Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The Future is Energy Shots. Lots of Energy Shots.

Hello everyone! This is my first post in about two months. Sorry to abandon you. I'll try to get back to regular news updates again now that my kids are back in school. For the past month, I've been making sure my kids were prepared for their fall placement exams in math (which they aced.) My personal belief is that many young people are effectively funneled into law school because way, way back at some point the ball was dropped on math and their career options were cut off as a result. As insightfully stated by Adam B., making a difference with the law school is a long-term game. So, if you know any young people thinking about law as a career, gently point them to a scam blog and offer to help tutor them in math instead. :)

Here's some stories you might have missed:



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"Is part-time work the new normal? For many, full-time work still hard to find,"  by Frank Witsil (Detroit Free Press, September 2, 2013)

Money Quote #1: "To make ends meet, newly minted attorney Scott Neal is working three part-time jobs. He's practicing law in a Birmingham firm, keeping tabs on the North Oakland Family YMCA as a building supervisor and trimming trees."

Money Quote #2: "'My parents are pressuring me to get a full-time job, even if it's not in law,' said Neal, who lives with his parents in Lake Orion."

Money Quote #3: "Derrick George, the attorney who hired Neal, runs his own firm and a company that sells energy shots, On Go Energy."

Go to law school, run around from part time job to part time job, take energy shots to stay awake, sell energy shots to your friends, crash with your parents.  

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Money Quote: "Officials at Portland, Oregon-based Concordia University say enrollment of first-year law students in Boise is down 40 percent from law year."

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"Amid crisis in legal profession, two-year law schools have merit,"  by Boston Globe Editorial (August 30, 2013)

Money Quote: "A massive market failure."

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Money Quote: "A recent graduate of the University of Missouri law school, Rita Florez says a third year of classes is 'like watching paint dry' after two years of course work. 'You get to 3L and you're just like, why I am here? she said."

"Why I am here?" That's a question to ask before you enroll.

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Money Quote: "We've too many of the wrong kind of lawyers. I say, let's close a law school. Why not start with the University of Connecticut? It is, after all, the only law school in the state beholden to state taxpayers."

31 comments:

  1. Regarding UConn:

    State taxpayers dont subsidize JD factories very much these days. It's the borrowed tuition money that pays for the frantic upgrades and the academic pretensions. Not to mention that the deans borrow on their own and have their own bond ratings.

    You might argue that taxpayers paid to start them up, but their current mode of operation depends on very high tuition which is often borrowed by the students, against any reason or common sense.

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  2. Norm Pattis' comment about real estate lawyers trolling Connecticut's criminal courts for felony clients is spot on. A friend who is chief clerk in one of those courts tells me that it has been happening more and more.

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  3. A scamblogger has kids? My, my, that just goes against the narrative, doesn't it?

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    1. There's a million stories in the naked city....don't assume we are all cut from the same cloth.

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    2. No, the narrative has always been that law school debt ruins your life.

      It does not stop you getting married, buying a house, or having kids. That was the Unmentionable Manual Laborer's narrative, which is why his blog failed.

      The $1000 you put into law school loans each month over fifteen years is $1000 that you don't spend on a new car, or a vacation, or furniture, or your kid's college (prolonging the harm to future generations), or consumer goods that prop up the entire economy. You avoid going to the eye doctor each year because you don't have the money. Same for the dentist, the movies, restaurants.

      Fifteen years.

      That's the narrative. The debt stops you from being a paying member of society for fifteen years.

      And what's worse, it's some of the best and brightest students who end up in this trap, not the dummies who can't tie their shoes and who work at the Ford dealership.

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    3. It only goes against the narrative if you assume beforehand that the scambloggers are abject liars about the reality of their circumstances.

      I know a couple of JD single moms who had the temerity to go to law school so as to improve their circumstances for their kid and themselves, in good old Horatio Alger fashion. One ended going back to her old job (but with more debt, yay) and the other continues to scramble to patch it together - not exactly a high-quality life. They could go on about the realities of the scam at length.

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    4. There is no narrative ... there are just people's life stories. And most recent law grads have shitty ones to tell. And so do many longterm practitioners. Biglaw and Midlaw aren't stable environments.

      Don't go to law school, even if you're given a free ride. Yeah, we all know that law's a challenging, competitive profession and that not everyone will get a prize. Only the creme de la creme will make it. Got it.

      But now it's no longer a stable profession for even the lucky few winners.

      Game over.

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    5. Guys, 4:32 is sarcasm. You're all right, of course, but it's sad you felt the need to correct it. Poe's Law School Law, perhaps?

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  4. That Concordia news is great. The periodic statistics these days are just so entertaining. Beats fantasy soccer any day.

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  5. But a tree-trimmer with a JD earns an average of $53,000 per year more than a tree-trimmer with a bachelor's only. (Welcome back, RAB!)

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    1. This is a fucking hardcore proof that the JD degree is tremendously versatile. Did not the deans tell you this all way through?

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  6. These articles reflect steps towards the right direction, but there still needs to be far more drastic remedial measures taken if the profession is to be saved.

    1.) Part-time work ....COMBINED with a spouse who works a non-legal job with benefits is the only way that non-Biglaw grads will make law work financially. Assuming you're one of the 40% that gets a paying job, starting law pays about what a good truck driver makes. That's it. It's a lower middle class profession.

    2.) Close UConn AND all the other law schools in the State of Connecticut.. and let Yale remain to process SCOTUS clerks and ConLaw scholars, etc.

    3.) The problem with the 3rd year of law school is that you must have gone through years 1 and 2 to get there. Yes, the third year should be abolished .... along with the 1st and 2nd years. In short, the law schools should close, not simply shorten themselves.

    4.) Seeing a drop in enrollment is a nice start, but the place must CLOSE in order to save the profession. Boards on the windows and chains on the doors. Close down now.

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    1. A nice dream, but too radical.

      The problem could be as easily solved with an across the board reduction in class sizes by 50%. No shuttering schools.

      I want to see these schools shut down as much as you, but maybe one or two will (those with huge real estate carry costs that need a huge class), but most will not. They are linked to universities that could retool the space and use it for something else when the law school downsizes.

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    2. 5:02, a 50% reduction is not enough. Remember, 50% of JDs will never hold any job that requires a JD. Your 50% cut will eliminate those folks but the remaining 50% will still include part-timers, document reviewers, etc.

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    3. And how about upper bounds on what students can borrow per year? That's the way to reduce capacity *and* improve the finances of future students. As for past victims of the scam, maybe something about discharging student debt through bankruptcy?

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    4. 6:37, while capping loans will help protect students and I support it in theory, I wonder whether it could backfire. Maybe the pigs would cut their prices across the board to save their jobs or pass out more discounts, which might encourage more to attend resulting in even more ruined careers but with lower debt. Another approach would be to make the schools liable for a percentage of any defaults by their students. That would make them think twice about flooding the job market.

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  7. Not that I'm disagreeing that lack of facility with mathematics is a real problem, but .... (as a pretty well-established industrial computer science type), it seems pretty clear that lots of my fellow citizens just don't have the neurons to do work at the level required to really make a difference in -any- seriously technical field. Esp. since in many of these fields, the work of the "right guy" can be replicated many times over.

    So while it's important to tell youngsters (and help them) to learn their math and science, it's also important to remember that even those who still can't learn their math are our fellow citizens, and deserve lives worth living for -merely- that reason, and nothing more.

    I think it's a mistake to not include that latter thought, every time we insist that youngsters learn their STEM fields.

    As I once remarked to a friend, "I know it'll come as a shock to you, but did you know that half of Americans have an IQ less than 100?"

    There's nothing wrong with those of my fellow citizens.

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    1. Good point. We've been on a sliding slope for some time now, in that STEM is what every two-year-old wants to do (ha), while "everything else" is just dumb and a waste of time. Until STEM gets flooded, of course, and then its on the the next major-du-jour.

      Same thing happened with JD overproduction for decades; now its not worth it for many. Higher Ed has turned into a giant game of musical-chairs, and that helps no one in the long run.

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    2. I think the point is that vast majority of kids heading off to college lack the basic aptitude to graduate with a BS in Electical Engineering, Physics and the like. 25 years ago, I went to a well-regarded private college with a good engineering program. At least half the people I knew who started out in the BS Engineering program ended up graduating with a BA in Economics. These weren't dumb kids mind you. But when it came down to subjects like differential equations and thermodynamics - they couldn't cut it. For that reason, I don't think STEM will ever be flooded to the extent we see with BA and JD degrees.

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    3. stem wont be flooded with americans. but it will be flooded with foreigners. Have you seen the people receiving phd's in any field nowadays? Have you seen who is receiving post docs?

      I drove through a top university a few days ago before school started. I saw lots of Asians and Indians walking around with back packs full of books. I saw a few Caucasians, but not that many. and them I drove by frat house row and saw many Caucasians standing around with a beer in their hands or playing volleyball. yeah, I can see how this semester will end.

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    4. @ Anonymous September 5, 2013 at 12:25 PM

      pharm schools have bubbles
      http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=138436703&page=1

      "retail pharmacy is changing and going to a more centralized filling process which will cut pharmacist jobs in the future. it is a BIG BUBBLE about to burst like Law school. i think pharmacy bubble will be worse because CVS and Walgreens have made it a point to undercut all independents and make pharmacists reliant on being hired as an EMPLOYEE."

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  8. ^^^^ maybe so, but there are plenty of Americans with very high IQs who suck at math.

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  9. Off topic a little. I am sitting here watching tv. There were ten commercials for higher education institutions in one half hour of tv. Mostly peddling worthless online degrees. That was more than one third of all commercials. These institutions do not pay tax. What is wrong here.

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    1. nothing new. subway stations are flooded with these advertisements.

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    2. Get back to work, slave!

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  10. OT, but I think that one sign we're having an effect (or the decline in applications is) is that schools are considering 2-yr degrees or 2yr + 1yr externships. The latter is utterly pointless though and obviously a self-serving way to get tuition dollars. "Go work in the real world for a year while paying law school $50,000". Its like we're going back to the apprenticeship model and adding a $50,000 price tag. Because legal education needs an outrageous price tag attached, and it cant be any other way!!!

    I think the best thing would be law as undergrad major. Take these 9-12 classes, then you're eligible for the bar exam. If you realize you don't like law, that's great, your life isnt destroyed by $200k debt and the scarlet letters (JD). If you do take the bar exam, only the top 20% pass it. The rest, go do something else, because numbers have to be limited.

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    1. A little remembered fact is that people used to go to college for three years and then transfer to law school for three years for a net of six years of higher education and an LL.B. This went on into the seventies at a few schools where exceptional candidates were allowed to do it. Those who had finished college went for two years and got a B.S.L. Thus there was a time within living memory when six years of higher education including two years of law school was deemed sufficient to take the bar.

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  11. We missed you RAB! Good job not raising liberal artists, but beware the grass-is-greener STEM worship by scamblogger types. Those fields are not much better off these days for the average 22 year old college grad, and many smart people get stuck in the higher ed panopticon with debt and joblessness and useless degrees in increasingly glutted STEM fields.

    There is no magic bullet these days...but steering the youngins away from law is always a good bet. Finding the right STEM track that has not yet suffered a glut is a trickier proposition.

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    1. It is difficult to know where to steer children. I know the so-called Great Recession knocked a lot of STEM people out of jobs too. However, I think that as long as you can keep kids on top of their math all through school at least they have their options open. That's about the best you can do these days.

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    2. Agreed. Keeping kids well-versed and nimble, rather than shunting them into so-called "left-brain"/"right-brain" orientations, is probably the best one can do. The last thing anyone needs to think is that they are "bad" at math, or science, or history, or language, or whatever. Maybe not always the best, but certainly not the worst - always willing to try.

      Feeling confident about tackling a well-researched challenge (as opposed to special-snowflake foolhardiness) will help them be more entreprenurial, too, overall.

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