6 ms·

Law school applications are collapsing

55 points by blatherard 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago
Surprised to see this make the front page... The basic fact is that only half of the 45,000 or so law graduates each year will even get jobs as lawyers. I disagree with many that the ABA should clamp down on accreditation. The AMA did that in the last few decades, and while that guaranteed solid employment prospects for medical school graduates, it also led to skyrocketing salaries and medical costs. I think the medical profession has more goodwill capital to spend with the public in this regard than the legal profession, and any such move would be a very bad idea. However, I do support measures to increase transparency and make educational loans harder to get. In-state tuition at the University of Michigan in 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's dollars). It is now over $48,000/year. Now, the teaching of law has not changed since Harvard Law School was founded in 1817. You get a bunch of students in a room. You make them read cases from a casebook. You grill them in front of the class on their comprehension of the cases. It's not a high-tech process, but it works, and can be extremely cheap. There is no reason tuitions need to be 4x higher than they were just 20 years ago. The soaring cost of legal education is really the perfect example of how incredibly dysfunctional our higher education system has become. At least with engineering or medical school tuitions you can point to the expense of lab equipment, etc. Not so with a segment of academia where students are taught the same way they have been for two centuries.
- Antiks72 14y ago
  The reason costs of tuition are going up is because of loan money which is easily available. Easy loan money always raises costs. Furthermore, you have laws on the books that guarantee those loans will be paid back.
  - mjn 14y ago
    Depends on the school. At the University of California, total cost of education (student+state portion) has declined about 25% in real terms over the past few decades, despite an increase in loan availability. Tuition is up pretty much solely due to a decline in the proportion of costs that the state pays, which is made up for by tuition hikes at a rate somewhat less than $1-for-$1. Some numbers I compiled a while ago: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt The situation might well be different for law schools or other university systems, which I haven't investigated in detail.
    - dmm 14y ago
      But if the decreased state funding had not been accompanied by increased loan availability, the result would have been lower enrolment. right? Or did I misunderstand what you meant by "in real terms". "in real terms" means TCOE = tuition + state contribution
      - mjn 14y ago
        By "real terms" I just meant that it's inflation-adjusted (in constant 2010 dollars). I agree lower enrollment is a possibility if there were both decreased state funding and no increase in loan availability. Not sure, though. Would need some information on supply and demand of UC enrollment slots, and what kind of marginal impact loan availability has. One hypothesis is that it might just result in a wealthier student population with lower average grades. That scenario would happen if there currently exist students who didn't have good enough grades to make it into a UC, but whose parents would have paid cash out of pocket to attend, if their sons/daughters were able to get in. Those potential customers/students who are willing and able to pay, but are currently being turned away, might pick up the opened slots, if any materialized. I don't know how many such students exist, though. Another approach could have been for the UC system to lower enrollment on its side, so they could educate fewer students at lower tuition, given the same amount of state funding. But California law doesn't currently permit them to do that: the UC system is required to open admissions slots equal to at least 12.5% of in-state graduating seniors.
- henrikschroder 14y ago
  > I think the medical profession has more goodwill capital to spend with the public in this regard than the legal profession, and any such move would be a very bad idea. There's also the fact that our demand for healthcare is enormous, because we all get sick, it's a fact of life that's not gonna change very soon. But the demand for lawyers is completely cultural. Where I am, the amount of lawyers per capita is one tenth of what it is in the US, there's no innate demand for lawyers, so if they start to price themselves too high, demand will fall as people and communities and businesses figure out ways to accomplish the same things as before, but without lawyers.
  - jivatmanx 14y ago
    You probably live in a civil law jurisdiction, rather than common law. Juries are limited, and thus less lawyers needed overall.
    - patrickgzill 14y ago
      The USA hasn't had separate common law courts since 1938. I doubt many cases from before 1938, are still being litigated in the court.
      - jivatmanx 14y ago
        This is what I'm referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LegalSystemsOfTheWorldMap.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LegalSystemsOfTheWorldMap....
    - henrikschroder 14y ago
      I don't understand. What do you mean? Here, if you go to court, either civil or criminal, you of course need a lawyer. I don't see how that is substantially different from the way it works in the US. And the UK, which also is a common law country, has a much lower amount of lawyers per capita than the US. One explanation for the difference is of course that the US is a very litigious society, resulting in more legal proceedings than elsewhere, and that might be hard to change. But to me it appears the americans in general use lawyers for trivial matters like divorces or wills or entering into contracts or buying property or whatever, and if the cost of lawyers were to increase sharply, I think that americans would be able to discover ways to do those things without lawyers, just like the rest of the world is doing perfectly fine already.
- pyre 14y ago
  > 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's > dollars). It is now over $48,000/year IIRC, these 'estimates' (usually) don't just include tuition, but also things like room and board (at dorm room rates).
  - rayiner 14y ago
    This is just tuition.
- jussij 14y ago
  > in 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's dollars) That $11,700 figure is a bit low. Take $6,830, compounded it at a very modest 3.0% and you will end up with over $13,000 after 22 years. A more realistic rate of return would be about 5% which compounds to about $20,000 in todays terms.
  - jussij 14y ago
    Having said that, US inflation for the last two decades has been at or below 3.0%. http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation/DecadeInflation.asp http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation/DecadeInflation...
    - skylan_q 14y ago
      You clearly don't buy your own gas, food, or clothes.
      - jussij 14y ago
        Where I live we call it petrol and buy it by the litre, not the gallon. So, no I'm not up to speed on the cost of living in the USA ;)
  - anonymoushn 14y ago
    Where do you find these risk-free instruments that yield 5%?
    - jussij 14y ago
      Here in Australia there are four major banks, which effectively gives them a monopoly on the entire banking sector and it's been that way for decades. All those banks pay a 4.5% dividend and on top of that you also get capital growth on that investment. Now while this is by no means risk free investing, unlike banks in America that are pretty much unregulated, these Australian banks are heavily regulated. So for these institutes the term 'safe as a bank' does in fact apply.
jivatmanx 14y ago
Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed. It's a profession dealing with text/knowledge. Easy to digitize.
- rayiner 14y ago
  > Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed. [Citation needed] It's not really the case that demand for lawyers is lower (recession aside). It's that the growth in demand for lawyers is lower than it has been. Remember, we're dealing with derivatives here: the number of new jobs available for new graduates is the derivative of overall legal demand. I don't think technology has had much to do with it, except within certain segments (mainly document review). As technology has evolved, expectations have risen. Yes, you can get on Lexis and quickly look up the case law on an issue, instead of heading over to the library and poring through books, but countering that is the fact that now you're expected to be on top of the absolute latest precedent. It's not enough to give the definition of some element out of a legal encyclopedia. Gotta make sure you review all the cases that touch on the topic to make sure nothing adds a wrinkle that your opponent might bring up. Similarly with document review. Yes, predictive coding will blow through thousands of documents a second, but back in the day you could just interview some people to get the story of what happened. Now you're expected to review every e-mail everyone sent within the relevant time period. Even with technology, someone has to piece those e-mails together into a coherent narrative. What really happened is that during the 1970's and 1980's, the corporatization and financialization of America caused demand for legal services to explode relative to GDP. We seem to have hit a plateau in that process in the late 1990's and 2000's, which has caused the growth in demand to stagnate, and indeed dip in the recent recession.
  - Retric 14y ago
    It's not just a question of changes in demand, your also replacing people that leave the profession.
  - EwanToo 14y ago
afterburner 14y ago
Finally! I was wondering when it would sink in how unrewarding this path could be.
- timwiseman 14y ago
  It depends on what you mean. I am a law student now, and while my perspective may shift when I graduate, I have had some tangential involvement in projects that that help people, that is extremely rewarding. Financially, the market as a whole looks less secure and perhaps less lucrative than it was in the past, but that matters less for people not driven mostly be finances and the compensation for some of those graduating ahead of me is not unlivable.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    > that matters less for people not driven mostly be finances and the compensation for some of those graduating ahead of me is not unlivable And the precipitous drop in applicants is due to the people driven more by finances not applying because the financial advantage is no longer there. Which is fine - this is standard supply/demand behavior.
  - afterburner 14y ago
    It's the not getting a law job at all part that blows. In Ontario, it's a 4 year Bachelors plus 3 years of law school... that's a heavy price to pay, mainly in money but also in time. The job better be financially rewarding to some extent. No I'm not talking about spiritually or intangibly rewarding. I'm talking about whether the huge investment ends up being wasteful and an unnecessary burden.
_delirium 14y ago
Not too surprising: university enrollments tend to crash following job-market crashes in a sector, with a lag of a few years. Look at what happened to CS enrollments after the dot-com crash, for another example [1]: by the time the lowest point was reached, they were down ~50% from the peak, and some schools saw a >75% decline in CS majors, leading the department to be eliminated at some smaller schools. (It's picked up again lately, though enrollments are still not back up to the peak years.) [1] Chart from the CRA, though note that this is charting number of degrees awarded rather than freshman enrollment, so has about a 4-year pipeline lag. Hence, the downturn starts in 2004-05 rather than 2000-01: http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/2009-10_undergrad-CS-production.png http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...
GnarfGnarf 14y ago
My Anti-virus software flagged this link as a malicious URL.
- loungin 14y ago
  It is about lawyers, guns and money. I would flag it malicious as well!
jburwell 14y ago
And this is a problem? Hopefully these potential law school candidates have found more productive avenues to devote their professional lives.
001sky 14y ago
Now comes word that applications in this admissions cycle appear to be in something like free fall. As of December 7th, they are down 24.6% from the same time last year, while the total number of applicants has declined by 22.4% year over year. These numbers suggest that law schools will have a total of somewhere between 52,000 and 53,000 applicants to choose from in this cycle, i.e., slightly more than half as many as in 2004, when there were 188 ABA accredited law schools (there are 201 at the moment, with an emphasis on “at the moment”). To put that number in perspective, law schools admitted 60,400 first year JD students two years ago -- The Key Data
joonix 14y ago
As a recent law graduate: Finally. I had no idea what people who started in law school in 2011+ were thinking. They went to law school at a time when almost every month a major publication wrote an article about terrible job prospects and rising tuition. Law school is by and large a scam.
jseliger 14y ago
There's a good reason for this: law school is a terrible deal for the vast majority of applicants and potential applicants. Paul Campos's book Don't Go To Law School (Unless) (which I wrote about here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-school-unless-paul-campos/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-sch...) is one of the more comprehensive examples I've seen, although I'm sure the book mentioned is good too. The really bizarre thing is that 60K people are still deluded enough to apply.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  For a lot of people I know who've gone to law school, I'm not sure it's entirely a delusion. I think the situation is that they find themselves a couple years out of college and still unable to put their BAs in a Humanities field (another area for which supply has greatly outpaced demand) to use. So they're already saddled with a debt they can't really service, and they've already got the B word in their heads. And along comes a really attractive proposition: If you double down on it by going back to school, you catch an immediate break because you get to immediately stop paying your student loans, and wont have to start again until after you've graduated. And sure, after that you'll have even more debt, but there's also a decent (maybe not great, but decent) chance that your new degree will let you land a sweet job that lets you pay them off much more easily and have plenty of money to spare. And even if you only land an OK job, hopefully it'll still be enough to keep your loans covered. . . and if it isn't, hey, no harm no foul. You're already thinking about the B word right now, so even if it turns out you can't handle all the new debt you've taken on it's not like you'll be any worse off than you are now. Posed that way, I'm not sure what the students are doing is terribly irrational or delusional. What's crazy is the irrational credit system that enables/encourages this kind of thing to happen.
  - arjunnarayan 14y ago
    Sidenote: The B word is irrelevant here as you can't bankrupt your way out of student debt. You're stuck with it forever. But otherwise I find your arguments compelling, and an accurate model of how my humanities friends were thinking when they applied/got into law schools.
mburshteyn 14y ago
Original article on Professor Paul Campos' blog: http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/12/applications-to-law-school-are.html http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/12/applicati...

55 points by blatherard 14y ago

Surprised to see this make the front page... The basic fact is that only half of the 45,000 or so law graduates each year will even get jobs as lawyers. I disagree with many that the ABA should clamp down on accreditation. The AMA did that in the last few decades, and while that guaranteed solid employment prospects for medical school graduates, it also led to skyrocketing salaries and medical costs. I think the medical profession has more goodwill capital to spend with the public in this regard than the legal profession, and any such move would be a very bad idea. However, I do support measures to increase transparency and make educational loans harder to get. In-state tuition at the University of Michigan in 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's dollars). It is now over $48,000/year. Now, the teaching of law has not changed since Harvard Law School was founded in 1817. You get a bunch of students in a room. You make them read cases from a casebook. You grill them in front of the class on their comprehension of the cases. It's not a high-tech process, but it works, and can be extremely cheap. There is no reason tuitions need to be 4x higher than they were just 20 years ago. The soaring cost of legal education is really the perfect example of how incredibly dysfunctional our higher education system has become. At least with engineering or medical school tuitions you can point to the expense of lab equipment, etc. Not so with a segment of academia where students are taught the same way they have been for two centuries.

Antiks72 14y ago
The reason costs of tuition are going up is because of loan money which is easily available. Easy loan money always raises costs. Furthermore, you have laws on the books that guarantee those loans will be paid back.
- mjn 14y ago
  Depends on the school. At the University of California, total cost of education (student+state portion) has declined about 25% in real terms over the past few decades, despite an increase in loan availability. Tuition is up pretty much solely due to a decline in the proportion of costs that the state pays, which is made up for by tuition hikes at a rate somewhat less than $1-for-$1. Some numbers I compiled a while ago: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt The situation might well be different for law schools or other university systems, which I haven't investigated in detail.
  - dmm 14y ago
    But if the decreased state funding had not been accompanied by increased loan availability, the result would have been lower enrolment. right? Or did I misunderstand what you meant by "in real terms". "in real terms" means TCOE = tuition + state contribution
    - mjn 14y ago
      By "real terms" I just meant that it's inflation-adjusted (in constant 2010 dollars). I agree lower enrollment is a possibility if there were both decreased state funding and no increase in loan availability. Not sure, though. Would need some information on supply and demand of UC enrollment slots, and what kind of marginal impact loan availability has. One hypothesis is that it might just result in a wealthier student population with lower average grades. That scenario would happen if there currently exist students who didn't have good enough grades to make it into a UC, but whose parents would have paid cash out of pocket to attend, if their sons/daughters were able to get in. Those potential customers/students who are willing and able to pay, but are currently being turned away, might pick up the opened slots, if any materialized. I don't know how many such students exist, though. Another approach could have been for the UC system to lower enrollment on its side, so they could educate fewer students at lower tuition, given the same amount of state funding. But California law doesn't currently permit them to do that: the UC system is required to open admissions slots equal to at least 12.5% of in-state graduating seniors.
henrikschroder 14y ago
> I think the medical profession has more goodwill capital to spend with the public in this regard than the legal profession, and any such move would be a very bad idea. There's also the fact that our demand for healthcare is enormous, because we all get sick, it's a fact of life that's not gonna change very soon. But the demand for lawyers is completely cultural. Where I am, the amount of lawyers per capita is one tenth of what it is in the US, there's no innate demand for lawyers, so if they start to price themselves too high, demand will fall as people and communities and businesses figure out ways to accomplish the same things as before, but without lawyers.
- jivatmanx 14y ago
  You probably live in a civil law jurisdiction, rather than common law. Juries are limited, and thus less lawyers needed overall.
  - patrickgzill 14y ago
    The USA hasn't had separate common law courts since 1938. I doubt many cases from before 1938, are still being litigated in the court.
    - jivatmanx 14y ago
      This is what I'm referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LegalSystemsOfTheWorldMap.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LegalSystemsOfTheWorldMap....
  - henrikschroder 14y ago
    I don't understand. What do you mean? Here, if you go to court, either civil or criminal, you of course need a lawyer. I don't see how that is substantially different from the way it works in the US. And the UK, which also is a common law country, has a much lower amount of lawyers per capita than the US. One explanation for the difference is of course that the US is a very litigious society, resulting in more legal proceedings than elsewhere, and that might be hard to change. But to me it appears the americans in general use lawyers for trivial matters like divorces or wills or entering into contracts or buying property or whatever, and if the cost of lawyers were to increase sharply, I think that americans would be able to discover ways to do those things without lawyers, just like the rest of the world is doing perfectly fine already.
pyre 14y ago
> 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's > dollars). It is now over $48,000/year IIRC, these 'estimates' (usually) don't just include tuition, but also things like room and board (at dorm room rates).
- rayiner 14y ago
  This is just tuition.
jussij 14y ago
> in 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's dollars) That $11,700 figure is a bit low. Take $6,830, compounded it at a very modest 3.0% and you will end up with over $13,000 after 22 years. A more realistic rate of return would be about 5% which compounds to about $20,000 in todays terms.
- jussij 14y ago
  Having said that, US inflation for the last two decades has been at or below 3.0%. http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation/DecadeInflation.asp http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation/DecadeInflation...
  - skylan_q 14y ago
    You clearly don't buy your own gas, food, or clothes.
    - jussij 14y ago
      Where I live we call it petrol and buy it by the litre, not the gallon. So, no I'm not up to speed on the cost of living in the USA ;)
- anonymoushn 14y ago
  Where do you find these risk-free instruments that yield 5%?
  - jussij 14y ago
    Here in Australia there are four major banks, which effectively gives them a monopoly on the entire banking sector and it's been that way for decades. All those banks pay a 4.5% dividend and on top of that you also get capital growth on that investment. Now while this is by no means risk free investing, unlike banks in America that are pretty much unregulated, these Australian banks are heavily regulated. So for these institutes the term 'safe as a bank' does in fact apply.

jivatmanx 14y ago

Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed. It's a profession dealing with text/knowledge. Easy to digitize.

rayiner 14y ago
> Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed. [Citation needed] It's not really the case that demand for lawyers is lower (recession aside). It's that the growth in demand for lawyers is lower than it has been. Remember, we're dealing with derivatives here: the number of new jobs available for new graduates is the derivative of overall legal demand. I don't think technology has had much to do with it, except within certain segments (mainly document review). As technology has evolved, expectations have risen. Yes, you can get on Lexis and quickly look up the case law on an issue, instead of heading over to the library and poring through books, but countering that is the fact that now you're expected to be on top of the absolute latest precedent. It's not enough to give the definition of some element out of a legal encyclopedia. Gotta make sure you review all the cases that touch on the topic to make sure nothing adds a wrinkle that your opponent might bring up. Similarly with document review. Yes, predictive coding will blow through thousands of documents a second, but back in the day you could just interview some people to get the story of what happened. Now you're expected to review every e-mail everyone sent within the relevant time period. Even with technology, someone has to piece those e-mails together into a coherent narrative. What really happened is that during the 1970's and 1980's, the corporatization and financialization of America caused demand for legal services to explode relative to GDP. We seem to have hit a plateau in that process in the late 1990's and 2000's, which has caused the growth in demand to stagnate, and indeed dip in the recent recession.
- Retric 14y ago
  It's not just a question of changes in demand, your also replacing people that leave the profession.
- EwanToo 14y ago

afterburner 14y ago

Finally! I was wondering when it would sink in how unrewarding this path could be.

timwiseman 14y ago
It depends on what you mean. I am a law student now, and while my perspective may shift when I graduate, I have had some tangential involvement in projects that that help people, that is extremely rewarding. Financially, the market as a whole looks less secure and perhaps less lucrative than it was in the past, but that matters less for people not driven mostly be finances and the compensation for some of those graduating ahead of me is not unlivable.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > that matters less for people not driven mostly be finances and the compensation for some of those graduating ahead of me is not unlivable And the precipitous drop in applicants is due to the people driven more by finances not applying because the financial advantage is no longer there. Which is fine - this is standard supply/demand behavior.
- afterburner 14y ago
  It's the not getting a law job at all part that blows. In Ontario, it's a 4 year Bachelors plus 3 years of law school... that's a heavy price to pay, mainly in money but also in time. The job better be financially rewarding to some extent. No I'm not talking about spiritually or intangibly rewarding. I'm talking about whether the huge investment ends up being wasteful and an unnecessary burden.

_delirium 14y ago

Not too surprising: university enrollments tend to crash following job-market crashes in a sector, with a lag of a few years. Look at what happened to CS enrollments after the dot-com crash, for another example [1]: by the time the lowest point was reached, they were down ~50% from the peak, and some schools saw a >75% decline in CS majors, leading the department to be eliminated at some smaller schools. (It's picked up again lately, though enrollments are still not back up to the peak years.) [1] Chart from the CRA, though note that this is charting number of degrees awarded rather than freshman enrollment, so has about a 4-year pipeline lag. Hence, the downturn starts in 2004-05 rather than 2000-01: http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/2009-10_undergrad-CS-production.png http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...

GnarfGnarf 14y ago

My Anti-virus software flagged this link as a malicious URL.

loungin 14y ago
It is about lawyers, guns and money. I would flag it malicious as well!

jburwell 14y ago

And this is a problem? Hopefully these potential law school candidates have found more productive avenues to devote their professional lives.

001sky 14y ago

Now comes word that applications in this admissions cycle appear to be in something like free fall. As of December 7th, they are down 24.6% from the same time last year, while the total number of applicants has declined by 22.4% year over year. These numbers suggest that law schools will have a total of somewhere between 52,000 and 53,000 applicants to choose from in this cycle, i.e., slightly more than half as many as in 2004, when there were 188 ABA accredited law schools (there are 201 at the moment, with an emphasis on “at the moment”). To put that number in perspective, law schools admitted 60,400 first year JD students two years ago -- The Key Data

joonix 14y ago

As a recent law graduate: Finally. I had no idea what people who started in law school in 2011+ were thinking. They went to law school at a time when almost every month a major publication wrote an article about terrible job prospects and rising tuition. Law school is by and large a scam.

jseliger 14y ago

There's a good reason for this: law school is a terrible deal for the vast majority of applicants and potential applicants. Paul Campos's book Don't Go To Law School (Unless) (which I wrote about here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-school-unless-paul-campos/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-sch...) is one of the more comprehensive examples I've seen, although I'm sure the book mentioned is good too. The really bizarre thing is that 60K people are still deluded enough to apply.

bunderbunder 14y ago
For a lot of people I know who've gone to law school, I'm not sure it's entirely a delusion. I think the situation is that they find themselves a couple years out of college and still unable to put their BAs in a Humanities field (another area for which supply has greatly outpaced demand) to use. So they're already saddled with a debt they can't really service, and they've already got the B word in their heads. And along comes a really attractive proposition: If you double down on it by going back to school, you catch an immediate break because you get to immediately stop paying your student loans, and wont have to start again until after you've graduated. And sure, after that you'll have even more debt, but there's also a decent (maybe not great, but decent) chance that your new degree will let you land a sweet job that lets you pay them off much more easily and have plenty of money to spare. And even if you only land an OK job, hopefully it'll still be enough to keep your loans covered. . . and if it isn't, hey, no harm no foul. You're already thinking about the B word right now, so even if it turns out you can't handle all the new debt you've taken on it's not like you'll be any worse off than you are now. Posed that way, I'm not sure what the students are doing is terribly irrational or delusional. What's crazy is the irrational credit system that enables/encourages this kind of thing to happen.
- arjunnarayan 14y ago
  Sidenote: The B word is irrelevant here as you can't bankrupt your way out of student debt. You're stuck with it forever. But otherwise I find your arguments compelling, and an accurate model of how my humanities friends were thinking when they applied/got into law schools.

mburshteyn 14y ago

Original article on Professor Paul Campos' blog: http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/12/applications-to-law-school-are.html http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/12/applicati...