Hacker News Reader

Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

There's a good reason for this: law school is a terrible deal for the vast majority of applicants and potential applicants. Paul Campos's book Don't Go To Law School (Unless) (which I wrote about here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-sch...) is one of the more comprehensive examples I've seen, although I'm sure the book mentioned is good too.

The really bizarre thing is that 60K people are still deluded enough to apply.

View on HN

For a lot of people I know who've gone to law school, I'm not sure it's entirely a delusion. I think the situation is that they find themselves a couple years out of college and still unable to put their BAs in a Humanities field (another area for which supply has greatly outpaced demand) to use. So they're already saddled with a debt they can't really service, and they've already got the B word in their heads. And along comes a really attractive proposition: If you double down on it by going back to school, you catch an immediate break because you get to immediately stop paying your student loans, and wont have to start again until after you've graduated. And sure, after that you'll have even more debt, but there's also a decent (maybe not great, but decent) chance that your new degree will let you land a sweet job that lets you pay them off much more easily and have plenty of money to spare. And even if you only land an OK job, hopefully it'll still be enough to keep your loans covered. . . and if it isn't, hey, no harm no foul. You're already thinking about the B word right now, so even if it turns out you can't handle all the new debt you've taken on it's not like you'll be any worse off than you are now.

Posed that way, I'm not sure what the students are doing is terribly irrational or delusional. What's crazy is the irrational credit system that enables/encourages this kind of thing to happen.

Sidenote: The B word is irrelevant here as you can't bankrupt your way out of student debt. You're stuck with it forever.

But otherwise I find your arguments compelling, and an accurate model of how my humanities friends were thinking when they applied/got into law schools.

It's difficult - more difficult than for other kinds of debt - but not impossible.

http://www.bankruptcylawnetwork.com/what-is-the-brunner-test...

I think in America they passed a law that student loans are not relived once you declare yourself bankrupt though. From memory Bush passed it because so many students were doing it due to crazy debt

Student loans don't discharge in bankruptcy. Also, the odds are not decent of landing a "sweet job that lets you pay [loans] off much more easily and have plenty of money to spare." Take a look at the bimodal distribution for starting lawyer salaries.[1] In 2011, less than 6% of graduates got jobs at large law firms paying $160k.[2] I don't know current attrition rate stats, but generally most of the entry-level class at a large firm is gone within 5-7 years.[3]

It sounds like the people you know may have gotten lucky pursuing a high-risk gamble, whether they knew it or not.

[1] http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/10/five-stag...

[2] http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legalwhiteboard/2012/07/a-p...

[3] http://www.law.com/jsp/llf/PubArticleLLF.jsp?id=119494824709...

Thanks for the link, I think there were some good insights here.

I'm a law school dropout myself, having left after the first semester (I got an MS in Engineering instead). To me, the big problem isn't that there are all these law grads, it's that you have to go through three years of law school in order to sit for the bar exam.

While I was only there for a semester, I did pass all my courses and leave in good academic standing. I just didn't want to waste (EDIT: spend) any more time on the subject. In my opinion, it could easily be an undergraduate major, or a shorter master's degree. Unlike grad school in Sci/Eng, where there's no way to take the classes without a specialized background, law really doesn't need to be a grad degree.

For example, my graduate course in Advanced Nonlinear Optimization, were you deal with optimality in equations with multiple variables subject to multiple (nonlinear) constraints, obviously required a certain math background. You need to know calculus, and you need to be able to deal with differential equations, or at least handle first and second order partial derivatives in equations with multiple variables. You also really do need a course in linear algebra, and you probably should have at least a couple of theory courses under your belt, because you are going to need to do some proofs. So, you know, grad degree.

While torts, civil procedure, and contracts do require the ability to read some dense material,make sense of it, and write about it, there's really no "need" for an undergraduate degree in English or History. I'm also highly skeptical that three years of graduate study are at all required. I think that top students are more than capable of mastering this coursework at a far more rapid rate.

The problem to me isn't that lawyers aren't finding jobs, it's that people have to spend far too much time and go far too deeply into debt to get this credential. Feel free to keep the bar exam and make it hard. If it were an undergrad degree, and students could graduate for little or no debt, they'd be able to either 1) work for less, and get legal services to people who actually desperately need them, or 2) do what a lot of people do - go outside your field and find a job. I haven't found a lot of call for writing proofs about convex sets. It's hardly some great tragedy that I instead learned about programming and found gainful employment that way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com