Above the Law: “Last week, we set up an open thread for people to discuss the next round of tuition hikes at their law schools. Sadly, it appears that many schools are indeed raising tuition despite the soft economy for legal jobs. Once again, the cost of legal education is proving to be recession proof.”
A post on The Volokh Conspiracy entitled “Brian Tamanaha on the Law School Business Model” discussed an article called “Wake Up, Fellow Law Professors, to the Casualties of Our Enterprise.” The latter article posted on Balkinization begins: “Their complaint is that non-elite law schools are selling a fraudulent bill of goods. Law schools advertise deceptively high rates of employment and misleading income figures. Many graduates can’t get jobs. Many graduates end up as temp attorneys working for $15 to $20 dollars an hour on two week gigs, with no benefits. The luckier graduates land jobs in government or small firms for maybe $45,000, with limited prospects for improvement. A handful of lottery winners score big firm jobs.”
Here is the comment I posted on The Volokh Conspiracy in response to Brian Tamanaha’s article:
I think it is a big mistake for most young people today to incur $150,000 plus of law school debt to enter a job market that has many more graduates than law jobs and in which firms are laying lawyers off. A former partner of mine has a daughter who is going to go to law school next year at a private school in California and borrow $70,00+ a year for three years. The girl says she is not sure she wants to practice law.
I’ve told my former partner he should not let her go, but she really wants to do it. That $220,000 of debt will ruin her life. Nobody will want to marry her and inherit her debt dowry. She probably won’t be able to qualify for a loan to buy a home for many many years because of the debt. At 6% interest, she’ll be paying $1,312, $1,568 or $2,430 per month over 30, 20 or 10 years, respectively. Annual payments for those periods are $15,744, $18,816 and $29,164, respectively.
I am very troubled by what I call the “law school, law professor — government loan complex.” By this I mean a conspiracy of the three players to omit material facts to prospective and actual students about the problems of big long term debt, job prospects for law grads and actual and meaningful law graduate employment statistics (numbers, months to get hired, actual salaries, etc.) while jacking up tuition without any regard for the students or the laws of economics knowing that the government has created a blank check student loan program to fund the entire immoral scheme.
Law professors are part of the problem. Law professors in conjunction with law school administrators have created a three year education program that does nothing to teach a student how to practice law. I know from personal experience observed many times that it takes years for practicing lawyers to teach beginning lawyers how to practice law. Why do law schools charge students outrageous amounts and fail to teach the students how to be lawyers? Perhaps it’s because too many law professors have little practical knowledge of how to practice law. They teach “book learning” rather than the skills students need to be productive lawyers after they graduate.
I am so troubled by all of this that I created a topic area on my blog called “Law School Reality” where I collect articles (some might call them horror stories) and information about the law school, law professor — government loan complex, the dismal new lawyer job market, the massive student loan debt problem and other issues related to these topics. I am collecting this information because I hope that some prospective law students will learn from the information I have collected and have their eyes opened about law school reality.
You can read more on this topic at http://tinyurl.com/2f2rjxj.
Washington Post: Osielski is among a small but apparently growing number of the college-educated who are taking up the trades. They started out studying aerospace engineering, creative writing and urban planning. But somewhere on the path to accumulating academic credentials, they decided that working with their hands sounded more pleasant — and lucrative — than a lot of white-collar work.”
Times have changed, but many people continue to live in the past and follow the now out-dated and obsolete models passed down by previous generations. The belief that a college degree is a must for success and capturing the American dream may be an illusion.
Students are paying outrageous amounts of money to get college degrees and incurring school loan debts that may take a life time to repay. School loan debts are the modern day equivalent of the ball and chain. Years and years of loan payments that may prevent the former student from qualifying for a loan to buy a home.
As the average amount of debt incurred by the average college student increases, institutions of higher learning raise tuition year after year with no regard for the fate of their students. The out of control federal student loan program is what gives schools the ability to increase tuition and ignore the laws of economics and the consequences to their students. No matter how high the cost of higher education, the federal government gives students a blank check to pay the ridiculous tab. This bargain with the devil made by higher education, the federal government and politicians will ultimately come crashing down just like collapse of the entire higher education system when the bubble bursts as it did with the housing market.
Los Angeles Times: “As U.S. employment patterns evolve, a diploma is no longer a guarantee of a better job and higher pay.” The article states:
“As the warm glow of college commencement ceremonies gives way to the cold reality of today’s job market, this year’s graduates and their anxious parents might be tempted to wonder whether it was worth it.”
“After spending tens of thousands of dollars on higher education, often taking on huge debts along the way, many face a job market that doesn’t seem to need them. Not only is the American economy producing few new jobs of any kind, but the ones that are being added are overwhelmingly on the lower end of the skill and pay scale.”
“In fact, government surveys indicate that the vast majority of job gains this year have gone to workers with only a high school education or less, casting some doubt on one of the nation’s most deeply held convictions: that a college education is the ticket to the American Dream.”
New York Times: “t if you borrow money to get an education and can’t afford the loan payments after a few years of underemployment, that’s another matter entirely. It’s nearly impossible to get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court . . . . This part of the bankruptcy law is little known outside education circles, but ever since it went into effect in 2005, it’s inspired shock and often rage among young adults who got in over their heads. Today, they find themselves in the same category as people who can’t discharge child support payments or criminal fines.”