The law-school bubble is popping:
“I’m hearing from the students I work with that they are concerned about the value of a law degree,” said Tim Stiles, a career adviser at the University of North Carolina. Students, he said, often tell him they have read press accounts about the difficulty of finding law jobs.
Some students are starting to feel they don’t need an advanced degree to improve their career opportunities, college advisers said.
Business-school applications for the fall 2011 class have not been tallied yet by the Graduate Management Admission Council. But last year, the average number of applications to full-time graduate programs declined 1.8%, the Council said, the first decline since 2005.
“When the economy first went down, students saw law school as a way to dodge the work force,” said Ryan Heitkamp, a pre-law adviser at Ohio State University. “The news has gotten out that law school is not necessarily a safe backup plan.”
It’s not just good news because it’s generally good news when bubbles finally deflate, at least for productive activity. It’s also good news because the overproduction of lawyers in itself has high external costs on society. I wish that we could swap a million or so for Japanese engineers.
I don’t think that’s it. I think we’re just seeing the back side of the tidal wave, really. When the economy took a big dive in 2009, Classo of ’09 and ’10 graduates took one look at their job prospects and said this is obviously the right time to get a graduate degree. It helps that as a culture we’ve been telling them for years that more education = more employability and higher salary, a lie of course, but one that served many interests (other than theirs, that is). I happen to know this was true at the undergraduate level, because my kid was applying to college — and applications were up fantastically in 2010.
Anyway, once the big wave passes, not surprisingly you see steep year over year declines, so that would be my first guess as to what is happening here. It also follows the 44th Corollary to Pham’s Second Law, which says sudden problems come from sudden (not long-standing or slow-growing) causes. This is the same corollary that allows you to dismiss the media lies about the sharp recent run-up in gas prices — it’s not Peak Oil, economic growth in China, the failure of the Obama Administration to either drill for more oil or more seriously pursue High Speed Rail(TM) solutiosn to Break Our Dependence On Foreign Oil, or any other slow-moving chronic condition.
What would the Japanese do with a bunch of surplus American lawyers though? Even a million lawyers won’t yield enough water to cool the fuel rods.
Being a lawyer has such a bad connotation now. Much more so even than it used to I think. All of us need lawyers periodically, but we dread it. Guys like John Edwards don’t help that. TV and movies all make them look shifty, crooked or stupid. There’s damned little in between. Who wants to go to school to be crooked or stupid? And there’s no longer that guaranteed big paycheck.
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For local color vis a vis UNC and (advanced) degrees and the need for same issued anywhere.
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My younger son went to school with a young guy, Pete, from 7th grade through HS graduation. His twin sister was a year ahead of them because Pete had flunked 3rd or 4th grade.
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Pete went to work for his dad out of HS, he’s not a great student, and doesn’t care to be. He worked for three years in dad’s contracting business, before swapping over to his uncle’s plumbing business.
Pete’s sister went to UNC on an academic full ride, went to law school at UNC on some kind of plan where prospective employers paid 80% because she’s THAT smart and passed the Bar on the first taking of the test. That test was in early 2006. She never did find a job that paid well and took other work while doing free legal wok trying to get a foot in the door.
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Not that it should matter, but this young lady is smart, well spoken and DROP dead gorgeous. I can’t imagine that she interviews badly. When she worked for me some in the concession tent she made tips when no one else did. (young guys tipping $2 on a $5 bag of popcorn don’t generally do so because the seller is ugly or sounds stupid when they talk to that seller)
But, back to Pete. Pete now has his own small plumbing company. It’s going OK, even in a bad economy, toilets need repair and sinks need snaking. He’s got 4 or 5 guys, all driving their own trucks, they all have more toilets to unclog than 6 guys can do most weeks. Pete is making over 6 figures and his guys aren’t getting hurt either as he takes just a percentage cut of their work, they get the benefit Pete’s business name and contacts.
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Pete’s sister finally gave up looking for a legal job. In her words,
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“…there are SO many people out there with law degrees you have just a few choices. Become an ambulance chaser, do “Family Law”, or work for the government. It’s NOT what I thought it would be.”
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Regardless of that, the money is NOT great because law offices that used to hire 2 or 3 new lawyers in a year, now hire 6 or 8 and, according to her, in effect tell them,
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“You can make minimal BS money at the bottom, doing scut work forever or you can cut the throats of the other newbies and make your money AND theirs. We’re paying “X” dollars this year for new lawyers, and it doesn’t necessarily go up because we hired more people…”
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This smart, beautiful lady didn’t want to live like that. So she walked away from 6 or 7 years of schooling, and thousands of hours of studying and working toward the Bar. She worked through parties, ball games, dating, all the stuff most people do in college to GET that degree. Then she was told she had to be an animal to make it worthwhile. And remember, she did hers mostly for free.
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When you call his office, Pete’s sister is answering the phone, but she’s started running some calls too. There is a niche market out there, it seems, of women who want women to fix their plumbing!
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It can’t be hard for those kinds of stories to get out and make people think twice about spending THEIR OWN money to go through all that. They certainly won’t spend $100K or $125K, all so they can wind up running the office in a plumbing company run by their brother who only has a HS diploma. Or some other such thing.
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Honestly, if my sons were in HS or younger even, I’d be pushing them toward a trade. As good as it sounds during Career Day, everyone can’t be a programmer or a dentist or a lawyer. My younger son is back in school, on the G.I. Bill. He’s taking a 1 year welding program, to be followed by a 2 year ASE backed auto mechanics AAS program. He gave up on construction blasting, not enough work for the number of certified blasters.
My older son has 20 months left until he retires from the Navy, He’s been doing various computer work for all of his career. He’s headed to the ASE thing when he retires. He’s walking away from computers, too many people for the number of jobs.
There seems to be a theme here, or is it just my insulated, myopic view?
And those are the sympathetic portrayals. <rimshot>
McGehee,
it doesn’t help that American lawyers have gone from being good guys to being rats.
Perry Mason, in the 50’s & 60’s, a great guy who helped convict the real bad guy and get the other guy acquitted. We knew NOTHING about PM having a private life, or how much money he made. The DA wanted to beat PM but he also wanted to convict the REAL bad guy.
L.A. Law was next. Some of them were good guys, some were sleazy, they all LOOKED great made tons of money, drove fast cars and humped like drunk rabbits. They wanted to win and on several occasions avoided wanting to know IF their client was guilty or not. The D.A. or opposing attorney was just the same. So the bar is sliding to lawyers being like regular people, some good, some bad; except they were rich as hell and got laid a lot!
Law & Order, and Boston Legal. (…hello, Denny Crane, Denny Crane, I am Denny Crane!! how annoying was that by the 3rd show? And I love The Shat) Lawyers are shifty, worthless, lying, back stabbing scumbags, who only want the win. Getting Hitler off of mass murder charges on technicalities or convicting Mother Theresa for operating a soup kitchen in Mumbai without a license as an illegal alien, the sentence, 25 years in prison, it’s all the same, who gives a f*&k, they just want that mark in the WIN column!!! They make decent money, still hump a lot and most of them would kill their parents, children or mother for $2 and the WIN!! Screw justice or right and wrong, screw the ACTUAL reason for having laws, just get the WIN!!
As with all TV, I get that Father did NOT know best, Flipper and Lassie couldn’t really dial a phone or drive a boat, and Cliff Huxtable was just the black guy from I Spy only older with a new (very fictitious) show, and truly we know none of it is real in the end.
But if other shows had taken the same ‘turns’ that legal shows did…all fathers would be pedophile, philandering liars, Flipper would have lured Lassie into the water and drowned him (her) so as to draw in bait fish for Flipper eat, and Dr Huxtable would have been a drunk (rich) gay guy, working as an abortionist at Planned Parenthood.
And who the hell wants to go to college for 6 years and spend $100K to be ANY of THAT!!!?
The brain drain into law and other paper-pushing professions has definitely weakened us. My kids hear from me regularly how much better a career in engineering or the hard sciences would be.
And I’m an attorney.
The chickens are finally coming home to roost. Too many teachers are teaching what they have been taught by teachers aho have been taught, ad infinitum. They have lost touch with the businesses they teach people to to take up. Come on folks take a few weeks of your life (50 to 100) TO LEARN THE BUSINESS AS IT NOW EXISTS. After college I had to spend three to four years to learn my field of endeavor before I was worth my keep to my future employers.