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Would You Put Law School on Your Credit Card?

Someone close to me is considering law school after studying economics and sociology at a name brand east coast college. What would you say?

My usual advice to prospective law students is, "Don't split the baby. Shoot for a top ten school, and if you don't make it then attend the best school can for free." I feel, however, like warning about what I call the sub-prime student loan market, where borrowers (students) are leveraged to the hilt with the help of private lenders, despite the students' total absence of apparent immediate income. Rather than common sense, the market operates on the principle that loans can be secured by an educational asset that everyone tacitly agrees will increase in value. No matter how many people get law degrees, and no matter how expensive they become, the degree will always out-value the debt liability.

Law schools aren't helping. Call any law school and ask about their graduate employment rate. Any school -- including ours -- will give you a number that our guts tell us is not accurate. Ask about median starting salary and again you will get rosy numbers we all know are false. Lenders have no incentive to be any more helpful -- recall that statutes rendering student loans immune to discharge by bankruptcy essentially nullifies lenders' risk. And with student loan rates at about seven percent (the cost of a credit card six years ago), they are making a killing. And absolute killing.

The refrain goes like this: "Oh, but law school is about education; it is about deeper understanding of our social and political systems." Well, maybe. It is also about a career. I don't really understand why so many academics resist the idea that legal education is a trade education by insisting on calling law a "calling" or a "profession," especially given that their actions are so much to the contrary. Schools of late are paying firms to hire their graduates. They are flagrantly manipulating their grading scales to make their students appear better qualified than students from 'competing' schools' (ours included, by the way). Students aren't likely to complain -- the vast majority of us want a job first, and a 'deeper understanding of our social and political systems' second. Again: we may want an education, but we all need a job. None of this is in the admissions brochures or in a college career counselor's pamphlets.

I don't know what to say to my friend. On the one hand, I loved law school and I would do it again in a heartbeat. My three years at Boalt Hall have been some of the best of my life. On the other, I'm (probably) in the minority on that point.

So, what would you say?

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on June 26, 2010 (boomark / email).