Outside the Law School Scam is about to celebrate its tenth birthday: it was founded on February 27, 2013.
When we started this site, not a single law school had closed down in many years. We predicted that ten would be gone by the end of the decade. That prediction came to pass, and by now fifteen law schools have taken a one-way trip to Hell:
Cooley (one campus)
Hamline (merged with Mitchell)
Indiana Tech
Whittier
Charlotte
Savannah
Valpo
Arizona Summit
Cooley (a second campus)
Thomas Jefferson (relinquished ABA accreditation in favor of state accreditation)
La Verne (relinquished ABA accreditation in favor of state accreditation)
Concordia
Cooley (a third campus)
Florida Coastal (and with it InfiLaw)
Penn State Law (or maybe Dickinson—one or the other will be closing)
This humble site has been cited in the mainstream media and other publications. It has done much both to dissuade people from attending scam-schools and to foster public discourse on the law-school scam. Its material has been read more than 3.3 million times. We have had fun with original poems and other art, and we have singled some particularly vile scamsters out for public denunciation and (where appropriate) ridicule. Undeniably, we have had a hand in the decline of the law-school scam and the closure of various über-toilet law schools. People have also thanked us for saving them from the mistake of enrolling at a scam-school—or attending law school at all.
Our work, however, is far from complete. Four or five new über-toilets have been announced in the past year or two. And although many über-toilets have shrunk to a mere fraction of their former sizes, and quite a few are in financial or administrative peril, the law-school scam has shown resilience. Attacking the federally guaranteed student loans that make the law-school scam possible will remain a priority.
Many happy returns of the day to Outside the Law School Scam!
Over 3.3 million views is a remarkable achievment.
ReplyDeleteA touch off-topic, but an interesting article about PSFL and the work it takes to actually make it work. He refers to this time in the Navy as "basically forced labor" so it's not a recruiting poster, and it's unclear what his job in the Navy is/was; it doesn't appear to be JAG but maybe someone else can fill in the blanks.
ReplyDeletehttps://localtoday.news/fl/how-the-navy-officer-got-323000-in-student-loan-debt-forgiven-by-pslf-247191.html
Cases of getting federally guaranteed loans for law school discharged are as rare as hens' teeth. There was another one several years ago—something to do with total disability.
DeleteEh, I got mine discharged by PSLF. Wasn't that hard if you just read the rules and follow them, which is something lawyers are supposed to be good at.
DeleteI love your site old guy. I’m not even a lawyer, but the higher ed scam affected me too. When i am
DeleteNear a law school, i post this website url on their bulletin noard 🙂🙂
Congratulations on 10 years. The closure of the 15 schools is a good accomplishment, but I can't help think that the next 15 will be a much tougher slog. But looking forward to see what unfolds.
ReplyDeleteThank you. Indeed, the first ones to fall were probably the most precarious, so the next 15 may take longer to fold. But a number of law schools are in dire financial straits—even the U of Minnesota, in the upper fourth tier by Old Guy's classification. And just maybe the ABA will feel the need to make an example of a Golden Gate or a Cooley for yielding truly awful results (only 38% of graduates who take a bar exam pass one within two years). Also, the new law schools, such as that damn thing in Jacksonville and the eight-student branch of Southern University Law Center in Shreveport, will almost certainly fail to thrive.
DeleteI am a political science major that is considering going to Law School. However, your blog has exposed me the dangers of going to law school. I will only consider going to Law School is if I get into a t14 or a law school that is strong regionally for a low price. This will require me to retake the LSAT. If this doesn't happen, I will consider going back to school in something STEM or Health related in order to find a job that is relevant.
DeleteYour plan is more or less correct. For more specific advice, see the following:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-seven-tiers-of-law-schools-update.html
Key to your plan is "a low price". And, yes, a good LSAT score (upper 160s at least) will be crucial. If you don't get it, you're probably better off to go into health or engineering. Indeed, you're probably better off in health or engineering in any event.
@10:43 If you are considering STEM, such as engineering, wouldn't the time be now to change your undergrad major rather than wait to see how the LSAT and the t14 shakes out? pol sci is not exactly a foundation for STEM.
DeleteOne piece of bad advice that was widespread when Old Guy was in high school and university is "Do what you love; the money will follow". No, sorry, it won't. It probably did, much of the time, in the baby boomers' salad days. One could major in political science or archaeology or Italian literature and expect to find decent work—not necessarily in the field. Unfortunately, the approach to work in this society has become so goddamn instrumental that majoring in one of those fields—or a new counterpart, such as film studies or women's studies—is usually unwise if one is not a trust-fund baby. It's true that a less practical major is often at least as good as a practical one for admission to law school—and some, such as classics, are positively desirable. But hitching one's wagons to law school is a bad idea nowadays. Anyone who is devoted to art history or whatever might at least consider adding a more practical field as a double major, or relegating the less practical one to a minor (if that option is available). If the person above who is majoring in political science has the ability to succeed in one of the fields that are collectively called STEM today (the term didn't exist when Old Guy was young), perhaps she should have combined that with political science, or even abandoned political science (it's really a lot of cotton candy, let's admit) in favor of something in STEM.
DeleteOf course, Old Guy is well aware that not everyone can work in engineering or medicine. It is sad that there's so very little space today for a philologist or an art historian—and the very few openings in these fields are occupied by baby boomers who aren't gracious enough to retire or die. But one has to live in the real world…
As a follow-up to OG's comments, years ago big NYC banks, most of which no longer exist(anybody remember Chemical Bank?) used to have training programs. If you were hired-with that BA in art history-you spent weeks at their boot camp, and then went to work for the bank. All this was premised on the idea that a bachelor's degree was an achievement, not matter what major, and the candidate could be trained. Just like these banks, these training programs for liberal arts majors have pretty much gone extinct(yes, so IB places hire from the Harvard/Yale/Princeton trilogy, but that's about it.).
Delete@9:24 I would still be interested in hearing back from 10:43 as to the rationale in continuing as a political science major when the only value the poster gives it is a ticket to a T14 school. And that prospect is dubious with the lowish LSAT. LSAT scores usually do not rise significantly on retakes.
DeleteIn my experience, it is advantageous to change majors while enrolled at the institution. All course credits can be retained for purposes of satisfying electives, etc. Even if there is an occasional gentleman's C, it can often be salvaged. Unfortunately, where the LSAT has already been taken the poster is probably well in to the undergrad pol sci program. It would be interesting to know what this fall back STEM field would be. Nursing? Pharmacy? Phlebotomist? TV Repairman correspondence course from the back of a matchbook? I would find it very discouraging to face applying for and completing a second four year degree program from square one.
Indeed, it is very unlikely that an LSAT score will go up much unless the person has put in a good deal of effort to improve it. Old Guy taught courses on the LSAT many years ago, and a few of his students posted improvements of 25 points or more (the highest was 29, if memory serves), thereby transforming themselves from Cooley to Yale material in a few short, if busy, months. But although Old Guy's fine instruction certainly helped, their own effort was crucial. Plenty of other students got more or less the same score, or only a small improvement, because they didn't study.
DeletePolitical science is a worthless major. It's such a cliché for law school that almost anything else would be better, at least as a sign of not being square and boring. If you're determined to go to law school despite Old Guy's advice, stand out in the admissions office by majoring in classics or art history or philosophy. Better yet, don't put all of your eggs in one basket (especially the rotting basket of law school): major in something that will help you find a job (such as engineering), and perhaps get a second major or a minor in something that won't (such as philosophy). But let political science go. It's scarcely above communications or criminology.
Actually, why does 10:43 have to go to a T14 at all? If the only impediments are pesky things like GPA, LSAT scores or undergrad brand image, then why not just go to Cooley? We all know that the only characteristic required to succeed as a lawyer is having enough grit and the other embellishments are just window dressing. And with a guaranteed $150 k that is similar to the median for most STEM careers.
DeleteThat must be why Cooley charges nearly as much as Harvard—well, that and Cooley's view that it ranks second after Harvard (and just barely).
DeleteI actually just graduated with my political science degree before I came across this blog site. I am just trying to come up with options with what to do with my life at the moment.
Delete@ 5:13PM For now just get a "regular" job - warehouse, waiter, cashier, assembly, - and get a year or two of work experience. A lot of people end up in worthless law and graduate programs because they're afraid of the "real world," and only make things worse. Get acquainted with the real world first.
DeleteI think that is a good suggestion. I may work a "normal" job until I figure out what to do with my life. I may go back to school for a health career such as nursing.
DeleteBe careful about nursing. It’s a very hard job. I know nurses who now work in non-nursing or at drug store health clinics. While you will get a job you will be overworked. However many hospitals will partially pay for Masters degrees generally at toilet schools. A nurse I know got an MBA and went into healthcare management.
DeleteThough there are a million nursing programs and h1b visas, nursing is never saturated. Nurses are wives and don’t need the job and have an entitlement mentality stemming from henpecking the husband. Not all nurses, but the things I have seen are horrible.
DeleteThanks for the cheap shots at my alma mater, Cooley, bringing legal education to everyone willing to work for it (who else would open institutions in another state?)
ReplyDeleteThe only references to Cooley above are strictly factual: three campuses have closed in the last few years; Cooley's graduates perform terribly on bar exams. Facts are cheap shots? My, my.
DeleteCooley opened a branch in Florida for the $ame rea$on that led InfiLaw to branch out into Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina (with an attempt made at South Carolina). Cooley is a predatory racket that could not last another day without arbitrarily large student loans guaranteed by Uncle Sugar.
Cooley is a dump run by scamsters. It destroys lives and saddles people with crippling debt. The people who work at Cooley should be prosecuted and jailed.
DeleteI don't think anyone is saying that there aren't some people who've done well out of Cooley. Maybe they got a full or near-full scholarship, maybe they just have that innate salesmanship quality that makes them successful running their own firm, or maybe they ranked really high in the class and are among the few that got good jobs right out the gate.
DeleteBut you don't evaluate an institution based on such outliers. As OG said, the objective facts are low bar passage rates, high debt, and lots of un or under employment, all manifesting in declining enrollment and closed campuses.
I'm glad Cooley worked out for this poster. Truly, I am. But as they say in the fine print underneath an infomercial testimonial: "Results not typical."
Congratulations. When this blog started, it was largely a problem of greedy law schools fleecing gullible, earnest applicants, many of them youngsters about to graduate from college, into a road of deep debt and awful job options. Now, however, it is absolutely common for 18 year olds to party hard in college for 4-6 years, financed by "student loans" they will never repay. Law schools, particularly low-ranked ones that take just about all applicants, are a great way for these folks to keep the party going for ANOTHER THREE YEARS! Living large on student loans they will never repay. I am sorry to say that federally guaranteed "student loans" aren't loans at all anymore, it's just free money from the government. If you read The Law School Reddit you will hear about folks "borrowing $150K to attend an unranked law school". They're having lots of fun, without having to work for a living, at the taxpayer's expense.
ReplyDeleteStudent loans at all levels have become exactly the sort of boondoggle that you describe. They're a massive rip-off of the public. The benefits go both to ejookayshunnal scamsters and to so-called students.
DeleteFifty years ago, any bachelor's degree would put its bearer into an élite. A bachelor's degree in any field commonly landed one in a well-paying job in business or government. Now that everyone and her Yorkshire terrier has a bachelor's degree, however, the things are of little use. They've also been debased, precisely because so many people have them: they have become excess to requirements, and their ubiquity has been made possible by a dramatic reduction of standards (to the point that large numbers of "students" at many institutions have to take remedial courses in basic reading and arithmetic, often for a year or more).
About a year ago, someone here perceptively analyzed the history of degrees. In a rural county in Minnesota (most counties there being rural), only physicians, lawyers, judges, and a couple of other people had bachelor's degrees as late as 1940. Teachers, nurses, accountants, businesspeople—these and others did not need bachelor's degrees and ordinarily did not get them. (The writer could have added that lawyers too just a couple of decades earlier usually did not have a degree of any kind.) The GI Bill and certain other changes led to the requirement of a degree for various types of work, without necessarily making a concrete difference. Notice how many jobs that formerly did not require so much as a high-school diploma now require a bachelor's degree.
Old Guy isn't the only one to opine that today's bachelor's degrees is on a par with the high-school diploma of, say, 1950. And now the universities are commonly used as expensive playgrounds at which young people can prolong childhood for 7+ years, with the public footing the monstrous bill.
I have to disagree with the assertion that a 1950s high school diploma was equivalent in rigor as a middling BA of today.
DeleteIn 1950, drop out rates were the majority and advanced senior math was algebra…
We have more people in college today and the rigor of college outside premed, computer science and engineering is less than a 1950s BA.
Thank you for your hard work. I don't understand how prospective law students believe law school is a good idea when they look at lawyer job postings and see the horrible salaries. I am a 09 Mississippi College graduate and would suggest three years in prison would do more for career advancement than that fourth tier toliet. Putting folks in this kind of debt for such little opportunity is a crime.
ReplyDeleteOK . . .this is due to a psychological phenomenon known as "Confirmation Bias" aka "wishful thinking". There are people considering law school who aren't old enough to drink. They will honestly tell you that they want to go to law school to be like Elle Woods in "Legally Blonde". I wish that I was making this up, but I am not. Now, law schools admissions committee members are very, very good at scamming gullible young people into spending over 150K and 3Y of their lives doing something that will not benefit them in the slightest, and will in fact hurt them in the long run, but will greatly benefit the law school faculty. So they feed into the pre-conceived notions that yes, all lawyers are wealthy, powerful, successful people who drive luxury cars, just like in the movies/TV show/John Grisham novels. They will tell the dupe "some of our graduates get high-paying jobs with big, prestigious law firms, starting as soon as they graduate. . .which is technically true, for most law schools, but what it means IRL is "90 percent of our students will never, ever, even get so much as an interview for a summer job with a large law firm. The top 5-10 percent of the class (preferably also on Law Review) might have a shot at one of these jobs, the rest of you suckers are SOL. They tell the prospective applicants "we have an amazing International Law Program" and pitch Sports Law, Space Law, etc. I have been practicing law for over a quarter century, haven't met a Space Lawyer yet, or an "international lawyer" or a Sports Agent with a law degree. There probably are people with JD's who do this stuff, somewhere on a continent with over 300 million people, but they're less common than winning lotto tickets. The law schools cash in. Every good con artist understands Confirmation Bias, the easiest way to fool someone is to convince them of something they already believe to be true.
DeleteConfirmation bias is illustrated by this line from an old song by Simon & Garfunkel: "Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest".
DeleteLaw-school scamsters also isolate the unsuccessful and make them feel responsible for their plight, even though few graduates of toilet schools get anything like a decent outcome (and even many graduates of élite schools who do land Big Law or federal clerkships find themselves out on their asses in a few years).
And "international law", "sports law", "aerospace law", "entertainment law", and the many other variations on the save-the-dolphins-while-driving-a-Rolls-Royce theme are nothing but fantasies sold to the gullible. They don't exist. At best they are specialized versions of standard areas of practice, such as corporate law (a handful of lawyers out there may happen to have prominent athletes as clients for contractual matters). Old Guy arguably does practice, part of the time, something that could be called "international law", involving matters that cross jurisdictional boundaries. It helps greatly to know the languages of the jurisdictions in question (most toileteers, therefore, need not apply), and one also needs more than a toileteer's knowledge of law (especially if some of the jurisdictions in question use civil law or something else with which toileteers are unlikely to be familiar—hell, they don't even know garden-variety common law). But this sort of work is only one little part of what Old Guy has done, and it doesn't involve flying first class to Paris or Bangkok: it's a lot less glamorous than you might imagine.
If you don't believe me, ask yourself why scam schools are always touting "environmental law", "global leadership", and other such mythological areas of practice but never defense against traffic tickets, low-grade insurance work, transactions in real estate—the sorts of things that an über-toileteer might actually have a shot at doing. Answer: there's nothing sexy about the latter, and pitching them, although practical and realistic, would alienate delusional lemmings. Better to pander to their expectations of grand careers with flashy work and lots of money. Make them feel special: they in their glory have the privilege of electing something glamorous like sports law while the rest of us schmucks handle divorces and bail hearings.
There is no question that making them feel special for three years is part of the allure. Heck I miss law school. It was fun, in the sense that it was fun to feel like almost you're getting paid (since loans are paying your rent) to talk about all these big important cases. But it's a mirage that will disappear when your loan checks do. Making you feel like you're destined for greatness is absolutely part of how they get people to keep singing those promissory notes. If they taught traffic tickets and DUIs and divorces and slipnfalls, there's no way people would pay this much.
DeleteEvery time I see the next crop of lemmings (they can usually be found as early as high school, on the debate team and such) I die a little inside.
I tell people openly that there are only two acceptable reasons to go to law school, and none of them involve "liking to argue" or whatever. One is that it's Harvard/Yale/etc, and the other is that it's a full scholarship (or on parents' dime) AND you have a success guarantee in the form of a trust fund or a guaranteed job at (and eventual inheritance of) a VERY successful firm owned by your parents or something like that.
Interesting that you mention the debate team. When Old Guy, from East Bumblefuck High, arrived at university, someone asked him whether he was on the debate team in high school. His answer: "What's a debate team?" Old Guy had never heard of it. East Bumblefuck didn't have a debate team, nor eight years of classical Greek, field trips to Switzerland, courses in jazz dance (whatever that is), a swimming pool, or other things that seem to be taken for granted at many schools. We didn't even have "shop" (for making things out of wood or whatever).
Delete"Liking to argue" is a stupid reason for going into law. Good lawyers—a small minority—regularly find the quality of advocacy disappointing. I can mop the floor with opposing counsel but still get a horrible decision from some ass-eyed judge. Anyway, "arguing" in the sense of advancing personal opinions or debating political preferences is not done in court (or should not be). And it's only one small part of a lawyer's practice: most of us spend far more time sitting in our offices than pleading in a courtroom.
Your two acceptable reasons for going to law school strike Old Guy as accurate enough. One warning is that Harvard and Yale are not the doors to a great career that they used to be. It is entirely possible, especially if you're a hayseed like Old Guy, to leave one of these with $350k in non-dischargeable debt and either no job at all or a job that won't support the monthly payments. Harvard and Yale really are for trust-fund babies, although the occasional nobody such as Old Guy does somehow end up there (probably through a clerical error in the admissions office).
9:11-I gotta ask: where did you go to law school? While your analysis is apparently correct, things have changed. I went to State U years ago when it was cheap and I could pay my own way. Back in those days, the overall sense of things was that our professors-and I use the term very loosely-detested us; made a point of not ever learning anyone's name(even those who really really sucked up) and did everything possible to have no contact with the students beyond actual class hours, and those were a terrible terrible burden.
DeleteAnd OG, I have met 0Ls who decide to go to law school because "my parents tell me I like to argue); in other words, just arguing with your parents about essential topics such as curfew, grades, etc is enough reason to spend 200K on a worthless degree.
"It was fun, in the sense that it was fun to feel like almost you're getting paid (since loans are paying your rent) to talk about all these big important cases. But it's a mirage that will disappear when your loan checks do." That is one of the most succinct, profound, and accurate descriptions of The Law School Scam that I have ever seen. PLEASE post this on The Law School Reddit site, where one fool openly admitted to borrowing $150,000 to attend an "unranked law school". He boasted that he "only" used $20,000 of it for living expenses. This is doing a terrible disservice to the taxpayers who fund these bogus loans, the students who waste 3Y of their lives and go into debt for a worthless degree, and the legal system itself, which grows ever more flooded with ever less capable new lawyers. Youtube also has some great videos on the theme of "Don't go to Law School", your quote would reverberate there.
DeleteSee also:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2021/03/all-law-schools-are-free-outsider-hits.html
An asshole named Michael Wallerstein borrowed a quarter of a million dollars to attend Thomas Jefferson (which forfeited its accreditation a couple of years ago). He blew much of the money on high living and nearly used part of it for a downpayment on a $350k condo.
@6:35 just an aside here of the misconceptions of the non legal public, I remember during the OJ trial hearing some people saying that if they were a lawyer they would like to be a tough no nonsense prosecutor like Marcia Clark, when it was apparent to even a 4th tier student that Marcia Clark was an incompetent attorney and that about half way through the trial that it was becoming increasingly clear that the prosecution was going to lose its case.
DeleteFrankly, using the loan money on the condo at that time would have made way more sense (for Michael and for Uncle Sam) than on tuition or living expenses. At least those condos appreciated in value and had assets to sell to payoff the loan.
DeleteOld Guy, Michael Wallerstein may have come off okay based on the articles below.
Deletehttps://nypost.com/2012/06/20/tragic-battle-of-will/
https://observer.com/2012/06/controversy-over-site-of-suspected-toll-brothers-tower-deepens/
I only borrowed what I really needed in law school, and paid back all my student loans, with interest, early. I got tired of writing monthly checks and finally just got a lump sum payoff number, paid that, and the loan was PIF. Sometimes I feel like a sucker. Long term, loaning dummies huge sums of money that they spend frivolously and never repay will lead to ever higher inflation and continue to devalue the ever-weakening US dollar.
DeleteWell, if Wallerstein got away with that windfall, I certainly hope that it was taken off him to satisfy those student loans that he never intended to repay.
DeleteI don't know what happened in that particular case, but preying upon vulnerable elderly people for their money has become common. Many jurisdictions have begun to crack down on this form of abuse.
Congratulations on 10 years of scam-busting. You have outlived all the other scamblogs bu a long shot. Here's to another 10 years. (Reform of the federal loan bondoggle won't happen anytime soon!)
ReplyDeleteThanks very much. Old Guy wishes that he could bake a big birthday cake and invite everyone for a slice.
DeleteTaxProf Blog ranking law schools by Acceptance Rate. Nando's own Third Tier Drake is the second-least selective law school in the country, bested by North Dakota of all places.
ReplyDeletehttps://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/02/law-school-rankings-by-fall-2022-acceptance-rate.html
Thanks. Both Dreck and North Dakota take in more than 70% of their applicants. One wonders how bad the other 30% must be.
DeleteAlso available at that site is a list of law schools by median LSAT score. Now 19 schools have a median of 170 or higher. Old Guy remembers when there were only 4–6. Since the scoring reflects consistent percentages of the population from year to year (about 3% get 170 or higher), this change would appear to represent declining interest in law school among the top performers.
Acceptance rate can be gamed, though. Schools get lists of people in different LSAT ranges from LSAC, and they have been known to use that to send application fee waivers to people they KNOW they would never admit in a million years. They just want them to apply so that they can reject them and lower the acceptance rate.
DeleteI say just rank 'em on the percentage of graduates whose first job is either biglaw or a federal clerkship. Short of literal fraud, the schools can't game that.
That phenomenon is known as yield protection. (Its counterpart among undergraduate institutions is known as Tufts syndrome, because Tufts has long been accused of turning down people who are competitive for Harvard.) You Ass News incorporates yield—the percentage of admitted students who enroll—into its worthless "rankings", and some schools calculate that they can kick themselves up a point or two by rejecting candidates who were very unlikely to enroll anyway. Michigan and Vanderbilt, for instance, reject people with Harvard-calibre LSAT scores much more often than would be expected if they did not engage in yield protection, so it is very likely—though not certain—that they do engage in it.
DeleteAnd, yes, that gimmick of soliciting applications from high-scoring lemmings is as old as the hills. Old Guy, with his excellent LSAT score, received fee waivers from just about every school from Columbia on down. Applications still cost money (one had to pay the LSAC to send an LSAT score) and, of course, time, so Old Guy was left to wonder why an über-toilet would bother to come after him. But maybe a frightened lemming would treat some fucking Cooley as a "safety" school, and then the Cooley could reject Ms or Mr Yale with a haughty letter about not meeting Cooleyite standards. With enough of these engineered rejections, the Cooley might appear marginally more selective, taking only, say, 72% rather than 73% of its applicants.
Old Guy doubts whether this practice is frequent at the bottom end, where classes have been shrinking for years. Furthermore, there's hardly anything to be gained from rejecting the very few candidates who stand head and shoulders—and waist and maybe ankles—above the über-toileteers. It is among the bottom-end élite schools and the barely sub-élite that yield protection pays off: Michigan, Penn, Vanderbilt, perhaps down to Notre Dame (though now we're stretching the limits of sub-élite). Among undergraduate institutions, Tufts is an excellent example: it's obviously used as a safety school by boatloads of people who are competitive for Harvard or MIT, and it can appear more desirable by rejecting these candidates for scoring distinctly above Tufts's territory on the SAT.
Your approach—using the percentage of graduates that go straight into Big Law or a federal clerkship—is the one that Old Guy published in his first article on this site, more than eight years ago:
https://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2014/12/guest-post-by-old-guy-which-law-schools.html
Well yield protect is the same concept but different implementation. In yield protect, you aren't necessarily soliciting the app, but someone applies to you as an obvious safety and you decline them because you know they probably wouldn't accept your offer even with a full scholarship.
DeleteThe phenomenon I was referring to was the same thing (rejecting) but for opposite reason. School encourages someone with like a 145 to apply at a school that has like a 160 LSAT median. The school knows it will reject the person, but it's actively inviting them to apply just so they can lower their admit rate.
Same result (rejection) but different motivations. One is hoping to bring the yield rate up, the other is primarily interested in bringing the acceptance rate down. Schools are known to engage in both, though I agree it's more practiced among schools in the like "top 50" or whatever. 4th tier schools have no rank to lose, really, so they don't care about playing these games. They only really care about keeping ABA status (and thus loan revenue) so they focus on gaming the bar exam pass rate, such as by bribing good students to attend and bad ones not to take the bar or trying to fail them out so they never can.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood you. I wasn't aware that schools were encouraging applications from people who were far below the range. I did know that all kinds of toilets approached me with waivers of their application fees—but because I had a high score, not a low one. At the time I was naïve about these things and thought that La Toilette seriously hoped to win me on account of my high LSAT score. Only later did I find out that La Toilette might actually reject me, while élite schools accepted me, because La Toilette was just trying to drive its "ranking" up.
DeleteMore charitably, one might think that La Toilette hoped that I'd take a bribe such as $5k and free tuition, just so that it could claim to have someone with an élite-quality LSAT score.
Lately a bunch of über‑toilets have been trying to haul their asses out of the low 140s in order to drive a greater portion of the class through the bar exam. They have had to shrivel up, because there just aren't that many lemmings to go around, even at poor levels such as 150. An über-toilet either shrivels up to the point of losing a lot of money or dips deep into the 140s and lower. Wanting to be at 150 and getting to 150 are different things.
Some trashcans are too desperate to engage in Yield protection and will accept any ham sandwich that applies..... they might be next on the chopping block
DeleteIn particular peril are those schools that can't get enrollment up to a sustainable level, especially if they have been skating on thin financial ice for years. Among these are Appalachian, Ohio Northern, the U of the District of Columbia, and Faulkner. Old Guy is going to go out on a limb here and predict that either Appalachian or Ohio Northern will be the next to shut up shop.
DeleteAnother candidate for shuttering is Golden Gate. This year it offered free tuition while shrinking to a tiny class (only 31 students) with slightly higher, though still toilet-level, LSAT scores. Indiana Tech pulled the same stunt but still went tits up a year later. The fact remains that Golden Gate is unwanted and unneeded. Chain that gate up and hang on it a sign saying "Danger: toxic waste".
DeleteI see the Wallerstein Thomas Jefferson comments above. Full disclosure, I am a TJ alum from 2014. His story is more common than not. SD County is littered with thousands of alums from the school who are hopelessly in debt, waiting for a bailout. I have never held a job in law, not even long-term doc review (I was on the "circuit"). My debt load was at one point a clip over 300,000, it is now about 250,000. At this point, I plan on moving abroad and marrying a foreigner for the citizenship. I can then stay overseas and keep my pay, whereas in the US I will never have hope of buying a house, having retirement savings, or starting a family. I know the taxpayer will be on the hook but I have no choice.
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear that, but you do have a choice. Put your loans on income driven repayment whenever the COVID pause ends. Your payment is just a percentage of income regardless of principal, and can even be zero if your income is low enough. Then if your job is nonprofit or government, you'll get it forgiven in ten years (PSLF), or in 20 years otherwise. Either way, your account is in good standing under an IDR and not hurting your credit or ability to buy a house or whatever. For example, Fannie and Freddie revised their mortgage guidelines a few year back to accept people's IDR payment as a "real" payment regardless of whether such a low payment would ever actually pay the debt off.
DeleteIf you do your paperwork, student loans just aren't loans anymore. Not really. More like a tax or something, where you pay a certain percentage of your income for a certain number of years and then they let you off the hook.
Can someone explain why prospective students should be worried about student loans when there is PSLF, income based repayment where they only pay a % of income regardless of the total debt, and doubtless other forgiveness programs (esp as that generation gets older and more politically powerful)? Don't misunderstand me, I think it's a moral hazard and will only keep driving costs up, if borrowers have no incentive to limit their debt. Why should they care if it is Monopoly money to them and will never be repaid?
DeleteWith PLSF you will eventually have a tax bomb. I don’t have a choice if I want to live an okay life. Sorry if you’re left to pay the bill.
DeleteIt is a massive moral hazard, and that's part of why people assume it cannot possibly go on forever and that sooner or later, congress will pull the plug on it. Something to rein this in sooner or later probably is inevitable; if something can't go on forever, then by definition it won't. But it's not likely to be retroactively applied to borrowers already out of school and pursuing some kind of forgiveness track, so I don't lose sleep over that. The remaining reason to care about over-borrowing, then, is simply the fact that 20 years is a very long time if you don't end up in nonprofit or government (and thus ineligible for PSLF).
DeletePlus, all the forms and processing and confusing rules have really turned people off to PSLF. I got it no problem, and my loans are completely gone because of it, and I didn't need any of those Biden waivers or anything because I actually read the original rules and followed them (something lawyers are supposed to be good at) but a lot of people seem to have trouble navigating it and their experiences tell others not to trust it.
Four months until I’m in turkey on a beach, reading your comments as my debt load grows due to nonpayment. Have fun paying it as creditors can’t cross international boundaries for this.
DeleteThere is no taxation due to forgiveness on PSLF; that was in the statute from the get-go. Regular 20 year IDR forgiveness is a different story, but that imputation of income has been suspended thru 2025 by specific act of congress in one of the COVID bills, and a lot of folks predict a more permanent fix in the works.
DeleteEven without a fix, PSLF never has a tax and the tax on regular IDR write-offs is a heck of a lot less than the amount forgiven, especially when the "insolvency exclusion" is considered. (That's a tax form that gets attached to your 1040 that basically makes it so you don't get taxed on forgiven debt to the extent that debt, prior to being forgiven, put you in a negative net worth position).
More power to you, 1:38, but you did say your plan hinges on marrying a native. That is indeed pretty much the only way for a US citizen who doesn't have ample unearned income or an employer sponsor to move abroad permanently, legally and with work permissions, so good luck.
DeleteSeems easier to me to just fill out an IDR form once a year, but hey whatever floats your boat.
You can’t accrue assets or build a nest egg that way. There are paper marriages all around the world. The US is fat, mentally ill, deracinated, and full of criminals. For all the complaining here about how the US is a scam, I’m actually taking action. There’s no fixing it.
DeleteYes paper marriages happen, but you have to admit it's a bit hypocritical to say you want to escape a country "full of criminals" by potentially becoming one yourself. And pragmatically, it requires a co-conspirator who is going to be pretty corrupt themselves and who now has dirt on you, so who knows what they might try to blackmail you out of next?
DeleteOr alternatively, it's a real marriage but one where you're expected to provide a much higher standard of living than the native spouse currently has. If you're just a broke American fleeing crippling debt, you can't provide that and they simply don't take the deal.
Either way, still seems easier to just fill out an IDR form once a year.
What law am I breaking that would make me a “criminal”? I’m allowed to marry abroad to avoid paying debts.
DeleteTeaching English in turkey will put me in the top quartile there, if not higher. They’ll flock to me. Even if what you said is true, I’d rather not pay the scam. You can!
As I said above, a real marriage is a real marriage. But you said "paper marriage." Marriage entered into solely on paper for the sole purpose of getting immigration permission is the crime. It's a form of fraud. Here's an example of how they police that here in the USA, but I'm sure every country has some version of it (though admittedly, how well they enforce it will vary):
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokes_interview
Oh and by the way, teaching English abroad may not be the student loan escape you think. Sure they're not going to go into foreign country courts to come after you, but the teach english abroad company may have USA payroll operations which can mean intercept. Also, it can be almost impossible to find a bank that doesn't do SOME kind of US business for which they will have to report your bank accounts back to the US and probably honor levies lest the bank get hit with penalties of its own. Pretty hard to live abroad if you can't open a bank account! Tax dodgers find this out the hard way, for example: https://ustax.bz/received-dear-american-letter-non-u-s-bank.
DeleteLol at all your faux research. Have fun paying my loans for me
Deletecan you elaborate on your plan? I have tried to go abroad for years, but other countries protect their own and its very difficult to get a job, even with citizenship.
Deletebaronzp@yahoo.com
Please consider visiting The Law School Reddit and telling people this. The folks on that site are deeply out of touch with reality, and some folks considering law school come on there, read happy tales about why law school is a great idea for everyone, and the debt doesn't matter, and get sucked in.
ReplyDeleteThe information is readily available. I have concluded that people who won't read it are willfully blind.
DeleteWell, that is true. . .law schools tend to draw in unintelligent, unsuccessful people, who are, in fact, willfully blind. . .which then creates big problems for the legal profession, as some of these idiots manage to eventually pass a Bar Exam somewhere, on their third or fourth attempt, and then try to practice law. It would be great if we has a professional organization to regulate the practice of law and prevent this sort of thing. . .you could call it a Bar Association, maybe a good name for it would be The American Bar Association, or ABA. . .but, well that would be nice but isn't gonna happen. The scam will just keep going.
DeleteThe ABA accredits law schools; it does not regulate the content of bar exams or the practice of law which is the territory of state supreme courts and the state bar associations under them, and anyone they choose to hire such as the NCBE if they're going to choose to adopt the uniform bar exam (in whole or in part).
DeleteI've long wondered what a campaign to reform the practice at the state level might look like, basically lobbying state supreme court judges perhaps to require graduated licensure like a postgrad apprenticeship or residency or something. But whatever that might look like it'd have to be consumer protection focused - they might listen to protecting people from crappy lawyers. But they'll have no interest in trying to shrink the profession just to reduce competition for jobs or drive lawyer salaries up. These are state supreme court judges - the practice of law obviously went very, very well for them. They may well have sympathy for clients being ripped off or appearing before their fellow judges and performing incompetently, but they will have zero sympathy for JDs who just can't find work.
Happy Birthday, OG! I have been following your critiques of what is largely a predatory industry for about seven years now - it has been absurdly helpful as someone with no family in the legal field.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, just wondering about your most recent tiers. UPenn had a higher FC+BL rate than, say, NYU yet it's grouped with schools like Mich that have a much lower rate. Is lay prestige why UPenn is in a different tier than NYU?
Thanks for any insights, just in the process of differentiating between schools; keep up the important work that you do!
Thank you. I too have no family in the legal field; I was thus vulnerable to deception by the law-school scam, although I blame only myself.
DeleteI'd have to check the data for my seven tiers again; I haven't looked at them lately. They weren't based strictly on good employment (taken to be federal court or Big Law right after graduation); other factors, such as cost, were also considered. As the description of Tier 2 says, it formerly included Michigan and Penn. Probably I did not get around to reviewing Tiers 1–3 when I last revised the ranking, since I was concerned primarily with Tiers 4–6: I merged 5 and 6 and also dropped those schools that had closed. Some adjustments in the upper tiers may indeed be needed.
Fine distinctions between schools are neither necessary nor appropriate. You Ass News continues to mislead the public by purporting to rank schools in strict order when even a very coarse ranking such as Old Guy's is too specific (which is why I dropped Tier 6 the last time). Really, "Attend at your own risk" (13 schools at most) and "Do not attend" (all the rest) might be an adequate ranking, and I'm tempted to say that "Do not attend" is good enough.
For all the problems with USNWR, it did pretty accurately create the notion of the "top 14." Now, USN didn't draw any line at 14, it's just that people noticed that schools in that range rarely moved into or out of it, whereas the rest of the list was more volatile, and people at schools within that 14 seemed to do pretty well at OCI. Georgetown is arguable I know, which is probably why you said 13 at most, but in general the community sorta combined USNWR ranks with popular wisdom and the notion of there being a "top 14" overall holds up IMHO.
DeleteSimplicity is probably preferable to exactness here. I think the best advice for 0Ls is simple: Top 14 or bust, unless someone else is paying and you have a guaranteed job lined up. And if you're already in law school and have no such guarantee, stick around for OCI (if you get any interviews) but drop out immediately after that unless you get an offer.
Actually, I said 13 at most because years ago my investigations (cited above) revealed that there were only 13 schools at which 50% or more of the graduates got Big Law or a federal clerkship right after graduation. Shade the threshold down to 40%, and there were still only 16 schools. I treated Big Law and federal clerkships together as a proxy for a successful outcome. Yes, I'm well aware that other successful outcomes exist, such as getting a job in "consulting" (as if a miscellaneous 25-year-old fresh out of Yale knew anything about this) or at the family's law firm in Shaker Heights. But Big Law and (as Old Guy knows from experience) federal clerkships are by no means guarantees of success. On balance, I think that this quick-and-dirty metric works pretty well. And, as you said, it happens to coincide with the notion of the "top 14" (or the top 13 if Georgetown is booted out, as it sometimes is).
DeleteYour simplified approach meets Old Guy's approval. The sorts of people who end up at the "top 14" are of little concern to us, since they can read our materials and make reasonable decisions. For everyone else, your advice boils down to "Don't go to law school" (slight exception for the rich and pampered), which is all that needs to be said outside top-14 territory.
The wonderful world of higher ed; as OG and others have noted, it's pretty much all a scam:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.yahoo.com/news/they-should-be-charged-thousands-of-nurses-obtained-fake-diplomas-and-provided-care-without-proper-training-210421338.html
I don't know what's worse, the fact that schools were giving out fake degrees or the fact that the people they gave them to really did pass the NCLEX. So either the test is crap, or the academic instruction wasn't really needed in the first place and we should go back to a pure apprenticeship model.
DeleteI suspect these exams are like the bar exam; if you take a good bar review course and actually study, you could pass the bar with zero time spent in law school. It may be the same here.
DeleteYa know, it's funny. The wiki article about history of US law schools says that moving away from apprenticeship was largely motivated by concerns that the practitioners were just using the apprentices as grunt labor and not really teaching them anything. Not unlike the "coffee-fetching internship" of today.
DeleteSets up an interesting dynamic for a society trying to grow professions of any sort, doesn't it? If you go for apprenticeship, you risk the practitioner just using the apprentices as free or cheap labor. But if you go academic, you risk that the teacher is now not living in the real world and doesn't teach anything useful. So the risk is that you either don't learn anything, or you learn lots of stuff but it's of questionable relevance to day-to-day work.
Medical residencies have figured this out. You can't just go anywhere and rack up a certain number of hours. A residency that qualifies for board certification has to be accredited by the ACGME, which makes sure it's a true hands-on learning experience and doesn't just stick the residents at reception or whatever.
I think that's where we should be at. Academia is probably pretty useless. But you can't just have people attach themselves to any old solo practitioner who just wants use of the student's free westlaw either. There needs to be a real training program, vetted and approved and overseen, but delivered in the context of a real practicing organization and not a classroom completely disconnected from the real world. We should go back to apprenticeship, but that is what apprenticeship should mean.
3:20, this is a great thought. The problem is law schools would not go for an apprenticeship model because they do not give one damn about their students or the legal profession. There is already an unofficial apprenticeship model in place. Graduates of elite schools get Federal Clerkships and jobs with elite law firms. The firms have an up or out system, and we have seen stories in recent years of elite law grads having trouble getting jobs after big law. But in the past, these grads could move on to in-house counsel or big Fed. The poor grad of the toilet law school had no such unofficial apprenticeship opportunity. If they wanted to practice law, they had to set up a solo office in a dilapidated office building handling DUI defense or Family law and had to figure it out as they went. None of the training in law school, debating who owns a Fox in 19th Century America or arguing over stew chickens, prepared these graduates for the solo practice they were destined.
DeleteThere is more to medical education than an apprenticeship. The classroom teaching of medical school focused on high yield problems, meaning common medical problems or can’t miss medical problems because the problem would kill the patient. While law students learn about useless old English common law fee tail and life estates rather than how to write a will or perform a home closing, medical students learn about myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) and heart failure. Moreover, the clinical courses like cards, GI, infectious disease are taught by practicing physicians in that specialty (how about that, medical school professors can teach, work in their specialty, and perform research at the same time unlike lazy entitled law school professors). Could you imagine a lazy physician telling a medical school, “I don’t want to see patients, I want a six figure salary to teach a couple classes a week about the prior practice of blood letting and publish non-peer reviewed papers.” They would be told to get lost.
The medical apprenticeship doesn’t start in residency. The apprenticeship starts in the 3rd and 4th years of medical school. After high yield classroom training, 3rd and 4th year medical students spend time at teaching hospital and clinics. My first clinical rotation was overnights on OB. The very first night the OB/GYN resident told me to deliver a baby (under the supervision of the Attending and Resident). During my surgery rotation on the overnight trauma service, the surgery resident put me to work and had me suture an injured patient after a MVC.
The medical apprenticeship also works because there are more residency spots than US graduates. US medical students have a 90%+ chance of matching to residency. My entire class matched. US graduates run into trouble when they apply to very competitive specialties or do not apply to enough residency programs. If you just apply to MGH, Hopkins, and Mayo’s neurosurgery residency, you are probably not going to match (I know a neurosurgeon who matched into their 20th choice). Continued below:
For law schools to adopt an apprenticeship model like medical schools, they would ideally change the curriculum to high yield legal topics and hire practicing lawyers to teach those topics. Law school administrators and professors are lazy. They are not going to do that. Nor are they going to fire out of touch professors and replace them with practicing attorneys. Law students, with a knowledge of high yield legal concepts, would then rotate in prosecutor offices, public defender offices, big law firms, PI firms, family law firms, and other law firms to gain experience in the various practice areas. When it comes to highly ranked law schools, many legal employers would probably be fine having those students rotate in their office. I can’t imagine prestigious law firms want students from toilet law schools rotating in their office though. Lastly, there are more residency positions than US medical school graduates ensuring high match rates for US med schools. With the oversupply of law grads and lawyers, legal employers are not going to absorb all of the current grads into apprenticeships. Law schools would need to cut back on student loan conduits. That’s just not going to happen. We will just end up with a lot of unmatched law grads. And law schools wouldn’t be able to just blame the unmatched law grads for being a lazy, entitled loser who wouldn’t take one of those small firm jobs because they were waiting for a big law job.
DeleteMedicine for me used to represent the gold standard of professional training. (Second, believe it or not, is probably classics.) Nowadays it too is deteriorating. A thoracic surgeon of my acquaintance complained about residents who could not find the superior vena cava during an operation. I, never having had a course in anatomy or even in biology, proceeded to describe the size and position of the superior vena cava.
DeleteSome years ago I had to see a dermatologist. He asked whether I would mind having his resident attend the appointment. I cheerfully agreed. But the resident could not answer his questions. He asked, for example, for an antihistamine that does not cause drowsiness. The resident fenced about and finally named Benadryl, which, of course, does cause drowsiness. I immediately thought of two non-soporific antihistamines and could have come up with another if given time to think.
During a hearing, I drew an analogy to a diagnosis of marasmus. The physician, also a professor of medicine, who was present had never heard of marasmus. She said that I knew more medicine than she did. (Admittedly it's not a condition that is commonly found in the West.)
Another physician contradicted me when I mentioned that warts are caused by the human papillomavirus. He couldn't tell me what did cause them. I was right. (Well, maybe there's another minor cause, but HPV is the dominant one.)
It is disturbing to see medicine relinquish its high standards.
Legal "education" is an absolute wreck. Profe$$ors openly piss on practice as something beneath their dignity—in part because most of them couldn't practice law worth a tinker's damn, but mainly because their intellectual pretensions separate them from anything so base and vulgar as helping people with legal problems in the real world. Consequently, law reviews seldom contain anything of use to bench or bar but rather fill their pages with scholarshit about "the Open Road" or "law and hip-hop".
DeleteLaw courses are similarly self-indulgent, or at least impractical, with a lot of "law and popular culture", "critical legal pluralism", "intersectionality", and the like. I won't go so far as to say that life estates are worthless knowledge, because they do arise. Nor would I consider it appropriate for law students to study only garden-variety legal matters such as wills and conveyances. But it's true that graduates of law school—and this includes people from Harvard or Yale—usually cannot do much of anything for a client when they are called to the bar. Unlike physicians, however, they are licensed to practice in all branches of their domain—including those that they have never studied at all.
Medical students, as you mentioned, get practical experience long before graduation. At my élite law school, I never even saw a contract; still less did I draft one. Nor did I see a lawyer's office. There is simply no comparison between medical and legal training.
Old Guy, that’s pretty bad that thoracic surgery residents could not find the superior vena cava. I can understand orthopods not knowing anything about diabetes, diabetes medications, and the management of diabetes, and asking hospitalists to manage diabetes for their osteomyelitis patients. But a thoracic surgery resident should absolutely know chest anatomy. One possible explanation may be the evaluation process. The most important factor for matching into a competitive specialty or matching to a prestigious program is the USMLE step 1 score. This is a standardized multiple choice test taken after the 2nd year of medical school. Thoracic surgery is a very competitive specialty, requiring high USMLE step 1 scores to match. Truthfully though, Step 1 has little relevance as to how good of a thoracic surgeon one will be. If the thoracic surgery program only judges applicants based on who memorized a bunch of trivia relatively better than others, rather than based on who was getting in the OR their 3rd and 4th years of medical school, then they may not be getting the quality resident they are looking for. But I’m just speculating.
DeleteThis is only an anecdote, but I think it reflects the over reliance of residency programs on step 1 scores, a test taken after the second year of med school. I have a judgmental friend from medical school who became a general surgeon (their personality fits in well with their chosen specialty). They are still bitter they went to an elite under grad but did not get into Harvard. They are very hard working, got a good step 1 score, but not great. They worked hard their 3rd and 4th year of medical school, getting in the OR, and performing well enough that surgeons were allowing them to do a lot. We had a peer who aced Step 1 who was also interested in general surgery. Of course, our peer who aced Step 1 matched to one of the most prestigious programs in the country. My judgmental surgeon friend correctly predicted, our peer was soft, didn’t have the heart for general surgery, merely viewed their high step 1 score as their ticket to a prestigious program, and would wash out. Sure enough, our peer quit the prestigious surgery program within a year and transferred to a different specialty.
That doesn’t explain your other interactions though, like a physician incorrectly telling you warts are not caused by HPV. That’s pretty bad.
Interesting to learn how residents are selected for competitive programs. It does indeed seem odd to rely on a general-purpose multiple-choice test for admission to a specialized field for which very many people, however much they may know about medicine, are not cut out.
DeleteOld Guy is very much a generalist, able to practice law in all major domains and a great many minor ones. He takes the view that a professional should be reasonably well versed in more than a so-called specialty, so he does not accept "not knowing anything about diabetes" from a physician (which is not to say that every physician must or should manage diabetes) or not knowing anything about wills or criminal law or contracts from a lawyer. Yes, he's a rare bird nowadays.
Very much second OG when he cites classics as a gold standard.
DeleteIn undergrad, I had to take at least 6 credits of a foreign language. I wanted to just get this over with, and there was one class offered that'd satisfy this requirement entirely in one semester: Intensive Latin for Classics majors. But it wasn't exactly in high demand so I could sign up for it even though it wasn't my major.
Good God it was intense, and it quickly became apparent why it was worth double the credits of a normal class. You had to to read and translate Latin as it would originally appear on a stone tablet or whatever. Classical Latin and Greek was in "scripta continua" meaning there was no lowercase/uppercare, no spaces between words, and no punctuation marks. Just jumble of letters. It looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua
That stuff was intense. Hardest class I ever took in undergrad or any level of grad school, and never been so happy to manage to walk away with a C, whereas all my regular liberal artistry was an easy 4.0 as long as you were halfway decent at BSing and turned in your papers on time.
If the purpose of a liberal arts education is to demonstrate that you can learn anything an employer wants to teach you, I have no doubt that the classics kids could do just that. I think classics was in fact the original liberal arts major. Something like majoring in English probably would've been unheard of prior to higher ed opening itself up to the hoi polloi which began in earnest around the time of the GI Bill.
To this day, I tell modern liberal artists this. If you want to get a peek at what a REAL, rigorous liberal arts education was before the schools dumbed it down to juice enrollment, take a class for classics majors. And if you can survive actually majoring in it? Well wow, kudos to you. It definitely earns my respect.
The first university degrees were actually in—wait for it—law.
DeleteMajors came about in the nineteenth century. The original liberal arts (Latin artes liberales, literally 'skills fit for a free person') were seven in number, from Grecian antiquity to fairly recent times: grammar, rhetoric, and logic constituted the trivium; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music constituted the quadrivium. Well into the nineteenth century, students pursuing a bachelor's degree took exactly the same courses, in a curriculum designed to cultivate the liberal arts. A few universities began to offer the option of a concentration, which would be pursued in greater depth but still within the framework of the broad liberal-arts curriculum. That was the origin of our modern majors, although the liberal-arts curriculum has degenerated into a more or less open-ended choice of electives ("I'll take Intensive Latin for Classics Majors with a side of egg rolls"). Classics was indeed one of the first majors on offer.
As late as the turn of the twentieth century, Latin and its literature (in the original) were central to post-secondary study. In 1900, all applicants to the undergraduate program at the University of California had to complete lengthy examinations in Latin and Classical Greek. How far we have fallen! Now few undergraduates—or people with advanced degrees—have even a rudimentary knowledge of any language but English (often not even that!).
In se ipsa fortuna ruit.
DeleteHAPPY TENTH BIRTHDAY TO OUTSIDE THE LAW SCHOOL SCAM!
ReplyDeleteI graduated law school and passed the bar exam first attempt more than 20 years ago and never found legal employment. And out of roughly 250 of my high school classmates I am probably the only one still working a minimum wage job. All my other high school classmates I run into are doing much better than me and even the ones who took up vocational training and jobs right out of high school. Plus they didn't lose opportunity cost of wasted 3 years that they could have been working. In hindsight I realized that law was like a country club and you don't get in unless you have connections.
ReplyDeleteI had the same results with a legal career but I graduated 30 years ago. I was able to fall back on an modest paying accounting career so I did better than minimum wage, but the skills required in accounting have morphed more into database, particularly SQL skills, and combined with my obscure specialized experience, I cannot persuade employers that I can adapt. Nor do I particularly like database coding anyway. Therefore, I have become obsolete. You are correct, never mind trades, but those who could secure employment in the transit system, postal work or the 'phone company' fared far better.
DeleteThe problem is that law school Deans, Professors, Adminstrators, and the Career Services Office are all in on the scam. They don't see law students as "students" at all, but rather as "student loan conduits": the money flow from the government, through the students, and to the law school bank account. So you get hapless college grads working minimum wage jobs with their worthless BA in "film" or a liberal arts major, who realize they can't get a good job with their undergrad degree, and consider law school. They desperately WANT to believe that law school is a sure-fire path to riches, and the law schools, depending on Confirmation Bias, aka Wishful thinking, have decades of experience conning and duping applicants and their gullible parents. What this all means is that even the few who do actually get jobs as lawyers post graduation tend to be very dull, gullible people who "believe their own BS" and will make terrible lawyers. One of the first rules of practicing law is never trust your client, but if you cannot even trust yourself, you are going to be utterly incapable of rendering independent, unbiased, common-sense legal advice, which is the role of an attorney. Oh, and if you come out of law school preaching communism, and hating your own country, that won't help you either IRL, see, e.g. the shameful way Stanford students recently treated a Federal Judge who came to speak on their campus but apparently wasn't "woke" enough for the student body.
ReplyDeleteI remember being in Federalist Society in law school, and having friends in Constitution Society, and we helped each other network. When it came to the important things we could be on the same side. I fear that's gone forever.
DeleteOh, it is completely gone forever. And the idea that every single lawyer in the US is an extreme lefty is nonsense as well. There are conservative lawyers, moderate lawyers, apolitical lawyers, all types, and there are old school judges who make Reagan look like a liberal. So if you get sworn in as a licensed attorney and decide that your commitment to "social justice" will govern your career, and you will hate and vilify anyone who doesn't think exactly the same way as you do, you will end up preaching "social justice" from behind the counter of your local Starbucks. Smart lawyers don't bring their political beliefs into the courtroom, but smart lawyers are in short supply these days.
DeleteWe all know Stanford law school is overrated.
DeleteOf course there are conservative lawyers. But academia does skew liberal and so do college students in general.
DeleteThe chicken and egg question is arguable, i.e. whether higher ed just tends to attract more libs or whether it creates them by indoctrination, but one thing is for sure with law school: The FedSoc kids and their views are usually in the minority in the school setting, even in red states where they're otherwise in the majority.
Ironically, that reduced competition can give them a leg up for certain jobs, like clerkships with Republican-appointed judges and such. So there can be a silver lining to it once they get out.
Congrats to Old Guy, all of the contributors to OTLSS, and the commenters. Your hard work over the last 10 years has saved countless people. Twenty years ago, toilet law schools could lie to applicants and claim 99% of grads were obtaining jobs with average salaries of $100k+. I witnessed Deans and “Career Services” Deans spit out lies without hesitation at admitted student events. If someone asked about repaying the exorbitant $150k student loan debt (the typical cost in the 2000s), the mark was reassured they could easily repay the debt on their expected $100k+ salary. If someone was interested in public interest law, the mark was “advised” to pursue a high paying private practice job first paying $100k+, pay off their loans, and then pursue public interest law. Marks were reassured that countless employers interviewed on campus in the fall. And the Dean of my toilet law school told marks, “everyone gets a job, even the person at the bottom of the class.” Of course, OCI was for the students at the top of the class (myself and other peers on Law Review were still rejected). After OCI the “Career Services” narrative changed to “most people don’t get jobs through OCI, you need to network!” Network sure…I once went to a legal career fair. A big law firm refused to even accept my resume. They wouldn’t even give me the courtesy of taking my resume and throwing it in the trash like all the other employers do with 2nd tier toilet law school resumes. And after graduation, a lot of people never got legal jobs. I was rejected by Big law, Big Fed, s—t law, state prosecutor offices, the public defender, judicial clerkships, and municipal government. Nine months later, my school published the same garbage stats for my class, “99% of grads got jobs making $100k+.” A friend of mine pointed out, the real stats of toilet law schools are 50 and 50. 50% of the class obtains a legal job making $50k.
ReplyDeleteWhen the law school scam movement began years ago, the law schools continued to lie. They claimed we were entitled losers, didn’t interview well, didn’t network, didn’t work closely with career services, among other lies to convince marks to attend. There were a lot of smart hardworking people scammed by law schools. The graduates were not the problem. The problem was and still is that there are more graduates than jobs available. I have no problem with interviewing. I had to interview for med school and for residency. I was able to attend a US med school and match into a competitive specialty. And in the real profession of medicine, I don’t need to “network” or work closely with a career services office (which does not exist at least at my med school). Myself and my peers get emails for job openings all the time.
Thanks to all of your hard work, law schools now have to publish accurate employment data. You saved countless people from making the mistake of borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend toilet law schools. Enrollment significantly declined and toilet law schools closed. Keep up the good work!
"Your hard work over the last 10 years has saved countless people."
DeleteHopefully, or at least a few people anyway.
Anon JD, MD nailed it!!
ReplyDeleteYour use of the word "marks" to describe law school applicants is important, as is shows that you understand that modern US law schools are, in fact, a scam with con artists seeking to target gullible marks and shake them down for money. You say that "I witnessed Deans and “Career Services” Deans spit out lies without hesitation at admitted student events." showing that law schools are operating like Bernie Modoff and Sam Bankman-Fried did in hustling people to give them money for a Ponzi scheme. You mention on-campus interviews, touted as a great way for law students to get a lucrative job, when, in fact, "According to the ABA for Law Students, “About 90 percent of the nation’s law graduates do not get hired through OCI. " https://lawpreview.barbri.com/what-is-oci/#:~:text=On%2DCampus%20Interviewing%20(OCI),summer%20and%20post%2Dgraduate%20employment. This whole thing is just another Madoff schme, another Sam Bankman-Fried con, and the participants in it know this. These Deans are criminals, pure and simple, and they belong in jail.
ReplyDeleteWorse than the Madoff Ponzi scheme. At least with Madoff the Feds were able to seize Madoffs remaining assets and sell them off at auction and get some money back for investors even if it was penny on the dollars. A law school gave you worthless sheep skin as a degree.
DeleteSheepskin nowadays would be rare indeed. Even the élite schools long ago stopped purchasing vellum for diplomas. And a lot of über-toilets reportedly just issue a sheet of ordinary paper that came out of a laser printer.
DeleteI cannot even imagine trying to get a piece of white copy paper, with laser print on it, framed and hung on my office wall as my "law school diploma". Clients, potential clients, and other lawyers would laugh at such a display. Those schools are doing their graduates a real dis-service. My certificate of admission to practice in the state where I am licensed is much more impressive, with the fancy gold seal and all the other stuff that looks, well, real, for lack of a better term. A "diploma" that is nothing more than a word documented printed up on someone's laser printer sitting in their basement. . .after the "student" has invested 3Y of his or her life and spent over 150K on tuition and books, and probably another 100K on living expenses. . .the whole thing reeks of fraud.
DeleteA note of congratulations to the team here for keeping things running 10 years on. It was a different world 10 years ago; the mainstream media was running articles on what a scam law school was, there were numerous websites/blogs decrying the scam, and even members of the scam itself were occasionally admitting that yes, law school was a scam.
ReplyDeleteAll of that is gone, with a few minor exceptions. OTLSS is the last blog standing, which is a shame, as law school is still a scam. So muted congratulations on a job well done, as there is much to do and OTLSS is the only voice in the wilderness.
My favorite scam blog was Nando's THIRDTIERREALITY with all the toilet pictures. A marketing masterpiece on how people can use the WordPress platform to get a message across to the world.
DeleteModern US law schools are complex, multi-layered scams designed to extract the most money possible from their marks, while delivering nothing of value in return. Applicants are promised "some our grads get jobs with big prestigious firms paying as much as 200K as a starting salary". Once the mark has actually been in law school for a few months, he learns that "some of our grads" refers to 5-10 percent of the class, the top 5 to ten percent. No problem, if he doesn't get top grades in his first semester, he can just drop out and cut his losses, right? WRONG. Law schools intentionally refuse to release fall 1L grades until after the marks have paid the full tuition, bought books, and secured housing for the second semester. Then comes lie number 2: Well if you DON'T make top ten percent/Law Review, but you ARE top 1/3 & Space Law Journal, that's pretty much the same thing, see. . .and as idiotic as that sounds, the marks will buy it. Obviously telling an employer that you're in the top 32.135 or your class and write for an idiotic "secondary journal" that no one has ever heard of will only give the employer a big belly laugh before he puts the mark's resume into the shredder, but as long as they collect a full 3Y tuition, the Dean of the Law school and his well-paid professors could not care less. These law schools are so shameful and manipulative that they would make Bernie Madoff blush. Some of his early investors really did get great, albeit bogus, returns on their "investment". Law school grads get debt, unemployment, and the bitter hard-learned lesson not to trust people and institutions that want their money. I run into unemployed and severely under-employed lawyers all the time, and their plights are pitiful and very sad. . .it is a blight upon my profession. The Deans, Professors, "Career Service Offices" are all in on the scam, BTW. They know there are NO JOBS for most of their grads, and their response to that is to keep on lying and raising tuition.
ReplyDeleteThis is the truth for thousands of graduates yearly. Thanks for posting this.
DeletePeople would be better off taking 200k and putting it on black. Odds are 47-48%, which is a lot better than the odds of the only good outcome (biglaw) at most schools, and since there's only one shot at biglaw (2L OCI) it's an apt analogy.
DeleteThat said, the feds won't loan you 200k to spin it on black, and you can still drop out after OCI. Even if it's timed so you can't get a refund, you're still saving second semester of 2L and all of 3L which is half the cost.
This is especially true at "trap schools" in like the 15-25 range where somewhere around 25-33% of the class gets biglaw. Still not great odds, but a lot better than Cooley or something and enough to justify sticking around long enough to at least take your shot at OCI (and potentially even transfer to an elite school, if you happen to end up at the VERY top of the class).
Why, exactly, would anyone consider a job in BigLaw worth the investment of law school? The average tenure of a first-year associate in a large law firm is just 4Y. So that means that many people spend 7Y in higher education--4Y college, 3Y law school, 2-day Bar Exam, fo r a job that is over in 24-36 months. At the old 190K pay scale, a first year associate working roughly 70 hours a week earns about $50 per hour, pre-tax, with no extra pay for overtime. A vaguely competent DUI lawyer can easily earn $1,200 in 15 minutes in a courtroom. My plumber and electrician both charge around $140 per hour, with little or no student debt. Remember, if you are an associate at a large law firm, you are on an up-or-out career, if you do not establish yourself firmly on the Partnership track by your fourth or fifth year there--if you last that long--you are on your way out the door. See, e.g., https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/kirkland-ellis-lays-off-associates-across-us-offices
DeleteYou need to lay off Cooley. You don’t know what goes on there. A lot of us had an amazing time and we’re productive there.
DeleteWe're not advocating Big Law, just saying that it's about the best that a fresh graduate of law school can hope to get. Very few people who get Big Law become partners; the great majority, as you said, are out on their asses in a few years.
DeleteYou might say that a stable job in a government agency, or something of the sort, is better than Big Law. Probably so, but those jobs can't be found on every corner, and they don't usually pay enough to cover the payments on student loans from law school. So those who have student loans to repay have to shoot for Big Law, though few of them will get it and a lot fewer still will keep it. Even those who do keep it end up working all the time.
Oh, yes, Cooleyite, we stand corrected. Cooley is a veritable Harvard on the Red Cedar, a palace of learning whose hallowed halls are adorned with the inscription "Atque inter silvas Academi quaerere verum".
DeleteDon't feed the trolls, OG. I think it's hard for some people to accept (or even realize) the mistakes they've made. It's a sign of immaturity.
DeleteMost people in biglaw won't make partner, but most aren't trying to. It's more like a well-paid (but grueling hours-wise) residency than anything else for a fresh grad.
DeleteRightly or wrongly, it's seen as the best training in the business and so after a few years, that's when the headhunters start calling and you look to make a move inhouse or to a prestigious federal position at like SEC or DOJ, or the "boutique" firms. These things are referred to as "exit opportunities" and its why the big firms tend to refer to their associates as "classes" and to the former ones as "alumni" - because for most people, biglaw is something you graduate from.
In short, most people who get it are in it for those "exit opportunities." Having biglaw on the resume opens a lot of doors. A small percentage will make partner, sure, but most are in it for what it leads to, not as an end unto itself.
Another response that did not address any of my concerns or claims. Harvard really isn’t that good…..
DeleteI keep seeing 'plumber' mentioned as the logical alternative to being a lawyer. I did a home plumbing job and it's not as much fun as you people are touting it. I replaced a bathroom faucet, which per you tube was supposed to be a 45 minute job, but it took two days. One obstacle after another. You are dealing with confined spaces and when you are on the hot water side being right handed makes it different on the cold water side. You need three hands or five. I was on my back for hours over two day trying to do this and the compression of my body on the frame of the cabinet fractured one of my ribs. I am convalescing. I guess the good thing is that I got the faucet replaced without leaks. I would not advise law school, but also think twice about plumbing.
DeleteBiglaw does not open the doors it used to. 30 years ago, sure, transitioning from a large law firm to being in-house counsel for a big corporation or another cushy job was quite common. These days a "transition" to temporary document review work paying $22 an hour is more likely. The job market is just too crowded to accommodate that massive number of lawyers we have. I have always been irked by the obsession that law schools and law students have with BigLaw. It is part of the big lie that schools use to lure in students, and suck them dry of 3Y of tuition, plus books and many other expenses. At most law schools only 10 percent of the class will ever even get an interview for a summer job with a law firm in their lives. The top 10 percent (top 5 percent for Cravath and other highly grade-sensitive law firms). So telling people come to our law school for opportunities to get job that, in reality, does not exist for 90 percent of the class is highly deceptive. And as for "big money at big law firms" again, at the risk of repeating myself, at the 190K per year/70 hours per week scheme that is still the norm at many large firms, that works out to about $50 per hour, pre-tax, with no time-and-a-half overtime pay. To this lawyer, that's not big money, that's joke money. Try getting an electrician to work on your house for $50 per hour,, and tell me how that works out for you. Big Law is just part of the big lie and the big scam that defines modern US law schools.
Delete5:45-youre right, all too often it's asserted here that people ought to "just go be a plumber" or similar, ignoring the fact that the job requires physical labor, which gets more difficult to accomplish as one gets older. And you don't roll out of bed one day "and be a plumber"; in addition to the apprentice/journeyman/master progression, there's also state licensing and required testing, and you've actually got to good at it in order to get enough business to make things work.
DeleteThat said, nobody has claimed it was "fun"; it's called work for a reason. But it doesn't require 3 years of near 200K expenses, plus bar prep, etc so you aren't hugely in debt, and if you've got a scintilla of sense, you can set up your own business and make an honest living.
So no, being a plumber isn't easy, and many of us would be unable to keep up with the physical demands, but it is honest work that doesn't require a mountain of debt to enter.
And as a practical matter, every time a plumber sees additional work-as you did-s/he charges more, so while that may be more strenous, it's also more remunerative.
Indeed, no handy-dandy recommendation of a line of work will suit everyone. We've had a lot of them over the years: lawyer in rural Nebraska, plumber, unionized employee of major municipal government, physician, military shit-kicker… One size does not fit all.
DeleteOptions seem to be fewer and less attractive than they were a few decades ago. The baby boomers fucked everything up, and we're still dealing with the consequences.
@936 It does still open those doors. There's a glut of lawyers to be sure, but the much smaller subset of them with biglaw on their resumes tend to be in plenty of demand. No argument at all that most grads can't get it though, that's why it should be top 14 school or bust for most people.
DeleteAs to the hours, yeah they're grueling, and yeah if you break that down to an hourly rate the first year might seem not so great. But remember, there's bonus and the pay goes up over the years. By the 4th year you're making over 400k with bonus. See https://www.biglawinvestor.com/biglaw-salary-scale/
In addition, sure you might not get a plumber for $50/hr, but do you really think the actual plumber is actually pocketing anything close to what he charges you? If he works for a company, they take much of that. And if he owns the joint, he's got overhead to pay. And just like in every profession there's plenty of nonbillable time, so factor that in too. That hourly rate would only go right into his pocket if he owned the PLACE and had zero overhead, i.e. a 100% profit margin. No business has a 100% margin.
Law firms are no different. Say that $200k equates to $50/hr per your calculation. The firm is probably billing that associate out at $500/hr. That's how all professional services firms make money, by buying time at a wholesale price and reselling it at a retail price. If you did what you're doing with the plumber with the law firm associate then you'd be assuming the associate was pocketing over a mil a year because you'd just be multiplying that $500/hr rate by 2080. C'mon, you know that not every hour of their time is billed and collected and that even if it is, they only take home a fraction of that. No one's entire price is pure profit, not lawyers and not plumbers either.
Law school is a scam at pretty much all but the top 14 schools, and maybe the top few percent students at some other regional ones who basically win a lottery. The VAST majority of people do not get the good outcome, that's why it's a scam. But we shouldn't deny that the good outcome does exist.
A law degree closes doors and nails them shut. Its a disastrous decision that will destroy job prospects for life unless you are top 10% at Yale or Harvard or Stanford. Just dont go, and its time to start criminally prosecuting those who benefit from running law schools.
DeleteHappy Anniversary, OLSS! While I don't agree with everything OG says, I do appreciate his dedication to keeping this blog going. When things were really bad for me (around 2014), the scamblogs were a form of therapy for me and helped me make it through--I realized I wasn't alone. Even though we are losing the war, we have won some strategic battles, and that does matter. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the scamblog movement through the years.
ReplyDeleteEveryone here is so pessimistic and doesn’t have a grab the bull by the balls attitude. I went to Charlotte back in 2012. We all knew the market was tight. I wasn’t top half so law wasn’t an option unless I went solo which I didn’t want to do. I became a student loan broker for a regional firm and now syndicate student loans for a national financial institution. My base is six figures and with commission I’m in seven figures some years. I’ve had a great career helping place students in colleges and grad schools and I have built strong reputations with universities, including law school admissions offices.
DeleteOk, let the next round of back and forth begin! Assuming this is a real post, then 4:52, you must be proud of yourself, profiting from the misery of others; congratulations!
DeleteYou went into the money-lending trade. You are a pirate.
DeleteIt's obviously untrue. Don't let this piece of Harlotte harlotry upset you.
DeleteSo funny how butt hurt everyone here gets when anyone else is successful with a law degree outside of law. There’s are tens of thousands of professionals involved in student loan origination and syndication. Yet you think one couldn’t wind up here with a simple google search? Guess litigation and fact finding wasn’t for you…..
DeleteClear trolling. Gets saddled with student loans and then works making them? And SEVEN figures? C'mon.
DeleteAlso, I cannot imagine there being much growth in "student loan syndication." FFEL was abolished in 2010 which means almost all student loans are direct loans which are held by the government and not resold. You could do some syndication and investing in private loans, but most of the private lenders post-FFEL pivoted to either refinancing federal loans after graduation (when outcomes are known) or servicing them for the feds.
A few do remain making upfront student loans (almost always requiring a cosigner) but there can't realistically be much growth in that space with the feds offering much better terms and safety nets like income based repayment, and with PLUS loans creating ways around the Stafford caps, much less the kind of growth that someone would see seven figure comp.
Definitely not credible.
Who said I was ever saddled with loans? My tuition was paid for. Seven figures isn’t that much money, it’s not the 90s anymore.
DeleteWhat you consider syndication is way too narrow. I do the refinancing, servicing, and private loans. The outcomes are not known upon graduation, as many alumni do not pay. I stand by my posts and enjoy my career.
Stand by your posts? Huh? This is a blog, and your posts are completely anonymous; that's hardly "stand(ing) by your posts".
DeleteYes. I stand by my posts. I make a lot more money than posters here with a worse degree. I had what it takes to make it. Not all do.
DeleteThe post looks bogus. Too much of the "you can do anything with law degree" flavor to it. I don't think anyone goes to law school not intending to be a lawyer. Too far too many grads, their JD ends up being worthless. I have a family member who is not academically oriented, shall we say, and she studied for 4 semester to become a radiation tech, administering X Rays and providing medical treatment, under the supervision of doctors and other medical professionals. She eventually ended up making six figures with her Associate's degree, back when money was actually worth something in this country, pre-inflation. There are so, so many stories just like hers. People who spend a year or two, or less, studying in a particular field, and end up making much more money than most new law school grads, and even, in fact, more money than many experienced, practicing lawyers. I honestly think that people are so dumb that they watch a few episodes of "Law & Order", or "Suits" or whatever--read a John Grisham novel, watch one of Tom Cruise's legal thriller--and decide they can be a lawyer just like the guy on their TV screen. If you doubt me about just how awfully flooded the job market for lawyers is, pleas know this: if you get a DUI, just about anywhere in the US, you will get so many written soliciations from so many desperate lawyers that you can paper your walls with them. Im talking DOZENS of targeted direct mail ads for one minor traffic offense. That is an absolute fact, and lawyers go broke all the time after spending thousands of dollars on to send thousands of fliers to get one or two low-fee traffic leads in return. In the old days, after your practice failed you could find work at the Public Defender's Office, but these days they won't even bother reading your resume. I run into unemployed and severely underemployed lawyers all the time.
ReplyDeleteOld Guy would like to know when and how it came to be supposed that anyone could be a lawyer. Everyone knows that only a few can become professional athletes or musicians, and it is also generally understood that medicine, engineering, and academia have real barriers to entry. Law, however, has come to be seen as being accessible to everyone, irrespective of intelligence or potential. That wasn't the case a few decades ago.
DeleteI didn’t go to law school intent on entering the student loan profession.
DeleteProblem with this message board is that a lot of posters went to great law schools and expected a yellow brick road of riches. It takes hard work to make a career. There’s no mythical yacht club connection to get a client or old boys network. You have to pick up the phone, make cold calls for clients, and pound the pavement. A lot of posters here just don’t “have it”
Well, if we look here: https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/trends/enrollment/all
DeleteWe can see that law school enrollment (1L) has moved from about 20k in 1963 to about double that today, down from a peak of just over 50k in 2010.
Now of course, US population overall has about doubled in that timeframe, so enrollment today (now that it has dipped significantly) is probably reflective of what would've been a reasonable growth rate if it had reached that point steadily and if the market weren't already flooded with excess graduates from those prior years.
But it didn't reach it steadily. Looks like from roughly the early 70s until 2010, it was growing at an unsustainable rate. What happened? Well, for one thing, Sallie Mae was created in 1972. This was the turning point for student loans because Sallie Mae was bundling them up and selling them much like Fannie and Freddie existed primarily to make the sale of mortgage notes liquid and thus entice lenders to make them. It's also when schools started to realize that failing to maximize seats amounted to leaving money on the table. FFEL has (as of 2010) been abolished, of course, with almost all lending being direct, but income driven repayment and PLUS loans continue to fuel excessive borrowing.
But there you have it. Basically, if you want to find a turning point for the explosion of law school expansion, it coincides quite closely with the formation of Sallie Mae. Student loans existed before then, of course, but it was sallie mae that got a government charter to turn them into investment vehicles during the period roughly 1972-2010.
Part of the problem is that 1) unlike most nations, the US tends to encourage just about everyone who graduates from high school to go to college, even though many are uninterested and unqualified and 2) like no other nation in the history of the world, the US advertises college as a wild 4 year long party, and emphasizes football games in huge stadiums, an hugely publicized annual Basketball tournament, something related to the "Sweet 16/Final 4". So we get a wave of not too bright people with worthless college degrees. You end up getting pizza delivered by people with 4 year Bachelor's degrees in worthless majors from joke schools. These folks are so dense that they honestly believe that if 4Y/1 degree got them a minimum wage job, then 3 mor years of highered education, earning a JD is the solution. So yes, borrowing fuels this, but so do stupid movies like Animal House that portray college as one big party, and so do College Bowl Games, Basketball Tournaments, Fraternities, Sororities, and so on. It is all a massive problem that is largely unique to the USA.
DeleteI got Lathamed in 2010. "Work harder" is what I was told for 4 years. No matter what you do, the goal-posts were just moved, and you were told to "work harder." I left the law for construction manufacturing (making things used to build buildings) and it turns out work is easy to find in sectors that aren't hopelessly flooded.
DeleteContributing to (1), 8:19, is the fact that a high-school diploma, very much a sign of middle-class respectability a hundred years ago, is now almost worthless for finding work, so even people who otherwise wouldn't go to college feel that they have no other choice.
DeleteAll very good points. And indeed, the fact that everyone is pushed to get a bachelors now is part of what drives people to law school, because when that BA proves to be useless there are no other professional programs I know of that require no specific undergrad prerequisites or work experience.
DeleteThere is indeed a movement right now, some of it with governmental support, to try and convince employers to stop requiring college degrees for jobs that don't really need them: https://www.vox.com/policy/23628627/degree-inflation-college-bacheors-stars-labor-worker-paper-ceiling
That said, I think an obstacle to this is college's inherent attractiveness as a weed-out. If you're hiring for an office manager, for example, and stop requiring a college degree, then you're going to get more applicants. And inevitably, some of the ones who DON'T get the job will allege discrimination and tie you up in a litigation process, potentially for years. A college degree is one of the few ways to winnow the applicant pool down in a way that doesn't create liability risk, so employers have an incentive to keep it.
Credentialism is nothing new. See this article of mine:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-law-school-scam-is-just-one-ugly.html
OG, here is the statistics for 2022 of the percentage of a law school's graduates who land a Biglaw position on graduation. I know it omits jobs like federal clerkships, but I still wonder if this affects the way you rank law schools.
Deletehttps://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/large-us-law-firms-love-hiring-these-schools-2023-04-28/
Indeed, OG, and as your old article pointed out, this broad phenomenon of degree inflation leads to the perceived "need" for things beyond a BA when a BA no longer distinguishes you.
DeleteThe top 2 culprits are, as you said, probably the MBA and the JD, as both look very "practical" without actually requiring much in terms of hard skills.
Not sure which is worse. The MBA is cheaper (if only cuz it's a year shorter and/or cuz employers are paying sometimes) and many of them have work experience. Thus the MBA students often either already have a job or at least aren't relying on the degree alone to get one, and the degree doesn't lead to a license so it's not going to pigeonhole them into a specific (and glutted) profession. But on the other hand, there's about 1000 business schools in the US compared to around 200 law schools, so I'm sure the bottom of the barrel is getting scraped pretty hard at some of those b-schools.
So the worst offender is one of the 2, just not sure which one.
Congratulations, OTLSS and keep going with the message. I'm still missing JD Underground ... still practicing law but trying to educate others about the dangers of going to law school, especially low-ranked schools.
ReplyDeletePlease keep it up. I have been practicing law for over 25 years, am successful, and still tell anyone who will listen NOT to go to law school. I graduated the number one law school in a state with only two law schools in the mid 90's. Literally everyone I knew who graduated, passed the Bar Exam, and was serious got a job as a lawyer, pretty quickly without a massive effort. Attending the best law school in a state with a large population and only two graduating classes of new lawyers every year, back in the mid 90's or earlier, made sense. The problem is that over time the market became more and more crowded, the tuition got much higher, and the ROI on a JD become zero (or really negative, in fact). People need to understand the nature of time and how things change. A lot of things that made sense 30 years ago don't make sense today, just as many of the things we do, say, wear, and even eat today would be seen as crazy decades ago. There is nothing hypocritical about saying "I went to a good law school, in a state with a need for qualified new lawyers, a very long time ago, and that made sense and worked out well for me and for my fellow graduates, BUT that decision would make no sense whatsoever today". Just because your father, or grandfather, found success practicing law decades ago does not mean that you will find success doing this today.
DeleteYou're 100% right, but then the next question you get is "well then what the heck else do I do with a BA in English?"
DeleteI don't really have a good answer to that, other than to go back to undergrad to take some science prereqs and then on to further education to get licensed in a healthcare field. I honestly don't know if there's any other sector of the economy anymore where a credential/license alone can put you in a position where demand exceeds supply.
Respectfully, why on earth would one spend 4Y studying "English" or something else that is worthless? What job could one possibly expect to get with that Bachelor's in Liberal Arts? I have zero sympathy for the Philosophy majors working at Wal Mart, the Film majors working at the grocery store--those are just two examples of people I know personally. Being a good lawyer requires one to be smart and to plan things well in advance. Spending 4Y learning something worthless is the opposite of being smart and future planning. Pretending that if 4Y and one degree didn't get you a job, 3 more years of higher education and another degree will get you a job is literally insane. I, myself, was a History major: I knew that I had to get top grades and a top LSAT score or the degree would be useless. I also did Army ROTC as a back-up plan. I had all of that planned out before I set foot on campus at a 17 year old, I knew exactly where I was going, and what I needed to get there. I have no sympathy for clueless college students and recent college grads who didn't plan their careers and futures out well in advance. Why should I have sympathy for hapless people like that?
DeleteThe popularity of what you call worthless majors is another manifestation of the baby boomers' lingering influence. Once upon a boomer time, any bachelor's degree was special. A common boomer trope is "Do what you love; the money will follow". The subsequent generations have heard that piece of bad advice from boomers. Consequently, young people by the boatload major in something non-professional such as history, English, or philosophy. That would have turned out well fifty years ago, but today it is a mistake for most people.
DeleteVery well said. 50 years ago most people did not go to college, and a high school diploma sufficed to get a good job. Somewhere along the way, the US made two key mistakes: 1) we began encouraging just about everyone who graduates from high school to go to college and 2) we turned "college" into a place to drink, party, and watch semi-professional sports in huge, expensive stadiums, with huge, expensive weight rooms and training facilities, heavily recruited and highly paid college football and basketball coaches and so on. I was serious about my education from Kindergarten through Bar Exam preparation: I never thought that college was a place to spend years partying, watching football games, or "hooking up" with members of opposite sex. In those days, if you didn't have a very good college GPA and an excellent LSAT score, you weren't going to Law School, any law school, period, full stop. This country has lost its way, and the blame lies with both political parties, both sides of the political spectrum, and lies with a society that itself simultaneously trivializes higher education while encouraging everyone to pursue higher education, leading to pizza deliverymen with Bachelor's Degress, Uber Drivers with Law Degrees, and so on.
DeleteI give the history of it here:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-law-school-scam-is-just-one-ugly.html
Within living memory, high school wasn't even widely available. Within Old Guy's lifetime, an able-bodied man could get a well-paying blue-collar job without finishing high school. Now people leave their degrees off their résumés so that they can get a goddamn job delivering pizzas.
And you're certainly right about the perversion of "higher education" into a depraved spectacle of all-male football and basketball teams (the centerpiece of many so-called universities), heavy drinking, and libertine sex, with a few courses tacked on for a veneer of respectability. North Uhmerica has always had a strong current (a veritable Amazon, really) of anti-intellectualism, and its "higher education" reflects that.
The traditional "pitch" for useless majors is that no matter what you major in, it will impart good oral & written communication skills and "critical thinking" skills that are useful in any (*desk) job, and that one should not necessarily expect their actual career to have anything to do with what they majored in. This would be proudly proclaimed, as the label of being a "trade school" is distinctly un-prestigious and so not only would preparation for a particular career not be on the agenda, it would be actively avoided.
DeleteThat may be all well and good when college was mostly for the landed gentry who primarily needed to sound smart at dinner parties, or when it was so cheap you could pay for it with a summer job and still most of your high school classmates wouldn't go (and thus wouldn't be competing with you later) because they got put on the "shop track" and then off to a unionized factory job. But now, as others have said, BAs are a dime a dozen and they've been dumbed WAY down so the only path people see to distinguish themselves is to get more and more degrees and take on more and more debt.
Every "developmental course" at every worthless college in the country imparts "critical thinking skills."
DeleteTo have a little fun the next time a hackademic fake solemnly intones "We teach critical thinking", ask "How, exactly? What specifically do you do?" Don't expect a concrete answer.
DeleteFirst of all, I hesitate to refer to any major as "useless". Everyone knows that many majors have practically no direct application in the realm of employment, outside teaching (for which a higher degree is almost invariably required). But the label "useless" is often extended to the field itself, whereas majors such as business and even computer science are likely to be labelled "useful" even though their utility for finding jobs is also very much in doubt.
DeleteAbout two hundred years ago, majors didn't exist: universities continued the liberal tradition that originated in the mediaeval trivium and quadrivium, with all students taking the same courses. What started as an adjunct to that program—the opportunity to pursue one of several fields in greater depth within the framework of liberal education—came to take over, such that now what was held to be a liberal education is little a "core curriculum" of a few required courses, if that. In many places outside the US, it has gone even further, to the point that students apply not to an undergraduate institution at large but to a specific course of study within a university. In most of the world, one cannot show up fresh out of high school and play the field of art history, mathematics, and economics for a year or two before settling on a major; one chooses a field of study at the outset and hopes to be admitted to the relevant department.
So, yes, there was a time when a bachelor's degree was a mark of distinction—in part academic (long before the term "critical thinking" came into vogue), but mainly aristocratic. Much later, in the 1970s, bachelor's degrees were still rare, and plenty of jobs were open to people with "any major"—because what was sought was not an alleged knowledge of this or that but either the dedication or the social class that a degree implied. As 2:26 said, some people cashed in back then. Today a bachelor's degree is so common that one almost has to justify not having one, and the standards have fallen so low that it cannot symbolize dedication, let alone "critical thinking". Really, it just symbolizes "sucker".
Yeah, I've heard of even stuff like comp sci being less "practical" in the sense that it can be hard to be practical and still take 4+ years, i.e. by the time you finished whatever you learned is out of date. That's kinda the idea behind those coding bootcamps - teach you what's hot, fast, so you're done while it's still hot. Whereas the comp sci is more like a 4 year aptitude test where what you'll actually do day-to-day is something you'll still have to learn, you've just majored in something that demonstrates an aptitude for it.
DeleteI read an interesting paper by some Stanford mathematics prof once, where she argued that the way we teach STEM in high school is all wrong. She referred to it as "extremely narrow questions under extremely short time constraints." She argued that this method, designed as it is to produce questions that have one and only one right answer and which judge you based on how quickly you can reach it, is often not how mathematics is used in real life and moreover, causes many (perhaps most) people to conclude that this is essentially genetic and so they simply were not born to be "math people."
So in college, that is in part what makes these majors "practical": Many, having long ago decided and experienced things to make them say "I'm just not a math person," don't undertake hard majors and even fewer (relatively speaking) finish. That can make them like the college degrees of old: Valuable in the sense that they still set you apart. Don't get me wrong though, they aren't guaranteed riches by any stretch. (I don't know if there's anything outside of healthcare that is), but it's certainly better than the average bachelors.
https://www.reddit.com/r/barexam/comments/13fmhzi/ok_graders_failed_to_attend_ube_writing_portion/ interesting story if true.
ReplyDeleteCan we start a thread here about when you first realized you were screwed and weren't getting a law job? Mine was at the start of my last year when all my cold mailings failed. What are other peoples experiences?
ReplyDeleteIn my second year, when I couldn't get so much as an interview, I came close to dropping out of law school. Several more times in second year, and even in third, I considered doing so.
DeleteI was let go from a firm in 2010 because my billable hours had collapsed. I saw it coming and had about 30 resumes out already. I had an interview 2 weeks later, where the first question was "are you still working there?" I said no, and the interview ended in 4 minutes. That's when I knew I was screwed.
DeleteAt the very beginning of my second year, I learned I was in the bottom third of the class at a T2 school (I was dealing with some personal issues). I realized I could only get the worst; lowest-paying legal jobs. And I didn't want to be one of the graduates who'd been looking to land a job after graduating over a year before- man, those people seemed desperate. I thought I'd do better elsewhere, so I dropped out. Oddly, I learned K-12 education was one area where people were actually impressed that I attended law school. And they accepted my LS credit for salary differentials, so they paid me as if I had a master's degree since I had a year of LS (JD-advantage?)
DeleteWhat you call T2 would be Tier 5–6 (the bottom) by Old Guy's standards. You were right to drop out. Finding a decent job in law would have been difficult if you had been at the top of your class, but you were near the bottom.
DeleteTeaching positions in primary and secondary schools are often difficult to get nowadays. You were fortunate to get one, and even more fortunate to have your first year of law school (with poor grades at that) treated as being tantamount to a master's degree.
I was utterly clueless when I entered my OG tier 4 law school; I didn't know any lawyers-actually hadn't even met any attorneys. So I apply for all sorts of jobs, get no interviews...then one day had an interview with a big local firm. The interview went great, it went past the allotted time and the two attorneys(one partner, one associate) were clearly impressed(in my mind, anyway). We even made arrangements tentatively for me to go to the firm for a follow-up. So I leave, feeling great....then the next day I get a call from the associate. She cut right to the point: what was my GPA? Was I on law review? A: Not very good(I treated law school like college) and No. I never heard from them again. And that was it for me; I knew I was in a world of hurt-and unfortunately I was right about that. Got exactly zero job offers through law school graduation.
DeleteI've seen that before, 9:46. I know a couple of people who dropped out after 1L and there was actually a surprising amount of jobs that seemed to like this: They seemed to like the idea of someone with legal knowledge but who wasn't actually a lawyer. Maybe they're afraid hiring an actual lawyer is hiring someone who will be looking for reasons to sue them, maybe they just figure lawyers are rich and if one is looking for a nonlegal job they must be a failure, but whatever the reason, it seems that an unfinished JD pigeonholes you much less than a finished one.
DeleteI had assumed it would get you labeled as a dropout, but my anecdotal experience suggests otherwise: People seem to be able to understand why someone might start down that path but decide it isn't for them, and indeed given how much people hate lawyers "wising up" like that may make some of them like you more.
You definitely made the right call.
My problem, 2:46, was just the opposite: I did have the top grades and was on law review, but nobody gave a good goddamn—on account of my age. I couldn't get so much as an interview. So you outdid me by far, if that's any comfort.
DeleteI don't recall meeting a lawyer until I was 25, and that was by chance: I happened to sit next to one on an airplane.
Thanks 10:04, you're absolutely correct in your analysis. People seemed to assume that I dropped out due to some higher moral principles (not that I partied too much). Also, this was the early 90's and school administrators and older faculty were boomers who revered lawyers as above them in the hierarchy. Though one woman did ask me how I could give up all that money?? For most of the faculty, attending LS was not an option academically; so they saw me as smart. It seems different these days where there's a LS for every applicant.
DeleteAs F. Lee Bailey once said: "The public regards lawyers with great distrust. They think lawyers are smarter than the average guy but use their intelligence deviously. Well, they're wrong. Usually they are not smarter."
DeleteNowhere is that assumption more on display than with law school dropouts. People simply don't know how easy it is to get into law school nowadays, so they assume that getting in proved the intelligence and dropping out proved the LACK of deviousness.
Perceived as smart enough to get in, but too honest to finish. Least stigmatized dropping out I know of.
That just goes to show how dumb "the public" really is. Getting into law school in the US is about as challenging as getting a cup of coffee at 7-11. Pennsylvania has 10 law schools--TEN--as of this writing. Some states have dozen law schools, some have even more. This means that 1) the lower ranked law schools accept just about anyone who applies and 2) in a state with 10 law schools, it is unlikely that even half of the grads will find jobs as attorneys swiftly post-graduation. That's like 1,500 new JD's each May, more than 100 per month. That pretty much guarantees lawyers working at McDonald's, lawyers working for Uber, and lawyers competing with one another for temporary document-review projects that pay $22.00 per hour.
DeleteThey're not necessarily dumb, so much as they simply have no reason to look into things. How many people ask where their doctor went to medical school, or where they did their residency or even know what a residency is? No, they mostly just use reviews and referrals from people they trust and bedside manner to decide if they're good or not.
DeleteThis is similar. If neither they nor any immediate family member is a lawyer, law student or prospective law student, odds are they have no reason to be looking up info about the law school scam. They know stereotypes, like "pathetic ambulance chaser" vs. "rich corporate lawyer" but beyond that they know very little and more importantly, see no need to learn more.
Well they might not ask what law school someone went to, but they will ask what type of law they practice, whereas if someone says they are a doctor I'm not sure anyone asks what type of doctor.
DeleteLooks like the ABA is going to accredited the Jacksonville Law School: https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/education/2023/06/09/ju-law-school-gets-multimillion-dollar-endowment-chases-accreditation/70304104007/
ReplyDeleteYour point? The school seems respectable and well financed. Jacksonville, like much of Florida, is exploding economically and they need lawyers. This isn’t the rust belt or the northeast, this is De Santis and his Midas Touch.
DeleteI didn't editorialize. I just posted the news that it appears it is going to survive.
DeleteI just closed my physical law office, now working remotely (wrapping up the remaining work (nightmares)), about April 2023. Just a solo for over 40 years. Top quarter of a top 20 percent law school. No jobs then in 1977, and so on. First job 1.5 years after graduation then went on my own.
ReplyDeleteIt has been Hell to make my living practicing law. 70 to 80 hour weeks for over 20 years. Just small law here-maybe 20 to 40 hours actually paid.
Once a lawyer challenged me, and I responded, "Come Match Wits With ME." My children are not lawyers. They can do much better.
What state did you attend law school in? I went to the better of the two law schools in a state with a pretty large population, and only two law schools. Graduating in 1995, literally everyone I knew found a job within a few months of graduation, without much difficulty. In fact, for a while the job market was so good that unemployed lawyers would earn six figures doing highly-paid document review jobs. In the region where I live, it wasn't until sometime after 2000 that the legal job market got bad, and then it swiftly got awful. I think that when people go to law in a state like Pennsylvania, that has 10--TEN--law schools--you read that correctly. . .well, they should know that there is no possible way for the state to employ over 1,500 new lawyers every year, and that their JD will end up being an expensive waste of their time. I try to feel bad for folks, but honestly, if you are dumb enough to go to law school in a state that cranks out over 1,000 new JD's every 12 months, you just aren't using your head. Going to law school in the state where I reside is still a pretty bad bet, but if you go to the better of the two law schools, you will be competing for jobs with a couple of hundred people, in a state with over six million people, so you have some kind of a shot at employment. There, see that, not all lawyers are "bad at math".
DeleteIllinois. Top student started at about $80,000 in BigLaw. My first job offer was $9,600, but was told I had to work Saturdays, and not work Tuesday nights as the "senior partner wanted to rattle about the office undisturbed." "Depending on how the practice went, there might be a $200 to $400 bonus per month." Senior partner was my interviewer and sole owner. Another job interview, the interviewer asked where I was living. "At home with parents." He said, "Good, because we don't pay much, $12,600." Never heard back after my interview. I made that much teaching music part time. Got a job interview and offer of $14,400. No benefits .Decent attorneys. Took that job. Of 7 attorneys, I was the second highest fee producer in the firm my first year-higher than attorneys with 8 years seniority. They billed $95 per hour, I was billing $45 per hour. When I presented a graph of my production, the bookkeeper was told not to release my production info to me in the future. No one thanked me for doing such a fine job, nor encouraged me, or asked what I could do even better to make them more money. A $1,000 raise that year. Who cares? Offered partnership at 2.5 years of service, though was considered for partnership at 1.5 years but a jealous junior partner objected as it took that partner longer to attain partnership. I declined partnership as there was no meaningful increase in income, just liability for all the firm's obligations. Worked in several loose amalgams of attorneys under a firm name for about 2 years. Contacted an attorney I respected and asked for a job. "What salary would you want? "$25,000." Never heard back. BEST thing that ever happened to me NOT getting a job as I grossed $175,000 that year. (At $75 per hour, that was 2,333 paid hours.) Had I gotten a job, I would have given $150,000 to that lawyer but I which was able to keep. Never looked back and practiced as a solo thereafter. There is very little "work-life balance" aspect to solo practice. If you do a proper job attending to client needs, it is a very tough route. If you push all the marketing and practice management buttons, one could do very well. But, during the course of a 60 to 80 hour week, who has time for that?
DeleteCan we have some discussion on a topic that Scott Bullock and Paul Campos touched on near the end of their blogging, and that is that the legal system, and legal services, are largely worthless? That basically many cases are decided on arbitrary factors, and by and large there's no real skill in practicing law. Folks have picked up on this, and thats why nobody will pay for legal services, ever. A hidden issue not often discussed, but very true.
ReplyDeleteI really do think there is very little skill in most legal work. Maybe high stakes litigation or prosecution in a well organised court (but most courts aren't well organised)
ReplyDeleteIf one does it well-there is an enormous amount of skill required. Even for a trivial case. Much more skill than the case might warrant from a financial aspect.
DeleteAn interesting side note, from GGU's press release:
ReplyDelete"To be clear, this decision applies to one program in the Law School. While the JD program will sunset, the Law School will continue serving students with standout legal education, as it has since its founding in 1901. GGU Law will continue to offer degrees at the graduate and undergraduate levels."
So here's the interesting question: "The law school will continue..." not "the law school will now be called abc and offer xyz." I wonder if they intend to continue to call themselves a "school of law" without even offering a JD. That'd seem quite misleading.