<p>I read an LA times article about how community college students are going to be funneled into Law schools.</p>
<p>This is called the "Pathways to Law School" program, and it's preparing to exploit 6-figures from naive minorities, many of whom will work as baristas at starbucks or some mind-numbing, low paying job in a cubicle.</p>
<p>Point is, what is the point of dumping more water into an overflowing bucket?</p>
<p>Aren't law graduates facing high unemployment as well as continued saturation of law degrees?</p>
<p>There’s nothing in the article about whether there’s any meaningful financial support or even financial advising. Nor is it clear, given that the students have to be accepted to the law schools’ undergraduate campuses, whether they’re going to be taking on undergraduate debt in the first instance.</p>
<p>Our profession is in a real bind. There’s a terrible pipeline problem where we aren’t preparing minority and low-income students for success in law school. That’s bad not only for law schools, but for the profession and for the clients we serve (meaning everybody). At the same time, if you help 10 disadvantaged kids get through law school, maybe 3 of them will end up in the legal career they hoped for, and the other 7 may well be worse off. The program as described may be better for the law schools than it is for any individual student.</p>
<p>One possibility is that many of these kids won’t end up in law school, but that the program may motivate them to finish college more efficiently and get better grades. That would be a great outcome even if they don’t go to law school.</p>
<p>I’ll let others comment on the appropriateness of that phrase.</p>
<p>Moving past that, while as a lawyer (who went to Harvard), I see no reason whatsoever to push even more people overall to law school, people from schools like Harvard do things like corporate finance, M&A and corporate litigation. They don’t do things such as family law, criminal law in private practice, medical malpractice law, etc. People from law schools mentioned in the article, such as Loyola, do such things, so ensuring that schools like that have a steady supply of students is fine. Plus encouraging more minorities to be lawyers helps lawyer diversity, which is a good thing.</p>
<p>I have done hiring in law firms for decades and it’s been my experience that minority recruitment is done from law schools where white students can never even get an interview. It’s a totally different process.</p>
<p>@zoosermom interesting… so would the minority students gain a noticeable financial advantage over the “overrepresented” races, like Asians and Caucasians?</p>
<p>And also, would you agree that there are simply too many law graduates in the market?</p>
<p>Entirely too many graduates from second-rate schools. </p>
<p>I guess that getting a job is a financial advantage, right? Black and hispanic students are recruited by top firms out of schools where white and Asian graduates have almost no realistic chance of getting any job at all and couldn’t ever be interviewed by good firms. But the reason is that the real numbers of black and Hispanic graduates is so small that it can’t fill the need for firms to meet diversity goals. Many people don’t know this, but law firm rankings (which are incredibly important to law firms) take diversity heavily into account. Black and Hispanic graduates of top schools can pretty much write their own tickets.</p>
<p>As someone who went to what I hope is a “top school”, Harvard, and who had plenty of African-American and Hispanic classmates, I find the above posts extremely offensive and dismissive. My classmates of color were just as qualified as I am (as a white person), I don’t see that they fared any better than white people in interview season. Of people I know who went to what’s considered the #1 firm, Wachtell, all were white. The rest of us all had plenty of options, from Cravath to Skadden and the like. Nobody in my class had any trouble whatsoever in getting a job at a top-tier firm, regardless of race. Sure, some 1L hiring programs were focused on students of color, but others were focused on Europeans and other international students. Those are fine by me.</p>
<p>Thing is, a majority of these community college students will likely go to 2nd or 3rd tier, or for-profit law schools…there, they will get thousands and thousands in debt, then they can’t find a job to pay off those loans since there are too many lawyers.</p>
<p>Yes, lawyers can be successful but it seems like the prestige of the school is a major factor in how well they are employed.</p>
<p>HappyAlumnus, I said nothing about qualification. I spoke of scarsity. There are so few black and hispanic students (in real numbers) at top law schools that firms looking to diversify need to cast a wider net, which is not necessary for black and Asian students because they are, wait for it, over represented.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>You should read carefully and ensure that you comprehend what you read. Did my statement about qualifications state that it was in response to your post? NO. (I stated that I was responding to “posts” (plural) above.) So your assertions (which are based on your false assumption that my statement was in response to yours) are wrong.</p></li>
<li><p>You should run a spell check on the post in which you make an ad hominem attack. It’s a good idea to not make typos in a post such as that. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>So your ad hominem attack, your thinking and your spelling are all wrong. Try again.</p>
<p>Asian students are certainly not “over represented” (her spelling) if you look at the credentials of Asian applicants; to the contrary, if Asian students were admitted to top law schools at the same rates as white students with the same qualifications, many more Asian students would be accepted than currently are. On that basis, Asian students are significantly under-represented. My Asian classmates were somewhat bitter about this fact, which smacks of the racism-based caps on Jewish admissions to top schools decades ago.</p>
<p>have you seen any applicant data by race or ethnicity or even sex (to be able to make such a claim)?</p>
<p>(Not trying to be argumentative, but I’m been looking for same for awhile, and haven’t seen it anywhere.)</p>
<p>fwiw zoos, my reaction was the same as yours. Given its proximity to your post, I assumed that Happy was addressing you. Critical reading fail. :)</p>
<p>bluebayou, try typing “Asian-American LSAT score” into Yahoo and tons of articles, with data on point, come up. In addition, recollections of extensive venting by Asian and Asian-American students in law school about “caps” on Asian and Asian-American admissions, while not scientifically valid data, are consistent with the data that is available online.</p>
<p>As a white person, I’d much rather have whites and Asians admitted purely on merit. The result would be more Asians and fewer whites, which would be fine by me because I’d have sharper classmates and more diversity.</p>
<p>hmm, the first three articles I found all showed that Asians had lower LSAT mean scores than whites, including a 2014 post in the American Lawyer. (But carry on.)</p>