Choosing a Law School

Graduate School Law School
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<p>Or they’re doing it to game the rankings and dressing it up as a commitment to public service. Because of the crappy legal employment environment, they have a bunch of graduates that would have been doing volunteer public interest work in a desperate attempt to build a career. Now they get to count those students as “employed.”</p>

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<p>To agree with cranky: I think the medical school analogy is instructive.</p>

<p>There are two circumstances in which a medical school will hire its own graduates. The first is Residency Training, in which a medical student becomes an intern and subsequently a resident. That will be a temporary job, insofar as it will expire at some point (1-7 years) in the future, but the point is that it trains the young physician for another job and almost always leads to future employment at the job for which he is being trained.</p>

<p>The other alternative would be to hire a medical school graduate, usually as a “research assistant,” if he failed to obtain a residency placement either in the “match” or in the “scramble.” This position does not consist of further clinical training, does not prepare a student for practice as a physician, and is not a direct route to any other employment. Usually such students will re-apply to residency at the end of this year, meaning that the year was a detour at best. It certainly is not the road to a long-term job.</p>

<p>Law schools have, as padad argues, some jobs that are analogous to medical residency, because they consist of training which students actively seek in order to lead directly to employment prospects. Cranky is right that they also have some jobs, employing their own graduates, that are similar to research assistantships – these consist of jobs which students would not choose except as an alternative to unemployment. They are not primarily intended as training, they do not lead directly to other employment, and they are detours at best and dead ends at worst.</p>

<p>We on CC are debating this issue in a vacuum. Padad is asserting that these jobs are like residencies; cranky is asserting that they are more like research assistant years. Obviously there are some of each, but on the whole I’m inclined to agree with cranky as to the majority of them. But we’ve presented no evidence on the relative proportions of residency-like jobs to research-assistant-like jobs, and so we’ll find ourselves arguing in circles if we continue.</p>

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<p>BDM: While I enjoyed reading your analysis, I would argue that this new process is not similar to the medical school/residency model.

  1. There are law schools which for years have offered “fellowships”, which are indeed analogous to medical school residencies. Using GU as the example, these were competitive placements for which a JD is required. Selected candidates-and the candidates are from all over the country from numerous different schools-usually work as adjunct professors in a clinic, perform research on their own, receive a nominal stipend, and receive their LLM upon successful completion. Key here is that these are competitive, accepting outside applicants from law schools all over the country. With these newly-created law school post-grad programs, you don’t see these law schools hiring the graduates of other law schools for these newly created positions- only their own grads. There is no way to impute motive for this hiring other than to speculate-and based on all available information, it’s clear that most of these law schools hire their own grads to beef up the “JD required/full time job” category. Why in the world would GW law school hire 80(!) of its own graduates? GW law school isn’t a teaching hospital-it’s a law school.
  2. As mentioned above, virtually all of these new programs came into existence AFTER the economy-and particularly the law graduate/legal services economy-tanked. For years it was a running joke that law schools didn’t teach anyone how to actually practice law. In fact, the schools were uniformly criticized for it-but the system kept steaming along, with big firms paying outrageous salaries to new grads who didn’t know what they were doing. Some schools-but not all-adopted clinical programs, but all schools uniformly fought against the notion of any substantive change in legal education. Each law student would go to law school for three years, learn Great Things/Legal Division, and whether the student could actually practice law was someone else’s concern.
    So the economy tanks, and now schools which never thought twice about clinical training or even the status of its grads after they left campus are hiring-some in huge numbers-their own grads. Frankly seems mighty suspicious.
  3. The residency analogy only goes so far. After you graduate from law school, you take the bar-if you pass, you can practice(or malpractice) law. That isn’t so in medicine. The days of the GP are long-gone; if you want to practice medicine in the US, you’ve got to do a residency. It’s not optional. It’s required for both licensing-and it you want to get insurance. A residency is not required for lawyers, and never has been. For law schools to suddenly decide that the “residency” model is now a good idea-especially after fighting it for years-is disingenuous at best.
  4. But to accept the residency analogy, if only briefly-most of these jobs aren’t “residencies”. These are jobs as assistant admissions counselors, etc-there’s no real additional training. And don’t take my word for it-look at the schools’ websites. For every UVA giving a full description of its post-grad program, you’ll find several others which note that they hire their own grads. Period. Won’t tell you doing what, or what the grads are paid, etc. And often you’ve got to hunt quite a while to find even this information.
    So I would suggest that unfortunately, these are not jobs akin to residencies. Sadly, more often than not they are low-paid genuinely dead-end positions.
    But as evidence based medicine is the rule today, let’s go to evidence-based law statistics.
    Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country produces twice the number of JDs per year as there are jobs requiring a JD.
    Almost every medical school graduating class has full employment at the end of the “match” and the subsequent scramble. This isn’t true of law schools. A few examples for percentage of graduates employed at graduation:
    UCLA: 45.9% (average indebtedness: $109,539)
    Notre Dame: 48.9%(average indebtedness: $101, 512)
    Both of those are top-25 law schools per everyone’s most reviled bible, USNWR. And don’t take my word for it; the statistics are available for free on USNWR’s website.</p>

<p>So I don’t agree we’re arguing in circles. My argument is that law jobs are tough to find, and if you’re going to embrace over $100,000 in debt to obtain a degree, you ought to know what your job prospects are upon graduation.
Don’t take my word for anything; either go to USNWR or the specific school’s website. The numbers are there, and you can make your own decision</p>

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<p>Let’s say you’re a 2011 law school grad. If you’ve been working at a legal services organization since graduation through one of these fellowships, you are a realistic applicant to various desirable legal jobs. You’re not guaranteed to get one, but a lot of small firms and government agencies will take you seriously, so you have a shot. If you’ve got a hole in your resume since graduation – and working retail is a hole – then God help you.</p>

<p>Sure, the law schools do this partly for selfish reasons. But as long as they disclose the number of school-funded jobs, it’s win-win. It is MUCH better for the graduates if they offer this program than if they don’t. As for entering students, I’ve begun to feel pretty caveat emptor about them. This isn’t 2009, and accurate employment information is all over if you make a cursory search for it. The problem isn’t a lack of transparency; it’s a lack of realism on the part of 0Ls. In my experience, you can tell them that 95% of graduates at their intended school are unemployed, and they’ll just decide that they’re going to be in the 5%.</p>

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<p>I’m with Hanna on feeling no sympathy for anyone who enrolled after 2009.</p>

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<p>I have a lot of sympathy. It flies in the face of all available evidence to think a numerical analysis would trump the massive societal and emotional pressure to do things like higher education.</p>

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<p>In 2005, I questioned the value of law school and, for various reasons, left for a year. That was before the crash, when school was a lot less expensive. Either I am an economic genuis (or psychic), or this has been an obvious problem for almost a decade.</p>

<p>If you cannot even do a rudimentary analysis of what your loan payments and job prospects will be before signing the paperwork, you shouldn’t be a lawyer.</p>

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<p>Or you got lucky. Lots of people make predictions that turn out to be wrong. But even if you’re right and you’re more perceptive than most, that strikes me as suggesting you should be more sympathetic, not less. If you have to build in an inherent advantage for yourself to let you escape the higher education bubble, wouldn’t that suggest it’s outside the control of those without that inherent advantage? And that’s not even touching on how different people reasonably react to varying degrees of pressure.</p>

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<p>Oh, I have sympathy, because they are in a bad situation. I just don’t think that the law schools are primarily responsible for that bad situation – and to the extent that the law schools are to blame, hiring their own graduates mitigates the problem, it doesn’t worsen it.</p>

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<p>Except insofar as it might make statistics look artificially better. But that’s partly the fault of the reporter (USN), since apparently others (LST) can figure it out pretty well.</p>

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I am sympathetic to people who didn’t see it coming; I am not sympathetic to people who saw Legal Armageddon (aka the massive layoffs of 2008) and still decided to start law school at a cost that is 50% higher than it was a mere few years prior.</p>

<p>What “inherent advantage”? What on earth is that all about? The only knowledge required was the capability of doing sixth-grade math. Anyone who can’t do even a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis and blithely believes that it will “all work out” - when a quarter-million dollars of unsecured debt is involved! - shouldn’t be a lawyer. </p>

<p>This reminds me of those people who bought half-million dollar houses on a $30k a year salary - except they were generally not very savvy people, and certainly weren’t trying to be attorneys.</p>

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<p>I’m sympathetic b/c I don’t like the idea of people so young saddled with so much debt, but the point has been stated clearly: it wouldn’t have taken a lot of research to see how bad a bet law school is for so many. Although maybe I should feel equally sympathetic for taxpayers, who are going to get stuck the the massive unpaid loan bill-$1 trillion and counting. Law school is only a small part of that, but still a significant amount of debt that probably won’t get repaid.
And I don’t let the law schools off the hook; these dead-end jobs some schools are creating are evidence of culpability and nothing else. I am referring here to the “new” jobs laws schools are creating for their own grads only, not the established fellowships that some law schools have offered for years. It’s a legal prepetual motion machine: charge $50,000 in tuition, then offer a one-year job paying $35K. The only one making out in that transaction is the law school. And it’s the law schools which have relentlessly charged more and more each year, squeezing every penny out of gullible new students with the chimera of high paying jobs, or at least a degree that “you can use for anything”.</p>

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<p>When I entered law school in 2011 few of my classmates knew all that much about what was going on. The information was out there, sure, but to get at it you first had to doubt what your school was telling you. Maybe they’d heard about a downturn in the legal market (though I doubt it) but they’d heard about it in the background of the Great Recession. Law didn’t stand out from any of the other collapsing industries without doing quite a bit of digging. My natural cynicism helped me out there but many of my classmates were not so lucky. I’m not sure why we think they should be. After all, we’ve been teaching them for years to trust their parents and teachers and both those groups were selling law school quite hard. Is our argument seriously going to be “Ignore what those people who have led and guided you your whole life are saying, I’m from the internet”?</p>

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<p>Being more perceptive than most. As for that “shouldn’t be a lawyer” business, I think it misses the point. It’s not about whether a person is well suited for a given profession, it’s about whether the circumstances that led them where they are warrant sympathy. Whether the people should or shouldn’t be lawyers I can’t say, but I think it’s reasonable to point out that a lot of what led and still leads people into law school has nothing to do with the given student.</p>