<p>"But experts say that the planned reductions by at least 10 of the roughly 200 laws schools accredited in the U.S., suggest a new reality is sinking in: The legal profession may never return to its prerecession prosperity."</p>
<p>""This looks like it's a big structural shift," says William Henderson, an Indiana University law professor who studies the market for law jobs. "Law schools don't think this is going to bounce back.""</p>
<p>^^Its the moral thing to do. Law schools should not be encouraging students to borrow $200k when the school knows with certainty that the bottom xx of its class will have no jobs/incomes by which to payback those loans.</p>
<p>What’s missing from the article is the data for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and others which show that the law field only needs 25k grads every year, about half of what is actually being produced.</p>
<p>I’m not sure I agree with that. It will certainly work to protect the interests of current practicing attorneys. I’d rather the opportunity to study and practice law be open to whomever is interested and qualified. Licensed attorneys do not need to be employed by anyone; they are qualified to hang their own shingles.</p>
<p>I do think prospective law students should be well-informed and not misled about their prospects, however. But I don’t think law schools should have to be responsible for the decisions of their college-graduate applicants, so long as they are not making false promises to get them there.</p>
<p>Plenty of bottom-of-the-class lawyers from lower tier law schools had/have successful careers in law.</p>
<p>There is an article in the current Journal Of Higher Ed with different stats - I think that of the students who graduated in 2011, it says two thirds are employed.</p>
<p>Also read another article this week that contradicts the idea that law grads are worse off than any other.</p>
<p>Reducing enrollment by 10% does not address or solve the issue of law schools misrepresenting the employment prospects of prospective graduates. If law schools are misleading applicants, then they need to stop that. The solution should not be to prevent interested students from pursuing higher education in the law, unless one prefers nanny-state solutions.</p>
<p>Exactly. IMO, it’s no different than making a massive home loan to someone that we know with 99% certainty that the borrow has no chance of paying in back. </p>
<p>The real questions: what % have permanent jobs that require a JD and are not working retail or at Starbucks (“industry”) and did not take a Research position offered by the law school to boost their reported numbers? And note, even those that do have permanent legal jobs, many are making ~$60k – which ain’t close to even service the interest on $200k in loans.</p>
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<p>Easy, get the federal government out of the loan guarantee business, and stop being a banking “nanny”.</p>
<p>Bay- Things have changed. Job prospects out of lower tier schools and/or bottom of the class at even top schools are slim to none. It is truly frightening and the schools are lying, lying, lying. As a practicing lawyer, I get the resumes and the pleas for help from my alma mater and the highly ranked law school here in my city.</p>
<p>I was furious at my son when he bailed on applying to law school for fall 2010. I did not see what he was going to to instead. (part of why I was furious was that I had paid for TWO sittings of LSAT which he never took AND the review course…) I’ve told him several times since that he made the right decision. He got a good job and has since been hired away by the top company in his industry. The law school thing just isn’t working well these days for most students. </p>
<p>BCEagle- I’m hurt! I thought you were my fan! :)</p>
<p>What I would do if I were hell bent to go to law school these days is this: 1. Make sure I got into a top 20 school OR the state school in a state I want to live in forever. This means high college GPA and outstanding LSAT. 2. DO WELL. You have to be in the top portion of the class. 3. Shoot for a strong regional firm like Baker Donelson or Waller in Nashville. Quality of life is better. Still a lot of miserable lawyers out there, but in my mind the regional firm route is the best. 4. Stay away from NYC. The lawyers are miserable.</p>
<p>blue,
Do you feel the same way about undergraduate colleges, then? If college grads are not getting jobs, should we prevent them from attending college?</p>
<p>I don’t disagree that there are more law grads than current jobs, but plenty of J.D.s use their degrees in other careers: real estate, sports agents, etc. Limiting the supply of lawyers simply reduces competition, keeping billing rates high and representation less accessible.</p>
<p>Again, if the problem is misrepresentation, then address that. If the problem is that too many student are taking big loans, then address that. Don’t stop people from learning about the law. To me, that is stupid.</p>
<p>^^I see them as different, Bay. The max federal loan that an undergrad can get is ~$25k for four years. But there is no max on grad school loans, so if the COA is $250k over three years, a student can borrow that much and the feds will guarantee it. Moreover, the interest compounds while the student is in school, so total debt can be close to $300k by graduation time. Check out a loan calculator to see what the minimum payments are on that kinda money. Law School grad income is bimodal: of those with legal jobs, a bunch making $160k and a bunch making $60k. It is impossible to make the principal and interest payments on the latter salary, and also pay for rent.</p>
<p>It sounds like your real issue is with the large loans some law students take on, blue. Reducing enrollment doesn’t target that issue. There may be plenty of would-be law students who would not have taken unreasonable loans who won’t get to go now.</p>
<p>Again, I disagree Bay. If we could waive a magic wand and reduce ALL law school slots by 10%, there would be thousands of fewer students in massive debt without a job.</p>
<p>The federal loan guarantees create a moral hazard. I can guarantee you that law schools wouldn’t look the other way if they had to loan out their own money and the debt was dischargeable in bk.</p>
<p>btw: why I believe it is a moral issue is bcos law schools are cash cows for universities. They spend the ‘profits’ from the LS on other programs.</p>
<p>“Also read another article this week that contradicts the idea that law grads are worse off than any other.”</p>
<p>What’s different is the debt the law grads take on.</p>
<p>All but a small handful of law schools are not-for-profit institutions that reap huge benefits from tax breaks. I think that a responsibility to serve the public good comes along with that huge public subsidy. The caveat emptor approach, where schools have no more duty to their students than snake oil salesmen do to customers, is not consistent with that responsibility.</p>
<p>Reducing or limiting access to legal representation and education about the law does not serve the public good. Quite the opposite.</p>
<p>It is quite a stretch to analogize placing the onus on college-educated citizens to make the right call about law school and loans, to law school as snake-oil salesman.</p>
<p>I say, put a stop to availability of huge loans, don’t put a stop to higher education. Doesn’t that make sense?</p>
<p>Whether it is the moral thing to do or not, isn’t it likely that the motivation for the law schools to reduce enrollment is that they need to either reduce enrollment or lower standards of admission due to reduced student demand? Lowering standards of admission to fill the class may cost them prestige points that are so important to them and their graduates.</p>
<p>I’m all for student loan reform. But in practice, the higher education is only possible because of the loans. If most students cannot borrow piles of money, they can’t go to law school. Ending the availability of large loans would shut the doors of law school to far more students, more quickly and more drastically, than would shrinking class sizes 10%. It would also disproportionately cut nonwhite and first-generation students out of the 1L class.</p>
<p>“Reducing or limiting access to legal representation and education about the law does not serve the public good. Quite the opposite.”</p>
<p>45,000 seats a year is a whole lot of access and a whole lot of potential representation – far more than any other country in the world, both by absolute numbers and by proportion of population. If an excess of underemployed lawyers really brought down the price of legal services, fees would already be close to zero. The problem is that the people who lack services can’t pay anything at all, or so little that it’s less than the lawyer would make at Starbucks. Only greater support for legal aid (whether charitable or state-sponsored) can address that problem.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus – maybe. Law schools only care about how they’re doing relative to their competitors. Absolute numbers mean very little. So if a reduction in applicants hits all the schools in a tier roughly equally, the impact of lower apparent selectivity is minimized.</p>
<p>Wait a second, I thought someone (you?) said most law schools are money-making cash cows. That makes it sound like there is plenty of room to lower tuition.</p>
<p>It wasn’t me. At some universities, yes, it is true that they are cash cows. But even if tuition were cut in half tomorrow, I’d still consider, say, $75,000 over three years to be a giant pile of money. Absent subsidies and guarantees, most law students would not be able to borrow even that much (never mind the $150,000 required by current tuition).</p>