What a cheerful news day!

Warning:  If you are having a happy Friday, you might not want to read these articles.

The ABA Journal email that arrived in my inbox is just chock full of cheerful articles today.  The first and most relevant one for our purposes is entitled "Legal Field Is Nation's Most Difficult Field For Job Placement, Employment Website Says."  Read it and weep.  The site, SimplyHired.com, claims that there is apparently one job opening for every 100 working lawyers.  Does that figure include the unemployed attorneys?  Probably not, which means the outlook is even worse than they know.

Second, there is an article which discuss women in the workforce.  It is called  "Survey Reveals Profile of Unhappy Worker: She's Unmarried, 42, and a Lawyer or Doctor."

There are always tons of stories about how unhappy attorneys are in the legal field. That's not to say that ALL attorneys are unhappy.  But a field that many people enter by default because they do not know what else to do lends itself to that sort of career dissatisfaction, if they are able to find a legal job at all these days.  But I am always suspect when surveys claim that professional women are particularly unhappy.  It seems easy to manipulate that data for a political agenda that encourages women to work part time or stay at home all together, as if very many women or men have that luxury nowadays.

Nando's Takedown of the Education Scam for AskMen

Nando, author of Third Tier Reality and one of the most notorious (and most effective) scambloggers, has a great piece for AskMen.com, which I highly recommend you check out.  It's a fantastic article that exposes a problem, backs it up with cold, hard facts, and proposes legitimate ways to fix it.  It is well worth your time. Read it here.

Happy Belated Labor Day, everyone!

Jobs disappear, lemmings fill out law school applications

It's the circle of life, folks.


The title of the article is promising:  "Law schools lure fewer students as jobs dry up."  And yet the article is full of anecdotes, mostly centered on prospective law students in Missouri, that make me want to smash my face into my keyboard.  Here is the opening act:

Tenia Phillips has heard the horror stories about life after law school, circa 2011, from crushing student loan debt to recent graduates serving coffee at Starbucks.
The reality check didn't deter the 27-year-old Waco, Texas, resident from pursuing her childhood dream, though it took four years of working as an apartment leasing agent before she could start fall classes last week at the University of Missouri law school.
"I had gotten to the point in my life where it was either now or never," she said. "Nothing in life is guaranteed. The job market can go back up again or back down."

That's not true, Tenia.  One thing is guaranteed, and that is the non-dischargeable nature of your future debt load.


Or:

James Leopold, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement, said such criticism "adds to that culture of doubt surrounding legal education."
"The whole economy of delivering legal services, and the structure of these services, is changing," he said, describing changes that include a move to "offshore" legal jobs as well as a growing reliance by corporations on contract attorneys rather than in-house counsel.
"Are we producing too many lawyers? It's a question I can't answer," Leopold said.

 Really, Mr. Leopold?  You can't answer that question?

There are some bright spots in the article, which mentions that schools such as the University of Delaware and SUNY-Stony Brook have shelved their plans for a money trap law school.  As I said in a prior post, all press is good press.  But it saddens me, once again, that these students saw the writing on the wall and took the plunge anyway.

Bad Reasons For Starting Law School, Part 1: Parents

First year orientation is, for most members of the future class of 2014, about a month away.  I think that now is a good time for me to do a small series on bad reasons to go to law school.  If you are reading this blog and thinking about law school, my blanket advice to you is not to go.  There may be exceptions, but for the vast majority of people the best decision is not to go, to the point where I am willing to offer that as my one-size-fits-all take on the matter.  But if any of the reasons I will be profiling in this series apply to you, you REALLY should not be going. 

The first factor I am going to focus on is one of the worst reasons to go, but it is also one of the most tragic.  And probably, although many might hesitate to admit it, one of the most common:

1)      Parents:  

      

                 Back in the day, a college degree was a guarantee of success.  A graduate degree of any  kind was a winning lottery ticket.  As a result, many Baby Boomers with children who are now in their twenties really think they are doing the right thing by encouraging their children, many of whom have worthless liberal arts degrees, to go to law school.

In January, when the New York Times published a widely circulated article about the pitfalls of going to law school, my blog was one of the ones linked to in the online version.  I saw a huge increase in traffic as a result.  I also received an enormous number of emails, mostly from prospective or current law students sharing their stories or asking for advice.  But what surprised me most was the volume of emails I received from parents of current law students or recent law school graduates expressing remorse for encouraging their children to go to law school in the first place.  One poor woman felt that the situation had done irreparable harm to her relationship with her son.  He had expressed some reservations about attending, but with her encouragement he took the plunge and enrolled in a Tier 2 law school.  Now he has a ton of debt and few job prospects.  (Or at least few job prospects as of January, and it is hard for me to imagine things are looking up.)  I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I literally had tears in my eyes as I read her email, both for the sadness of the circumstances and for the fact that she was troubled enough by the situation to reveal it to a complete stranger via email.  I feel for both the mother who thought she was offering sound advice, and the son who followed the natural instincts of many people.  After all, their parents have probably never led them astray before, and they certainly would not do it intentionally.

As I have mentioned before on this blog, I was definitely influenced by my parents.  It was my decision to begin the application process, and ultimately it was my decision to enroll.  I do not blame my parents in the slightest bit for my decision or the repercussions that followed.  But they certainly influenced me.  They thought it was a great idea, and the best thing I could do with an English degree.  Unfortunately, they were wrong.  We both were.  But I know their hearts were in the right place.  They just did not have all of the information.  But that is starting to change.

One of the best things about the exposure that the law school scam is receiving from the mainstream media is that the message is finally beginning to reach parents.  Parents read the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, etc.  They do not necessarily read blogs.  As parents come around to the reality of the situation, they will stop offering their children such unfortunate advice.

The point I am ultimately trying to make is that if you are scheduled to begin law school this August, and pleasing your parents or following their advice was one of the pivotal factors leading you to enroll – PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE rethink your decision.  The only exception is if your parents are extremely successful attorneys themselves and have either (a) some very serious, guaranteed connections, or (b) a thriving practice that you will be able to join when you graduate.

Your parents are suggesting this because they think it is best for you.  If you do not take their advice, they may be hurt, confused or even angry at first.  They will get over it.  And trust me, you will be proven right.

And the money keeps rolling in...

I'm glad to see that the New York Times has published another article critical of the law school scam.

“'I once joked with my dean that there is a certain amount of money that we could drag into the middle of the school’s quadrangle and burn,' said John F. Duffy, a George Washington School of Law professor, 'and when the flames died down, we’d be a Top 10 school. As long as the point of the bonfire was to teach our students. Perhaps what we could teach them is the idiocy in the US News rankings.'”

Funny he should say that, because that is essentially what students will be doing with their money if they decide to enroll in law school next month.

But George Washington University is not at the center of David Segal's article.  That would be New York Law School.  Check out this charming excerpt, courtesy of the Dean of NYLS:

“'What I’ve said to people in giving talks like this in the past is, we should be ashamed of ourselves,” Mr. Matasar said at a 2009 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. He ended with a challenge: If a law school can’t help its students achieve their goals, 'we should shut the damn place down.'

Given his scathing critiques, you might expect that during Mr. Matasar’s 11 years as dean, he has reshaped New York Law School to conform with his reformist agenda. But he hasn’t. Instead, the school seems to be benefitting from many of legal education’s assorted perversities. 

N.Y.L.S. is ranked in the bottom third of all law schools in the country, but with tuition and fees now set at $47,800 a year, it charges more than Harvard. It increased the size of the class that arrived in the fall of 2009 by an astounding 30 percent, even as hiring in the legal profession imploded. It reported in the most recent US News & World Report rankings that the median starting salary of its graduates was the same as for those of the best schools in the nation — even though most of its graduates, in fact, find work at less than half that amount."

How does he justify this disconnect between his actions and his words?  Here's the moral of the story:

"Asked if there was a contradiction between his stand against expanding class sizes and the growth of the student population at N.Y.L.S., Mr. Matasar wrote: 'The answer is that we exist in a market. When there is demand for education, we, like other law schools, respond.'"

The whole article is well worth a read if you want to see some shocking figures about the economics of law school.  I only wish that these articles would focus on the travesty that is the second tier.  By focusing on the lowest ranked schools, the media implies that the way the second tier schools operate is acceptable.  (Although, thankfully, Mr. Segal does admit in his article that there is no drastic difference between the way NYLS runs and the way other law schools run.)  That said, Mr. Segal has done a great job in making his ultimate point, which is that there is no way change is going to come from within the schools themselves.   If someone like Mr. Matasar, whose earlier words and philosophy showed so much promise, cannot be relied upon to at least attempt to instigate change from within, there is little chance of it happening.

Lookout For Falling Salaries

The Wall Street Journal has a short piece today on attorney salaries and the NALP Employment Report and Salary Survey on the Class of 2010.  This is the key part:

"Even so, the national median salary for newbie lawyers – at least for those with full-time work – still stands at $63,000, according to the report. That doesn’t sound so bad, except for the fact that only about 64% of law school graduates found full-time employment in a job requiring bar passage. The rest found non-legal or part-time work, and more than a quarter reported biding their time in temporary jobs."

Let that sink in:  according to NALP, only 64% of law school graduates whose employment status is known are working in a full-time job requiring bar passage.  For what it's worth, NALP says that in the graduating class of 2010, they know the employment status of 87.6% of graduates.

From the NALP press release itself:

"We have been watching this market deteriorate for several years now," Leipold offered when asked about the significance of some of these changes, "but even I was surprised to see that the percentage of graduates employed in a full-time job requiring bar passage had dropped to 64%. In this market far more graduates are stringing together several part-time or temporary jobs to approximate a full-time equivalency for themselves. Leaving clerkships aside, one in five jobs obtained were temporary. That represents a dramatic change in the entry-level market."

Run, don't walk, from law school.  It is just not worth it.

Some sound advice

Here is some sound advice from TIME Moneyland.  There is really only one thing I would add.  At the end, Mr. Bissonnette suggests that people only pursue law school "if the career you are passionate about involves being a lawyer."  It's not that this is incorrect per se, but I would add that prospective students should also educate themselves about what being a lawyer actually entails before deciding law is their passion.  Most people have little or no idea going into the law school application process what their career will actually look like if they are fortunate enough to actually get a legal position upon graduation.


But that minor point aside, it is always nice to see mainstream publications picking up on and spreading this message to their readers.

The Sound of Silence

Here's an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, commenting on Villanova's response in the face of the data inflation scandal that broke four months ago today. Or rather, their lack of a response. It seems that Villanova's strategy could be summed up as: "Least said, soonest mended."

Is that a smart move? I think it probably is. Unless they plan on taking extremely proactive, positive steps to deal with the larger problem, they have nothing to gain and everything to lose from the story getting any media attention at all.

I think the most interesting part of the article is buried at the bottom.

"Two American Bar Association committees are working on revamping the reporting requirements in an effort to better inform prospective students. One of the participants, David N. Yellen, dean of Loyola University School of Law in Chicago, says he doubts there's much that can be done to prevent the kind of out-and-out academic fraud that occurred with the Villanova numbers.

He says the upside is that it probably is very rare - there are only so many Bernie Madoffs in the world. The employment information is another matter. That is reported every year and used by U.S. News & World Report. Yellen says it is often misleading because it makes no distinction between full- and part-time employment. Moreover, salary data often are reported from a misleadingly small sample of graduates."

Is it really rare? Or is it just rare to get caught?

Great Start to 2011!

I'm coming into this a bit late in the game, but I am overwhelmed by the response I have received to the recent NYT article which included a link to Rose Colored Glasses. I think the article explores many important points. If there is a weakness, it is that the author should have mentioned more of the scamblogs such as "But I Did Everything Right!", Jobless Juris Doctor, and numerous others that I link to in my blog roll.

The fact that this movement is finally getting real, mainstream publicity makes me very happy. I have been accused by some of whining and looking for pity, or feeling entitled, but the fact is that if all this blog is is a chance for me to rant about how miserable I am in law school and the legal field, and for like minded people to respond in kind, it hasn't done anyone much good. The real point is to reach people who are CONSIDERING applying to or enrolling in law school and make sure that they really know what they are getting in to. I honestly don't think it is my job to be “fair and balanced” because frankly, the 0Ls get enough law school cheerleading in the echo chambers that are admissions boards. It is my goal to make sure that the pitfalls get any attention at all. The other side is well-covered and well-funded. It wouldn't be productive for me to pay token lip service to a bunch of pro-law arguments that I do not espouse.

While no one is entitled to a job, no less a six figure job, one thing that we are ALL entitled to is transparency when we are making a huge financial investment, and I would hope that even the law school apologists could agree on that. The more transparency the better, and the fact that the NYT article was the most emailed article yesterday can only be a step in the right direction.

The end of the world as we know it...

Here's an article on one particularly abysmal legal market.

Once again, a swing and a miss in terms of getting to the actual point. The author comes extremely close to writing a great piece on the state of the legal market, at least in one city. Now I don't know if this is a flaw in the article or in the presentation/layout, but the site chose to use as it's photo/caption a picture of a smiling girl in a business suit, holding law books. The caption tells how this young woman was warned about a bad job market and yet still received multiple offers.

THAT is what the Philadelphia Inquirer thinks is the take-away from that article???

Almost Doesn't Count

I know this article is a few days old, but I am just seeing it.

It's a good article, overall, but like so many of the other articles in the mainstream media that touch on this subject, it falls short. Essentially, almost everything that the author says is true, but law degrees are not mentioned by name. She does say that degrees in finance or business are still in "hot demand" but I don't think that is necessarily true. I know a few people with advanced business degrees who have had a lot of trouble finding jobs, and an even harder time finding jobs that justify having gone to school and earned that degree.

In short, I wish the author had gone further with this, but when it comes to our "movement" all press is good press.

Sidebar: I was complaining to someone today about the dearth of law jobs and how frustrated I am that I have essentially locked myself into this profession. Her response: "Well, at least a law degree opens a ton of other doors. It is an asset in any field, really." For some reason, that particular line goes THROUGH me.

Question for readers: is there a particular line that you get that is your pet peeve?

An Open Secret

I'm sure that this has been pondered at length by other people in the scamblogosphere, but I wonder why it is that, despite the fact that this information is so readily available, the mainstream media has been so slow to pick up on the law school scam.

I have read several articles recently exploring the idea of making it easier to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. I read the NYT article about law school grade inflation. But other than that, it seems the mainstream media does not want to touch this with a ten foot pole. When I was applying to law school, there were a few bloggers and people in comments sections trying to shed light on the reality of the situation but even they were few and far between (this was back in 2007). Every now and then I would read an article on the declining value of a college degree, but if anything those articles served to validate the idea of going to law school (or really any graduate program) to somehow distinguish myself from the masses.

If I were a journalist, I would be all over this. What gives?