An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It – The New York Times

• An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It – The New York Times

  Code camps will get you a job with minimal to no student loan debt. We can somewhat now group law schools with for-profit schools that promised employment or lucrative careers instead students are left with crippling student loan debt that hampers economic growth. We need 100% transparency from all colleges and universities that accept state and federal dollars on employment statistics for graduates. 

  tags: education college degree higher education unemployment underemployment

  • Yet in financial terms, there is almost no way for Mr. Acosta to climb out of the crater he dug for himself in law school, when he borrowed over $200,000.
  • Mr. Acosta is just one of tens of thousands of recent law school graduates caught up in a broad transformation of the legal profession
  • Nationally, the proportion of recent graduates who find work as a lawyer is down 10 percentage points since its peak of the last decade, according to the most recent data.
  • “People are not being helped by going to these schools,” Kyle McEntee, executive director of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, said of Valparaiso and other low-tier law schools
  • Even as employment prospects have dimmed, however, law school student debt has ballooned, rising from about $95,000 among borrowers at the average school in 2010 to about $112,000 in 2014, according to Mr. McEntee’s group.
  • Such is the atavistic rage among those who went to law school seeking the upper-middle-class status and security often enjoyed by earlier generations, only to find themselves on a financial treadmill and convinced their schools misled them, that there is now a whole genre of online writing devoted specifically to channeling it: “scamblogging.”
  • But from the perspective of the students caught up in the explosion of unrepayable law school debt, the shake-up at the school, and others like it, look rather pedestrian.
  • Today the more important question is whether they should exist at all.
  • Between them they will be nearly half a million dollars in the red while trying to run two businesses and raise Ms. Melendez’s 5-year-old daughter.
  • didn’t see what good passing the bar would do if you were “working at Starbucks for less than $40,000 per year.”
  • over $100,000 in debt and her job search has been taxing. With few leads on a legal position
  • A decade ago, a large majority of graduates from the top 10 to 15 law schools who wanted full-time work at a big law firm could get it, said Paul F. Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder
  • Law schools, for their part, seem strangely oblivious to all this
  • “If you are entrepreneurial but not the best lawyer, you might look into it.”
  • Law school applications topped out at just over 100,000 nationally in 2004 and gradually began to decline.
  • An enormous number of students wouldn’t be able to work as lawyers in the state even if jobs were theoretically available.
  • Valparaiso was, in effect, caught in a deflating financial bubble, one most law schools were slow to heed because of the government’s role in financing legal education.
  • By that point, the faculty put up little resistance. “I don’t think it’s moral to take someone’s money who can’t make it,” Dean Lyon told me. “It’s just wrong.”
  • Inevitably, many of these sticker-price payers are weak students who lack better options.
  • Research by Prof. Jerome M. Organ, an expert on law school economics at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, shows that students with low test scores and undergraduate grade-point averages tend to subsidize the stars; this is especially true of third- and fourth-tier schools like Valparaiso. It’s the marginal students who pay the bills, not students like Mr. Hahn.
  • In such a world, schools like Valparaiso essentially face the following choice: Admit a large number of marginal students, or shut down.
  • “Why does Valpo have an economic structure that looks like Harvard Law School’s?” asked Mr. Campos, the University of Colorado expert on the prospects of recent law school graduates. “It makes absolutely no sense to do it. It’s why they have to charge Harvardesque prices.”
  • “The bottom line here is that institutions like Valparaiso clearly were fulfilling a valuable role until they were swept up in various forms of craziness in higher education,” Mr. Campos continued.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.