Old Guy stumbled upon a ten-year-old criticism of the law school scam. Although written by an outsider (specifically a psychiatrist), it shows real insight into what was wrong with law school in 2011—and what is still wrong with it today.
Long-time anti-scam warriors will be familiar with an old article in The New York Times that used as its chief example Michael Wallerstein, "a tall, sandy-haired, 27-year-old radiating a kind of surfer-dude serenity". Wallerstein borrowed a quarter of a million dollars to attend now-defunct über-toilet Thomas Jefferson while indulging in high living that included a fancy apartment—he nearly used his borrowed funds for the downpayment on a $350k condo—and trips to Europe for "study". After graduation, he couldn't find work other than temporary document review under a manager who likewise had failed to thrive ("I was 32 when I graduated, and at 32 you’re washed up in this field"). He couldn't pay the interest on his loans, never mind the principal. His fiancée was if anything even more oblivious, hoping that he wouldn't "wind up in one of those time-gobbling corporate law jobs" that he would never get, all because "[w]e like hanging out together". (While he stiffed his creditors, somehow he and his brainless bit of stuff appear to have found the money for a "Boho-Chic Wedding", whatever that means.) Yet Wallerstein was "one of law schools’ satisfied customers" on account of the "prestige" of nominally being a lawyer.
"Do you hate law grads yet?" asked our psychiatrist. Yes, we do. Even those of us who are law grads ourselves. And Wallerstein is particularly odious. The psychiatrist called him an "intelligent but entitled douchebag". I disagree with the "intelligent" part, but the rest is true in spades.
The psychiatrist ripped into the garbage-purveyors at You Ass News and the scamsters who manipulate the worthless "rankings" for status and profit, but also exposed the plight of graduates who find themselves all but indistinguishable from the rest because they too are not meaningfully assessed:
Law students had no real measure of their status as an applicant; no reliable descriptor of what kind of a school they went to (short of branding); and no reliable measure of their performance there. "What do you mean I can't get hired?" They think to themselves, "amn't I bright? Hard working? Fluent in legal theory?" And the employers respond, "how the hell would we know that?"
Back to the douchebag Wallerstein and his coveted "prestige" of being a document-review monkey masquerading as a lawyer:
I don't doubt for a moment he sincerely believes he is a lawyer, because lawyer for him isn't a profession or even a job, it's a label, a code word for a kind of intellectualism he wants for himself. As long as "all of my friends see me as..." it was well worth the cost. He didn't study to become an attorney, he bought a back-up identity.
It's worth asking why Wallerstein chose a JD as a back-up identity, and not an MD or a PhD. Can we agree it was easier? Why not an MBA? Because an MBA is for something else; a law degree is a brand in itself. You can get an MBA and still be nothing unless you find a job. Get a law degree, you're always a lawyer.
That may be correct (with one slight change: one has to maintain a license in order to be a lawyer). An undeserved intellectual cachet attaches to the JD. Lemmings from Maine to California are told that "you can do anything with a law degree". The magical "million-dollar" JD supposedly sets one head and shoulders above the generality. An MBA is nothing without an overpaid corporate job in so-called management, but a JD is thought to represent quality whether its bearer works in the field of law or not. Perhaps there was something to that sixty or seventy years ago, but how much intellectual superiority can the JD connote in a day—a very bleak day—when über-toilets raffle off "scholarships" to people who haven't even applied for admission?
On the prestige of a law degree:
In actuality, law school is utterly useless. The only thing that was useful was the writing class, which basically taught you how to argue thoroughly but efficiently on paper.
That overstates the outcome of the writing class. The few people who come out able to argue thoroughly but efficiently on paper were able to do so before law school. That said, "utterly useless" isn't wide of the mark. Certainly law school, pretensions aside, does not teach anyone "to think like a lawyer"; it doesn't even impart much knowledge of law.
Continuing:
I go through this to show you that law school, while it attracts people wanting to practice law, also attracts college kids who are bright but emotionally adrift. They don't know what they want-- besides a mental image of a lifestyle-- and they don't know who they are-- besides a mental image of an identity. A three year law program is a great way to postpone reality and still have something to show for yourself.
Again, law school also attracts plenty of people who are not bright. But this psychiatrist has put a finger on an important element of the law-school scam: just like an undergraduate program, it's an extension of high school. Thousands of lemmings leap into law school without intending to practice law; many others entertain fantasies of being paid six figures for saving dolphins or hobnobbing at cocktail receptions in Vienna. These and many others go to law school "to postpone reality" while collecting a faux-prestigious JD at the end (unless they fail out, as many do).
Lemmings can afford the frivolous venture for one simple reason:
[B]ecause all law schools are free. Read it again. All law schools are free.
Not after you graduate, of course, but right now. Law schools can charge anything they want because everyone has enough money to pay for it- today. As long as there are guaranteed government loans available for this, there is no economic incentive to lower the costs. And as long as the price is zero, demand will always be infinity.
If it was true supply and demand, #1 ranked Harvard and #100 ranked Hofstra wouldn't have the same tuition. But they do, the same as stupid Washington University, which is so stupid it's in Missouri. "It's underrated." Bite me. Are we saying that Hofstra's worth the same money as Harvard? That people would pay anything to go to Hofstra? No, they don't have to pay anything to go to Hofstra. That's the point.
The psychiatrist correctly excoriates scam-professor Steven Greenberger for proposing to address the high cost of law school through a warning like those put on packages of cigarettes. That kind of warning, which the scamsters haven't given even once in the many years since Greenberger made his scam-serving suggestion, would afford a handy to excuse to the scamsters while failing to deter significant numbers of lemmings.
I don't agree that supply and demand would solve the problem. Even without student loans, Hofstra could charge high rates because there is no real competition: the choice is not between Hofstra and Harvard; it is between Hofstra and nothing. Nevertheless, I do agree that non-dischargeable student loans should not be available for law school, at least in the current free-for-all of arbitrarily large amounts for anyone whom some goddamn über-toilet choo$e$ to admit. Those who worship at the altar of free markets—Old Guy certainly isn't among the devout—should demand that the loans be dischargeable in bankruptcy. As things stand, federally guaranteed student loans underpin the contemptible and pernicious hackademic–industrial complex.
Thanks, Old Guy. What a great post. It gave me insight to the social psychology behind all the irrational decision making to attend law school (as well as, of course, the economics of it). We need to advocate ending the "federally guaranteed student loans underpin the contemptible and pernicious hackademic–industrial complex," especially as it relates to law and graduate schools. In addition, we need to work on ending the misconception that if you have a law degree you are: 1) a lawyer, and 2) worthy of prestige. Let's face it: if you do not have a law license and if you are not practicing law, you are not a lawyer. This should be self-evident (like if you have a MBA but are a stay-at-home parent, you are not a business person), but apparently it is not. Also, it should be self-evident that if you are six-figures in debt and cannot afford a basic 'Merican lifestyle, you are not prestigious, but apparently it is not.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, great job Old Guy. And I hope things are going better for you.
Great-and depressing-post. It's been a decade,and what's changed? Essentially, nothing. Yes, a handful of schools have closed but there are still at least 100 too many totally unneeded law schools still operating, still raking in that tuition $$$, still immune to market forces, still luring gullible 0Ls.
ReplyDeleteA noteworthy analysis from 10 years ago....and absolutely nothing has changed. Long live the Scam!
I think 10 years has shown us one thing we've all been proven wrong on, we thought that it was unsustainable, and clearly we were incorrect.
DeleteI don't agree that we've been proven wrong. We never predicted that the law-school scam would collapse in a day. What we did predict, in the middle of the last decade, was that ten law schools would close by 2020. As of August 2020, thirteen had closed since 2016. Far from being wrong, we were right.
DeleteMost people unaffected by the scam just don't get it until I bring up the Harvard/Hofstra conundrum (although being in the northeast I go with Harvard/WNEU). People are shocked when I tell them the tuition is about the same, because everyone knows that when you pay a lot more for a Mercedes Benz than you would for a Hyundai you get a lot more value in return. In the land of the grownups if the Mercedes cost the same as the Hyundai Hyundai would soon be out of business. The economics of the scam make zero sense, but of course no one would lend you the cost of a Mercedes to spend on a Hyundai.
ReplyDeleteAnyone who wants the expensive Mercedes can buy it by paying the price. That's not true of Harvard's JD. Given the choice between Harvard and Hofstra (or Western New England or any other toilet or über-toilet) at the same price, practically everyone would take Harvard.
DeleteThen why do people pay the same price for Hofstra? Because they're not allowed to go to Harvard, whose JD program takes only a few hundred students per year out of the tens of thousands who'd happily sign up. As I said earlier, the choice for most lemmings isn't between Hofstra and Harvard; it's between Hofstra (or other Hofstra-like toilets) and nothing. The correct choice—even for many people at Harvard—is nothing, but of course it's hard to persuade a lemming not to go to law school.
If most people who were prepared to buy a Mercedes were allowed to buy only a Hyundai or similar car, the price of a Hyundai could be expected to rise.
Good point OG. Indeed, if you tell me someone's LSAT score and where they want to live/practice, you can narrow it down to at most 2-3 schools they're likely to attend, and often just one.
DeleteThat's an oligopoly. They don't need to compete on price because each school has its own turf. For example, if you want to live/work in Massachusetts and you have an LSAT in the high 140s/low 150s (yeesh) then if you're not looking to work in Boston specifically, Western New England essentially owns the market for people like you. And if you do want Boston then Suffolk and NESL pretty much own that territory. Similarly, Northeastern basically owns the market for Massholes with a 155-60 and BC/BU own it for those with like 163-166ish. Above that you get into T14 territory but obviously that's a different ballgame entirely. Below the national schools though, each has a "turf."
Why would the schools compete on price? They're not competing with each other because they're mostly serving different people. They've all basically just carved out a turf for themselves consisting of a certain geographic area and a certain LSAT score within a spread of 5 points-ish. And since everyone can pay thanks to loans, the only economically rational decision is that all the law schools basically peg their tuition to each other, with the occasional exception of states where there are public law schools in which case in-state tuition is a draw. But of course, a public school charging lower in-state isn't something the school chooses to do, it's typically mandated by law so that one can be put aside.
"You stay off my turf, I'll stay off yours, and we'll both be able to charge more by doing so." That's how an oligopoly works. Except this oligopoly is not a literal conspiracy. It's just sorta naturally/unconsciously created because of the importance of LSAT scores to USNWR and the fact that (a few national schools aside) people generally go to law school in the geographic area in which they intend to practice.
The exceptions to what 4:11 wrote are few. A Mormon from some distant place might go to Brigham Young University, both for the religious cachet and for the fat discount available only to documented members of the church. The U of Hawai‘i must attract plenty of people who imagine themselves lounging about on some beach, and the numerous toilets in Florida (one next to each building in foreclosure) must likewise draw in outsiders foolish enough to want to live in that state. Vermont Law School must lure some dolts by pretending to specialize in environmental law. But a generic East Bumblefuck Skule o' Law will fare poorly outside its own area.
DeleteThose who insist on going to some no-name toilet institution should at least favor one in their general vicinity. If you live in Los Angeles and have in mind to work there, don't run off to the U of Maine without a good reason.
People with toilet-level credentials have few options. They can go to some shithole such as Cooley or Appalachian, or they can give up on law school. Anyone with a brain would give up, but brains aren't common in toilet territory. Since moving out of the area rarely makes sense, toileteers end up buying from an oligopoly—and since they don't spend their own money, they don't care much about prices anyway.
There is an old saying that if you want your kid to get into Harvard you should move to Wyoming. The most elite schools make a conscious effort to assemble a truly national student body. On a similar note, it has long been my observation that most if not all toilets will take the most marginal of lemmings from far-away corners of the country who were rejected by their local toilets. Since their standards can't really get lower they might as well increase the number of states they can say their students represent.
DeletePlenty of über-toileteers do run off to a Cooley or an Appalachian in some distant place. Über-toileteers are not known for their intelligence, which is why they go to über-toilets in the first place.
DeleteI don't see the advantage of moving to attend a distant toilet law school, unless the location is especially appealing (and this is usually a terrible reason to choose a law school). Other than a handful of élite institutions, law schools have little recognition outside their own area.
When Arizona Summit went tits up a couple of years ago, the U of North Dakota snapped up many of the suddenly cast-off Summitites. The influx of people from the same distant dump must have changed the character of the adoptive school for years. The U of North Dakota was totally unselective, taking anyone from Arizona Summit who wanted to go. But what do those erstwhile Summitites plan to do: beg for jobs in Minot and Dickinson? Well, many of them won't pass the bar anyway, so it's a moot point. But if they go back to Arizona, how are they going to explain going all the way to North Dakota for law school?
Your comment about Wyoming applies better to undergraduate schools. It's true that Harvard and Yale may smile a bit more on an applicant from some place that is otherwise likely to go unrepresented. Nonetheless, they draw the bulk of their students from southern New England, New York, New Jersey, and a few cities elsewhere.
Something tells me North Dakota saw the cash grab opportunity in that Summit example. All of those kids would be transfers, and transfers don't count in the USNWR rankings and generally pay full boat tuition. Meanwhile, the Summitites are desperately trying to find a way to finish their degrees and as the old saying goes, any port in a storm.
DeleteI do feel bad for the people who were already there though, as ND was at least a lot more selective than Summit was. The tidal wave of morons must have been disruptive indeed for the people already there.
But regardless, I don't think vulturing a toilet like that changes the standard rule that people GENERALLY go to law school in the region in which they intend to practice.
What makes me really sad about Summit, BTW, is that the dept of ed provides for loan cancellation in cases of school closure, but only if the person does not reenroll somewhere else in the same program within a certain amount of time. Anyone who succumbed to that instinct to need to finish passed up a golden, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by which they could've gotten a Mulligan on their terrible decision to go to a place like Summit. Sad.
Yes, the U of North Dakota just wanted asses in seats. Those asses paid out-of-state rates and presumably got no discounts, since most of them had no practical choice, and thus no real bargaining power, if they wanted to continue pretending to study law that year.
DeleteAs I recall, Arizona Summit gave only a couple of weeks' notice of its closure. A distant über-toilet saw a golden opportunity and grabbed it. Where the hell were the other über-toilets? Why didn't they leap at this chance?
The sensible thing to do, as you said, was to put in for cancellation of the debts on the grounds that the school had gone tits up. But obviously the sorts of people who would go to Arizona Summit or the U of North Dakota cannot be expected to do what is sensible.
4:20 here, OG. I should have been clearer in my post, the Wyoming thing is meant to boost undergrad admissions odds, not law school odds. But I do think that toilet law schools probably crave geographic diversity more than elite law schools. Saying your students represent 25 states makes you look a little less like the local dumping ground that you actually are. And I do know of one toileteer from New England who in the 1970's wanted to join his Ivy-law educated father's practice but could not get into even the newest of the several New England toilets that sprung up in the early 1970's. He wound up at the University of Puget Sound Law School (which later switched to a new parent U, the University of Seattle). Dear old dad could have easily funded tuition anywhere in those easy times so it was a kind of symbiotic thing, UofPS law got to flash someone who had travelled 3,000 miles to take advantage of their superior-in-every-particular program and he got a place that would overlook his LSAT score and GPA. But unlike most lemmings he had a guaranteed job, so just getting the ticket was all that mattered. Others would do it, even today, just because they think they're really good on their feet.
DeleteIndiana Tech boasted of getting someone from Ghana. Right off the bat it had a claim to "international" prestige.
DeleteThe toilets may well prefer a measure of geographic diversity so that they can seem broader in scope, but above all they crave money. They don't have the luxury of selecting people from different places; they take just about everyone that they can get.
Respectfully, it is unsustainable, we just don't know how much longer it will go on for. Aside from student loans for law school, student loans for kids to get drunk and party at Spring Break don't make sense either, but we still dole them out. Does Universal Basic Income make sense, or cash payouts of "reparations" for wrongs that are centuries old? Does our National Debt make sense? It all seems like a gigantic financial crisis that is about to hit us, but I cannot tell you whether it will hit next year, in ten years, in fifty years, or tomorrow morning. . .
ReplyDeleteIf anyone is feeling down, check the ABA 509 reports for your nearest trashcan law school, and see applications from 2011 and compare to 2020.
ReplyDeleteDePaul 2011: 4743 In 2020: 1684
Drake 2011: 1026 In 2020: 447
Creighton : 1214 In 2020: 772
St Thomas: 1283 In 2020: 577
These are huge declines.
Thanks for those reassuring reports, 10:59. Here are the figures for first-year enrollment at various toilets (figures are for 2011, then 2020):
DeleteCooley ("Western Michigan University"): 1647, 167
Appalachian: 145, 72
Ohio Northern: 111, 59
Touro: 266, 206
Florida A&M: 254, 111
Golden Gate: 229, 140
Hofstra: 362, 274
Florida Coastal: 679, 98
https://abovethelaw.com/2021/04/law-school-gets-cut-off-from-student-loan-funds-again/
DeleteFlorida Coastal looks ready to take the dirt nap.
Thanks for the news about Florida Coastal. It's the last of the InfiLaw scam-chain. Indeed, InfiLaw's Web site and even its domain are gone. Are the shareholders looking for another scam that offers plenty of ill-gotten gains?
DeleteIn other über-toilet news, Cooley is trying to sell its building in Grand Rapids. The once-expansive Cooley chain is now down to a branch in Lansing and another in Riverview, Florida.
I am also a psychiatrist, so I wonder if the author of that blog post considered something else: When consumers of a service or product perceive it as being "free," they typically treat it as if it has little value. I do mostly inpatient psychiatry, and few of my patients end up paying much, if anything, directly out of pocket for their care. (Even most Americans who have healthcare insurance don't factor in their monthly premiums and their employers' contributions as being part of the "cost" of treatment, and most of our hospitalized patients make little or no effort to pay copays and cover their deductibles.) So, few of our hospitalized patients contribute much effort to their own treatment, and mostly expect symptom relief without any real change in behaviors or investment in terms of adherence to medications, efforts to stay sober, etc...
ReplyDeleteAnd so I think it is with students in America's dysfunctional higher education system, and in particular law students like the Wallerstein idiot. If I knew I were going to shell out six figures for a legal education, I would think it would behoove me to start preparing for the bar exam after the first year so there would not be a lengthy delay before I would be qualified to practice law. Instead you see undergraduates and some graduate students screw around, hang out at bars, and play video games for years, then bemoan the fact that their student loans pile up during the inevitable periods of unemployment or underemployment that follow completion of worthless degree programs.
"If it's free it's worth nothing to them" is a very fundamental economic principle. My senior year of college a friend who was heavily involved in student government (something of zero interest to me) persuaded me to be one of the non-Student Senate members of a committee that reviewed applications of groups that were seeking student activity funding for the coming school year. That year, for reasons that I cannot now recall, there was going to be a lot less money available for the next year so we had to help these groups look for savings and alternative sources of revenue. When the student literary "magazine" came to make it's pitch I asked whether they might consider raising their cover price from its current $0.25 ($0.70 today). They gave a very good answer. If they charged a buck ($2.80 today) a lot fewer people would buy it so any price increase entailed the very real threat of actually lowering revenues. On the other hand, they knew that if they passed it out for free people would take it regardless of whether they were seriously interested in it. It was a sort of price point resistance. We didn't bother them further about their cover price.
DeleteAnother story from college was of a young woman who was considering taking a class I had taken so she asked me: "Can you blow off class?" I replied that I didn't know because I never blew off classes. Can't remember her face but I can still see the expression of embarrassment. But then the years went by and tuition went up and I blithely assumed that for what college costs nowadays blowing off class couldn't much be happening anymore. When my son was at our flagship state university, however, I asked him about it and he said loads of people (but not him) blow off classes. I mentioned this to a friend whose son was at a less competitive and (being private) more expensive school. He said the same was true there and that his son believed he received a premium in grading because he never missed a class. Dr. Coe nailed it, it was free back in the day and it is still free despite the looming consequences being so much more expensive.
That's the economics of it. I'll leave it to the psychiatrists to figure out how people can so successfully delude themselves.
I don't think kids blow off class because it's "free." They blow off class because classes aren't what they're paying for.
DeleteThe instinct here to say "students must think of it as free" comes from this equation or something like it: 30k/yr for 10 classes/yr = $3k per course. Ten week semester each class meets 3x/wk so that's 30 total sessions for $3,000. 3000/30=$100 per session. Or $200, in the case of a school that charges $60k/yr, and so on.
You could think of it like that and conclude that you're flushing a Benjamin or two every time you blow off a class, but no one thinks of it that way. That's because they're not paying for the classes, they're paying for the degree. Or more accurately, at the end of the day you're really paying for an agreement by which the school will keep your "permanent record" permanent and for all time, if anyone asks, they will confirm that you have a degree from there. Because that is necessary to jump thru the next hoop of life, whether that be job or graduate school or whatever.
It isn't free, and I don't think people think it is by and large. Rather, I think students simply recognize the tuition as the sunk cost of getting the degree and may try to minimize other costs they can control, like their time. From that perspective, if you can blow off class and still graduate with a good GPA then blowing off class is actually the economically rational thing to do.
Maybe I was strange but when I was in college and law school, decades ago, I hated missing classes because I did figure out what each class was costing me...of course back then it wasn't all that much. Went to a flagship state college and than a mediocre law school at night. I have had a successful legal career...but it is much harder these days to make it.
DeleteThe comment by 2:33 shows what ejookayshun in the US has become—a pursuit of credentials independent of substance.
Delete"A free good is an abused good," economists say. It's also a lesson that politicians and others fail to learn.
DeleteExactly, OG. Indeed, substance is found in an apprenticeship system, which stuff like medicine well knows since they learn a whole lot more in residency than med school. And even during med school, half the time at least is spent in rotations.
DeleteIt's like in the Tipping Point, where Malcolm Gladwell talks about how becoming an expert at pretty much anything is largely a matter of acquiring 10,000 hours experience doing it. That's about 5 years of doing something full-time, and sitting in a classroom listening to a professor who has been removed from the real world for many years (or may never have practiced at all) drone on is no substitute for it. But we pretend it is, which is why it's so important to get that piece of paper.
@12:32: I was the same way. Had essentially perfect attendance throughout both college and law school. I wasn't thinking so much about cost as about the idea that you might score some extra credit for class participation, mainly in undergrad. Or in LS, some profs were more Socratic and would cold-call off the class roster and not based on eyeballing who was there.
DeleteSome profs of course flunk people out for nonattendance no matter how well they might do on a test. They're kinda few and far between though, especially in large lecture-hall style classes. So the decision is an economic one, and it should disregard the sunk cost of tuition in the cost/benefit analysis. If you perceive the benefit of attendance (or the penalty for nonattendance, if any) to outweigh the cost of time or commute or whatever, you attend. If not, you blow it off. Same analysis as pretty much every decision homo economicus makes.
I perceived even a slight possible bump in GPA to be worth the time. Others didn't, and I don't blame 'em.
In Talent Is Overrated, Colvin said that those 10,000 hours must be applied diligently to focused practice and improvement. Just sitting on your ass for five years won't get you anywhere.
Delete@3:12 the legal system historically relied on an informal apprenticeship system. It was assumed after law school the new lawyer would train under experienced lawyers. The demand for legal services was greater than the supply produced by law schools, so there wasn't much difficulty for the vast majority to secure some type of position.
DeleteIn the 19th century all it was was an apprentice system with no need for law schools. Harvard, Yale and Princeton trained you to be a gentleman and provided whatever general knowledge was needed.
Afterwards, the firm would take care of the legal details.
Higher education, the 10,000 hours, became more of another barrier to entry to whatever career was being sought. Another hurdle to get through in the process of elimination to prove you're the right stuff.
Now the legal apprenticeship system is gone because the need for the services is gone for the number of lawyers and all that is left are the law schools churning out even less qualified graduates. Law school, actually the bar exam, has become the terminal point in legal education rather than apprenticeship. In a system that originally provided for and can only work with apprenticeship as the end point.
Apprenticeship (referred to I think often as "articling") is alive and well in pretty much every other common law country besides the US, and the law degree is just an undergraduate major (LLB not JD). There's still an oversupply of would-be lawyers, but they're not allowed to become actual lawyers because they didn't get an articling slot and you can't get a "practicing certificate" without it.
DeleteBut instead of endlessly and fruitlessly pursuing a legal career that'll never bear fruit as with our hordes of under/unemployed JDs whose degree now functions as a scarlet letter, those who didn't get an articling post can just go do something else. It's just an undergrad major so you're not pigeonholed or deeply indebted, nor did you create a resume gap.
This produces solicitors/barristers who actually know what they're doing, ensures there aren't more of them than needed, and still lets people try for it without it destroying their lives when it doesn't work out, which it still won't for most of them.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that articling "produces solicitors/barristers who actually know what they're doing". Plenty of lawyers have described it as a farce, as most articling students get very limited experience. Articles in Canada typically last about ten months, and they don't have to include (and typically don't include) a broad range of legal practice.
DeleteOne drawback to articling is that it keeps people out altogether. Capable graduates find themselves excluded from the practice of law because they are too old, too Black, too gay, too disabled (or, formerly, too female or too Jewish). At least in the US they can be admitted to the bar—whether they can find jobs is another story—without having to pass muster with law firms bent on discrimination.
The initial degree in law is a bachelor's degree, the LLB, in Britain. In Canada, however, it is the JD, and it is realistically a second degree, not a first. (Some people get a JD in Canada without a bachelor's degree, but some people do the same at Cooley and elsewhere.) Australia too has been moving towards the JD.
The only solution then is to dramatically lower the number of law schools. Whether this will help the discrimination problem that is claimed to exist is another question. I would guess it would not but perhaps it would since it would be primarily upper tier law schools determining what the available pool of lawyers is.
DeleteA maxim: It is better that a toilet produces one judge or one JAG officer, and 99 disgruntled failures, than that the toiled never existed at all.
ReplyDeleteI don't agree. The one judge or JAG officer could have come from a better school. There are by no means enough jobs even for capable graduates, to say nothing of toileteers.
DeleteNo, it's not better to financially destroy 99 lives in exchange for anything, let alone a judge or a JAG-especially in light of the fact there is no shortage of either judges or JAGs.
DeleteSo that isn't a "maxim"...it's "nonsense".
The toilet would disagree, since it is the judge and the JAG and maybe the candlestick maker, who will be showcased in their recruiting brochure as evidence of the possibilities from attending their prestigious institution.
DeleteOf course, 8:36, and said toilet will justify it on access grounds. It's a very American idea, like in a Disney movie or something. Doesn't matter how low your odds of success may be, the top 1 or 2 kids can have a good outcome and so no one should deny anyone the opportunity to spend $200k competing to be one of them. Follow your dreams and all that.
DeleteFor the love of god, anyone attending law school because they think they will stride the steel deck of an aircraft carrier wearing Navy Blues, and be a JAG officer like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men or like the Navy JAG TV show is an idiot, and absolute, certified, 100 percent idiot. The Navy actually did hire a bunch of JAG lawyers recently--20 in one year. That means that not only is is quite likely that not one person in the entire graduating class of your law school going to get a job as a NAVY JAG officer, statistically speaking, not one person in your entire state will get such a job. And odds aren't much better in the Army or Air Force. Oh, and yeah, they're fairly low-paying jobs anyway, with a lot of risks, like getting shot. As for Judgeships, well, that can actually happen for you, but a whole lot of dominos have to fall in the right order, and you may not make judge until you are in your 50's, so that's not a valid reason to attend law school either. There is one, broad, and ever-growing class of lawyers you may very well end up in, a certain practice area--unemployed lawyers. As a successful lawyer, I run into unemployed and severely under-employed lawyers all the time, they fall into three categories: part-time work for the Public Defender's Office, temporary document review work for $20-$22 per hour, and pro bono work for the local women's shelter. Those are your realistic outcomes for attending law school in 2021.
DeleteThere's a TV show about JAG? Old Guy stopped watching television in the 1980s, so he's blissfully unaware of any program much more recent than Welcome Back, Kotter. Still, he's surprised that the courts martial provide sufficiently titillating fodder for the boob tube.
DeleteAnyway, dilbert113 is quite right. JAG is another bullshit fantasy. The graduating class of Harvard alone could soak up all of the openings 30 times over. Not that Harvard types, mind you, are likely to go into JAG. I'd bet that JAG calls for typical military lunkheads who do what they're told and haven't a thought of their own to their name. Maybe a toileteer would even have an advantage.
Years ago I posted this article about lawyers who were paid less than janitors and switchboard operators working at the same courthouse:
https://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2015/06/jd-disadvantage-make-less-than-janitor.html
And to think that those positions for lawyers at the courthouse are highly coveted!
Welcome Back, Kotter was 70's. It was initially banned in Boston, which was then at the height of its bussing crisis/debacle. They didn't need students channeling Arnold Horshak "Oh, oh! Call on me Mr. Kotter!" We were able to pick up a fuzzy version from Manchester, NH in those pre-cable days for the few weeks before the censors relented.
DeleteInteresting piece of history, 6:09; I didn't know about that. People who felt the need to ban something so tame must have been searching for reds under the beds.
DeleteI can't imagine going to great lengths to pick up Welcome Back, Kotter, but the ban must have made it all the more attractive.
Is the "Old Guy" the last blogger keeping this blog going?
ReplyDeleteApparently. Maybe disgruntled toileteers are occupying their time as street agitators rather than advocates for people.
DeleteNo mention above of the recent efforts of Elizabeth Warren or Charles Schumer yet?
DeleteAt least half of physicians' professional training is in the form of hands-on experience via internship/residency. Medical residents spend most of their training under the supervision of experts who actually practice in their respective fields, rather than hackademics who've never treated a real patient spewing esoteric scholarshit nonsense. Unlike law skule graduates, medical trainees leave their residency programs pretty much "practice-ready." Furthermore, many academic medical centers are good places to seek medical care because trainees often spend more time with their patients, and are supervised by some of the best physicians in their respective specialties.
ReplyDeleteImagine if law school could be like that! If they "internship" part were part of the law school curricula, that would prevent the exclusion of racialized persons and other marginalized groups as long as they were already in law school. And, a law school's faculty would function as a large group practice, providing general and specialty legal services to the well-heeled and indigent alike. A corporation could contract with the school to provide defense against patent trolls, while an indigent victim of domestic violence could get assistance with a divorce, restraining orders, etc.
Won't happen in my lifetime, but I can still dream...
Very true. In fact, it's more like 75%. Figure 4 years med school and 4 years residency. Residency is 100% hands-on of course, but even during med school they spend about half the time in rotations. So that's about 6 of 8 years spent in just hands-on stuff. They definitely get their 10,000 hours, and then some, before they can go out on their own.
DeleteTheirs is an apprenticeship model first, foremost and above all else. The classroom component is the add-on, the experiential learning is the core.
Of course, there is no "legal insurance" like there is health insurance/medicare/medicaid. So it wouldn't matter how practical you made the law school curriculum, there still wouldn't be enough demand. Requiring residencies and then limiting the number of those residencies could, however, get some toilets closed because they'd be unable to match anyone into them.
It seems that Medical School grads who cannot match have a similar experience to law toilet grads. Stigma, Scarlet Letter, lack of transferable skills. The difference is that the numbers of orphan MDs is much, much less. 5% or less.
Deletehttps://www.physiciansweekly.com/unmatched-graduate-med-schools-to-blame/
How many of the medical-school graduates who can't find residencies were good students? Does the über-toilet phenomenon exist in medicine as well? Might a person like Old Guy finish at the top of the class at an élite school only to be unable to find a residency on account of age?
DeleteOld Guy, I've never heard of a "good student" who couldn't match in a residency. Students who don't match either have had behavioral or academic problems (rare) or have only applied to competitive residencies that are out of their league.
DeleteIn fact, residency programs in non-competitive fields like psychiatry often have to fill their ranks with international medical graduates because not enough Americans go to medical school to keep up with demand for practitioners in certain fields.
The only medical school "scam" I know of is perpetrated by some Caribbean medical schools that accept unqualified students who pay exorbitant tuition for two years then get weeded out after about the second year. This funds their scam, but then by eliminating the underperformers before the first round of standardized exams, they artificially manipulate the stats the way law schools discourage underperforming students from even trying to take the barzam.
I still don't get comparing medicine to law. The two professions have nothing in common with each other. I would almost rather be an unemployed lawyer than a physician. Beyond the decent salaries they make, I could not imagine anything worse than listen to people belly ache every day about their physical ailments and listening to their heart beats.
DeleteSay what you want about law, it can be very interesting. I used to love reading cases, and enjoyed the give and take, the intellectual sparring, between attorneys in litigation. I am old now and the profession is not what it once was. Lack of civility. Lack of ethics. Non stop advertising. Oftentimes incompetent Judges and the Federal Bench has turned decidedly to the Right.
I would probably not go into law again the way things are now. And then the tuition is a scam, as if a legal education is worth a thousand dollars a credit....
but in the end, the way society is now, everything is a scam these days. Congress is bought and paid for and dysfunctional. The middle class is dying, and our economy with all of the deficit spending may well have entered into a death spiral in the long run.
From my vantage point...nothing is what it once was in this country. exploitation is everywhere. Lawyers, at least, have a fighting chance because they have the skills to fight back. Just a simplified version of how I see things.
A couple of things: the five year old letter cited in 6:00pm is fully anonymous, so OG's question-was this a genuinely lousy student-can't get answered. Because yes, if you're a lousy medical student with poor grades and poor clinical recommendations, the match will not be kind to you.
DeleteAnd the writer entered medical school in his mid-30s; if he couldn't figure out personal finance by the point in his life, what kind of physician would he make?
But let's deal with facts: for the most recent year, 94% of graduates from US medical school matched. And that doesn't tell the whole story: the most likely reason the 6% didn't match is because they chose a very selective specialty-so sorry, but every medical student can't become a dermatologist.
But after the match comes the "scramble" where the unmatched can search for unfilled residency slots still available-these are invariably in less desirable locations in less desirable specialty programs(e.g. economically stressed urban or rural locations, in the lesser paid specialties, such as family practice). Every year there are enough of these slots to take every single US medical school graduate...but many of the unmatched refuse these slots, and enter the next year's match still hoping to be Dr Beverly Hills or whatever, hence our letter writer.
Medical school is insanely expensive, but repeated comparisons to the Law School Scam are inapposite. Even with the ton of debt, every graduate can get a job-maybe not a job in the specialty they want in the location they want, but a job as a physician in a certified medical training program. That just isn't true of the scam, with job numbers much lower but with debt very similar. And there's no such thing as the ersatz "JD preferred" jobs; medical schools don't list such stuff because there's no need.
There really is no comparison between law and medicine; either in terms of what it takes to get accepted, or short or long-term job prospects. As the graduate of a TTT law school, it would make me feel better to think so, but it just isn't accurate.
I fully agree that there's no comparison between law and medicine. Another important difference: lawyers are licensed to practice in the full range of law, even in areas that they've never studied, whereas physicians are trained at least superficially in all areas but still are limited to one (without further training). A divorce pig, glorified as a "specialist in family law", can just hang out a shingle and offer corporate bankruptcies without knowing the first thing about them. Not so a physician.
DeletePeople tend to link law and medicine because of the false assumption that practitioners of each necessarily draw in big six-figure incomes, and perhaps because of the equally false assumption that practitioners of each are necessarily intellectuals. The public tends to think of the zenith of white-collar work and the nadir of blue-collar work, so people are surprised to learn both of a lawyer who experiences protracted unemployment or earnings in the vicinity of the minimum wage and of a janitor whose income exceeds $100k per year.
In any event, I fully agree that law and medicine shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath.
I've heard a lot of bitching about the inability of some medical graduates to find residencies, but knowledgeable people have told me that a large part of that has to do with insisting on being in one place—almost invariably a flashy one, such as Manhattan—or pursuing a coveted specialty such as dermatology (the same ten medications over and over, rarely a consultation outside business hours). Some people, it seems, apply to only a few highly selective residencies and then bitch about being left with none when they could have had a position if they had been more flexible and realistic.
Then there's the question of academic and practical performance. Just this week, Old Guy interviewed two students who are about to graduate from law school, both in the bottom of their class (grades were mostly B's and C's). Old Guy wasn't expecting much of either of them, but one of them turned out to be quite good. When asked about his inferior grades, he said that he had found the manner of examination difficult. But he knew his law pretty well and was able to think through practical problems critically and with sophistication. He is likely to get a job. The other student candidly justified her poor grades on the grounds that she had chosen to spend her time on recreational endeavors rather than her studies because the grading curve made it unreasonable to put in much effort (as if I would be pleased to hear that she put play ahead of work). She turned out not to know much law, not even such basic things as the structure of the Constitution. That interview ended early.
I've noticed that medical students too can seem underprepared. A couple of years ago, I agreed to let a resident attend my medical consultation. He wasn't able to answer most of the physician's many questions. When asked to name an antihistamine that doesn't cause drowsiness, for instance, he thought for some time and came up with Benadryl, which, of course, does cause drowsiness. I, a layperson with no medical training, immediately thought of two antihistamines that filled the bill and probably could have come up with a third had I thought for a bit. A surgeon of my acquaintance complains that many residents nowadays do not even know anatomy very well.
As for Caribbean medical schools, I advise against signing up for any expensive professional school that has to resort to advertising. If it were any good, it wouldn't put up signs on municipal buses. Cooley and kin, that goes doubly for you.
In my state at least, docs can get licensed without residency if they can find somewhere that'll let them just do the internship year. And they can do whatever they want within the bounds of malpractice, because the license itself isn't specialized, much like lawyers.
DeleteBoard certification, which is earned after residency, is where everyone specializes. And while not technically required for the license, the fact is that without board certification or at least board eligibility, no one will employ you, no insurance company will put you in their network, no hospital will grant you privileges, and you'll have a hard time securing professional liability insurance.
So in theory, you could avoid residency, do the internship year, get licensed, hang a shingle and take cash-only patients much like how a solo or very small law firm operates. But without a residency that's about all you could do because no hospital or insurance company is going to want anything to do with you. So the number of people who actually do it is obviously minuscule.
What state is this, as almost everywhere in the USA to practice medicine you've got to complete a residency; the only exception that comes to mind is MO, which has something called "assistant physician" for medical school grads who can't pass the test.
DeleteAnd regardless, every MD has to complete a residency or no-as in zero-med malpractice insurance groups will offer coverage, and without malpractice insurance a doctor can't get licensed.
@8:04 it's actually a majority of states.
Deletehttps://thedo.osteopathic.org/2014/02/practicing-after-one-year-of-gme-is-it-feasible-should-it-be/
Ok, it is feasible, but as the cited article states, the number of MD/DO grads who follow that path is "very, very small" because as the article notes "Physicians will find it more difficult to enter into employment relationships without doing a residency”. Add to the problem getting a job-being unable to obtain malpractice insurance, as most reputable insurers won't issue a policy unless the physician finishes a residency.
DeleteAnd the article cited is over seven years old; if anything it's gotten even more difficult to obtain employment without a residency and near impossible w/o malpractice.
Mitchell Hamline recruiting convicts to law school:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.law.com/2021/04/22/getting-a-jd-while-in-prison-this-law-school-wants-to-establish-a-program-on-the-inside/?slreturn=20210322130145
Thanks for sharing that, 11:03. I had thought that racialized people were the last big group that the über-toilets could exploit, but one über-toilet has found a way to go after those who can't even show up on campus.
DeleteI thought felons were not allowed to practice law in most states. SOMEONE is obviously going to have to pay for this shit e.g. taxpayers? Will they get student loans and never pay them back (taxpayers) or will their state fund this education endeavor since they are incarcerated (taxpayers)?
DeleteOur civilization is certainly dying, and the legal profession is doing its part to hasten it's demise.
TO. HELL. WITH. THESE. PEOPLE.
This action by Mitchell Hamline should be receiving more attention. I mean its just unbelievable. The sheer greed of these faculties, the total abolition of standards. Prison to law pipeline? And of course, they will be refused on credit grounds anyway after a fortune has been creamed off by the law school. There are no more standards, society has collapsed.
DeleteClosest thing medicine has to toilets is those Caribbean schools. You spend 2 years in classes there and then they have agreements with hospitals back stateside where you do the second two years in rotations.
ReplyDeleteMatch rates at the "big 4" Caribbean schools are still 90%+, so long as you set your sites on less competitive residencies like primary care. Outside the big 4 though, you can see match rates of 60%, perhaps less if you count the people who drop out after they can't pass MLE Step 1 or whatever. They definitely have higher attrition rates too. So I would say those non-big-4 Carib schools are basically the "toilets" of medical schools.
And keep in mind that residencies are NOT just "work under supervision" things. They are highly organized and accredited training programs with real faculty, and once you complete it no one cares where you went to med school, they just care where you did residency and in what specialty.
Imagine if even the worst law schools placed 60% of their graduates in a training program following which nearly 100% of those so placed would receive jobs paying 150k at minimum.
There's no comparison. Even the worst medical schools the US will accept, which aren't even in the US, have better odds than all but the top law schools. And there definitely aren't any bad medical schools in the USA itself, that's for sure.
Medicine and law are certainly very different professions. But, the observation that there is "no comparison" illustrates what is wrong with the legal profession. Lawyers, like physicians are responsible for their clients' well-being, and in some places bad lawyers and bad judges can actually kill people and lead to horrendous suffering in the form of wrongful convictions, unfair trials, incompetent representation and such.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that legal training, unlike medical education, lacks meaningful standards when it comes to admissions to law school, assessment of competency during training, and remediation/expulsion for trainees who cannot cut the muster.
I would propose that, while no more than two years of college should qualify a person to enter law school, a law degree should take four years, two of which should be rotating "internships" or "preceptorships" with rigid guidelines for assuring the competency of trainees along the way. The public has a bona-fide interest in having the assurance that persons practicing law have demonstrated competency other than just being able to pass the barzam.
Sorry Sy, but gotta disagree: the last thing the scammers need is 4 years of required law school, siphoning off more of that taxpayer $$$. If it's all OJT, then make law firms/govt agencies/etc etc pay and train, which would be similar to the medical experience. Medical residents don't make much but they do get paid as they train.
DeleteAnd there is no comparison between law and medicine; just take a look at what's required to get accepted. A bored and feckless liberal artist will find some TTTT law school to take him; not so with medical school where the applicant has to take required-and very challenging-specific classes, and there are no TTTTs in the USA medical school system.
Sorry, but the last thing anyone needs is a four year law school, with the TTTTs vacuuming more taxpayer guaranteed loans and the hapless and hopeless dupes(aka law students) taking on momentous levels of debt...all for a worthless degree.
DeleteTo be fair to Sy, I think they are trying to say in an ideal world where law schools are not scam institutions with the sole mission of enriching the faculty and staff, law school would be 4 years with 2 years of clerkships. They are saying ideally, law schools should follow the same model of medical schools (even that is changing, medical schools are evolving more toward just over 1.5 years of classroom teaching followed by 2.5 years of training). In an ideal world, law students would spend the last two years of law school rotation through a State's Attorneys Office, Public Defenders Office, Big Law Firm, Family Law Firm, Judicial Clerkship, etc. Law students would be trained by practicing lawyers in a real world setting, not by the current lazy entitled crop of law profs in a classroom, reading worthless cases about the ownership of a fox in 19th century America. But scam law schools have no interest in serving the public and their students by adopting a model that trains and prepares lawyers.
DeleteTo add to Sy's thought, not that this would change, the core curriculum of law school during the first year would also adopt a medical school model. In med school, the emphasis is on the can't miss diseases and the common diseases. For instance, heart failure is a common disease. Myocardial infarction (heart attack) or meningitis are the can't miss diagnoses. We did learn about the rare diseases, but the focus was the common and can't miss problems. Ideally, law students would be taught common and can't miss legal problems in Contracts, Torts, Criminal law, etc. But the courses are not taught by practicing attorneys. The courses are taught by lazy, entitled, law profs who went to a top 3 law school, completed a Federal clerkship, worked in a big law firm for 2 years, and became a law prof. They do not practice in the field that they teach to law students. The schools hired these profs not to teach the students. Rather, the schools hired these elite credentialed profs hoping that their credentials will lead to more garbage scholarship published in worthless law reviews, elevating the ranking of the toilet law school.
Well, it's best to follow OG's prescription and close over 100 schools and reform the curriculum. Not expecting either to happen anytime soon...
DeleteI too support the model of a shorter period of instruction followed by a period (not "a longer period", because currently there is none at all) of practical training. Right now law school consists of two or three semesters of instruction in real subjects; the rest of the three-year term can easily be filled with such candy-ass bullshit as Animal Rights, Law and Popular Culture, or Hip-Hop and the US Constitution. If medicine were taught in the same way, there would be a bit of anatomy and histology amidst a heap of funky rubbish with virtually no practical or even theoretical application.
DeleteAnd, yes, the model proposed above assumes that the current top-heavy lot of hackademic scoundrels would be thrown out on their asses to make room for practitioners (gasp!). It also assumes that the half-ass dolts that populate the toilets today would be weeded out or, better still, would never be admitted.
Anon JD hints at the importance of general training and basic competence. Right now, prospective jurists are encouraged to view themselves as "specialists" even during law school, with the result that knowledge of anything outside the "specialty" is treated as superfluous if not wasteful. Training is almost totally disconnected from practice. For example, my year-long course on contracts—and this was at an élite law school—did not once present a written contract! As a result, many practicing lawyers with years at the bar make rudimentary errors all the time. I routinely find myself educating opposing counsel about basic points of law.
@anon 4:45 and @Old Guy 8:17 The way law school is supposed to test the students skill as can't miss problems is through issue spotting on essay exams. Most professors will include the can't miss issues and throw in some more obscure ones. The difference between knowing the obscure issues is often the difference between an A and a B. Start missing the gimmie issues and you descend to C territory. Then you get the professors that like to put only obscure issues on their exams. Not sure what they are trying to accomplish.
DeleteOld guy, my Contracts course was the same way, no drafting exercises. I think most ABA schools operate this way. My Wills and Estates course which was not required but recommended didn't have much in the way of drafting either. I took an Estate Planning course and a Modern Real Estate course which were recommended for practice application but not bar exam, which incorporated some practical aspects, such as analyzing a boiler plate P&S form or calculating an estate tax return.
This business of "issue spotting" tends to be artificial. The situations that arise on exams in law school have little to do with real legal work.
DeleteWell they always say the day you take the bar exam, you will never know more about the law and as little about being a lawyer.
DeleteOkay three total years of law school, four years, whatever. I'm not a lawyer, so I'd let the experts work that out. My crazy scheme only works if...
ReplyDelete1. There is funding for the "clerkships" or internships, or whatever other than students paying themselves to be slave labor for lazy faculty members. In medical residency programs, most faculty members at least pay for part of their keep by seeing patients, with and without residents and billing appropriately for those services. What I would propose is that maybe 1-1.5 years of law school could be essentially unpaid internships, with students only paying tuition at that point for whatever formal instruction they are getting, e.g. maybe a day of didactic lectures per week. (I'd say the interns should be paid, but that would only work if legal internships, like medical residency programs, were partially funded by taxpayers, which would be a no-go in my book. There would have to be strict restrictions on how much the interns would be required to work so that lazy faculty members could not just use them as slaves.)
2. Half of U.S. law schools close so that the supply of newly-minted lawyers dwindles so that the supply/demand equation is normalized.
3. I stress, again, that rigorous quality standards are applied throughout the entire training process, from selection of students for initial admission, requirements for advancement to the next level, and true assessments of competence in performing practical legal skills.
Of course this means kicking maybe half of all of the useless law school hackademics out on their asses to fend for themselves on the mean streets. But, like 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it would be a good start...
And, by the way, I'm generally opposed to unpaid internships, unless maybe they are heavily supplemented by actual formal instruction. I was appalled in medical school at how much work I did for the hospitals that hosted our clinical rotations: Intellectually useless bullshit "scut-work" as we called it, like transporting patients, holding retractors for hours during surgeries, and tracking down paper records, lab reports, etc. that should have been done by paid employees, in my opinion. And our hours were not limited, so a student on a surgery rotation might be paying full freight tuition to spend 70 hours a week hanging out in the call room, holding retractors, clearing out "fecal impactions," and such. I know that medical school has probably become less arduous since I was there, but that's one of a number of reasons we can't get enough Americans to attend medical school any more, as many born after about 1990 are too lazy to put on clean underwear, much less get overworked and abused in medical school for no pay. That's why I think that medical "internship" should start after two years of medical school, and the coveted "Doctor of Medicine" degree should only be conferred after medical school plus at least two years of residency/internship.
ReplyDeleteAnd, to echo what has been said above, a medical degree in and of itself is useless. Years ago I got burned out and wanted to change careers and it dawned on me that I was qualified to do absolutely nothing else without literally going back to school to get another degree. A physician who drops out of residency or gets a serious disciplinary action against them by their licensing agency or one of the federal healthcare programs is essentially unemployable, and probably worse off than a graduate of a toilet law school.
That said, medicine is probably one of the few decent careers left in America, along with nursing and maybe engineering. The medical professions are being trashed by bureaucracy, over-regulation, and the general trashiness and dangerousness of the general public.
Neither of my children are cut out for medical or STEM careers, so I have no idea what they are supposed to do for a living when they finish school.
No idea when you went to medical school, but where do you get "we can't get enough Americans to attend medical school anymore" from? For 20-21, over 900,000 applications were submitted to US medical schools from 53, 030 applicants-and of those applicants fewer than 2000 were international applicants.
Deletehttps://students-residents.aamc.org/applying-medical-school/applying-medical-school-international-applicant#:~:text=In%20the%202019%20application%20cycle,272%20matriculated%20into%https://www.aamc.org/system/files/2020-10/2020_FACTS_Table_A-1.pdf20medical%20school.
And medicine is a graduate degree; why would it prepare the student for anything other than being a physician? It sounds as if you're seeking "MD Advantage" jobs, one of the law school scam's hallmarks.
And how is a medical degree "useless"? With it, one can actually get a job in their chosen profession-how many newly minted JDs can say that?
So sorry Sy gotta disagree with most of your post; Americans are flocking to medical school, and it's a degree that trains one a lot better than the current JD format, and it's a specialty degree-like dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary-nobody attends these schools to go into finance.
As described above, a physician who has at least done PGY1 (or a standalone postgraduate internship year if they can find such a thing) can still set up an all-cash practice in most states. They just can't take insurance or get hospital privileges or be W2 employed for actual practice by pretty much anyone which is why it's so rare.
DeleteThere are also jobs for MDs that aren't actual practice. For example, I know an insurance company that loves to hire burnt out or sometimes matchless docs to just sit at home and plow through piles of prior authorization decisions. Sorta like the MD equivalent of doc review, but they don't care if someone's not boarded and it still pays six figs.
As to law school, I think it should just be the 1L year followed by a clerkship at a firm accredited by the state supreme court or the bar to teach. If the firms are permitted to charge the student it should be strictly capped, and the students they get should be the ones assigned to them by the bar or the school so as to prevent discrimination and whatnot. If not enough firms want to do it then the schools would have to just set up their own (subject to the same cost caps) or shut down. And if a student can demonstrably not afford the capped clerk tuition, the school would have to also set up a scholarship fund for that which, if it is allowed to make private loans, would have to have an income-based repayment option.
Because each state's supreme court can unilaterally set rules like this simply by administrative order, such a system would require no legislation or ABA action.
Ghetto law:
ReplyDeleteAaaannd...Here's what happens when your profession lacks standards regarding admission to professional school and entry into your profession.
https://www.wdrb.com/news/judge-charges-attorney-with-contempt-after-comment-that-made-courtroom-gasp/article_c6d0bdc4-553a-11eb-821c-abc84e02a154.html
Simply appalling. I wouldn't waive the term of imprisonment. I hope that that "lawyer" will be disbarred soon.
DeleteWhile this is clearly unethical conduct, I have some sympathy for the lawyer who seems pretty burnt out. Sure, clients balk at the last minute on deals. It happens and you can't just withdraw immediately when it does, nor can you just badmouth the client and hang up on the judge when your withdrawal motion gets denied.
DeleteBut this isn't just a client who welched on a deal. What people who don't have a lot of mentally ill clients rarely understand is how exhausting they can be. It's not necessarily that they don't like or don't understand the terms, it's that they simply do not believe there is anything wrong with them despite the mountain of destruction their behavior is causing to everyone who comes in contact with them. The justice system even tries to show compassion, often offering these deals in exchange for them just getting help. But they do not accept help, and the psychiatrists have no way of making them want it. There's no medication for anosognosia. That, and not necessarily a lack of mental health services as is often portrayed, is a big part of how such people end up in prison or dead on the streets.
I know nothing about this lady, but I assume she's an employed or contracted public defender with hundreds of stories just like this, and she has mental health of her own. She snapped. This one may have been the straw that finally broke the camel's back.
It's stuff like this that leads to so much suicide and substance problems in the profession itself, but she probably cannot take even the slightest break if her caseload is anything like most PDs or if the debt she's carrying is like most lawyers.
We recognize compassion fatigue in nurses and social workers and such, and numerous efforts to "care for caregivers" have gotten traction in healthcare. PDs have much more in common with these professions than most people realize, but they're not going to find any sympathy in a system built from the ground up as an adversarial one.
Lawyers don't just need support groups and mental healthcare. These kinds of lawyers need paid sabbaticals. They need to get away from this parade of horribles for a few months every few years. And I mean a real break, not some vacation where you spend half of it on emails and phone calls anyway.
You can't ask someone to deal with this level of human misery day in and day out for an entire career and not expect some of them to just...break. And then, unlike the nurse who will get told "thank you for what you do" every time anyone finds out what they do, the PD just has to suck it up and move on to the next thankless task.
I know I'm making a lot of leaps about this particular individual and what she might be going thru. But I also have seen it too many times (at lower levels of manifestation) not to recognize the signs, and I think a presumption of compassion, asking what might this person be going thru to cause something like this, is a fair and human one to make and one which could, given the chance, better our whole profession.
@3:26: I agree with what you wrote and I'll add I've been reading articles on how low wage, insecure industries are having trouble finding workers. The propaganda machine wants you to attack these people for not wanting these trash jobs, that don't pay enough to support yourself and where you're openly and roundly mocked and belittled constantly, to be thrown away and discarded whenever the employer feels like it.
DeleteYet the system is panicking that these jobs are not being filled, and wants to villianize these vulnerable groups for not taking these horrible jobs.
I have stated before I don't understand why people come to this country to take these jobs and why the poor keep reproducing. I suspect it's mostly propaganda forcing them into it, and capitalism requires this permanent underclass to exist and willingly be exploited.
There is a version of capitalism that may work, the one where the rich are taxed at 90% and wages are capped. However, that also sounds like communism, and while this country built itself up in its golden era that way, by respecting workers (albeit it also had slaves and attacked women and minorities, so maybe not everyone), the propaganda is now so strong since Reagan dismantled everything that I can't see this country returning to that, ever. Biden tries, but again, it's not really possible with the low information, low intelligence, zero compassion right wingers running around, storming the capitol and attacking minorities every chance they get.
There's that one guy that keeps whining and crying about politics. But I just don't know how you accurately explain the economic situation and why America is how it is without acknowledging these factors, which are objectively factual.
I digress, it's Old Guy's blog and I don't want to waste his time or my own.
The world is just a nasty place and has been especially nasty the past half century. Most developed nations are seeing a drop in fertility and birthrates, albeit it's still so low it really doesn't mean anything. Academically it was always claimed wealth inequality destroyed civilizations but nobody cares about that now, so I personally don't know.
I just know that the vast majority of these open jobs are terrible and I feel bad for anybody that has to do them. I don't have to do them, but I did them when younger and I'd probably snap if I had to do them again. The only thing I can do is be kind to these workers to at least make it better for them, but that only goes so far.
It isn't Old Guy's blog. Others are welcome to contribute. Our historically active authors seem to have fallen silent in recent months, for reasons that I cannot explain. I too am discouraged by the renewed interest in law school, which, as someone mentioned below, has driven applications to their highest level in a decade even after a substantial decline in the number of law schools (thirteen have closed in the past five years alone, and not many opened during that ten-year period). I too may hang it up. Really, it's exhausting to spend one's energies on a generally dumb population hellbent on self-destruction.
DeleteI share your view that the nastiness of the past half-century and the increasing rapaciousness of the US's economic situation cannot be laid at the feet of one or the other political party; indeed, I have said for decades that the US's "two" parties are one and the same.
And you can fool some of the people all the time: law school applications up 20%:
ReplyDeletehttps://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2021/04/2021-law-school-applicant-pool-shaping-up-to-be-the-largest-in-a-decade.html
"Neither of my children are cut out for medical or STEM careers, so I have no idea what they are supposed to do for a living when they finish school."...they will get jobs where they are exploited and make barely enough to survive, just like everybody else as the middle class disappears. At least Biden is trying to change the country's trajectory. We'll see. Anyway, at lest your kids have a rich Dad to help them. So there's that....
ReplyDeleteTo tell the truth, I really don't know what to recommend nowadays. Trades such as electrical work and plumbing may be good options for many people. Medical professions such as physician and nurse offer potential, but obviously not everyone is cut out for them. But law, teaching, even engineering seem to be drying up. I don't recommend that anyone go into law without a rich and well-connected benefactor, and even then it is probably a bad idea.
DeleteWell the point of this blog is to dissuade the average person to aspire to being a lawyer, not to offer career advice. The government can't offer career advice, so why should Old Guy be able to. The education system comes up with computerized job advice where the question asked is "Do you like to work on cars?" And if the answer is no, the determination is that the respondent doesn't have the ability to work on cars.
DeleteBiden is trying but unless the people support him there's just no way to overturn the entrenched corruption and nepotism dominating the wealth of America. I don't think America is fixable. If it was that easy to fix a sinking ship, the previous empires, which were greater than the US in terms of scope and time, would never have fallen. But they all did, why would America be exempt?
DeleteCan we PLEASE stay away from politics and on topic?
DeleteProblem is, so much of law school's allure is "what else are you going to do with a degree in English." You can't really dissuade people w/o offering some kind of alternative and frankly, I'm not averse to telling them to go back for a second bachelors in something useful or that gets them the prereqs for something useful. Still cheaper than law school and there's always IBR, though they might run into problems with the Stafford caps. (Crazy that undergrad caps borrowing but graduate school borrowing is limitless).
DeleteThe distinction between "useful" and "useless" bachelor's degrees is overstated. Traditionally it has been thought that the humanities fell into the latter category and that the natural and the applied sciences fell into the former. But just try getting a job with nothing but a bachelor's degree in biology or physics. You won't fare much better than someone who majored in anthropology or art history.
DeleteBiology and political science traditionally, even stereotypically, been gateways to medical school and law school, respectively. Probably biology, chemistry, and the like still serve well the applicant to medical school. Law schools don't favor or disfavor any major, so it has long been feasible to study something for interest at the undergraduate level and then move on to law. Indeed, majors such as classics are noted for the high quality of their applicants to law schools. Today, however, no one but the rich should be applying to law school at all. I don't really know what to do with a bachelor's degree in classics, but I'm not too sure of what to do with one in almost any other field, unless it be to apply to medical school or to become a nurse.
I've seen bio majors get jobs in labs and that sort of thing, but yes it is primarily a major that makes it administratively easy to pick up med school prereqs along the way. Or PA, pharmacy, dentistry, etc.
DeleteCertainly there's nothing as in demand as healthcare. But most of the demand elsewhere is basically either finance/accounting or tech. Accounting, for example, is yet another of those fields where you could just take classes til you get enough accounting credits, but there's no financial aid if one is not in a degree-granting program so actually matriculating into some kind of degree can be what you have to do if you can't pay out of pocket.
It's a pity that the US cannot make space for a handful of majors in a field such as classics. After all, there aren't many Old Guys who would study that sort of thing. Traditionally a lot of them went into law or teaching, but neither line of work is worth a tinker's damn nowadays, and society is poorer for the increasing concentration of academia in money-oriented fields.
DeleteBillions of dollars for football but scarcely a cent for Sappho…
We consider other careers here both because the scamsters promote law as a viable option in a tottering economic environment ("what else are you going to do?", "follow your heart", and so on) and because people considering law school often ask us outright to name some better options. Old Guy has long advocated against going to university at all unless one is seriously pursuing medicine, nursing, or perhaps one or two other lines of work for which a bachelor's degree is needed and the prospects of success are good relative to the costs. Do not go to university to "find yourself", study what you love, or indulge in a four-year party or vacation. Do not go to university because you consider it to be an "investment". Do not go to university because it turned out so well fifty years ago, when costs were low, students were few, and jobs were plentiful.
ReplyDeleteThe state does publish data on the outlook of many occupations over the next decade, and for many years the outlook for lawyers has been poor—without even considering the cost of entry, which at some law schools now approaches $400k plus a hell of a lot of interest.
The US empire will fall harder than the empires before it. I agree that the plutocratic US is beyond redemption.
If by the state, you mean the US Government, yes the Occupational Outlook Handbook. It's been around for decades. And since it is a governmental publication, it's now free and online so you don't even have to trudge to your local library to peruse it. Which in some ways is a shame.
DeleteHere is the job outlook entry for lawyers. Not foreboding enough in my opinion to deter aspiring toileteers.
" Job Outlook
Employment of lawyers is projected to grow 4 percent from 2019 to 2029, about as fast as the average for all occupations. Competition for jobs over the next 10 years is expected to be strong because more students graduate from law school each year than there are jobs available."
I think lawyers and judges used to be combined into one occupational category. Now there is a separate category for Judges and Hearing Officers. Here is the outlook for it.
" Job Outlook
Employment of judges and hearing officers is projected to grow 2 percent from 2019 to 2029, slower than the average for all occupations. These workers play an essential role in the legal system, and their services will continue to be needed into the future."
The population is expected to grow by much more than 4% over the same period, so the "growth" in legal employment actually represents a decline.
DeleteYup OG. I think the BLS reports are like the way the federal reserve talks in public, widely known as "fedspeak."
DeleteLike all fedspeak, you have to translate it. "Strong competition," "about as fast as average," and "more grads than jobs" is actually one of their more dire outlooks, but a reader has to understand their jargon to know what they're really saying.
The other thing is to disabuse people of the notion that strong competition is OK because "you only need one job offer" and will probably, eventually, find SOMETHING.
No you don't need just one. Employers who know they're the only thing between you and homelessness, where they can replace you but you can't replace them, is a recipe for 80 hour weeks and no raises ever. For an employee, options equals leverage and vice versa.
We're seeing this play out in the debate over unemployment paying more than what people made when working. That should be a debate over why employers pay so little, not why UI pays so much, and it's an illustration of how universal basic income would do so much to replace the drastically declined state of unionization.
All a union really is, when working as designed, is employees banding together to create leverage with the employer that they would never have alone, in order to extract a fairer bargain. Level the playing field just a little.
The same result could be achieved by any means that gives a worker the ability to decline a job offer or quit without being made homeless. The question society needs to ask itself is why we are so comfortable with employers having such an unbelievable amount of leverage that they can pretty much wield the threat of actual starvation. That's what turns wage earners into wage slaves.
Don't ask Old Guy to defend capitalism. He has always refused to accept the notion that people, when there is no material shortage, should be deprived of the necessities of life and the opportunity to put their abilities to socially beneficial uses.
DeletePretty discouraging that an article written a decade ago still accurately reflects the state of the scam. Yes, some progress has been made, but it's comparatively little. There's still a long long way to go-witness law school applications increasing 20% to the highest level in 10 years.
ReplyDeleteLaw school applicants are up 20%:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JljvIZu6U7g
Of course they are up. Going to school beats working. Lots of lazy college students don't want to work, so 3 more years of school, financed by student loans they will never pay back, looks like a great option for them.
DeleteApplications were down for a decade. Lazy college students were just as lazy at that time.
DeleteI don't know what explains the sudden proliferation of lemmings. Perhaps an important factor is the new possibility of attending an über-toilet without even moving to Grundy, Virginia, or South Royalton, Vermont.
I do know that Old Guy is thinking of hanging it up. If people are too goddamn stupid to heed advice, don't blame us at OTLSS.
People with worthless undergrad degrees cannot resist the siren song of law school when they have no options, or so they think. The constant stream of TV shows like Suits make law seem like an exciting and perfectly reasonable career aspiration.
DeleteThat, and the even more special siren call created by GradPLUS loans. Undergrad loans have lifetime limits, meaning that even if you pay it all off you can't go back and get more once you hit it.
DeleteSo there it is. As long as it's a graduate program, you can borrow to pay rent. But every other "practical" graduate program is going to have undergrad prerequisites that you don't have (because you majored in English) and may not be able to get unless you pay out of pocket.
Law school is uniquely positioned to say "Hey, it's us or move back in with your parents."
The psychiatrist is an entertaining writer!
ReplyDeleteNice find Olde!
Olde Guy isn't exactly a ham sandwich in the writing department either.
Well here’s one way to pay off loans…
ReplyDeletehttps://nypost.com/2012/06/20/tragic-battle-of-will/amp/