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<p>Again, the most important difference is that colleges almost always either guarantee that they’ll meet your demonstrated financial need or waive tuition altogether if your family’s income falls below a certain level. Law schools never do this, and rarely give any need-based aid at all. </p>
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<p>And I’m saying that this is a really poor argument. You claimed that people in “many” professions had debt comparable to that of law school grads. You then listed several occupations with no data at all about their average debt load. The fact that it hasn’t been disproved doesn’t mean it’s been proven. This is in addition to the point that the article was never about pure debt load anyway. </p>
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<p>Of course these are the questions on the table. This is the very point of the entire article. The debt is only relevant to the extent that it is difficult to pay off. It was you who decided to caricature the article as saying simply “lawyers have debt and financial troubles,” and then failed to even knock down your own strawman with any proof that their financial situation was comparable to other professions. </p>
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<p>And many don’t (including nearly all of the top schools) and the ones that do have relatively few spots in their PT programs. I really don’t see why you brought this up at all.</p>
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<p>Sure, and I did, to demonstrate that there was a much greater stratification in law than other similar professions. Which is, of course, a central point of the article that you continue to ignore. The high levels of risk and competition and the huge gap between the top and the bottom all make law different from these fields. Law school by design leaves large numbers of people saddled with tremendous debt they can’t repay. That’s not true of any other professional school I’ve heard of.</p>
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<p>Well, no, I don’t see how that’s really relevant to a discussion of what happens to the people at the bottom. Though I guess it does demonstrate the uniquely large gap that exists in the profession. But it really doesn’t do the Hofstra grad any good that Harvard grads have great jobs, does it? Although of course the existence of those jobs, the perception that lawyers are, on average, doing really well and the high visibility of successful lawyers might have motivated them to attend law school in the first place. </p>
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<p>The perspective you’re offering is precisely the one the article addresses. Specifically, focusing on averages or the people at the top and ignoring the huge gap between the top and the bottom, the high level of competition and the high rates of un- and under-employment. It’s sort of like refuting the claim that the United States has a higher poverty rate than Sweden by pointing to the US’ higher per capita GDP and far larger number of millionaires. It completely misses the point.</p>
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<p>I don’t know why you’d be surprised; you yourself seem to have incredibly inaccurate ideas about the legal profession. Again, nobody has ever said that lawyers are entitled to some kind of financial immunity, and the point of the article is not merely that some lawyers are not well-off. I realize it’s much easier to refute these claims than what is actually being discussed.</p>