<p>Given the number of CC students who mention planning on a law degree, some rather disturbing information. I was particularly unimpressed by Columbia hiring unemployed law school grads precisely for the six week period that overlapped the count date for reporting employment numbers.</p>
<p>My D had considered law school seriously enough to take a prep course this summer. However, she lived with current law school students & recent law school grads this summer, and she decided that she didn’t want to take the chance of paying a fortune & not getting the kind of job she wanted … and having to take it because loans needed to be repaid. She also decided that she really just wasn’t all that interested in law … which certainly helped make the decision easy … but it doesn’t seem as appealing financially as it once was.</p>
<p>You would think that kids would stop going to law school if it became widely known that it put you $250,000 in debt with no prospects for a job that will earn you enough to pay down that debt.</p>
<p>But listen to the graduated lawyer featured in the article:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Amazing…</p>
<p>Of course, he was piling on this debt and living very large off of his loans…</p>
<p>Law firms depend on business and the business world has been pummeled by the Great Recession. How far law firms will come back as the economic climate gets better will be interesting to see.</p>
<p>My son is in his second year as an undergrad and has talked about attending law school. He also is interested in getting his PhD or MBA. Not sure what route he will take, but if he reads enough articles about the debt that law school grads have, that PhD or MBA is going to sound better and better.</p>
<p>I just read this and was going to post. Scary stuff! I wonder if we will be hearing the same about MBAs next. I believe there is a much healthier job market for MBAs than JDs, but trust me, business schools operate exactly like law schools.</p>
<p>That article if frightening.</p>
<p>D thought about law school, but a stint as an intern in an overseas firm last summer helped her see that law was not for her.</p>
<p>Depends on your financial situation. We are encouraging my DD to go to law school next year because we feel it is a great basic education regardless if she works as lawyer some day, though I believe that she will. We will cover the cost of our children’s grad school educations so she will not incur any debt. She has been working as an assistant in a law firm since her graduation last May and she really enjoys what she is learning and doing.</p>
<p>A friend’s S is a second year law student. According to her, he chose law school because “he didn’t really know what he wanted to do after undergrad”. She had hoped that he once in law school he would “find himself”. So far I don’t think that has happened and she is pretty worried about how he will pay off the debt when he graduates. To make matters worse, he chose the most expensive law school he was accepted to thinking the “name” would be of value in the future.</p>
<p>The article seems to give credence to the thought that a name law school is a BIG help in getting a law firm job. A degree from the bottom 2/3 of law schools piles on lots of debt without a lot of employment bang.</p>
<p>Wow - great article - thanks for posting. My son is a college sophomore and has always planned to go to law school - but is now less certain. My feeling is that if one can get into a top law school - it might still be a worthwhile path - but students who go to 3rd and 4th tier law schools are just delusional about their prospects.</p>
<p>The kid the article was about went to Thomas Jefferson School of Law i.e. a fourth tier law school. This is why top 14 i think is pushed so hard.</p>
<p>Then the article goes to Columbia, didn’t think it was that bad.</p>
<p>The kid in the article is an idiot, but the article is true. My son also bailed on the law school plan (didn’t even take LSAT even though we had paid for it…which made me mad) because he thought it was a bad investment right now. You pretty much have to go to a T20 (I know they say T14, but I don’t) school and do well at that school. OR-do well at the state university law school in the state where you plan to practice. The top kids at UTenn and Alabama ARE getting good jobs.<br>
Going to a Loyola or a DePaul, both fine schools, is a mistake unless you are very connected and have a sure-job for when you get out.<br>
I can’t tell you how many resumes and calls our legal department gets every single day…from VERY experienced, talented lawyers.</p>
<p>D2 is considering law school, but she is only 17. My sister is telling D2 top law schools or bust, but she went to Stanford law. The only up side is we do have a lot of lawyers on my sister´s side of family (in-laws).</p>
<p>“The kid in the article is an idiot, but the article is true.”</p>
<p>I couldn’t have said it better myself. </p>
<p>A large majority of the law students in this country are making a terrible mistake. If you get into a T14 school, and/or your parents are paying, and/or you get a generous scholarship, and/or you have a job lined up through connections, law school may make a lot of sense. Most students don’t fit into any of those categories, and they’ll pay for their bad bets for the rest of their lives.</p>
<p>The problem is that it sounds like basically anyone can get a law degree, if they are willing to pay for it, because every university wants to offer a law degree because its a money maker regardless of the job market (business schools are the same). This is quite unlike, say, med school where its extremely competitive to get in, but there are jobs at the end of it.</p>
<p>I have a quick question regarding law school. The University of Delaware (my state flagship) is opening up a law school the fall after I graduate from college. Law school will be free (or really reduced I don’t remember) for the first class. Would it be worth it to spend my law school there if I could be admitted or would it be better to pay a lot of money and go to an elite law school?</p>
<p>let’s get down to it - the problem begins with the garden variety ba degree from lac. how many on this site have continued to recount that after graduating with a ba in humanities, social studies, or whatever, they or their kid plans to or did go on to law school, after which wonderful things certainly happen? 30 years ago that’s what my wife did, and she has had a fine career. but from what i have seen, this profession is returning to the unseemly days when the practice was aka soliciting or ambulance-chasing. attorneys really scramble to accumulate “billable hours” every month to cover their overhead in the firm. how different is that from sales targets. no wonder the country is so litigious. as for newly minted jds, maybe try wearing a sandwich board. as for parents of prospective or current lac students, encourage your kid to at least minor in something related to a job description. supply and demand cannot be overlooked in preparing for today’s job market.</p>
<p>raiderade- I sure wouldn’t want to be the first graduating class from a new law school in this environment. Delaware is a small state, and you will be fighting all the Penn grads for jobs- not to mention Temple and all the DC schools.</p>
<p>A good friend’s daughter is a second year law student at Columbia – while she has outstanding grades in law school and got good offers for summer associate positions with several big law firms in NYC, apparently the same is not true for students who were not in (approximately) the top half of the class. (Approximately because Columbia doesn’t rank, but apparently law firms can tell from your transcript about where you fall.) So a huge number of students are spending about $70K a year for three years of a top law school, and a whole lot of them do not have offers for jobs. The other scary thing is that summer associate offers (for the summer after your second year) are made in September or early October of your second year, and there is very little opportunity to interview for big law jobs at the start of your third year – if you didn’t get a summer associate position, or the firm didn’t like you, or if the firm downsizes, you don’t have much in the way of options. </p>
<p>Another friend is a manager for our state’s Public Defender program – and she tells me that they’re continually having to tell new law school grads that they’re unlikely to be able to afford working for the Public Defender’s office given the amount of college debt they have – often both undergrad and law school debt.</p>
<p>The OP complains that Columbia hired graduates on a temporary basis for 6 weeks that overlapped February 15, the relevant date for counting how many graduates were employed. However, the article named only one law school that did so: Georgetown, which hired 3 graduates. As its admissions deadlines for its various programs are February 1 and March 1, perhaps the law school had good reason to hire them. While I can’t defend Georgetown giving a variety of answers to the same questions, at the same time it is unfair for the OP to claim without evidence that Columbia did the same thing, or for the article to imply that hiring graduates temporarily is solely an effort to manipulate numbers or is common practice among top law schools.</p>
<p>The law school graduate featured most prominently in the article, Mr. Wallerstein, apparently used borrowed money to pay law school tuition and living expenses, rent a spacious apartment, study abroad for two months (normally not a component of law school), and pay $15,000 in living costs during months of studying for the bar. (In contrast, I think I took two weeks off work to study for the bar exam in one state and none to study for the bar exam in a second.) His story doesn’t indicate that law school is a losing game, but that failing to live frugally when one has no income is.</p>
<p>I found the article to be interesting to read but heavy on anecdotes and light on facts. Of course, aspiring lawyers should be aware that legal jobs are not guaranteed and some large law firms have even recently laid off associates. The system of reporting the number of law students employed after graduation should probably be changed–but until it is, aspiring law students should use other information to judge the quality of their prospective law schools.</p>