As the column to the right shows, OTLSS has been visited more than three million times. Thanks to our many allies in the battle against the law-school scam.
People have pointed out that OTLSS appears to be the last of the scam-blogs and that we have been publishing less and less. Old Guy does what he can to sustain the last major source of information on the law-school scam. Times have been difficult for most of us (Old Guy by no means excluded), and the dearth of news on law schools—other than a few recent closures—has contributed to a decline in our anti-scam journalism. We remain vigilant, however, and shall continue to provide the news, analysis, and activism that you have rightly come to expect.
Projects for the new year include a fresh analysis showing which schools may be worth attending and a summary of the data from the ABA's 509 disclosures, which were just released.
We at OTLSS thank you for your continued support and wish you happy and scam-free holidays.
In the aftermath of COVID, you will see college graduates try to ride out the recession in grad school or terminal professional schools and law is less gory than medical school (except to your own career chances.) Thomas Jefferson Skool o' Lawl has decided to go California law-only as Old Guy predicted....and will probably fold in a year, maaybe. You will only know when Law is defunct in America as a paying profession when Temple University loses its law school.
ReplyDeleteLess than half of med school applicants actually manage to matriculate at any US med school, MD or DO, and that's already an extremely self-selecting group that did well in a UG curriculum that included organic chem and a whole bunch of other hard science classes.
DeleteIf only half of those people are good enough to be docs, then there are very few if any people picking law over medicine for reasons like "less gory." Heck, there's probably hardly anyone "choosing" between law and medicine at all. Those for whom medicine is truly an option will select it pretty much 100% of the time.
Law is open to anyone who can finish a BA. Medicine is open only to those who pretty much spent their entire undergrad career preparing specifically for it, and even they only have about a 50/50 shot. No one who jumped through all the hoops to get in is going to just drop that path and decide to get a JD, not unless they didn't get in anywhere and ALSO couldn't get in to any of the med school fallback options like PA school or dentistry or pharmacy.
I certainly should have pursued medicine rather than law. Mind you, I wonder whether medicine won't be the next profession to be spoiled by shabbiness.
DeleteI don't know what is so special about Temple, but its enrollment did fall by 9% this year. Presumably you invoke Temple as a typical humdrum faux-prestigious institution; your point would have held just as well had you chosen Ohio State or any of a couple of dozen other trap schools.
I chose law school over medicine, medicine has a lot of problems too. Of course law is a worse choice, but the only lawyer I had in my family seemed generally happy, while all the doctors complained all the time how bad medicine was.
DeleteThe absolute happiest though seem to be the engineers and CPAs. They also make the most money, especially when adjusted for hours worked.
Most people really don't need an advanced education, the higher education system at large only harms the middle class and lower. Education is for the elites who don't need to earn a living. It's worthless to everyone else, in fact it only harms them, because the uneducated Boomers made so much more money than the highly educated Millennials.
I didn't have a single lawyer, doctor, engineer, or CPA in my family. I was on my own in more ways than one.
DeleteFew people at my élite law school could say the same. Most had at least one parent who was a lawyer, a judge, a law professor.
The nearly universal promotion of "education" is disingenuous. I'm all for education in the sense of self-cultivation. Like you, however, I am less sanguine about "education" in the sense of attendance at a university. Diploma-whoring is not education.
Not sure if there any "got it made" jobs. If you go to medical school, you're guaranteed a job, but the debt is enormous for most grads. Even average nursing school debt is pushing 50k-for the four year BSN.
DeleteAnd engineers? I come from a family of them; some have had excellent careers-others not so much. Several became petroleum engineers and while the salaries were good, there have been regular lay-offs during down years, and even in the best of times, the willingness to relocate ever 3-5 years was necessary; not so great for most families. One was required to move the boondocks of Montana to the boondocks of Louisiana. And even those getting promoted got to visit charming places like Kazakhstan for three years of fun and exploration. And to major in engineering, like pre-med, the student is required to take a lot of tough courses. Most 0Ls end up in law school because they wouldn't take the tough classes and ended up with a BA and literally no practical job skills and very few options. So they enroll in law school; everybody can get into some law school somewhere, and it's clearly the path of least resistance. It postpones decision-making(really reality-facing) for three years, sounds impressive to some, and beats working at The Gap.
And it's not really falling for the scam; most who enroll don't really care about anything but escaping the minimum-wage working world. Blogs like this will persuade some not to attend, but not most, because they can't be persuaded.
Here's a sure-fire way to end the scam: get the government out of the graduate school loan business and allow the loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. The latter option has its flaws(in letting people ignore their obligations), but there are plenty of penalties that come with declaring bankruptcy-and the lenders would stop writing bad loans ASAP.
It's time to get the scam off the backs of the taxpayers-and return the risk to the private lenders and the law schools.
The best occupational option nowadays may be a trade, such as plumbing or electrical work. I am increasingly of the view that university in the US has become the plaything of the rich, best avoided by almost everyone else.
DeleteThere was a scam towards STEM oriented law students, and that was patent law. Perhaps it was viable for a period of time, but it got glutted the same or worse than other areas of law.
DeleteThe issue is that STEM, outside of being a medical doctor or an RN, isn't as surefire as people claim. And those professions really don't take that many people.
I still maintain the world is extremely overpopulated. The population when the Boomers were coming of age is all a modern, developed economy can sustain. That is why they didn't need advanced education and didn't have the goalposts constantly moved to blame them for not having living wages---there was no choice, simple reality required that they get paid. There just weren't enough human beings around to get things done, so the elites couldn't devalue human life.
Our elites keep claiming we NEED population growth. That high populations power the economy. They are, as usual, being misleading, THEY NEED a large population to devalue human life so they can drive their own wealth and create huge wealth inequality. Otherwise, China and India would be the overwhelmingly strongest and best economies in the world, yet they struggle with even MORE wealth inequality than the US does---despite the US eager to close the gap.
Until birth rates start dropping, things won't get better. Japan has started the process of lowering birth rates, they will be in a good spot when their old finally start dying. It will take a couple of generations to fix though, but with post-Boomer generations having lower life longevity, it should clear up in under a half century or so.
It really should not matter what profession you choose, and it didn't for the Boomers. It didn't matter in the 50s and 60s, and it barely mattered until Reagan decided to favor the rich and destroy infrastructure set in place to allow the American way of life to be the envy of the world. Politicians won't fix these issues until they are forced to, and the people can't force them. So population and reality will have to do the work instead.
"I don't know what is so special about Temple, but its enrollment did fall by 9% this year. Presumably you invoke Temple as a typical humdrum faux-prestigious institution; your point would have held just as well had you chosen Ohio State or any of a couple of dozen other trap schools."
DeleteI chose Temple's Beasley Skool o' Lawl because in the rankings Temple U. and San Diego State U. are on a similar level, yet Temple has the law school and the medical school and the "college of dentistry", things unknown to SDSU. My point is Temple is punching above its weight, like a pocket battleship. It might be forced to scuttle, like the most famous vessel of that class, the "Admiral Graf Spee" if things go south enough.
That's a good way to look at the situation. The institutions with the best law schools tend to have a medical school; that becomes less common as we descend through the mediocre toilets and down into the über-toilets. Any moron with a bit of money can open an über-toilet law school, but opening a medical school isn't nearly so easy.
DeleteIn the 1955 movie "Blackboard Jungle", Glenn Ford tries to persuade Sidney Poitier to abandon his career objective of auto mechanic and enroll in college instead.
DeleteMy, how times have changed.
I'd try to persuade a lemming to abandon her career objective of becoming a lawyer and take up repairing cars instead.
Delete@5:28: When docs complain it really is just sour grapes. If they want something low stress there is plenty on offer. You can sign up with a locums agency and make six figs to work part-time 100% telemed. Just the other day I saw one offering 120k to work one (!) remote day per week.
DeleteYou can also work in an office based or clinic type setting and, if you deign to work full time, make 200-300k just doing 9921x (basic office visit) all day. Or you can work for an insurance company doing prior authorizations and not even worry about patients at all.
Point is, sure it can be hard and stressful work if you want to be a hospitalist/ED doc/surgeon. But you don't have to do that. There's lots of low-stress shift work on offer that pays perfectly fine and which can be had by pretty much anyone with a license and a pulse.
And the debt? Lol. Not only are there tons of special loan forgiveness programs for medicine, even without them there's also the same PSLF that's available to everyone, except that about half of all hospitals are actually 501c3s, and there are also nonprofit "community health centers" (Federally Qualified Health Center or FQHCs technically) which are essentially just primary care clinics but the feds pay special high rates to encourage their existence. Unlike in other sectors, there really isn't a pay differential between for-profit and nonprofit employers in the healthcare space. I've heard of this referred to explicitly as the "doctor loophole" in PSLF.
The bottom line is that medicine can be what you want it to be. If you want to be truly rich and work hard for it, you can. But if you want to just punch in and punch out and still make perfectly fine money, you can do that too. Insurance paperwork and student loans are minor gripes really, not things that should dissuade people from going into the field who actually have that option. And even at this unusual moment, I think we have to keep in mind that not all docs are on the COVID frontlines, and the ones who are, are handsomely compensated for the risks they take. The hospital janitor has just as much or more exposure as them, and no one is lavishing them with money or recognizing them as heroes.
Yes, but the length and devastation of training to the soul, is a price to high for a low six figure salary.
Delete"a fresh analysis showing which schools may be worth attending"
ReplyDeleteThat should be a short list.
There are 11.
DeleteThere is a MASSIVE flight to quality underway for law school applications according to the 509 reports. Top-ranked schools are seeing record high application numbers, but those ranked below about 75 are seeing record lows.
DeleteThere are 6. And even that's debatable. There is a vast difference in the so-called T14 between the bottom 8 and the top 6 and another huge jump between the top 3 and the bottom 3 in outcomes.
DeleteCongrats, and thanks OG. At least some of those 3m must be 0Ls, 1Ls or 2Ls.
ReplyDeleteIf even a minuscule percentage of them are persuaded by what they read here to dig deeper, beyond the glossy brochures, and maybe drop out or not enroll in the first place, then this blog has done a great service. And if anyone out there reading this fits that description, post saying so! Give the Jacob Marleys on here hope that their warnings get heeded, at least every once in awhile.
I fondly recall the insolent days of December 2013.
ReplyDeleteI'm writing from perhaps the furthest outlying reaches of the law school scam; that of being a slightly successful pro se litigant able to stumble through the Federal courts enough to force some settlements against a State agency in 3 cases. I've toyed with law school since, as well as JD and paralegal-type work, even though I'm in my mid-50's with a B.S. in Criminal Justice Admin. After reading this blog over time, it appears better to be a smart-ass paralegal than a rotten lawyer, and the pay may not be much different(!) Thanks for providing insights into the Law School and JD scam worlds; I never knew how screwed up things were until arriving her during a search for some legal nugget brought me here. It appears American law schools and lawyering in general have managed to commit professional suicide, but the corpse is still twitching. Maybe that new career in small-engine repair is a better move...
ReplyDeleteI don't know much about small-engine repair, but joining the legal "profession" for the sake of a paid career would be a terrible mistake at your age. It was a terrible mistake when I did it, fifteen or so years younger than you: I was considered too old (hence the moniker Old Guy) and couldn't find work despite excelling at a supposedly élite law school. You can read my story at this site.
DeleteMany people like you take a sincere interest in law for reasons far better than those of a typical 22-year-old who sees nothing better to do with a useless BA. Sincere interest, however, will not overcome the rampant age-based discrimination in the legal "profession" or the dearth of jobs even for those lacking in such undesirable traits as maturity and experience. Law-school scamsters will happily tell you otherwise in order to fleece you for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. You are right to stay away from this ruined "profession" and from its hackademic point of entry.
Creighton:
ReplyDelete2011: 1,214 Applications
2020: 772 Applications
Drake:
2011: 1,026 Applications
2020: 447 applications.
These are YUGE drops in applications.
50th Ranked Baylor:
Delete2011: 5,257
2020: 2,725