Only a Fool Would Start Law School Right Now

[bobbyw24]

[Matt Collins sent me this piece]

The Frugal Law Student was wondering earlier this year if law school is really worth the extra cost it takes to go:

Given the economic crisis that is going on, the difficulty new lawyers are having getting jobs, and the soaring cost of law school, I’m doing a little analysis to see if law school is worth it for many prospective students. A lot of people go into graduate or professional school believing the debt and time spent will pay off in a more rewarding/higher paying career. While this may be happen for some, it’s by no means a guarantee.

The Frugal Law Student then runs through a couple of scenarios, but we thought that discussion might be improved by adding a visual touch, which we've done by creating charts that project the lifetime income-earning trajectories for a regular bachelor degree holder who enters the U.S. workforce at Age 22 versus a bachelor degree holder who goes on to law school before entering the workforce at Age 25.

Bachelors Degree vs Law Degree Post-Graduation Direct Income Trajectory Comparison We'll base the lifetime income trajectory for our bachelor-degree holder on our model of the inflation-adjusted income that the average bachelor-degree holder saw between 1997 and 2007, assuming the average 2010 starting salary of $48,351, as reported by CNBC.

We've assumed that our hypothetical law student will earn an average of $10,000 more per year than our hypothetical average bachelor-degree holding income earner. That extra income comes at a cost however, in that we assume an average annual cost of $20,000 for law school, covering three years, in which our bachelor-degree holding law student also gives up the opportunity to have a real job. Law schools typically cost an average of $20,000 for state law schools, while private school's average $30,000 per year.

Attending a "prestige" institution can cost quite a bit more than those figures.

That extra $10,000 per year though is reasonable given that Payscale.com shows the typical range of annual salary for lawyers to run between $58,944 and $119,386.

Bachelors Degree vs Law Degree Post-Graduation Cumulative Income Comparison By comparison, our hypothetical bachelor-degree holder would see their salary range between $48,351 and $101,884.

MORE

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2010/07/does-it-pay-to-go-to-law-school.html

 

[Paleo]

depressing.

 

[bobbyw24]

depressing.

I know. I am glad I went to law school years ago and attended a cheap public school.

Took me 11 years to pay off the debt put at least I was able to pay it off.

Today's fools have $150,000 in student loan debt and if they are lucky, they land a job paying $45,000/year.

Supply of new lawyers outweighs demand for their overpriced services that smart people can often handle by themselves.

 

[bobbyw24]

More from Matt: Abolish Law School, Keep the Bar Exam

Posted By Hans Bader On July 14, 2010 @ 3:56 pm In Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation | No Comments

Elizabeth Wurtzel argues that the bar exam should be abolished [1] because many illustrious lawyer-politicians flunked it on their first try. I disagree. Passing the bar exam may not be enough to make you a good lawyer. But it is necessary, just as knowing how to read is necessary, but not enough, to make you a good English teacher. In fact, the bar exam is the one of the few incentives lazy law students have to actually learn basic legal principles.

I learned very little about real-world law in three years at Harvard Law School, as a result of classes taught by professors who obsessed over ideologically-trendy but irrelevant hypotheticals, or engaged in hide-the-ball Socratic dialogue. I somehow passed my Contracts class despite not knowing which body of law–the common law or the Uniform Commercial Code–applied to five-sixths of my final and only exam in the class. (I got a “B” anyway.) But my knowledge rapidly improved after graduation, when I had to sit for the bar exam.

I learned more practical law in six weeks of studying for the bar exam than I did in all of law school. The reason was that preparation for the bar exam is done using well-organized, concise commercial outlines produced by competing private companies like BarBri and BarPassers. Their materials won’t be bought by students unless they organize the material in a compact and easy-to-understand format, in a manner that enables students to pass the bar exam. By contrast, in law school, professors assign their own boring, long-winded, disorganized textbooks to students. (To make himself look smart, one Harvard professor would assign one text to his students, while teaching from yet another, to avoid giving away what he was asking about in class.)

On graduation from law school, I knew next to nothing about the law, having frittered away much of my legal studies watching “Married With Children,” arguing with classmates about politics, or drinking peach schnapps in the basement of the Lincoln’s Inn Society.

All that changed when I had to prepare for the bar exam. Because I suddenly faced the sword of Damocles in the form of exclusion from the bar, I studied hard and learned a lot of basic principles of law (especially real estate and contract law) that I never had mastered in law school. Thanks, BarBri and the New York Bar Exam, for teaching me what Harvard Law School failed to do.

Maybe top-of-the-line lawyers don’t need the bar exam to make them master the law. But most lawyers aren’t top-of-the-line. And their future clients deserve competent representation, something fostered by a would-be lawyer’s need to prepare for the bar exam.

SNIP

If the legal requirement that students graduate from law school were eliminated, law schools as we known them would probably disappear, replaced by a much shorter, more compact course of studies, probably lasting one or two years rather than three. You just don’t need three years and $100,000 plus in tuition bills to learn enough to do basic legal tasks or pass the bar exam.

Article printed from OpenMarket.org: http://www.openmarket.org

URL to article: http://www.openmarket.org/2010/07/14/abolish-law-school-keep-the-bar-exam/

URLs in this post:

[1] should be abolished: http://volokh.com/2010/07/13/elizabeth-wurtzels-case-for-abolishing-the-bar-exam/

 

[bobbyw24]

Student Loans are the New Indentured Servitude

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=214425&highlight=bobbyw24+student

 

[Matt Collins]

I know. I am glad I went to law school years ago and attended a cheap public school.

Took me 11 years to pay off the debt put at least I was able to pay it off.

Today's fools have $150,000 in student loan debt and if they are lucky, they land a job paying $45,000/year.

Supply of new lawyers outweighs demand for their overpriced services that smart people can often handle by themselves.

It's why I'm seriously considering FAMU. But we'll chat about that this weekend