.
I recommend them for the position of figuring out how to unfuck-up the economics of education in the US.
And the big indulgence we're asking for these entitled young people is that they shouldn't be misled about their odds of getting a job that will pay off their debt. That's not much in terms of entitlement.
Have we helped you, lurker?
It is not too late. You still have a job, since you mention a boss. All you've lost is the time you've put into the application. You can still walk away from law school.
Sadly, I don't think the applicant is lurking, just the guy who's writing the applicant a recommendation.
I think the applicant is only volunteering right now.
94: True. That seems reasonable. However, I wonder what happens if a similar calculation was applied to almost any other educational endeavor, except studying with a full scholarship, right now. Expecting to show a good return on your educational investment by taking the employment figures from the worst economy since the Great Depression seems entitled. Being able to say that even if everything goes to fuck, my plan still works is an enormous luxury.
84 -- And if 50k is a median income among the legally employed, that leave a bunch of folks in the lower half really struggling. And a bunch more at Burger King etc.
Unlike many of the lawyers who comment here, I didn't go to a school in the upper tiers. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised a year or two out to meet classmates tending bar or stacking shelves in bookstores, but, you know, I kind of was.
Recommender, this is your chance to keep the applicant out of law school! What a mitzvah!
What were the rules above? No positive adjectives and lukewarm praise?
Expecting to show a good return on your educational investment by taking the employment figures from the worst economy since the Great Depression seems entitled. Being able to say that even if everything goes to fuck, my plan still works is an enormous luxury.
No one is saying this. It was also true in the boom years that many, many law schools were bad investments. It is true that the bad economy has made going to even an ultracompetitive, top-tier law school a bad investment, highlighting the problem. But the main problem is that many people are completely deluded about the costs and benefits of going to law school, something that's aided and abetted by both the law schools themselves and the general culture.
It's a shame that US News is completely worthless, because an organization that actually gathered relevant data about schools and their graduates would be very valuable.
I'd love to see charts of odds of employment for various degrees at various places. "Don't get degree x unless you can go to one of the top n schools."
And a bunch more at Burger King etc.
It isn't like the other people working at Burger King are there because their plan worked.
@98
But the data seem to show that college graduates are in fact suffering less from the not-so-great depression than those without college degrees. Better average income, lower unemployment.
Except for the tiny fraction of folks who graduate from the top schools, it's unclear that a law degree pays the same kind of dividend.
98: I think there's a structural change in the legal job market happening beyond just the current recession, and that's a lot of what we're talking about. The change has been creeping along since I was in law school, and while the recession has made it really really apparent, I don't think a big drop in the unemployment rate generally is going to make going to law school on loans look like a sane thing to do.
My impression is that it used to be that top schools were expensive, but a highpaying job was next to guaranteed, and top didn't mean top-10 but more like top-30 or even more. And below that, schools were mostly cheaper, and if you were diligent and got good grades you could be fairly well assured of getting a lower-paid but in-scale with the cost of your education job. The odds that going to law school was a sensible thing to do, if you could get admitted and get decent grades, were very high.
Those odds have changed drastically in the last 10-15 years, and I don't think they're changing back.
Maybe they should drop fees. I have a list of people I want to sue as soon as I can afford to pay for it.
Isn't there some subject that compels the letter-requester more than law? Remember that one class that really broadened your horizons, letter-requester? Why not ditch that unpromising law school plan and get a Masters in Art History.
This thread is a total WTF. Halford is 100% right here. Perhaps 101% right. A significant fraction of people, maybe most people, who go to law school just flush that tuition money down the toilet.
The same could be said for beer if I wasn't pissing in the yard.
I understand that law school is more of a trade school than studying English literature or whatever and that therefore you* want to do it only if you see a potential return. But, if there is a general movement to stop flushing tuition money down the toilet, that's going to be a very broad thing. Making sure enrolling student have accurate information about likely outcomes is very reasonable and law schools are far better about that than most undergraduate programs (partially because they can be as a J.D. is a terminal degree).
Something has to be done, I agree, but I'd prefer a solution that involves as little cutting of educational opportunities as possible. And, if you cut off educational paths that have a low likelihood of leading to a good job, you are throwing a huge roadblock in the path of anybody who doesn't test well, has no good access to capital, and is too ambitious to want to be a tradesman.
*By "you," I mean "not me." I avoided law school on purpose and took as little literature as I could and still graduate.
So how much is it okay to let somebody borrow for a long-shot bet? $500,000? $1 million? $10 million?
but I'd prefer a solution that involves as little cutting of educational opportunities as possible.
Returning tuition in public law schools to the (inflation adjusted) amounts prevalent in the 1970s-1980s would, IMO, go almost all the way towards solving the problem while preserving widespread opportunity to become a lawyer for those who want it.
Substantially reduced tuition would probably involve substantially reducing the size of some law faculties, however (as well as obtaining more public funding for education, which, you know). In any event, universities need to stop running their law schools as profit centers designed to rake in money based on people's incorrect folk beliefs about the value of a law degree.
112: it's not a long-shot bet. I can put a kitten on Mars no problem if I can buy another four and a half million cans of sterno.
113: so what should universities run as their profit centers?
Making sure enrolling student have accurate information about likely outcomes is very reasonable and law schools are far better about that than most undergraduate programs (partially because they can be as a J.D. is a terminal degree).
I don't think so. I think law schools are far more likely to provide what looks like information about what you can expect to make as a graduate than undergrad programs, but that that information tends to be systematically optimistic to the point of being seriously misleading.
I'm kinda waiting for some hard-core lawyer hater (not me! love you guys!) to show up and call law school tuition a regrettable but socially important tax on the venal.
113 -- Sounds good. And genuine transparency in the employment stats.* In addition, I think a cap on tuition debt that's not dischargeable, to bring the private diploma mills under control.
* And Moby where you're comparing salaries of law grads to other salaries in the economy, don't forget that law students already have a 4 year degree in something, maybe even a science, before heading down the law school road.
But that's probably more apt for business schools, so.
When I try to think about things from the Homo Economicus point of view shared by all of our thought and opinion leaders who aren't right wing maniacs, a 1900% increase in real tuition prices over two years or whatever looks like a fantastic example of market clearing. Because you know, if the average lifetime income of someone with this or that degree is $N more than someone without the degree, you'd be a fool not to go into $(N-1) of debt to get that degree.
Who knew everyone was getting such an unfair bargain for all those years?
law school road
Sung to the tune of "Holiday Road".
118: True, but we've also ignored scholarships and whatnot. I don't know how common that is in the lower tier law schools, but I don't know many lawyers who paid the rack rate for their school either.
I agree they should cap the amount of student loans that aren't dischargeable. That would also cut the amount if loans, but that seems very reasonable.
115: If you want to make a profit, you need to do something vital for society, like making sure Clay Aiken gets paid everything coming to him.
Specifying "Clay Aiken" is exactly the kind of elegant touch that displays Moby's superlative commenting skills. Ten thousand hours of practice, indeed!
It probably wasn't the fairest rhetorical device ever.
"Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest rhetorical technique of them all?"
"Well, despite what many people say, it isn't the straw man."
"Fine. So?"
"Moving the goalposts I think is evidently the most dynamic, so that should settle it."
"What? No!"
"Fine, Hitler."
Last weekend I had dinner with an old friend who dropped out of grad school, went to a second-tier law school, did superlatively well there, and is now working at a white-shoe firm for real money. He has undergrad debt, a year of unfunded grad school debt, and law school debt, but feels pretty confident that he's going to be able to pay the loans down.
He mentioned that he's going to be hiring one of his law-school classmates to clean his apartment once a week. She really needs the work.
People here (and generally) are somewhat overstating how bad the situation is at the very top tier schools. The hiring market has picked up a fair bit, although it is still nowhere near boomtimes.
No excuse for whats going on at lower tiers schools though.
No excuse for whats going on at lower tiers schools though.
By which you mean the bottom 90%, right? Or 93%?
Who knows where precisely to draw the line, but yes, some ludicrously high percentage of schools are black holes for tuition money. Yet another example of the tournament economy...
Yet another example of the tournament economy...
It might be shifting that way, but compared to academia it is a long way off.
Anyway, you need 2nd tier law schools because when you get drunk, drive your SUV into the WalMart, crush three shoppers, and offer the officer arresting half a ham sandwich is she puts 'em on the glass, your lawyer better not scan as "elitist" to the jury.
Is it not the case that graduate programs -- in the humanities -- are also this sort of, shall we say, bad bargain? This is purely anecdotal at this point, since I admit I stopped paying close attention once I left grad school, but certainly by the mid-90s, my own grad department and faculty were beginning to talk amongst themselves about the increasingly dire state of the job market, and deciding that it was probably best to dissuade undergrads from pursuing a Ph.D. in the field unless they were among the absolutely most promising, could somehow ensure that their debt would be minimal, etc.
I know many people here know a great deal more about this than I do at this point, but my general and vague sense is that this is not a new or unusual phenomenon, and that it's only relatively recently that law schools are facing it as well.
133 is close to what I would have said above if I were polite and reflective.
A columbia MFA looks even more scamtacular than law school:
http://www.slate.com/id/2303878/
I was being very polite, because the truth is, the answer to the problem isn't: ha, sucks to be you/us, you think you have it tough, oh really, you aren't working as a toll-booth attendant, now are you?! Though I tend to think it's worthwhile to bear that in mind.
But rather, yeah, it's a problem and has been for some time. Of course, graduate programs aren't profit centers for universities as much as they are sources of cheap labor, which may or may not amount to the same thing in the end.
the answer to the problem isn't: ha, sucks to be you/us
You didn't spend the very earliest part of this new century listening people in their very early twenties complain about having to settle for a job that paid twice what you were being paid eight years out. Or, if you did, you're better at letting go than I.
Anyone who pays -- rather than being paid -- to get a PhD in the humanities is doing it wrong. Which is to say, getting a PhD in history or philosophy or whatever might be a time sink, and well might gobble up some of a student's prime earning years, but it shouldn't leave that person with crushing debt.
That said, I tell anyone who asks that getting a PhD in history is, except for very rare exceptions, a truly terrible idea: "You'll never be FAME-MOOSE if you get a PhD in history, young lad or lass." I steer them to the Sierras, mostly, and tell them to pan for gold instead.
except for...exceptions
Well, at least we can promise them that they'll all become great writers.
137: I think I'm better at letting it go, probably because I have no choice. Not to say I don't grit my teeth occasionally.
I steer them to the Sierras, mostly
I told you I'm not buying a truck no matter what kind of a deal you can get me.
133 -- I think that's fair. What would you think, though, if the response of your department/school to the suggestion 'we should discourage all but the most promising students' was to nonetheless admit a full class year after year, keep raising tuition (with little in the way of scholarships, really -- that's why the debt is so high), publish knowingly misleading employment statistics, and claim alums who inherited sports franchises as examples of how useful the degree is?
137 -- I'll never forget the first day of my first law job when the managing partner took us newbies aside and told us that if he ever heard us complain about money, or heard of us complaining about money, in the presence of a staff member, there would be hell to pay.
The differences between law school and humanities grad school are (a) going to humanities grad school doesn't require you to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt; (b) people generally go into the law with an expectation of making money and view the career as an attractive method of doing that, not pursuing an academic interest. I'm not saying one situation is better than the other or in any way minimizing the problems in the humanities, but they are quite different situations.
But I'm glad Moby is standing up for the rights of the working man, or more precisely the right of earnest, eager middle class kids to be egregiously ripped off by universities for profit.
143.1: I'd say that's very dirty pool indeed. It was sort of interesting to see the faculty in my own department chew the issue over amongst themselves: some were very resistant to coming clean (surely a philosophy Ph.D. is a noble, noble thing! surely one of our tasks is to train new members of society in this pursuit! I am not on board with saying anything to the contrary), and others were just like, "Yo, dude. Try to pay attention. Nobody can force you to adopt any particular stance, but where's your conscience, see what I'm saying?"
eager middle class kids to be egregiously ripped off by universities for profit
The universities should sell their network logs to RIAA and make money that way.
I really don't understand how law school works (apologies, then, for opining given that): I'm surprised that there isn't such a thing as a full or at least partial tuition waiver, as there is in at least higher-level graduate departments.
I don't understand how law schools work either, but they usually have nicer fixtures in the law library than in the regular library. I think it is easier because all the books are the same height.
Further to 147: I guess I just assumed there was, chiefly because a friend of mine (with a Columbia Ph.D. in literature, who after 3 years still hadn't found a job), was considering ditching that and going to law school, and was trying to convince me to do the same, because: loan forgiveness!
I figured if a law school was willing to pay off your freaking student loans for you, it would be giving you a tuition waiver.
If you go to NYU Law and commit to working in public service for x number of years, making less than y per year, the school will pay your loans back for you. I believe the same is true for Harvard and Yale, though, last I heard, their loan-repayment programs weren't quite as generous as NYU's (nb: last I heard was about fifteen years ago, so things well might have changed since then).
A relative of mine realized she had no chance of advancing in her current job so she took the LSAT after thumbing through a prep book for the afternoon. She scored in the 95th percentile and got a full scholarship to the 2nd tier school. She's been working steadily since the summer after her first year.
Also, her father gave her a well-running but really shitty-looking car.
It's like one of those Holiday specials on the TV, except no Wookies.
150: But still no tuition waiver? Or is that available only in the top-tier schools, whereas the article linked way upthread about Dusquesne is not about top-tier schools? I'm thinking that must be it. Sorry for my remedial learning here.
150: NYU's program was very generous, but having an employed spouse effectively locked you out; "public service" was defined as total household income being below a cutoff. Still a good thing, and I can see the argument for doing it that way, but I, for example, wouldn't have gotten a dime from the loan repayment program no matter where I worked.
154: Programs like that are in just a few schools -- not even broadly across everything you'd call top-tier.
I still recall NYU's student housing listings. For a couple, they would rent you 400 square feet for $1,300/month.
156: Huh. That just really surprises me, for some reason. Full tuition, huh?
Mostly, yeah. It's not grad school, it's professional school. There are academic scholarships for some students with excellent test scores at second-tier or lower schools, but most law students pay sticker price.
Mostly, yeah. It's not grad school, it's professional school. There are academic scholarships for some students with excellent test scores at second-tier or lower schools, but most law students pay sticker price.
Mostly, yeah. It's not grad school, it's professional school. There are academic scholarships for some students with excellent test scores at second-tier or lower schools, but most law students pay sticker price.
109
This thread is a total WTF. Halford is 100% right here. Perhaps 101% right. A significant fraction of people, maybe most people, who go to law school just flush that tuition money down the toilet.
Gotta agree with this. I guess it's elitist to think you shouldn't be allowed to sell yourself into slavery.
120
... Because you know, if the average lifetime income of someone with this or that degree is $N more than someone without the degree, you'd be a fool not to go into $(N-1) of debt to get that degree.
So if people owning Porsches make $N more than people who don't (averaged over the life time of the car) you'd be a fool not to incur $(N-1) of debt to buy that car?
most law students pay sticker price
I really had no idea. Talk about barriers to anyone without the reasonably robust financial wherewithal to do it (or else go into massive debt, not that grad students are immune from that either).
106
Maybe they should drop fees. I have a list of people I want to sue as soon as I can afford to pay for it.
If the people you want to sue have no money suing them is pointless. If the people you want to sue do have money and you can't find a contingency lawyer to take your case you have no case.
166: Good points. I'll just remove the valve stems from their tires.
Regarding student loans in general, if lots of people were being induced to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy shoddy houses many of which lost all value within a few years this would be a big scandal and something would probably be done about it. But for some reason selling shoddy degrees is ok.
168: That did happen. They bailed out the lenders.
Just to put a but of background to why this started me off a bit, Duquesne Law grads are 1/3 of the active bar in this area. I am sure it has failed a portion of its students and I suppose that could be increasing, but we are not talking about a insignificant school for the local region.
But how big is the bar compared to the cumulative sum of alumni over the past 30-40 years? Plus in most of those years, it's been said above, prospects were better.
138 is completely right. Friends don't let friends go to unfunded Ph.D. programs. This cannot be repeated enough and needs to become something more people are aware of.
It's hard for me to judge whether it's that law school has become a scam (outside the top n), or just that most people who graduated from any sort of school in the last 5 years are screwed for the rest of their life.
What is it that people should do instead of becoming lawyers? Something that doesn't require going into debt, of course, but what exactly?
Move to Mongolia and get a job wrangling peasants for archaeologists.
But then the job market for peasant wranglers will become saturated and you're out all the money you spent learning Mongolian and steppe aerobics.
Okay then, all these trucks I see on the highway have big letters on the back claiming that they're hiring drivers. Talk to a truck about how to get into it.
I got a merit-based 10% discount my second and third years. Other than that, I and most of my classmates paid sticker. There was some aid for truly exceptional cases.
Nowadays, some lower tier schools are willing to pay a lot of money for some high scoring students in order to cook their stats and raise their ranking. It's a decent strategy for a student who isn't going to need an elite credential.
On the internet, one reads that schools group these scholarship students in the same section, and lets the curve knock a certain percentage out of eligibility for subsequent years, counting on them to pay sticker to finish. I don't have any personal knowledge, but I wouldn't be shocked to hear that some schools actually do this.
174
What is it that people should do instead of becoming lawyers? ...
It is my understanding that the job market for medical doctors is better than for lawyers. Maybe health care in general is a better bet.
There's a need for more lawyers who know how and can help poor people. The problem being they don't have enough money to pay for lawyers.
We have a new LSR rule that goes into effect in two weeks. I've thought it was a bad idea, but just might find myself warming to it, if I get lucky with a few engagements.
The top-tier law schools have loan-repayment programs aimed at helping public-interest lawyers. The really worthwhile programs are only available in the top of the top 10, and they vary in certain ways such that some turn out to be better for some people, others for others -- among the top programs, it's really hard to say which loan-repayment program is better unless you really know a lot of specifics about your future career. Also, Harvard (probably similar to the Y,H,S lineup as a whole) gives a fair amount of need-based financial aid if you meet their slightly odd guidelines. It turns out that getting into the top five or six law schools is really great if you're doing public-interest law, but if you're going into public-interest law and you get into a somewhat less highly ranked school you will have a harder time. Privilege gets magnified.
On financial aid and spouses: I've thought about doing an MPH, and there's a weird financial calculus around marriage. Stay single and my financial aid isn't affected but I have to pay tax on the value of my health insurance (assuming my BF stays employed at a company that provides domestic partner benefits.) Then there's the whole,well what if I had to go on student health insurance? Because student health services suck. If you're not in school or your employer offers no insurance, MA has good options,but once you're in school, it's student health...unless you've got schizophrenia or something and can prove that youshould be on SSI. Then you can get Medicaid. And MassHealth can be pretty awesome. It's certainly better than what my employer offers.
170: Part of the deal is that the scam-nature of law school is pretty new, I think. I'm class of 1999, and I think that's about when it started to be systematically a questionable idea. So all the Duquesne lawyers in mid-career you see probably aren't the survivors of a scam, it's the Duquesne graduates under forty that are in trouble.
But, for something that has basically worked for 98 years (95 years?) and been a problem for five years, "scam" is an absurdly loaded word. This isn't the art school where you draw the elephant and send it for judging and they loan you $15,000 to learn how to draw a better elephant (a Pittsburgh-based company.)
Also, it isn't those under 40 that are in trouble. It is, as near as I can tell, the high-borrowing portions of the bottom half of the last three or four years classes.
a new LSR rule
Um, LifeRing Secular Recovery (non-religious alcohol recovery group)? Luftschutzraum (German: Air Raid Shelter)? Leaf Setup Request? Lunar Surface Rendezvous? Leelanau Scenic Railroad? Local Skin Response? Lynchburg Source Reactor? Level of System Robustness*?
*Level: McManly and pants-based
And there's that 2005 change in the bankruptcy code, and the spike upward in tuition.
And observing a bunch of D grads who've come out ok over the years doesn't answer the question. My school was a lottery when I went. I won. You can't point at me and say it's not a lottery. If we defining "winning" as a starting salary equal to or greater than loan balance, and "not losing" as a salary equal to or greater than poverty after loan payments, we had maybe 10% winners, and maybe no more than 50% not losers. After 20 years, there are 400 'winners' from my school running around, enough so that if you meet a lawyer from my school, you're not unlikely to meet a winner.
We could tell very early on who was going to be in which category. Some people you could tell on the first day weren't going to win, and might well lose. Others you could see by the end of the first semester. The Dean's letter is aimed at those people and their parents and friends, to get them to not support what is a mistake.
I'm not saying it's the worst scam ever. But with the federal law that ensures the debt continues, and bails out the bank, so there's no risk at all, the incentives line up for a law school to act pretty much like that art school. And law is entitled enough to think it ought to be a little better than that.
Limited Scope Representation. So many people are representing themselves because they can't afford lawyers, the system is overloaded with people who don't know the rules, and can't really play the game. Under LSR, we can do piecework for such people: ghostwrite (without attribution) a brief, for example, and have no responsibility for any other aspect of the case. Or take the deposition of the opposing party, and do nothing else.
I don't like the malpractice exposure -- piece work means they're not going to tell me stuff they think I don't need to know for my project (time talking to me being money), so I can't make fully informed judgments about strategy. On the other hand, at my old job I did quite a bit of what I used to call 'late inning relief' and it's often fun to step into a game to face a single batter. I'll decide what to do when a client asks for LSR.
not to withdraw support, obviously.
184
Also, it isn't those under 40 that are in trouble. It is, as near as I can tell, the high-borrowing portions of the bottom half of the last three or four years classes.
This rant is from 2004. Law school has long been a bad bet for many people and the odds have been getting worse.
Yes, 189 is right, as is everything Carp is saying. The last four years (and the change in the bankruptcy code) have really just brought to light a problem that's been building for a least as long as I've been practicing and probably the past 20 years, ever since the large increases in tuition/debt.
I'm a little skeptical about that rant. Yes schools should be forced to keep more accurate and standardized records of their students employments (either by the government, or by a US News that wasn't stupid). But that rant seems uninformed (anyone who thinks that being a professor is a 6 hour a week job is just an idiot). There's always some people who had unreasonably high expectations. There does seem to be a huge shift in lawyers career options recently.
One reason doctors do better is that there are way fewer medical schools, so almost all of them are "top tier" in some sense. But the para-doctor healthcare jobs seem like a solid living (NP etc.).
Well, it's a rant, and I wouldn't take it at face value. But that many (perhaps most) law students end up financially worse off after having attended law school than they would have been before attending was true well before 2008.
Is this what LB meant when she was worrying about her job?
It's not clear to me that the scam aspect of law school is any worse than it is in other professional schools. This is not to defend the law schools, just to say that if there's going to be reform, it's needed in lots of areas.
I don't know if it's true of all schools in my field, but a number have actually increased class size in the last few years, despite the demonstrable fact that job opportunities have decreased. Tuition and fees have gone up too. And this is an area where, if you look at the census numbers, tens of thousands of jobs (measured by job title) have been lost between 1990 and 2009. And you still hear people saying that retirements are imminent and the opportunities will open up. Frankly, I don't know what the hell I was thinking.
This is not to defend the law schools, just to say that if there's going to be reform, it's needed in lots of areas.
That. I certainly agree about the issue of non-dischargeable debt, but that is a big problem across the board.
Plus, nobody seems to be addressing the "what else are these students going to do" question that I keep bringing up. For Pitt, the only other law school in town, an LSAT of 157 puts you in the bottom quartile of the entering class and a 157 is the top 30%* of those taking the test. That LSAT will put you in the top quartile at Duquesne. Stating that it operates as a scam is effectively stating that you'd like to exclude anyone who doesn't test well from obtaining a legal education. Given that the LSAT doesn't seem to have any relevance at all to the practice of law, I don't find that reasonable.
*I got that from google, but I couldn't find an official site listing the LSAT to percentile conversion.
I like it how you're now framing this crap as a defense of those who don't test well. Those are precisely the most vulnerable people to the scam. The point is that the schools need to address ways for tuition to come down. Or, if they cannot do that, to stop admitting people with so much debt. Or, if they can't do that, at least stop lying to their students about their realistic cost/benefit, so if folks want to play the lottery they can at least do so with a reasonable sense of the risks involved. But I guess that would be entitled or mean to Duquesne grads or something.
To FA's point, I don't know, one way or another, how apt the comparison is to other professional schools. The gap between the popular folk belief "lawyer=good, safecareer" and reality seems unusually large. But I'd guessa lot of lower-end MBA programs are probably seriously not worth it.
Moby, for the bottom half of the class at the bottom 90% of law schools, 'what else should they do?' gives the same answer as 'what are they going to do after graduation?' That is, something that doesn't require law school, and needn't have cost all that money.
I don't doubt that other higher education is also bad value. One thing that's really bad about law school is that while the announcement that one intends to go for a PhD in art history might draw a lot of concern from friends and family -- which, I suppose, could be assuaged by convincing them of a true passion for the field, evidenced by undergraduate success etc. Some law students go into it with a burning passion. And a few are able to stay lit all through, and do well enough at it to have the option to pursue the thing they are passionate about.
The gap between the popular folk belief "lawyer=good, safecareer" and reality seems unusually large.
That's my impression. It was still common for me to hear people* talking about getting a law degree as their safe "fall-back" option in 2006, and maybe people still talk that way.
*These were academics, e.g. "If I don't land a TT position I can always go to law school..."
so if folks want to play the lottery they can at least do so with a reasonable sense of the risks involved
I think they do have a reasonable sense of the risks involved, at least least compared to you*. Via JP (lurkers support me in email), you'll see that Gormley's piece is in response to this article which says the debt loads are nearly half the $150k that this argument seems to take as a starting point. And, I think you have a very exaggerated, but unstated, comparison for a probably career outcome for somebody in Pittsburgh without a graduate degree (and, in all likelihood considering the population here, a very good undergraduate degree).
The median income for males in the city is $32k, for women it is lower. It hasn't really gone down with the recession. The economy has been depressed longer than most of the entering law students have been alive and has actually continued growing. A 50% chance at making $60k a year might seem reasonable if you have no other reasonable shot.
And, you probably don't have a better shot if you don't want to drill gas wells or join the army. The largest employers are medical and educational institutions. If you don't want to be a nurse and don't know anybody to get a good government job, you don't have many choices if you are trying to get ahead and most of them involve going back to school. I think many of the other graduate programs involve worse odds.
*Because you are entitled.
*These were academics, e.g. "If I don't land a TT position I can always go to law school..."
uurrrrrrrrgh
More than a few law students stay lit all through, badaboom.
How about we go back to the rule that you can be a lawyer if you pass the bar? It leaves law school as an explicit bet on getting one of the swank law jobs. People interested in making that bet should still be protected from lies & misrepresentation, but there's a shorter path for people who want a career boost or to work in the public interest.
I've been called upon now and again to come talk to local law students about employment prospects and strategies. This summer, for example, I was on a panel, and wasn't nearly the gloomiest. Anyway, a student contacted me, at the suggestion of a prof (who is also an administrator), to talk about his plans. Before law school, he'd been involved on the business side in a particular kind of regulatory transaction, that saves business engaging in a particular activity a whole barrel of money. Some special non-legal skills are required to pull this off, and, having those, he decided to go to law school with the dream of making a business of doing this thing.
It's not my field, but I admired the guy's focus and cleverness, a real contrast to most law students I meet. I had a nice time talking him through the obvious issues (like no one anywhere near us engages in the activity, the solicitation rules and how he'll have to market, other more general stuff about how the business works). I emailed a former colleague who is in the field, who told me that the Bush Admin tried to get rid of the statutory basis for this whole thing, but was beaten back by the Dem Congress, which imposed some kind of moratorium on the issue, which is soon to expire. Repeal (even with a grandfather clause) would be deficit reducing, so it's hard to predict that at the next turn of the wheel, Obama will play the role Pelosi played last time.
I suppose this can happen to anyone in any field.
202 -- I don't have an objection, if you make the bar a lot harder, covering more subjects in greater depth, and make the passing score higher. I thought as a 3d year, like everyone in their third year, that the thing could be done as well in two. It seemed to me that one reason to take up 3 years was more or less the same reason to make it a graduate degree, even if the undergrad degree was in music appreciation: so people have to be at least 25 before they get a license.
These were academics, e.g. "If I don't land a TT position I can always go to law school..."
I've never understood this. How are those even in the same category of aspiration? Professional class status?
(People my age and older here became lawyers without taking a bar exam, if they graduated from the only law school in the state. There's a constitutional problem with this, I think, so the class of '83 was the last given automatic entry.)
205 contains the answer to all of the world's problems: admittance to law school should be restricted to people with Ph.D.s. This will simultaneously solve the overproduction problem and finally give people with Ph.D.s a place to go.
The gap between the popular folk belief "lawyer=good, safecareer" and reality seems unusually large.
That belief sounds a bit like what's being referred to as entitlement. Of course law schools shouldn't be misleading people, but there is a difference between people not being informed about what law school can do to get you towards the goal of being a lawyer and not knowing what being a lawyer entails at both the lower and the higher ends. Law schools do of course have a responsibility to inform prospective students about the kind of careers they purportedly prepare people for, but there's only so much they can do about public perceptions. It's probably more common for professions to try to inflate rather than deflate perceptions, so law is kind of an outlier here.
But pretty much all of the professional certifications/credentials - note: MA in art history, not a certification, not a good comparison; art school, maybe - are sold as paths into relatively safe and secure professional jobs. The big difference with law being that it is perceived to pay a lot more (and for the top, it does), it has a higher social stature (except for the lawyer jokes) and it has most of the characteristics of a "true" profession with the kind of self-policing autonomy that many quasi-professions lack.
In terms of schooling costs it's a year or two longer than most professional masters, so that means a year or two more of debt. This is a nonnegligible amount, but you're still looking at 40-50,000/yr (private/out-of-state - in-state varies and is occasionally a good deal) tuition for a lot of professional masters. Unlike law, 40-50,000 starting salary at graduation will likely be considered a good, even high starting salary. A lot of work for new grads will end up being term-limited low-benefits contract work, or multiple part-time jobs, etc.
MBA programs may be the most law-like in cost and prestige, but they aren't at all the only problems out there. Pitt's got a high-ranked library school, but it would still be a good idea to think hard about going to it (or any other similar school). And to be prepared to move anywhere in the country to find a job at the end.
200 - so "entitled" means trying to dispel a false perception. Got it, asshole. And even at much lower -- say half -- the debt burden, law school is very often a bad financial idea, and schools are lying about that, but I guess saying that somehow is a problem or because other professions seem fucked up we should all shut up.
In light of 209, I should clarify that when I used "entitled" in 208, I meant it to characterize the perception of what kind of salary people think lawyers "deserve" in general, regardless of the variety of the kinds of work, and not the arguments being made in this thread.
I do think I'm arguing tangentially to the law school argument. I didn't realize that law school was as bad as the cases I'm more familiar with.
Let's just say that I don't think it coincidental that the one debt issue that gets you worked up is also the one that relates to maintaining your salary.
And I'm going to swim for the rest of the weekend.
However, I probably shouldn't pass off an opportunity to say fuck you to Halford.
Oh go fuck yourself. As I said, I'm perfectly fine with opening the law school gates wide, with lower tuition for all. And I'd note that apparently you make your money from some university funded job in which kids' tuition allows you to dick around on the Internet all day.
215 is to Moby. FA probably has some legitimate beef with me that I can't remember now.
216: Let's just say it's about copyright or something like that. Or maybe the Lakers. I can't really remember either.
On law school as a fall back, I remember seeing that a high percentage of the small number of high-profile disputed tenure cases that I knew about in the late 90s early 00s resulted in the not-tenured person moving on to law school. Aside from that, it was more common among people I knew to think of "anything but more school, at least not right now" as a fallback.
Wait, we are going to be accusing each other of dicking around on our employer's time now? That can't end well.
Law schools do of course have a responsibility to inform prospective students about the kind of careers they purportedly prepare people for, but there's only so much they can do about public perceptions. It's probably more common for professions to try to inflate rather than deflate perceptions, so law is kind of an outlier here.
I'm not in general a fan of Campos, but he's broken down the employment statistics for new law school graduates, and "approximately 45 percent of 2010 graduates of this particular top-50 law school had real legal jobs nine months after graduation" (by backing out temporary and non-legal work from a reported figure of well over 80%). Campos's rules about when you should go to law school seem about right:
* Do you genuinely want to be a lawyer and have a well-founded reason to believe you'll graduate in the upper reaches of a top-ten school?
* Do you genuinely want to be a lawyer, and you'll have a scholarship to a non-top-ten school?
* Is a law degree a useful non-lawyering professional accreditation for your chosen profession, and you'll leave law school without having accumulated debt? (This covers, e.g., cops going to night school.)
* Do you not need to work, or have a family/other connection that means you won't have to worry about getting a well-paying job? If you're going to work as house counsel for your family manufacturing firm, you're good to go.
* Is your family paying for it? Are they not going to mind sinking $80,000 into a potentially useless law degree? If they gave you a Mercedes as a graduate present and you lost it in a poker game the next week, would they cheerfully buy you another one?
Also, as I'm sure FA probably knows, library school has already gone through this issue; it was a hip and interesting (and expensive) professional school to attend, and now there's an oversupply of librarians and all the jobs are gone.
We can generously assume that we do less harm on Unfogged than we would by doing our jobs.
211
Let's just say that I don't think it coincidental that the one debt issue that gets you worked up is also the one that relates to maintaining your salary.
I doubt the over supply of third rate graduates from third rate law schools actually endangers Halford's salary.
Law school seems much more ranked than library schools. There are basically no guarantees that go with grades/ranks in library schools as far as anyone can tell (although no one has studied it systematically, as far as I know). This is probably good as far as keeping the profession open*, but it can make it very difficult to tell how much effort to put into any given thing in school. The best predictor of getting work is already working in the field, or having worked in the field before school.
It also means a lot of stress for me since I'm pretty bad at getting jobs, even though I've always done well once in the door. I've just been in the lowest or near lowest positions, so it's hard to make something of the experience. And my resume makes me look like an academic who couldn't make it. It could help that I'm trying to finish my history phd, but it could also just be digging the hole deeper. I want to finish for my own reasons, but I probably could have worked a real job last summer.
And this concludes today's public fretting about my uncertain future.
*within the limits of who can afford the schooling
(Not that there are guarantees with law school ranks, just that everyone seems to agree that they do have some meaning for employment.)
During the years I was hiring young lawyers, I hired a higher percentage of the Pitts grads I interviewed than of the Harvard grads.
library school has already gone through this issue; it was a hip and interesting (and expensive) professional school to attend, and now there's an oversupply of librarians and all the jobs are gone.
This always struck me as strange. For the last 2 decades the public funding that supports libraries has been declining and the internet has been cutting seriously into the position libraries formerly held as the place in which research was done.
Why during this period would attending library school be a popular thing to do?
For the last 2 decades the public funding that supports libraries has been declining and the internet has been cutting seriously into the position libraries formerly held as the place in which research was done.
Library science is plenty applicable to the Internet/web. Sure, the skills of managing a physical collection are going to be less and less important, but fundamentally LIS is about how people find and interact with information.
As someone who still has a dismal 1/13 record of talking young people out of law school, I'm finding this thread interesting. I have to say I agree with most of Halford and Shearer's biases on a population level, though I can think of some individual exceptions a la Moby's story above.
Two things I've been thinking about lately are a) the massive demise in good government jobs for working-class black and white Americans that is coming as the USPS contracts, and b) the massive increase in okay-to-good government jobs for working-class black and white and other Americans that emerged in the post-Sept. 11 TSA.
It would be...something...if history shows George W. Bush as having presided over the single biggest employment program for black Americans since the Great Society.
The subext to the last thirty comments: Moby is swimming to Barbados!
228: Fundamentally, yes. Ideally too. In practice, plenty of schools are still struggling to make the transition towards preparing graduates to do information work in all contexts, rather than the traditional ones. There's nothing wrong with being able to pursue the traditional areas, it's just that's probably where the oversupply is the biggest problem.*
Not surprisingly, the people who want to do more technical things are much better off if they've already picked up skills in that area, since in a lot of programs it's not easy to find courses that will teach them. You're more likely to learn why it's desirable to have them, and the kind of things you would use them for.
*On the other hand, it's the most protected by the MLS requirement. In other areas the competition pool involves more fields and backgrounds.
Speaking of teach-yourself skills, I'm installing MySQL on my computer, which I'm trying to run with the built-in server (IIS) but only locally, and thinking I picked (was pointed to) a version that's over my head. At this point, I just need it to run some software* that requires it, not to do anything with it directly.
*Designed to be used in a server-client configuration. But I want to run it on just my computer, not on the internet.
Yes, just a windows 7 laptop. Looking further, this actually might be the simplest version. I really hate how so much technical/computer stuff is still basically a black box to me.
I guess it really doesn't matter how it works since the installers won't install.
My installer won't install this mornin'
And I'm about to lose my mind
My installer won't install this mornin'
And I'm about to lose my mind
I wanna go and see my little baby
But my machine is all outta software