Law schools: Still hiding the sad truth from students | Hacker News Reader

Law schools: Still hiding the sad truth from students

management.fortune.cnn.com

Lack of transparency is a huge issue. I remember when I started law school in 2009, the economy had just collapsed and we had zero information about how graduates were faring. The kind of stuff that's available today, at least from the better law schools, information detailing the precise number of students that went into which jobs, just didn't exist. For most schools it still doesn't.

That being said, the problem with law schools is just a microcosm of the problem facing higher education throughout the country. Skyrocketing tuition has meant that more and more of the lifetime increase in earning power obtained by a degree is being captured by schools. Indeed, these days for many people the net expected value is negative. But demand for higher education seems completely inelastic, largely perpetuated by the cultural myth that the way to improve our lot as a nation is for more education and better education. The fact of the matter is that more education isn't going to make well-paying middle class jobs come back from China, any more than it's going to break the cycle of poverty in inner city ghettos. It's just a smoke signal to justify ever increasing ranks of higher-paid teachers and professors.

Also, as ever, there are university administrators with their heads in the sand: "Sarah Zearfoss, senior assistant dean for admissions, financial aid, and career planning at the University of Michigan Law School, says law schools have growing increasingly aware of the major shift in the job landscape. 'We had not been doing anything different than other law schools,' she says, noting that graduates had gone on to prestigious private firms, nonprofits, and government jobs or clerkships. 'Our students were getting great jobs, but then the economy changed and we began to see some decline in offers.'"

The situation at the University of Michigan has declined from the point where nearly everyone could get a job justifying the almost $50k/year in tuition to the point where only 50-60% of the class can do so. That's the "new normal" and it's more than just "some decline."

Yes, people going to graduate school should be able to run the numbers, especially now that so much more information is out there, but in the face of administrators like these, is there any wonder why many choose to believe instead?

> But demand for higher education seems completely inelastic, largely perpetuated by the cultural myth that the way to improve our lot as a nation is for more education and better education.

I wouldn't say that. I would say that the problem is by thinking a if you don't have a B[AS], you're worthless. Trade schools are, and will continue to be, important.

Mike Rowe sums it up in an address to congress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NwEFVUb-u0

I believe the parent's point is true. In my location (there is variance here), a graduate of a four year program needs to earn something like $43,000 per year to earn on par with a minimum wage worker without a post-secondary education when you consider the accumulated costs and lost opportunity.

The average income of a college graduate in my location is $34,000 per year. That means the majority of these graduates are effectively making less than minimum wage, yet the enrolment only continues to rise, if anything. That definitely seems inelastic to me.

Do run those numbers on a per-major basis, though. And try (though is is hard to get data) to separate the cohort who went to study and the cohort who went to party for 4 years.

I'm not sure where to even begin finding numbers for people working without a degree in the same field as the typical graduate of a given major to make the comparison, but I am definitely interested in seeing the results. My hunch says that we'll find very little difference between those with degrees and those without.

Unless you mean against minimum wage, but I'm not sure how telling that is. Certainly those with CS degrees will appear to be faring rather well, but that ignores that people without any degrees at all are doing just as well in the industry, and therefore are actually doing significantly better once you factor in the aforementioned costs.

There are also some issues around job preferences not being solely based on pay. The kinds of low-ish pay jobs worked by degree holders aren't identical to the distribution of low-ish pay jobs worked by non-degree holders, and skew, I believe, more office/white-collar rather than manual labor. Some people implicitly attach a significant value to that, whether due to working conditions or status, enough that they're willing to take that route even if they knew up front that it's not a net-positive financial decision. E.g., if attending college means you effectively make $10k/yr less, taking all costs into consideration, but you have a 60% greater chance of it being at a desk in an air-conditioned office, that might be worth it to some people.

In other words, some data on job-type mix rather than solely median salaries would be interesting.

The average income of a college graduate in my location is $34,000 per year.

Source?

Is that average income across all jobs, or entry level jobs? Because there is an expectation that people coming out of college get low-paying jobs, and then see fairly rapid career advancement.

Should law schools be held to a different standard than undergraduate programs? Last I checked, colleges don't advertise the employment prospects for a typical bachelor's degree. If you are smart enough to get into law school, you should be able to do enough research to gauge your prospects after graduation based on the law school you plan to attend and your undergraduate GPA.

The issue is, in popular culture, law is viewed as a relatively easy way (compared to medicine) to enter the upper middle class. This is outdated, but the fact remains, and it's re-enforced by many people in high ranking positions having a background in law.

Many people, particularly groups of people traditionally excluded from professional life, really have no idea about the reality. The information is out there, but if you've always been told that law is the safe, smart thing to do, you might not even know to look. Known unknowns versus unknown unknowns, and all that.

Most people fall into their work not out of a rational economic analysis (which is pretty damn hard, even for people who do it for a living) but out of impressions born of the zeitgeist. When someone chose to study CS or become a programmer (or whatever it is that you did), he or she probably didn't go through heaps of research about its prospects and then read a couple of books about whether or not those would continue in the future. Most likely, he chose to do it because he enjoyed computers, had friends with big salaries out of school, and knew there was a bunch of money flowing into companies like Google. Through luck of the draw, that decision worked out.

Number of Google m/billionaires who saw many people getting rich from a CS degree when they were in school: 0.

Fighting the previous war is always foolish. Money is made by leading the pack, not following it.

People don't go to law school to become billionaires. They go to law school because it used to be a pretty good odds ticket for a lifetime in the upper-middle class.

Law schools are almost always more expensive than undergraduate programs, aren't they?

Yes. Plus the new interest rates are 6.8% and 7.9% (the majority of which is 7.9%), which accrues immediately, as subsidized loans were eliminated last year.

The problem is the statistics that are given contain ABA-approval. Now, thanks to the efforts of LST and the broader scamblog movement, you should know better, but 5 years ago before anyone really talked about this? Is it reasonable to expect people not to trust the governing body's numbers to at least be in the realm of reality?

> The problem is the statistics that are given contain ABA-approval

Can you expand on that? Are they providing misleading data?

They allow misleading data. For example: average graduate salary $150K. They do not provide link showing that this includes only graduates who report salaries (so the formula is total of reported graduate salary / total number of graduates reporting a salary rather than total of reported salaries / total graduates. There is substantial evidence that worse outcomes are less reported, plus the school actively tracks grads with high salaries, while it ignores those without). Another example: employing students in "school funded" jobs for 9 months (when they report employment numbers), then ending the employment. Check out Law School Transparency, Inside The Law School Scam, Glenn Reynold's book Inside the Higher Education Bubble, and Constitutional Daily for more information.

I think the basic problem is that law is taught in the USA as a graduate degree, so the stakes are higher.

In Australia, most universities teach law as an undergraduate degree. It's basically viewed as the replacement for the Arts degree of the 50s: a generalist degree that shows a comfort with doing large volumes of work with verbal abstractions.

Lots of Australian law students discover that they don't want to be lawyers. They go on to other professional careers instead -- the public service, management etc etc. In my case I quit and did computer science.

I don't regret it. Legal thinking is unusually thorough and careful.

I believe the US is the only country in the world to teach law school as a graduate degree. It's a function of every school modeling itself on Harvard Law (which was the first American law school). It makes much more sense to teach law as an undergraduate degree followed by an internship, since it removes the massive debt burden brought on by undergraduate + graduate school debt.

Canadia also.

That is of course the proper way to do it. You can thank Big Academia for getting rid of the sensible LLB here in the U.S.

Indeed, even if you are an American and really want to be a lawyer it's not necessarily a bad idea to try your hand at an Australian or British law school then do an LLM in the U.S. Or learn to speak Cantonese and head over to Hong Kong (or Hindi and head to India, or Portuguese and head to Brazil) where economic development has created a large demand for lawyers.

The biggest switching divide is between common law countries (broadly, everywhere the British were) and code/civil law countries (broadly, everywhere else). They're actually quite different systems of law, not just similar systems with different contents.

I was thinking of going abroad to study, though I don't know if they are as accepting over in Asia of Anglos as we are of Asians.

Australia's education sector is catching the bug though. They want the profitable grad education, and thus Melbourne uni now offers only a JD (3 year graduate program).

UWA recently did this too, but then they partly backpedalled by offering guaranteed places in the following law degree.

So really what you're getting is a 6 year double degree instead of a 5 year double degree.

I think it's a bugger up, but I got my BCompSci (H1) and I'm happy I got in before the Melbourne Model struck.

Most law degrees in Australia are double degrees, aren't they? I haven't found too many schools that offer single degrees in Law.

Mind sharing with a non-Australian why that's the case there? (And if so, how it's different from doing a single Bachelor's degree and a JD after that.)

> Most law degrees in Australia are double degrees, aren't they?

You can take a straight LLB, which is a 4-year course. But most students figure "I'll take the double degree, it only takes an extra year and it covers my bases".

If you are absolutely certain that law is your destiny, then the straight LLB is the right move because you'll be able to do more electives.

If you're just getting a law degree because you got a high entrance score, then the double degree spreads the risk a bit. And some of them are great career-starters. Law/Commerce is a classic power combo for people looking to enter corporate Australia. Law/Arts is popular with activists and future politicians. Law/Science is around but it's a bit of a stepchild.

I studied the LLB part-time for 4 years, so I wound up with a half-degree worth of debt. If I'd gotten my shit together I'd have been able to grab a graduate-entry LLB in about a year by carrying credit, but it was long enough ago now that those credits have largely expired. Plus I just don't see the point in loading up on more debt for something I feel I've already gotten the maximum value out of.

I took an Honours year instead.

If I did something else next, I'd be probably considering getting a bachelor in maths and stats. That's my real weakness.

> And if so, how it's different from doing a single Bachelor's degree and a JD after that.

Doing a B(whatever) and then a JD takes a little longer and because of our funding rules costs more. That's why some more prestigious universities are trying to push that model: it makes them more money because they get your so-so undergraduate fees and then they get juicier postgraduate rates on top. And for longer.

Those are great explanations. Thanks!

This is part of the reason why I decided not to apply for law school despite scoring well on the LSAT (176). I couldn't commit to working 80 hours a week at a big law firm to pay off 250K of debt unless I was sure I loved the work.

With a 176 LSAT you probably would've gotten some rich scholarships barring unusual circumstances.

My 50% scholarship at a top 15 school (one of the cheaper ones too) still left me looking at a 40K per year bill with COL. You might be able to get a close to full ride if you are willing to go to a less prestigious school, but most aren't, since law is such a prestige obsessed world. It doesn't make much sense, given that there isn't really any difference in education quality or breadth between the schools. Law firms might as well just look at undergrad LSAT and GPA's, since that's about the extent of the filter "which law school you went to" applies.

It would save everyone a lot of money and cut out the middle man if all employers could just look at SAT scores and LSAT scores along with high school GPA. There would be no more need for academia as we now know it.

If high SAT scores meant that someone had learned the equivalent of a 4-year CS degree, sure, I'd be willing to consider them equivalent when hiring for a technical position. But high SAT scores just mean that you know basic, high-school-level arithmetic and reading comprehension, which is not quite the same thing.

It would be interesting to have some kind of exam showing equivalent knowledge, but I haven't seen attempts in that direction that aren't worse assessments than the degree/GPA. For example, as weird as law-school is, the bar exam is even weirder (deliberately so), and generally a terrible model to follow.

Some states allow legal apprentices (paralegals) to sit for the bar without going to law school, if their mentor approves.

At least in undergraduate programs there is variability in what is taught, the classes you take, the quality and type of instruction. There is almost none of that in law school.

Want to help me co-found a new college? We have one entrance requirement: you get a 2100 on the (3-part) SAT. That is also the graduation requirement.

If you don't mind me asking what were your stats? I suspect a 176 LSAT would've netted you a better-than-50% scholarship at the top 15s. Did you have a low GPA?

I have a relative who got into of the top 15 law schools. Despite getting a scholarship, he's still borrowing 30K per year. He was having doubts about being a lawyer; he was doing it mostly because people were saying "you're smart; you should do it." and he saw the JD as a means to an end. (I'm not sure what the "end" is, but he had no intention of being a lawyer "for life".)Anyway, though he did well his first year, he hated almost every second of it. He's cutting his losses, getting a job (hopefully - he's had promising interviews) and leaving after 1 year with only 30K in debt.

I dropped out of a top-15 program. The legal education is in crisis mode right now. Last I looked, applications to law school were lower than any year since they started counting them. Formerly "competitive" schools like American have dropped all pretense of admissions standards. In my opinion, at least one school will have gone belly up in the next year (and without significant reform, that's just the tip of the iceberg).

Well American only had pretenses to begin with.

Georgetown and then GWU had reputation, and UDC was a nice decently priced "local" school, like the one whose name escapes me (Suffolk?) in Mass where all the Mass politicians went.

American was always a tuition soak for rich wish-they-could-bes.

It's not in the best interest of the individual colleges that make up a university to discuss the prospects of their graduates. This article could be written about many of the liberal arts degrees or even about the lower-end students in science degree programs.

Those aren't trade schools with a public perception of solid return.

The bottom dropped out of law about 5 years ago, when jobs were cut and law school enrollment went up. Not everyone has gotten the memo.

There was never a time where people assumed they could pull anywhere near six digits their first year out of school by getting a graduate degree in writing poetry.

The fact that lawyers with jobs are still extremely highly paid in many cases also skews the perceptions, I think. Lawyers at the big firms are still making $150k+. That's different from areas like some parts of the liberal arts, where you don't really see people pulling down those kinds of salaries at all, so nobody is under the illusion that $150k+ jobs exist. In law they really do exist: salaries at law firms are comparable to those at tech firms. It's just that the odds of getting one of those jobs have significantly decreased over the past 5 years.

Why that situation remains, I'm not as sure. Why has the glut of lawyers not brought down salaries or prevailing rates? It seems instead that incomes have become bimodal, with one group of highly paid lawyers, and another group of very poorly paid lawyers with unstable employment.

Salaries were definitely affected by the changes in the market, though they didn't drop so much as stop growing nearly as quickly.

Also, because internship, first-year and clerkship positions became much more scarce, much of the glut of law grads have no real path to gain the experience they need to compete for firm salaries. Even in the good old days, it was very easy to get left behind in the biglaw game if you didn't score a position or clerkship right out of school.

Another factor is the partnership structure. In the 50 US States, only lawyers can have an ownership stake in a law firm. Partners are often practicing, so there is some motivation to keep the hourly rates high for their own benefit.

* DC is an outlier, mostly to enable our 'wonderful' lobbying system.

It's not a new phenomenon: http://www.nalp.org/uploads/0812Research.pdf.

As for what keeps the upper peak going, ironically law is supply constrained. Not by the number of JD's (if you just need legal services you can get them on Craigslist for $10/hour), but by available training opportunities. You're not going to hire a lawyer to do a $100 million bond offering who has never worked on one before, and there are only so many of those that are done each year which gates the number of new lawyers that can be trained to do them. This gating is the same reason you see similar or higher salaries in consulting or finance. There is no shortage of fresh BBA's and MBA's who'd love to be doing M&A deals, but MS/JPM/GS only need so many people each year to handle the deals they have.

The number of law school graduates has always exceeded the number of computer science graduates (yes a comparison of a graduate degree to an undergraduate but CS majors rarely need another degree).

We mock the fools who joined CS programs in undergrad to pursue a love of money but didn't care about computers. Why should we pity the law students? There is still plenty of work available for someone who wants a law degree in order to defend the defenseless and fight tyranny. But the market for predatory loan paperwork and anti-competitive M&A's s drying up. Those lawyers can cry into their beers with the RIAA lobbyists and the infamous buggy whip manufacturers.

There actually isn't. My friends from law school who sold their souls to corporate American mostly found jobs. It's my friends who wanted to defend poor people, fight racial injustice, or save the environment that had problems finding jobs. Corporate America is doing fine--it's the public sector that's really been gutted by the recession.

Not that I think this is a positive state of affairs, mind you. Karmicly, those people are a lot more deserving of jobs.

I didn't mean to suggest that good works would pay well, but I guess I implied that.

The public sector has never paid well, but now it doesn't pay at all. I know more than several people who could've easily gotten six-figure jobs in private practice that can't get $30k/year jobs in the public sector. Even if they were willing to work for free, public organizations don't even have the capacity to train people right now.

That's quite a nasty and vindictive worldview you've got there.

There is still plenty of work available for someone who wants a law degree in order to defend the defenseless and fight tyranny.

I really like law as an intellectual discipline and (I think) I would be happy to work at it for a fairly ordinary wage as opposed to big bucks. But it's hard to study outside of a conventional school (lack of contact with other students or feedback from faculty) and fairly tough to get job of any kind and accrue experience no matter which school you go to...and although there are schemes designed to enable relatively low-paid lawyering in the public interest by reducing loan obligations, I really don't care for the idea of running up >$100,000 in debt at a fairly high rate of interest. There aren't exactly a lot of low-cost law schools and scholarships/grants are not transparent at all.

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