Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

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This isn't new at all. Everyone in my law school class knew this before going in but still decided to roll the dice.

The major issue here is the US higher ed system which is massively unproductive and by and large a scam.

You don't need 3-years after your 4-year undergraduate degree to become a lawyer. In the UK, where common law comes from, you simply study law as an undergraduate. You finish at 22 and you're not saddled with massive debt and 3 more years of wasting your working age pursuing useless courses (my 2nd and 3rd year of law school were absolutely useless, while the first year was essential. These courses can be incorporated into undergraduate. Everyone else does it this way and they have high quality lawyers, probably better than ours.

This way if you decide you hate being a lawyer (like many do) or you don't get a job at a firm, your legal education is still valuable for other careers in business, strategy, etc. You're still young and don't have to worry about the three extra years and $200k you spent going to law school.

This is true in most countries. One caveat is that some countries that do it this way (Brazil, and perhaps Japan?) have very stringent entrance exams to enter that major.

The other point is some schools have undergraduate degrees that look like law degrees, and could perhaps serve the function with just a little tweaking. [0] [1] You just can't be a lawyer with them.

The whole thing is part a scam by schools (full priced students that can be served in large classes) and also the profession.

The untouched comment is law school was also a socially acceptable way for intelligent but undirected people to defer their choice of occupation for 3 more years.

[0] http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/lawlettersands...

[1] http://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/subjects-of-instruction/ethics-...

I wont disagree that perhaps the US system could use reform/overhaul, but it's a bit more complicated than you describe. When you compare how medical schools and medical school admissions are handled in the US versus how law schools are organized, it's no surprise why law school has a glut of graduates who can't find jobs. I know this because I have enough friend who went on either of those tracks (as well as others). The med school kids all have jobs that pay well-enough, and the law school kids all became disilusioned and moved to other fields (except for the one that went to NYU).

The number of Medical school admissions and future residency positions is pretty well controlled, so this kind of problem doesn't really arise (well, it's complicated but more or less).

On the other hand, any school can spin up a law program and start charging admission, no matter how qualified it is to actually do that. But it's only worthwhile going to law school if you can get into the first tier (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU) or second tier schools. Third and fourth tier are basically a joke. You're throwing your money away. Of course, many people ignore that thinking they'll be different or lucky. And we end up with the kind of issues we see here today.

It's still more complicated, though, because a lot of what people from third and fourth tier schools used to do (sit in giant rooms and review case law for big cases), they are no longer needed for thanks to technology. So the 2000's onward was an awful time to want to be shove yourself through law school hail-mary hoping that just because you're a "lawyer" you'll be OK.

Law schools students got squeezed on both sides, and the pain is real. A profession that used to be much like medicine, where you would do "OK" in life at the very worst is now a commodity product thanks to forces from all sides.

>A profession that used to be much like medicine, where you would do "OK" in life at the very worst is now a commodity product thanks to forces from all sides.

I went to graduate school at a college that had a primarily liberal-arts oriented undergraduate curriculum and I knew a lot of people who graduated with their liberal arts degree and ended up going to law school after finding that their degree wasn't really setting them on the path to a successful career. Not universally of course and a number of my friends did quite well for themselves with just their undergrad degrees but those who did didn't really follow particularly conventional career paths.

So for a reasonable number of people I knew, law school functioned as this sort of default career path for liberal arts undergrads--though a fair number of them didn't stay in the profession long-term.

>On the other hand, any school can spin up a law program and start charging admission, no matter how qualified it is to actually do that.

And a lot of them did, because a successful law school is a license to print money. Tuition is high, and there are no pesky labs or expensive test equipment to maintain.

Medicine is the same way in other countries - you go to med school as an undergraduate, with the same benefits that you mention for law school as an undergrad.

Not to pile on or insult US law students, but this is supported by the fact that for a long time in the US all you had to do was pass the bar exam to be a lawyer (now only two states allow this, with major caveats). Law is as difficult an occupation as any, but it really isn't like medicine in that it should require front-loaded special education (early in a medical career your mistakes are less reversible than an early lawyer's, etc). Apprenticing (like the Brits do) should be good enough.

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