3 ms·

interesting, but probably suboptimal in a quantitative sense. As an immigrant, it is interesting how Law is a universal dumping ground in the US...whether you m

by dxbydt 14y ago

interesting, but probably suboptimal in a quantitative sense. As an immigrant, it is interesting how Law is a universal dumping ground in the US...whether you major in Arts or Econ or PolSci or English or Philosophy or Culture Studies....you end up in Law !! Why ? The clearest trends were Biology & Chemistry...almost always end up in Healthcare. Is "college education" a proxy for gradschool ? If so, nice to see some strokes ending up in that bucket even in these very difficult economic times.

tatsuke95 14y ago
>"whether you major in Arts or Econ or PolSci or English or Philosophy or Culture Studies....you end up in Law !!" Law school has been the "go to" graduate option for the "soft" sciences for a long time, since there is no requisite pre-law undergrad. It's also led to a surplus of Law graduates with no job prospects. >"Is "college education" a proxy for gradschool ?" I believe that is actually teaching college courses. But I could be wrong.
- geebee 14y ago
  I agree with you about law - this is a kind of "doubling down" on the "no math career path". However, top humanities and arts students with very good grades and LSAT scores can still dramatically improve their earning prospects by attending an elite law school. I suspect that quite a few Williams students fit that description. MBAs are a harder option, because while they don't strictly require any one major, it can be harder to gain the experience MBA programs value with a very unmarketable major. This is a harsh but kind of funny dilbert... http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Journalism%20Major http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Journalism%20Major
  - tatsuke95 14y ago
    >"However, top humanities and arts students with very good grades and LSAT scores can still dramatically improve their earning prospects by attending an elite law school." Whole-heartedly agree. I'm an economics guy myself, so I didn't intend to denigrate the degree choice. Top students will succeed no matter what; but the law grad outlook (or lack of) is no joke. http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577486623469958142.html?mg=reno64-wsj http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230445860...
- ghaff 14y ago
  "Has been" is probably the applicable tense. And I saw this dynamic a lot among many English/Classical Studies/etc. majors that I've know. But, today, probably in no small part because of this dynamic (plus the ability to outsource/automate a lot of low IP legal tasks), the situation is actually pretty bad for middle-of-the-road law school gards from middle-of-the-road schools. The top Harvard grads still mostly do fine but law as a doubling-down strategy after graduating with a not particularly employable liberal arts degree is no longer especially viable.
colonelxc 14y ago
Williams is a (highly ranked) private liberal arts school[1]. That alone will significantly bias the results of this data. I'm sure a good chunk of those people chose Williams just so they could have a prestigious school to get their undergrad degree from for their application into law school. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_College http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_College
arjunnarayan 14y ago
Williams College's primary student body composition is affluent upper middle class white persons. It is #1 on the US News & World Report and has a fairly high number of cross admits with Harvard/Yale. So everyone is high achieving/extremely driven. The primary differentiator is that it disproportionately attracts students who are very much sold on the "study a broad liberal arts education for the sake of education and forsake career oriented life skills". I.E. the attitude that gets mocked daily on reddit. I.E. the sort of idealism that led Paul Graham to study Philosophy in college (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html) is omnipresent on campus. Almost everyone starts an idealist. This continues at Williams for a few years, until people panic and realize they don't have too many bankable life skills to get a real job. However, everyone is, or is surrounded by affluent, successful, career-oriented people. So they look around to find one of those successful career paths that are still open to them. Unless they are majoring in math/sciences (Williams has a 10% math major population, which is very high compared to the US average), or have already begun the pre-med track, the only clear avenues that aren't blocked off by their past decisions are consulting->MBA, and law school. Disclosure: I attended Williams. About 25% of students double major. I started off with a clear "1 major for me, 1 for life skills" path, and intended to major in CS and Music. At the end of freshman year I realized I was an exceedingly mediocre composer, and switched my second to Economics (if that seems like a cynical career move, at the time I thought economics was the path to becoming Hari Seldon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asimov-economics http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asi...)
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design" - not Hari Seldon
rayiner 14y ago
I went to a science/technology magnet high school, and 10 years out more of my classmates are in one of: law, consulting, or finance than any other. Even people who did a BS and sometimes MS often ended up getting graduate degrees and going into consulting. Why? The real money in this country isn't in making things, but in managing the people who make things, or in providing professional services to the managers. Silicon Valley is an exception right now, but only because consultants have yet to figure out how to drive down engineering salaries by outsourcing social network development to India (although Google, Microsoft, etc, have tried ardently to keep salaries down by engaging in anti-competive practices like agreeing not to poach each others' engineers). Heck, even the Valley isn't immune to this phenomenon. Taking your CS degree to Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan then lateraling to a VC fund after a few years is probably, adjusted for risk, the highest return career path in the Valley.
zissou 14y ago
Economists end up in law all of the time because economics and law are so tightly knit, particularly antitrust/competition policy. In my undergraduate thesis I looked at what causes schools to graduate more or less economics majors, and the most important factor is the existence of a business school at the university. If a school does not have a business school, like at a lot of top ranked liberal arts schools, students flock to the economics major. As a former economics PhD student, I've seen first hand the breadth of fields that economists end up in. From professors in a law school, to FTC economists, to public policy and healthcare, economists will always end up in a diverse set of fields. That's the nature of economics -- it does not teach you a set of facts. Instead, it teaches you how to solve problems. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, every industry has problems that boil down to raw economics.

by dxbydt 14y ago

tatsuke95 14y ago

>"whether you major in Arts or Econ or PolSci or English or Philosophy or Culture Studies....you end up in Law !!" Law school has been the "go to" graduate option for the "soft" sciences for a long time, since there is no requisite pre-law undergrad. It's also led to a surplus of Law graduates with no job prospects. >"Is "college education" a proxy for gradschool ?" I believe that is actually teaching college courses. But I could be wrong.

geebee 14y ago
I agree with you about law - this is a kind of "doubling down" on the "no math career path". However, top humanities and arts students with very good grades and LSAT scores can still dramatically improve their earning prospects by attending an elite law school. I suspect that quite a few Williams students fit that description. MBAs are a harder option, because while they don't strictly require any one major, it can be harder to gain the experience MBA programs value with a very unmarketable major. This is a harsh but kind of funny dilbert... http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Journalism%20Major http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Journalism%20Major
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  >"However, top humanities and arts students with very good grades and LSAT scores can still dramatically improve their earning prospects by attending an elite law school." Whole-heartedly agree. I'm an economics guy myself, so I didn't intend to denigrate the degree choice. Top students will succeed no matter what; but the law grad outlook (or lack of) is no joke. http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577486623469958142.html?mg=reno64-wsj http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230445860...
ghaff 14y ago
"Has been" is probably the applicable tense. And I saw this dynamic a lot among many English/Classical Studies/etc. majors that I've know. But, today, probably in no small part because of this dynamic (plus the ability to outsource/automate a lot of low IP legal tasks), the situation is actually pretty bad for middle-of-the-road law school gards from middle-of-the-road schools. The top Harvard grads still mostly do fine but law as a doubling-down strategy after graduating with a not particularly employable liberal arts degree is no longer especially viable.

colonelxc 14y ago

Williams is a (highly ranked) private liberal arts school[1]. That alone will significantly bias the results of this data. I'm sure a good chunk of those people chose Williams just so they could have a prestigious school to get their undergrad degree from for their application into law school. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_College http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_College

arjunnarayan 14y ago

Williams College's primary student body composition is affluent upper middle class white persons. It is #1 on the US News & World Report and has a fairly high number of cross admits with Harvard/Yale. So everyone is high achieving/extremely driven. The primary differentiator is that it disproportionately attracts students who are very much sold on the "study a broad liberal arts education for the sake of education and forsake career oriented life skills". I.E. the attitude that gets mocked daily on reddit. I.E. the sort of idealism that led Paul Graham to study Philosophy in college (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html) is omnipresent on campus. Almost everyone starts an idealist. This continues at Williams for a few years, until people panic and realize they don't have too many bankable life skills to get a real job. However, everyone is, or is surrounded by affluent, successful, career-oriented people. So they look around to find one of those successful career paths that are still open to them. Unless they are majoring in math/sciences (Williams has a 10% math major population, which is very high compared to the US average), or have already begun the pre-med track, the only clear avenues that aren't blocked off by their past decisions are consulting->MBA, and law school. Disclosure: I attended Williams. About 25% of students double major. I started off with a clear "1 major for me, 1 for life skills" path, and intended to major in CS and Music. At the end of freshman year I realized I was an exceedingly mediocre composer, and switched my second to Economics (if that seems like a cynical career move, at the time I thought economics was the path to becoming Hari Seldon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asimov-economics http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asi...)

jacoblyles 14y ago
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design" - not Hari Seldon

rayiner 14y ago

I went to a science/technology magnet high school, and 10 years out more of my classmates are in one of: law, consulting, or finance than any other. Even people who did a BS and sometimes MS often ended up getting graduate degrees and going into consulting. Why? The real money in this country isn't in making things, but in managing the people who make things, or in providing professional services to the managers. Silicon Valley is an exception right now, but only because consultants have yet to figure out how to drive down engineering salaries by outsourcing social network development to India (although Google, Microsoft, etc, have tried ardently to keep salaries down by engaging in anti-competive practices like agreeing not to poach each others' engineers). Heck, even the Valley isn't immune to this phenomenon. Taking your CS degree to Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan then lateraling to a VC fund after a few years is probably, adjusted for risk, the highest return career path in the Valley.

zissou 14y ago

Economists end up in law all of the time because economics and law are so tightly knit, particularly antitrust/competition policy. In my undergraduate thesis I looked at what causes schools to graduate more or less economics majors, and the most important factor is the existence of a business school at the university. If a school does not have a business school, like at a lot of top ranked liberal arts schools, students flock to the economics major. As a former economics PhD student, I've seen first hand the breadth of fields that economists end up in. From professors in a law school, to FTC economists, to public policy and healthcare, economists will always end up in a diverse set of fields. That's the nature of economics -- it does not teach you a set of facts. Instead, it teaches you how to solve problems. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, every industry has problems that boil down to raw economics.