I’m a Uni. of Washington undergraduate, and it seems to me that lots of people who “want” to go to law school aren’t particularly interested in law, but they say they want to go to law school.
Am I not seeing things right here? Or do lots of people apply to law school because they don’t know how else to major in the Humanities/Social Sciences and still make $$$?
Give me your experiences.
I’m the classic case–liberal arts undergrad with no idea what I wanted to do. Friend was going to law school, that sounded interesting, so off I went.
Very common. I’d say about 60% of my law school class fell into that category. In the past at least, a law degree from a good school was a guaranteed job with a good wage. So any sufficiently risk-averse liberal arts major with a decent LSAT score could look to law school as a ticket to guaranteed upper middle class status. And since virtually any area of interest has a legal side, it is easy for people to read their interests (international politics, finance, entertainment industry, etc.) into the vague Rorschach blob of being a “lawyer.”
Corporate lawyers are usually in the top two or three occupations most prone to suicide, alcoholism, and depression in surveys. I think this is one of the reasons why.
Students at the good universities that focus on the liberal arts often find themselves in a panic in what to do after they graduate. That BA in Philosophy or Sociology has little real world value (or so they think at the time but it really isn’t true). The prospect of law school is very concrete and can give them a job so lots of bright people take the test and make it in. One thing I have realized over time is that it is hard for 21 year olds to know how many other careers there are out there for their skills but the path is less obvious. Many are at least as lucrative and can range from starting a small business to being a project manager to being a consultant and many, many more careers within large companies. The same thing applies to academic grad school. Much of it is simple inertia in the student’s mind and fear of change. I did it myself.
Yeah, I have known a lot of people who are pre-law hopefuls and I agree that there are a lot of people who end up going to law school for the wrong reasons. You have all these people who only want to become a lawyer because they have no real direction, like reading/writing more than math, and law SOUNDS like a good way to make money. Then you have the people who sincerely think they want to be lawyers but don’t really know enough about the reality of what being a lawyer is like. It seems cooler on TV than it really is!
The sad thing is that nowadays there are so many law schools that the market is absolutely flooded with lawyers and a lot of new law school grads are really struggling to find jobs, let alone well-paying ones, so I think this is a terrible time to go to law school unless you have a burning passion for the legal field.
It would be awful to graduate law school with a lot of student loan debt and get stuck in a low-paying job that makes it hard to pay off the debt when you don’t even like studying the law to begin with!
If you want to get a very cynical view of law school, just look at some of the postings over at http://jdunderground.com/forum.php There are some pretty bitter people out there now. I would want anyone I knew who was thinking about law school to understand that law school is no guarantee of making lots of money.
I think our culture often has this idea that “More education = better!” when sometimes more education is a waste of time if it’s not giving you the skills you need to survive in the current job market (once you have a secure paycheck, yeah, then taking classes for personal enrichment is grand, but I think we do people a disservice when we encourage them to get degrees that will end up not paying their bills).
I think one thing going on here is that almost all people that go to law school have done well in school their whole lives, but half of every law school class is in the bottom 50%, and unless you are at a top school, that will make it hard to find a job. At my school, really everyone but the top 10% had a tough go of it.
So, many of these people feel cheated. They’ve always done well, so they aren’t used to not doing well. But that’s just what happens when you make the finals of a tournament–it doesn’t matter that you beat the socks off the people in the earlier rounds, you are now playing against the best, so you may not stack up against your new competition).
Are there that many law schools now? When I was considering it (about twenty years ago), the literature from the Law School Admission Council argued that a JD degree was more valuable than an MBA because there were so many fewer law schools than business schools.
That said, I think either degree is worth it if you can get into a top-ten (or perhaps top-twenty) school and it’s probably not worth it if you can only get into a second-rate professional school.
There’s an element of reaching the end of the bracket as you describe, where you’re simply competing with better students. There’s also an element of chance involved in law school exams. You add those together and voila: jdunderground is born along with its evil twin, xoxohth.com.
Because of the nature of law school exams, there is a significant variance in grading simply based on what gets tested on any given exam. I know I’ve done better than I would have on a test because the policy essay happened to be in an area of my interest, or because a major issue was the last thing I studied instead of the first. The tippy top of the class will be at the top regardless, because they will be prepared for anything. But those two students fighting over the remaining As with equal but not perfect preparation could have diverging grades just based on testing variance. That’s just the nature of a one-shot grading system. And even that is assuming two identical exams receive the same grade, which is a lot to ask from a professor grading 100 exams.
Law school grades are generally representative of something that could be called merit (though I’m not sure it is the same thing that makes a person a good lawyer). But only as an overall picture of performance over 20 or so exams, and as between the top and bottom quartiles. At least at my school, the difference between the top 5-10% and 10-15% were as much a result of luck and strategic class selection as merit. There just aren’t enough grades or enough differentiation among grades (unless you go to U Chicago) to accurately distinguish the student just over the Coif line from the one just under it. So I can just imagine how a student at a school where top 10% means a job would be pretty upset at missing the mark.
Law student here. Going into my second year.
I’m definitely seeing a lot of law students who do not care about the law. They can get by for now because they are extremely social, and no one really expects 1L students to know anything.
The students seem to be a mix of people who like the law and people who just like to brag about being law students. I think this is why the legal profession is such a huge social club. You never know who is just pretending to care about the law so you have to BS with everyone.
I have the opposite problem. I like the law but I’m not too fond of the people. I wonder where that will get me.
It’ll get you standing in front of a bunch of people who want to be lawyers for a couple of hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Law school is a good reference point *if *business is your target. So, right now, you’re just another college student wearing a t-shirt who doesn’t know what else to do. Business acumen involves not only “creativity” but – legal experitise – ever hear of intellectual property? Whatever business industry you enter into after college, you will be at an advantage with a legal background.
I think that has changed over the last decade or so. A lot of new law schools have opened over the last few years. What university or community wouldn’t want all that law school tuition money pouring their way? Even though there aren’t enough jobs for the current law school grads, there are STILL new law schools in the works even now. Meanwhile, some of the more ethical schools have been asking their incoming students to delay matriculation because of the current bad market conditions.
I definitely agree that it is probably only worth it nowadays if you can get into an upper tier school. Not everyone who wants to be a lawyer can find work in the field. The weeding out process will occur at one point or another. I’d rather see the weeding out happen before people have a ton of law school debt rather than after they’ve paid all that tuition money but have nothing to show for it.
That is a good point. I think it is harder to accept that you are at the bottom of the pile in professional school if you’ve spent your whole life feeling like the academic superstar - and such people might really be better off looking into a less prestigious/lucrative career where they could have continued to be one of the top people instead.
I think that sometimes the truly smart people are those who know that going further in education is not necessarily the right choice for everyone.
I don’t think there is anything special about law school in this regard. I am currently getting my MBA and an awful lot of my fellow students seem to be drifters without any definite plans about what to do next–you, the one who is planning to go on to a PhD in Economics, I’m looking at you.
Of course, when I graduated from college with a B.A. in Computer Science I had no immediate plans, so I just drifted into grad school then.
And to those who were successful at a lower academic level and then suddenly in the middle of the pack at the next level–oh, yeah. I really encountered that going from H.S., where I could drift through at the top of the class without doing any real work, to university–where everyone else who was there had also drifted through H.S. at the top of their classes.
I think that there are a lot of people who find that they are very comfortable in school and the real world looks like a cold, scary place.
The thing that makes law school different is that it requires no particular academic background, work experience, or credentials. Med school requires a certain background and the MCAT is a subject-specific test. Most top MBA programs require some work experience, or a plausible replacement for it. Top law schools require nothing more than a decent score on what is functionally an intelligence test and a high undergrad GPA.
There are certain “magic ticket” professions like Doctor, Lawyer, Investment Banker, and Management Consultant where the perception is you can come out of school making a huge salary. And let’s face it. You don’t hear a lot of those people bitching about how poor they are.
The bolded word sums it all up. If a person really wants to work in the law, they’ll tell you “I want to be a lawyer”…not “I want to go to school…”
An undergrad who says “I want to be a laywer” probably, well, wants to be a lawyer.
An undergrad who says “I want to go to school at”… probably doesn’t know what he wants.
It was my recognition of this psychological nuance that made me realize that I should not go to law school. When I was considering law school, I was drawn in by the prestige of the field, the high salaries, and the whole “law school” vibe. When I thought about actually working as an attorney, however, I realized that my thinking didn’t up add. What mattered was whether or not I actually wanted to do the grunt work of the job that I was in line for. In this case, I did not.
Those are sadly true of every profession which requires schooling. I’ll take a dollar (your choice of country) for every person who went to biology school or vet school because “animals are so pretty!” or for every student my friend Carlos has who hasn’t taken care of so much as a vase of daisies in his whole life (Carlos teaches Agricultural Engineering; on the first day of class he asks who has ever held a hoe in his hands).
I’m not familiar with US Law Schools, but in Spain Law isn’t a graduate degree and it’s pretty much the first degree any new university will offer. It doesn’t need any kind of labs (as opposed to not just sciences but also things like languages or geography, which in Spain is a branch of “Philosophy and Letters”… don’t ask), just a lot of big rooms and a library, and since often the people making the decisions (politicians) have law degrees they think it’s more useful than, say, Philosophy and Letters. People often don’t realize until they’ve been in school for several years that the immense majority of proper lawyer jobs in the country are either government jobs with incredibly hard exams (President may be about the only job that’s harder to get than Notary, which is even harder than Judge or Public Attorney) or one-lawyer offices.
Then they shouldn’t take so many damned surveys!
I’d say maybe a third of my law school class was there just for the hell of it or because they didn’t particularly have any better options. Many just didn’t know what else to do after college. I remember a New Yorker cartoon that showed a dreamy-eyed young woman saying to her friend in some sidewalk cafe, “You know, my poetry has gotten so much better since I went to law school!”
A law degree nowadays is not, as has been noted before, a guarantee of vast wealth and personal happiness. In my experience, those who succeed in their subsequent careers are those who are smart, personable, resourceful, but also committed to the law, and determined to help others and see that justice is done.