Too many students chasing too few jobs. Any other industry that was so deceptive and manupulative, and offered such a poor value for the money, would be excoriated by the media, if not subject to actual civil and criminal lawsuits.
11 thoughts on “It’s Not Just The Law Schools”
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What with the gummint’s new penchant for regulation (Can you say Dodd-Frank? I knew you could!) a person could think that there would be all kinds of need for attorneys.
That attorneys are begging for jobs suggests a kind of engineering-geek Utopia? That resources are finally being directed to making stuff instead of litigating about stuff?
Or is the economy so much in the dumps that even attorneys cannot get work?
Or is the IT revolution come to law firms, that a lot of the grunt work done by associate lawyers is now done by computers operated by para-legal workers? That attorneys, in effect, are being replaced by robots and the minders of those robots?
Paul,
Your close by why us IT when its cheaper to out source the work to India?
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/from_new_york_to_new_delhi_us_lawyers_look_for_work_in_indias_legal_outsour/
[[[Such jobs are based on an economic reality: Routine litigation support and corporate due diligence work can be handled abroad by teams of foreign attorneys at a considerably lower cost to clients in the U.S. than what they would have to pay law firms based in America.]]]
So if graduates of U.S. law schools want work they could go there, and work for the India wage as they article advocates. And I suspect engineering is the next field as was done with computer programmers a while ago.
Welcome to the global economy 🙂
Not any time soon, Paul, at least based on my experiences.
My previous employer outsourced a large portion of the routine engineering work we did to India, it didn’t end up saving them money, due to much higher supervision and re-work costs. They were able to cut back the local engineering staff but they ended up hiring more project management types, and now they can’t compete on jobs smaller than mega-projects. Not a winning situation.
Tell your kids to learn a trade. Welding, HVAC, machining, accounting, med-tech… something that won’t fluctuate with the economy. Then, after they’ve learned what the real world is like, thy could self-finance their way to a four-year degree in whatever they want.
It sure beats having $30,000 in student loan debts for a degree that you can’t get a job with.
Accounting is a profession, not a trade.
Sounds like a distinction without a difference. Care to elaborate?
I don’t know in the US but here accounting requires certification and examinations and things like that. Sure it is useful to know some basic accounting principles but the job itself gets more complicated than that.
I would say plumbing, mechanics, welding, machining are fine. Although machining will probably be changing a lot in the future so the skills may not last in the market very long. There are also some jobs in masonry which will probably change in the near future and the market is still not out of the slump.
DaveP,
why make the assumption that those jobs are simply a means to an end?
And then say right after, “…beats having $30,000 in student loan debts for a degree that you can’t get a job with.”
It seems just one more case of people looking down their nose at the ‘less than degreed’ people. It stymies me.
Um… Possibly you should check your preconceptions for a bad case of thinskinitis, Stump old lad. It could be what leads to your case of the stymies.
I said, “could”, as in “if they want to”. If they don’t? Fine. I have no higher-ed degrees myself and am doing quite well, because I’m IN one of those recession-resistant blue-collar trades. I know someone with more Master’s Degrees than easily countable (ABD in one) and almost none of them pertain to what she actually does for a living.
But there are far worse springboards to a four-year degree in a white-collar field than a few years in a manual trade, and with student loans the way they are now self-financing (along with the grants open for non-trad students) is likely to be a moneysaver in the long run.
I have no problem at all with those law schools. After all, most of the people who choose law as a career do so because they expect, forever after, to be able to charge ridiculous amounts of money for what is mostly fairly simple work such as dealing with inheritances and conveyancing – normally done by poorly paid juniors to boot.
No problem as far as I’m concerned, if they are wrong. As some fairly famous con-man once said; “You can’t scam an honest man.”
My previous client, the worst place I ever worked, imported a lot of very cheap Indian engineers and hired just out of school BSMEs at near minimum wage rates. We older designers had to babysit them, since they knew nothing of design. This prevented us from getting our own work done, which led to increasingly angry meetings between the managers and those of us trying to get the work out.
My current client is much better in terms of pay and working environment, but they are still, IMNSHO, making the mistake of hiring young, wet between the ears engineers. They are putting them in the deep end of the pool without much support from older engineers(who have their own deadlines to meet), and we checkers are trying to train them while getting our own work done. Of course, when I fail a package because of numerous errors, I get the blame for the delay. So it goes. And all of these kids graduate with $150,000 or more in debt, with a starting rate of under $40,000 per year. I thought Lincoln freed the slaves…
Still it is a living, and fun most of the time.