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<p>I think the difference is COA, and debt incurred. One can attend and Cal State and earn an MBA for ~$7k per year + plus living expenses for two years. In contrast, a LS tuition alone is $30-40k per year.</p>
<p>I think that the issue of unemployed lawyers is irrelevant. The law school degree opens all sorts of doors and just like any degree you have find a niche. My brother used his law degree to become a commercial real estate developer and could not be happier. My fellow biologist obtained a law degree and went into patent law consulting for the pharmaceuticals and had to turn down work. The point is, the degree is invaluable…you don’t have to be a court lawyer. I always recommend this degree.</p>
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<p>Well, if they asked me, I would certainly ask them to seriously reconsider going to law school. The odds that they’ll be really successful as lawyers just aren’t very good.</p>
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<p>Law school does little to nothing to help someone become a manager or entrepreneur. Someone saddled with significant debt from law school isn’t in a good position to do something risky like starting their own business. If by letting “supply and demand” sort things out, you mean a lot of new grads un- or under-employed, that’s what’s happening now, and not a lot of people think that’s an ideal result.</p>
<p>Remember the days when the only loans available were for academic disciplines that enhanced our ability to smite the godless communists before they smote us?</p>
<p>The idea of borrowing money to attend college/graduate/professional school is quite new in historical terms, only a few decades old. The whole concept may be flawed and unworkable.</p>
<p>Other developed countries don’t burden their young people with educational debt. It used to be that there was a payout on the risk of borrowing to get the degree. The modern American workplace may no longer support that practice.</p>
<p>One can make persuasive arguments for the value of a liberal arts degree. The same arguments are hollow when applied to occupational training like law or medicine.</p>
<p>Technical degrees are the only ones worth it anymore. Publicly financed with moderately high income.</p>
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<p>Sure and the people making that argument would be mainly the fat-cat college administrators who are making a killing off of the whole student loan system.</p>
<p>I’m not an economist, but I’m pretty confident that if you got rid of student loans, the colleges and universities would be forced to cut tuitions dramatically. It’s just a matter of supply and demand.</p>
<p>Also, you would start to see more CCNY-type situations. i.e. inexpensive schools turning into academic powerhouses because lots of smart but poor kids are attending. </p>
<p>It used to be possible to “work your way” through college and law school. So it’s clearly possible to provide a decent education at a low price. </p>
<p>But it’s no longer possible to “work your way” because colleges and law schools have raised tuitions dramatically. Colleges and law schools have raised tuitions dramatically in large part because people can afford to pay ridiculous tutions. Student loans are a big driver of this problem, IMHO, because they make it possible for students to pay ridiculous tuitions.</p>
<p>So I think students would actually be hurt very little if you got rid of student loans. </p>
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<p>It seems to me that everyone who pays ridiculous tuition is affected by the student loan problem.</p>
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<p>When did they do those things? I’m gonna guess it was in the last century. </p>
<p>I too used to recommend law school, but I realized a few months ago that I was fooled by history. Among other things, law school has become ridiculously expensive.</p>
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<p>I just don’t see how. In my 30+ years in business, a non-relevant (law) degree is a detriment to be overcome by relevant experience. Interviewing a 25 year-old with three years of relevant experience or a JD with zero…hmmmmmm.</p>
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<p>Sounds like legal work to me…</p>
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<p>You mean, he got outta law and he’s happy? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>This is the market at work. If undergrads want to go into law, colleges will open or expand law schools to meet that demand. When word gets around that only those with high ranks from name schools are making big bucks, demand will drop and enrollments will fall.</p>
<p>Personally, I think a law degree would be good training for various endeavors and an interesting intellectual exercise, though it would be hard to justify the years and dollars for that.</p>
<p>It’s not dissimilar to advanced liberal arts degrees. For a while, students flocked to PhD programs imagining a cozy academic career. They got a rude awakening when they found that tenure-track positions are rare and drew hundreds of applicants.</p>
<p>If colleges and universities could easily open or expand med schools, we’d no doubt have an oversupply of doctors in a decade or two.</p>
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<p>This has been the case for quite some time, but demand and enrollments are not dropping. Part of the reason is that schools are putting out employment information that is inaccurate or badly misleading. Applicants also aren’t good at understanding how likely they are to end up with a high-paying job, which isn’t helped by people who encourage them to ignore logic. </p>
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<p>Again, this isn’t really the case. It’s not even good training for the practice of law.</p>
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<p>Except students STILL flock to grad programs…check out Inside Higher Ed news. Of course, the difference with PhD and law school is that many grad programs will pay YOU to attend. Thus, an ABD may only end up with an MA and no job after a few years of academics, but s/he still wont be $200k in debt and no job.</p>
<p>I’ve worked with many attorneys who have earned my respect for their ethics and their skills, but when it comes to associations of attorneys such as the ABA I am appalled at how they fit the negative stereotypes.</p>
<p>“The ABA cites antitrust concerns in refusing to block new schools, taking a weak approach to regulation. For example, in 2008 the ABA created an accreditation task force to study the need for changes, but in the end it proposed only cosmetic changes.”</p>
<p>The ABA cares about today’s revenues for today’s attorneys, many of whom are working or hoping to work as law school faculty. Never mind that guarding the jobs of lower-tier law school faculty will perpetuate the glut of disappointed would-be lawyers. What really matters to the ABA is to keep those paychecks coming and to create even more faculty slots as still more unneeded law schools are launched.</p>
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<p>That “this is the market at work” does not imply that regulations do not need to be put in place. See: The financial crisis.</p>
<p>I’ve had the feeling for a while that there is a bubble aspect to law school tuition. </p>
<p>Law schools are relatively cheap to operate - many classes consist of a professor standing in front of a hundred or more students. The physical plant is relatively cheap to maintain - a building with some large lecture rooms, some seminar rooms and offices, and a library. (The library is a big expense, but medical schools also have expensive libraries, in addition to lab equipment, and much smaller class sizes.) I’ve read that most univesities actually make money off of their law schools.</p>
<p>It’s also true that most young people overestimate their own abilibies, and the likelihood that they will be one of the lucky ones who earn impressive salaries immediately after law school. They also tend to underestimate how difficult it will be to pay back massive student loans.</p>
<p>I’ve found great professional fulfillment practicing law, but I did attend one of those inexpensive academic powerhouses. (They’re essentially gone now, and don’t appear to be likely to come back. It wasn’t just “smart but poor” students who applied to them - plenty of “smart but rich” students were attracted by the low tuition.) My advice to my own children will be twofold: (a) they should go to law school only if they have a burning desire to practice law, and (b) a burning desire to practice law isn’t necessarily indicative of a well-informed, healthy psyche.</p>
<p>90% of lawyers are a waste of life, public resources and energy, and capital inertia. they should find something that produces wealth (in one form or another) rather than being extra mass on the economic machinery.</p>
<p>now, don’t get me wrong…we need some lawyers/attorneys, but we don’t need that many. the states would be such a better place with an overhauled legal/financial system.</p>
<p>minimize: bankers, lawyers, options traders, creditors, money capitalists, advertisers, marketers, conservatives, lack of good food.</p>
<p>maximize: scientists, engineers, educators, artists/musicians, doctors, writers, explorers, students, liberals, people who make good food</p>
<p>The first thing we can do is repeal the civil rights and overtime laws. There are too many of those parasitic lawyers running around making a living suing employers, stores, landlords and the like for discriminating and not paying overtime.</p>
<p>Then we can eliminate peoples’ right to a hearing if they receive a decision from the IRS they don’t like. Same thing for immigration hearings. </p>
<p>Next we can repeal all these panty-waist environmental laws which require armies of lawyers to enact, interpret, and adjudicate.</p>
<p>Did I leave anything out? How can we get rid of the lawyers who represent people and businesses in real estate closings and other transactions?</p>
<p>Or maybe we just make sure that the liberals are completely in control. No doubt they will do what it takes to reduce the number of lawyers.</p>
<p>rocketDA,</p>
<p>Hear. Hear!!</p>
<p>The problem with a glut of lawyers is that they self perpetuate and create work for themselves with frivolous lawsuits, making doing business more expensive and placing a drain on society. The only people who benefit from the bottom 90% are those selling yellow page ads, daytime TV commercials and billboards.</p>
<p>Perhaps those who can’t make a living should sue the law schools that accepted them. :D</p>
<p>skinner:</p>
<p>real estate is probably not a great example for you to use. Yeah, I know some states require lawyers to do the closing (thanks to the local legal union), but lawyers are not used in California for standard home closings, the nation’s biggest market for RE.</p>
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<p>I disagree. Let me ask you this: </p>
<p>Do you think people should have the right to hire an attorney before they sign a bunch of papers and enter into what will probably be by far the biggest transaction of their entire life? Do you think it’s reasonable for them to choose to do so?</p>
<p>Do you think corporations should have the right to hire attorneys to help them through multi-million dollar transactions? </p>
<p>Let’s make it a bit more specific: Apparently it was announced recently that Walgreens will be acquiring Duane Reade. Do you think that it makes sense for Walgreens and Duane Reade to hire fancy $300 per hour attorneys to guide them through the transaction?</p>
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<p>If the papers were standardized and written in easily understandable plain English and not legalese, would lawyers still be necessary?</p>