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Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering
- rayiner 12y agoSuggest changing to the title in the article, which is more relevant to HN: "US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into engineering."
- dang 12y agoDone. Thanks.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoThanks!
- graeme 12y agoOne thing these stats don't capture is the effective tuition charged by law schools. Schools are raising sticker prices, but handing out more scholarships. From discussions with someone who tracks these things, effective law school tuitions have been dropping. Law school attendance for most students is being subsidized by richer students and by those who haven't figured out that law school at sticker is generally a scam. The higher the sticker price, the more impressive a scholarship can seem. As enrolments drop, schools are pretty desperate for students at present. LSAT median scores and median GPAs are dropping at many schools. Eventually, some schools will have to close; they're in a bubble.
- imh 12y agoLikewise for engineering. I don't know anyone who paid for their doctorate. Instead, they got small stipends.
- josaka 12y agoAs a product of the system, agreed 100%. Also, the true cost should account for lost income while in law school. As opportunities improve for those students who could excel in other areas, the lost income exceeds the tuition cost.
- graeme 12y agoIf you know anyone thinking about applying, this site does a good job breaking down true costs: http://www.lstscorereports.com/national/ http://www.lstscorereports.com/national/ A bit under $300,000 for most schools when you consider tuition and living expenses. That doesn't include interest on the debt. It also doesn't consider the opportunity cost you mention. Finally, one thing most young students ignore is that they have to pay the debt back in AFTER-TAX income. $300,000 in debt takes $450,000 in before tax earnings, assuming a 33% average tax rate.
- geebee 12y agoInteresting data, but I'm not sure the title is supported by the conclusion. The title reads "US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into engineering." This is backed up by data that shows law school enrollment declining and engineering graduate enrollment increasing. However, it's not exactly a secret that engineering graduate programs have higher international student enrollment than law schools. So we'd need to know where the enrollment growth is coming from before we can conclude that US students are fleeing law for engineering.
- kylestlb 12y agoThis is my thought. What percentage of the engineering grad school bump is non-US citizens? What percentage of people who go to law school are non-US citizens? From purely anecdotal experience, I would guess that a significant portion of the rise in grad school attendance is from international students.
- objclxt 12y ago> What percentage of people who go to law school are non-US citizens? Significantly fewer than engineering schools, because engineering degrees are applicable worldwide, and law degrees are applicable only to the jurisdiction you wish to practice in.
- dang 12y agoGood point. We moved the "US" qualifier from "students" to "schools" in the title.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- _asummers 12y agoAdditionally, law schools have been in a bubble for at least the last 6-7 years, so seeing a decline as students realize this fact (and particularly hear anecdotes from people struggling to pay back their loans!) wouldn't be surprising to me and seems like it would make logical sense. I'm curious what the trends were with other academic bubbles to either confirm or deny this datapoint being significant.
- imcrs 12y agoLaw has changed since the 80s and 90s. The profession was much more of a bloodsport. Less cases settled, far less went to arbitration, and more money was spent when a case did go to trial. Nowadays the culture has shifted almost completely to keeping costs down and settling things outside of court -- either settling outright or through a mediated arbitration (much less expensive). It's no surprise to me that law school grads are out of work these days.
- theVirginian 12y agoI interned in a law firm my entire senior year and now hold a BA with majors in Government and Philosophy. These experiences would leave me well primed to go to law school which was my original intention after graduation. After spending time in the firm however it is really eye opening to see how the business is rapidly changing. There is an over supply of young lawyers these days for a number of reason. First, there are too many low quality law schools churning out people who can barely pass the bar. Those schools take home the tuition money and the young graduates have a mountain of non-dischargable debt with nowhere to turn. The rate of unemployed young graduates is actually probably even higher than figures show because schools will pay a small stipend to recent graduates so that they can say they are "employed" when the yearly figures for former students employed 6mo out are released. It's all about taking home the tuition for these schools and they shamefully advertise how demand for lawyers will increase and job prospects will remain high. Second, the business has become vastly more efficient as firms begin to adopt digital case management systems and can now conduct research online instead of having to sort through volumes of old books. You know when you see the generic shelves of law books in offices? Yeah those just sit there collecting dust now. They are for show because all of that information has now moved onto the computer. The legal industry has been slow and late to adopt technology but it has made lawyers vastly more efficient than they could have been before. Even things like being able to email scans of documents can speed up the process astronomically. As older lawyers who cannot use computers begin to exit the workforce and younger ones who can move up in the ranks, firms just do not need as many people working as they did before. The vast majority of legal work is not what you see on TV or in the Ellen Pao case where it is a battle of the brains in real time for a court room. It is mundane routine paperwork that can be automated or done by assistants. A lot of this stuff can even be done at home by your average person with products like turbo tax that enable the average person to not need representation for basic needs legal needs anymore. I no longer plan on going to law school and have been taking online courses in programming/reading a ton of programming books since I graduated in hopes of turning what has been a long term hobby of mine into a career, hopefully combined with politics or law. (I am thinking campaign research/advertising online or legal software on the law side.)
- woah 12y agoWe'd better improve our interview techniques before the flood of lawyer-like engineers who are only in it for the money arrives. My recommendation- avoid brain-teasers that can be crammed for. Assess based on open-source contributions, which show craftsmanship, architecture, and love of coding.
- s73v3r 12y agoHow about we create assessments which measure skill, and not simply how much spare time someone has, or whether their current employment allows them to do side work?
- krschultz 12y agoBelieve it or not, there are already large swathes of people that get engineering degrees because it is a good paying, stable, respected job. Probably 1/3 of my graduating class would have said their primary motivation for getting an engineering degree was the solid salary.
- rayiner 12y agoHistorically, the solid pay and good prospects have been a primary driving criterion for people going into engineering. The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" is the new phenomenon, not the other way around.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" is the new phenomenon The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" are (as a broad class, not every specific instance) largely PR faces created for marketing purposes by and for people who want to make lots of money, and know that having some kind of compelling mission (even if that "compelling mission" might change to something radically different later on) is important both for attracting customers and for attracting investors.
- mcantelon 12y agoI guess all the "everyone must code" propaganda, to lower labor prices by increasing supply, is working.
- patio11 12y agoFor definitions of "working" which include "We have almost recovered to the number of CS degrees issued in 1985."
- iak8god 12y agoTangential, but I'm curious: your comment seems to imply that that are now fewer CS degrees issued per year than in 1985. Is that what you meant? Can you point me to the numbers?
- mcantelon 12y agoYeah, that seems very unlikely. The population was lower, tech wasn't mainstream, and being a nerd was the opposite of fashionable.
- astrange 12y agoBeing an accountant, civil engineer, or construction crew has never been fashionable, but people have always signed up to do it anyway.
- patio11 12y agoSeems my joke is out of date: we've actually hit the 1985 number again! Whee! Granted total degrees doubled over the interval and CS is virtually flat but whee! http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_322.10.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_322.10.as...
- iak8god 12y agoThanks. I'm surprised to see that computer and information sciences and engineering have dropped quite a bit since then as the percentage of degrees.
- geebee 12y agoAnother factor to consider here is a rise (if any) in engineering undergraduate degrees. I know that grad engineering degrees to law degrees seems like more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but there's a big difference. A history major who goes to law school goes from not lawyer to lawyer (assuming he or she passes the bar). Engineering graduate students, on the other hand, almost always have a background in their field of graduate study. This is often very substantial - for instance, an EE major doesn't need a grad degree in EE to get to work. And even if a student is using grad school to build some general knowledge of a new field (such as a physics or math major going to grad school in CS), they're much closer than a history major would be to law [1]. In this case, the growth in grad enrollment might understate the transition, since a student who wanted to be a lawyer who instead decides to become an engineer might just change majors and avoid grad school altogether. [1] I actually think that if people were allowed to take the bar without attending law school, you'd find that a lot of people could become extremely talented lawyers without the graduate degree.
- theVirginian 12y agoActually, engineering students statistically score highest on the LSAT out of any undergraduate degree
- guelo 12y agoI think this is because an engineering undergrad degree is way harder than most other degrees except maybe pre-med types. That means there's a substantial weeding out effect plus all the extra studying helps shore up the general knowledge that the LSAT tests. In general, poli-sci or history majors have spent the previous four years idling. After I got my EE degree I took the GRE and GMAT and aced them, getting 95th+ percentile, without studying at all. I then enrolled in a MBA program and was shocked at how easy, and unrigorous, the courses were compared to EE classes.
- theVirginian 12y agoI wouldn't be so quick to write those majors off, they involve massive amounts of reading and writing; both skills that I heard many engineering students say they felt they were lacking in. Furthermore both of those majors score highly as well and the marginal difference is not large. I don't think that its the difficulty of engineering that lends itself to the LSAT I think it is the emphasis on problem solving and logical thinking, which is essentially what the LSAT tests.
- dylanz 12y agoI used to contract at a company and worked beside David Pollack (of the Lift framework), who came to the software world after being a lawyer (I think for most of his life). I'm sure he explained the "why" when I asked, but all I could think of was "Very cool! A lawyer likes this stuff too!". I still have a blast at my job, and one factor of people taking up engineering from other trades could be their found passion for it.
- kevin_thibedeau 12y agoEngineering has exploded with foreign students who will leave the US with a degree that prints money in their home country. Not so much in America. They need to look at the numbers closer to see where the US students are actually going.
- MollyR 12y agoSeriously this times a lot. At one unnamed ivy league university I went to, there were tons of chinese kids, not chinese americans. They made no effort to integrate, because they seriously were only there to study engineering, go back to china, and make a ton of money.
- xacaxulu 12y agoThere's even a trend for US grads relocating to developing economies. A lot of us (me included) have found very interesting work/life arrangements in places with lower taxes, lower rent and higher salaries (relative to cost of living of course). There's even a smallish trend of people expatriating to avoid crushing student loan debt. IMHO I'd expect that to increase. http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/23/pf/college/student_loan_fugitives/ http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/23/pf/college/student_loan_fugi...
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoAs one of those people, I have to say taxes and prices are much lower in the USA than say china or Thailand. Especially when you get away from food and low end services. I work in china but shop in the states on my visits back. As far as salary goes, I'm a bit below us levels but can save alot because I don't need, nor could I buy even I I wanted to, a car. Working in Swiss was like that also, things were just too expensive to buy so I was able to save alot.
- conanbatt 12y agoCan you elaborate with some stats or articles? The US, as far as I know, is by far the highest paying country to software engineers in the world, starting by 2-3x to rich countries. I seriously doubt ANY software engineer can make more money in China than in the US for any similar position of responsibility.
- voteapathy 12y agoWell, I guess this is me? I had the ideal of going to law school several years ago, studied history and economics in college, with loads of public policy knowledge. Ultimately I determined that these fields actually don't interest me all that much. I mean, I had been reading texts on formal logic in my spare time because I found such subjects to be far more engaging. I enrolled for another Bachelor's degree a while ago to help build up my chops for a career in development; effectively swapping one applied logic for another. Yet I have a lot of catching up to do to meet up with peers who have been working in the industry for nearly a decade. There's a nagging feeling of dread within me that I might just be naive at best, a fraud at worst, and end up a failure. Still, I enjoy working on projects for hours at a time (when I manage to find the time to do so) and find the subject matter I'm studying engaging. In that sense, I can at least say I don't regret the shift.
- ptmcc 12y agoI did a BA+BS in History and Economics in undergrad intending to go to law school. Did undergraduate law review and everything. About junior year or so I realized I actually did not want to do that. Now, 5-6 years out of undergrad I am a professional software developer without a formal CS education. I took a few CS classes and plenty of hard math as part of my Econ degree, but I don't hold a CS degree (or even a minor). But I was always a computer geek from a young age. Through many years of interest, motivation, and self-teaching I worked in IT, then QA, and now development. I also work with many other non-CS-degree developers that are great. You can definitely make a successful transition.
- emodendroket 12y agoIf recent trends are anything to go by, this will lead in ten years to an oversupply of engineers and then an attendant rise in unemployment and dip in wages, like what's starting to happen with nursing.
- stephengillie 12y agoSo you're saying this is a good time to start a law career?
- emodendroket 12y agoYou may be ahead of the curve!
- TaylorAlexander 12y agoIn ten years, a huge amount of legal work will be done with software. A gigantic codified legal system is a job almost tailor made for machine learning.
- vezzy-fnord 12y agoCould you elaborate? I think a better approach would be to revise the legal codex so that it becomes simple enough for individuals to research and lower dependency on professional lawyers. Moreover, I disagree with the common analogy made in circles like HN that laws resemble code. Perhaps in some esoteric probabilistic language they might, though I don't believe thinking such as "ML will fix this" will yield a proper correspondence.
- adventured 12y agoWell, to step back from even the future the parent is describing, consider what's already taking place. LegalZoom type services are wiping out entire segments that pricey lawyers used to occupy. Need to incorporate? Don't spend thousands of dollars, spend $150 to $200 + state fees. Need a trademark? $150 to $200 plus govt fees. Need a basic will? $50 to $100, no hassle. There are somewhere around 3 to 4 million corporations in the US. Most of those will fail and die over ten years. The new corporations that get started, will increasingly use easier and cheaper web services to incorporate. That's billions of dollars in lawyer revenue wiped out every ten years, from one example service.
- mmanfrin 12y ago[Anecdotally] I was on my way to Law School but decided to start a job in QA at a startup. Three months later I was writing code, and 9 months after that I left to find my first truly-engineering spot. Haven't looked back.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- stone2020 12y agoShould it be called the Minecraft effect or Zuckerberg effect?
- guyzero 12y agoIt's called the "new grads in petroleum engineering earn $90K" effect.
- guyzero 12y agoSo... a lot of comments in this thread seem to equate "engineering grad school" with CS or EE. There are some other branches of engineering too and the non-EE types outnumber the EE's. Pretty sure the programs in questions are mostly civil, mechanical, chemical, etc.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y agoThe joke is going to be on them.
- smegel 12y agoAnd I always complain that sodtware engineering, while having a decent initial salary progression, is a dead end career path (gaant charts anyone?), and I should have studied law instead. Maybe the grass is always greener...
- CmonDev 12y agoBeing a very successful lawyer is probably comparable to being a very successful developer. Unless you wanted to be "a lawyer"?
- charleystr 12y agoSheep before, sheep now. Always too late.