Unemployed TTT grads take the bar, then what?

Minnesota Lawyer gave us this dandy video featuring a bunch of recent TTT grads reflecting on the bar exam they were all about to take this week.



This video is part the of general coverage of the bar exam that happens every year. While asking banal questions like "how hard did you study, when did you go to sleep?" isn't unusual, it is sad that none of the TTT or TTTT grads featured in this clip mention employment, and those that do are most definitely UNEMPLOYED with no prospects on the horizon. It's just a LITTLE ridiculous, when these kids are swimming in debt and are totally unemployable, to focus on vapid questions like what kind of cereal they ate for breakfast before the exam. At least this year's TTT interviewees are just a bit less depressing than last year's.

Given that the four law schools in this small market spew out 1,000 new grads every year, things must be especially tough for TTT grads trying to find work. Despite its relatively small population, Minnesota boasts the 12th highest lawyer per capita ratio in the Union, with 11.2 lawyers for every 10,000 people. When even your local T-25, the University of Minnesota, graduates more than half of its Class of 2010 without jobs, one can only imagine how much more awful thing must be down in the TTTs, or especially at the local TTTT, Hambone University School of Law.

How long are these people going to allow themselves to be scammed? After suffering through three years and tens of thousands of dollars' worth of hell, just to end up unemployed, it must feel great to be plunking down for bar review and the exam without having the slightest idea about where you will eventually find work. These folks from the lower tiers are, sadly, especially likely to never find work as lawyers. Nando has already given us a trio of excellent exposés about the dismal employment prospects offered by these law school puppy mills. I must grudgingly admire the irrational optimism that these grads display in continuing on the road toward lawyerdom, but as a scamblogger, I know what awaits them. We've had a smattering of commenters from these schools show up on the scamblogs in the past few months, and none of them paints a rosy picture of their class' employment. In fact, they all agree that most of their former classmates are unemployed, indebted, and desperate. Yet the charlatans and book-cookers who run these institutions are still busy tallying the seat deposits and packing the next 1L class in time for the fall semester.

Ah, to be a recent and unemployed grad. No longer will the school shelter you from debt collectors, no longer will you be able to tell people you're "in school." No longer will you have access to any kind of job you might have been able to snag as a student (because it was cheaper to hire you part-time for $15/hour). Now, no one wants you. Thus begins the long, depressing decline into a broken state of misery. How long will it be before these poor souls attempt to slink back to their former employers, broken and distraught, but $90,000 in the red? With 1,000 new, unemployable lawyers to feed in Minnesota, my guess is that there will be a boom in well-educated Starbucks assistant managers, volunteer librarians, and applicants to yet more forms of graduate education in the coming months. A job well done for all concerned. Thank you, MinnesoTTTa law schools.

The textbook and supplement scam

Today’s dose of "journalism" over at the NYT today gives us this banal discussion about the sky-high price of college textbooks. Whatever the outrageous cost of these bundles of paper is in undergrad, it's amplified in law school. Anyone who has ever taken a law school class knows that textbooks and associated “recommended” study aids will run a poor student far more than undergraduate texts. My primary beef today is not with the cost of books for actual classes, although that is indeed highway robbery. The Times discussion left my mind to wander to the world of prelaw books, study aids, and other overpriced paperback manuals that claim to offer 0Ls the “inside track” to success in law school.

Apart from the schools themselves, who make out like bandits thanks to jacked-up tuition, there is an entirely separate bloated, fattened leech that feeds off of the law school scam. The law school “support industry,” or as some bloggers have dubbed it, the law school industrial complex, rakes in over $3 billion a year from hapless law lemmings. From publishers selling pricey, largely useless hornbooks or commercial outlines, to manufacturers of equally silly flashcards and other “study aids,” to bar prep and everything in between, these miserable creatures gorge themselves on the blood of 0Ls before they ever set foot in school.

It all starts long before a prospective 0L is even sure they’ll make it to law school. The LSAT prep industry charges students thousands of dollars for courses and books designed to boost dismally-low scores. In this economy, such scores ought to simply preclude many students from going to law school, but these vultures swoop in with their expensive paperback books and promise entry to a whole host of TTTs for the low, low price of a few grand. What is there for a future TTT student to worry about, if they’ll be making six figures upon graduation? Even those students with relatively decent scores often drop a couple hundred dollars on do-it-yourself LSAT prep guides. This is the first of many, many thousands that these students will be “investing in their futures.”

Once a lemming has been accepted to a presTTTigious institution, they will naturally want to start preparing in advance for the upcoming academic crucible. Luckily, the law school support industry is there again with a whole host of materials that will give students a look at the “reality” of law school. The publishers and marketers of these useless books have really done a great job of trumpeting their necessity to clueless 0Ls. They’re not casebooks, they’re not really study aids, and they honestly have very little to do with anything students will find themselves doing once classes begin. Due to the groupthink that zero-lemmings suffer from (particularly those on prelaw message boards), several popular titles are constantly bandied about in the desperate attempt to get a leg up on the competition once 1L classes begin.

The Battle for a 0L’s Soul

Over at the Minnesota Lawyer blog, they actually do a good job of regularly posting articles about the horrible prospects for J.D.s . Thus, I was a little disappointed to see a post seeking advice for a prospective student who wants to decide which local TTT to attend. The result is an ongoing comment war between supporters of TTTT Hamline and TTT William Mitchell. The lost soul who originally asked the question let it be known that she is 100% set on going to law school, so we should not try and dissuade her. She merely wants to hear about the relative merits of these trash bins when making her decision.

As a Minnesotan myself, I feel particularly well-suited to add my two cents on the matter. I applied to William MiTTTchell and St. TTThomas (but not fourth-tier Hambone) when I was a wayward 0L, although I thankfully wised up and made it into the presTTTigious UniversiTTTY of MinnesoTTTa, home to the 30%-employed Class of 2010. St. Thomas actually had the decency to offer me some big bucks, but it wasn’t enough to entice me. Mitchell had the audacity to expect me to pay sticker price to attend their spittoon of law. (The U came through with a scholarship after all. Not like it made any difference in the end.)

Nando over at Third Tier Reality has already done a great expose of the two dung heaps of law that our poor 0L is considering, so I won’t go into the details of how much they will pillage your finances and/or soul.

Minneapolis-St. Paul is a funny legal market. With four law schools in this mid-size city, 1,000 new J.D.s are defecated out into this oversaturated field every year. Minnesota as a state has one of the highest lawyer per capita ratios in the Union, despite it being pretty small population-wise. When I was considering law school, the general consensus was “get into the U of M or else your life will become a living hell.” Well, having gone to the U of M, and my life being even worse than I ever imagined, I don’t know how helpful this advice was. I can’t imagine how much worse things are coming out of the local TTTs.

In a market when T-14 graduates are getting screwed left and right, why would anyone seriously consider one of these dumps? I have to chalk it up to inability to follow the news, and/or "it won't happen to me" syndrome. In better times, Mitchell grads would have had a reasonable shot at eking out an existence in shitlaw or solo practice, but plenty of them still slipped through the woodwork. Hamline did even worse…it’s most prestigious grad is arguably a former local TV news anchor. In this market, students from the “best” school in town, which is generally agreed to be head-and-neck above its peers, aren’t finding jobs. How can any lawyer or law student in good conscience recommend a third-tier-toilet to a clueless 0L, who is looking for help?

The advice given to this 0L essentially devolved into a war between TTT cheerleaders who cite the “great practical experience” these toilets offer, versus disillusioned lawyers and graduates of these schools who are urging this 0L to reconsider.

The shills:

“Mitchell is known for its practical skills courses and clinics.”

“Mitchell has more alumni, which can be good for networking.”

“Hamline was a very good experience for me. I also had a lot of professors who were practicing or had recently practiced and were able to make legal issues come alive.”

“Making the choice between Mitchell and Hamline is simple: Mitchell is the better choice. I know many big-firm lawyers (and people in the government, and people at non-profits, etc.) who went to Mitchell and loved it. Mitchell is a fine school with solid legal education. And their career services people work very hard indeed.”

A nugget of honesty:

“But please reconsider. Mitchell and Hamline are both terrible choices for the vast majority of students. Almost everybody after graduation finds that their job choices are very limited, their career trajectories are flat, and they can’t get the kind of experience they want. . The very best people in any school will do fine. Chances are, I’m sorry to say, that you will not be in the top of the class.”

The best place for this wayward 0L to look is at actual recent grads of the schools:

“I’m a 2009 Hamline grad. I graduated with honors. I’m still unemployed. There’s a data point for you.
Good luck!
PS — it’s not too late to go to medical school.”

“Do not go to law school. The legal market is terrible, and it is going to keep getting worse: law classes are getting larger and larger. Top 1/4 students from UMN Law are having trouble finding jobs. You will be eaten alive unless those schools are offering you full-ride scholarships.”

“The legal market is terrible right now, no real news flash there. But if you are going to choose a MN school either go to the U and make sure to place in the top 25%, or go to Mitchell on a scholarship and place in the top 10%. If you can’t do that, don’t go to law school in the Twin Cities. And I’m not just saying that with regards to placing at a large firm, I’m saying that about having a chance at getting a legal job period when you graduate.
Hamline should never be an option.”

Which side will come away with the victory? Will the law school shills claim another bloody scalp from a hapless 0L? Will this woefully uninformed prospective student find her way to the scambloggers and others dedicated to exposing the law school scam? Classes are two months away, and the oilcan deans are busy making sure every seat will be filled with a warm body. Godspeed, "Jackie" the 0L, and may you see the light and run far, far away from law school.

An English PhD calls law school a scam

From the world of the liberal arts, we have another outsider who can take one look at law school and tell it like it is. The author notes that during her teaching career, she counseled many an English major on their prospects and wrote plenty of letters of recommendation for aspiring J.D.s. For someone who is a creature of the higher education establishment, and saw many of her own students off to law school, I have to admire her ability to be blunt regarding graduate-level education.

“Grad school in the humanities is a scam. There are simply no jobs, tenure is disappearing, the culture of the academic humanities is pathological, and the sort of academic life grad students hope to acquire is ceasing to exist.”

No real news here. As someone who flirted with going to grad school in the humanities, I was told much of the same things. Fellow scambloggers have long since noted the similarities between the (dismal) outlook for M.A./PhD holders and J.D.s. Now, when even law schools that might have been able to place a fair number of students are revealed to be first tier toilets, law school is more like grad school than ever. A certain, select number of students will still land their respective profession’s most coveted jobs. They will almost all come from the very best institutions and be the cream of the academic crop. For J.D.s from lesser schools and outside the top quartiles of the class, their future is looking more and more like that of the typical M.A. or PhD. Except worse.

“[L]aw school is turning into grad school, only with debt. At least if you are getting a PhD in English, you can do it for free. You might live on a shoestring (I lived on $10,000/year when I was getting my PhD during the early 1990s), but your tuition is covered and you don't graduate six figures under.”

The author ends by recommending that students not go to grad school OR law school. This is someone who’s done their own trial by fire, going the grad school route and being a professor for years. For every one of these honest, no-B.S. professors, there are thousands more who play accessory to the highway robbery that is the higher ed scam. This is coming from a PhD in English! I think everyone can agree that humanities PhDs are much more of a scam than a J.D., but here we have one such PhD telling us that no, sorry, we J.D.s have it much worse.

“Will law professors act to clean up law schools' act? They should. But if the example of the academic humanities is any indicator, they won't. Lowering costs and being honest about expectations would come out of their pockets and their comforts--and that would be just too much.”

I’m glad to see that more and more informed observers of legal education are wising up to the scam. We need more brave souls like Erin O’Connor and Professor Tamanaha who can speak up about the scam and try and warn off would-be victims. To the law school apologists and prospective law students, it’s not just “a few bitter bloggers” who are publicizing the law school scam.

First Tier Toilet Apologists

The NYT mustered half an ounce of courage and published a letter with a sprinkling of law school criticism in it. This tepid letter to the editor is a smidgen more critical of the law school scam than the Times' own article.

Re “In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That” (front page, June 22):

Raising the mandatory grading average is a disingenuous measure taken by law schools to appease students, many of whom are growing increasingly unhappy with the fact that they are graduating with crushing debt and meager job prospects.

Raising grades does no more than slapping a Band-Aid on the sliced jugular of the grim employment situation. Class rank relative to other students remains the same, and employers need only ask for a student’s class percentile to circumvent grade inflation.

Here's an admission that employment sucks, and schools are doing nothing about it. There's even a scamblog-worthy line about the "sliced jugular of the grim employment situation." Bravo, letter writer! Now that we've thrown that out there, it's time to hit them hard!

If schools are sincerely concerned about the well-being of their graduates, perhaps they should devote more of their resources to assisting students with finding clerkships and jobs, and even subsidizing them, as mine does.

At the very least, schools should address other factors within their control, like limiting the number of students enrolled so they can actually expect to find employment, or reining in skyrocketing law school tuition.

Nathan Rogers
Dallas, June 22, 2010

The writer attends SMU Dedman School of Law.

I had high hopes for this letter until we got to "schools should subsidize their students, like mine does." Would that I could sell my soul for a $3500 stipend, fend off unemployment for six months, and allow the school to count me as "employed." Other than that, the letter made some good points...apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Let's not encourage this kind of gamesmanship, Mr. Rogers! As long as there is support for half-baked schemes like SMU Dedman's "Test Drive" program, schools will continue to use such trickery to cook the books and deceive unwitting 0Ls.

SMU Dedman...is that supposed to refer to your employment prospects as a graduate? Dedman...Dead Man Walking? The test drive program is $3500, or thirty pieces of silver, that the school will throw its unemployed grads to keep them busy and out of the "unemployed" category. For a school that reports a whopping 97% of its class of 2009 as employed, they've got to keep those fake numbers up for the class of 2010. This program is not about helping students, it's about boosting SMU Dead-man's US News ranking and pulling a fast one on prospective students.

Despite what the dean claims, when the employment survey comes out, we can expect to see these "test driven" students listed as "employed." Really, it's a good deal for DeadMan...$3500 a head seems a small price to pay if you can put up good fake employment data because of it. For every student that they shell out 3500 bucks for now, they can be sure to get more suckers in the door come fall, paying a cool $38,406 a year in tuition alone.

Let's see where a "test drive" will land alums of this presTTTigious institution!

* 2:59 pm May 18, 2010
* Anonymous wrote:
I graduated from SMU in 2009 – they are disingenuous about their graduate employment statistics. I can name six peers that are employed outside the legal field and/or still looking for work. Another five are doing contract labor (i.e. document review). One of my friend’s was working at Toys-R-Us when these statistics were compiled. One was “employed” by the career services office. At least another five are working in the Barnett Shale doing door-to-door oil & gas leasing and/or title checks for Chesapeake Energy’s subcontractors (along-side college drop-outs). And one that became so frustrated with career prospects that he is studying to be a pharmacist.

Talk about a first-tier toilet! Mr. Rogers, don't tarnish an otherwise accurate letter to the editor about the perils of law school with a shill for the latest brand of law school scammery!

NYT tiptoes around law school scam

Yesterday brought another mainstream media piece about some of the shenanigans going on in legal education. Grade inflation is not exactly a great way to give students a leg-up in a horrible job market, especially when more and more schools are doing it. Additionally, as the article notes, employers are hip to the jive and are thus unlikely to care that a student's GPA is .333 higher.

It's good to see the paper give a skeptical glance to this grade-meddling. However, the NYT dropped the ball by failing to mention the larger problems that cause schools to come up with half-assed schemes like a GPA boost. The utter lack of legal jobs and the unemployment massacre that J.D. grads are entering after school is the root cause of these limpwristed efforts to aid students. As the article notes, how much of a boon these schemes will provide is quite debatable.

In an article that casts a suspicious eye on grade inflation and efforts by schools to pay employers to "test drive" their grads, more ought to have been said about what a bloody, suicidal clusterfuck law school has become. Instead, readers are given a few lines that passively reference the boiling cauldron of excrement that is the law school scam.

Once able to practically guarantee gainful employment to thousands of students every year, the schools are now fielding complaints from more and more unemployed graduates, frequently drowning in student debt.

"Fielding complaints" from "more and more" (read: tens of thousands) of graduates sounds a lot like the righteous anger of the law school scambloggers and other scammed grads. Yet a mere reference to "complaints" makes the whole backlash against law school seem wholly insignificant and whiny. There is a whole lot more going on than just a few complaints being filed!

As long as mainstream media outlets temper their reporting about the problems in legal education with an overall positive assessment, casual readers (like 0Ls and their parents) are not going to get the message. They might come away with some inkling that all is not well in law school land, but will just write it off. After all, it definitely isn't going to happen to THEM! As long as the plight of the tens of thousands of scammed grads is characterized as "a few complaints," or an aberration on the road to $160k salaries, unknowing students will continue to matriculate. I'm not expecting the NYT or any other respectable paper to adopt the tone of a scambuster, but it would be nice to see them give a harder look to the problems facing law grads.

Government work is NOT an alternative to private practice

It’s exasperating to hear naïve 0Ls, 1Ls, and even some dumber upperclassmen, talk about public-sector work like it is still a viable option for them. They'll say how are disappointed they are that biglaw is closed, but they will just go and work for “the government” instead. They usually cite something about how the lower salaries are worth working fewer hours and devoting yourself to “more meaningful” work.

These jobs were always scarce before the recession, and they also paid crap compared to the 100 or 150 thousand dollar debt students have. For as many law students that professed their desire to work in the public sector, there were never enough of these positions for them even in the best of times. They are even more scarce now as many government and nonprofit employers have seen their budgets crater. Those that are still around aren’t paying you any more than they ever were. Only a few schools have a worthwhile LRAP program that will make any significant dent in your debt, and they all happen to be top schools. If you go to a crap school or even a first tier toilet, and expecting to be bailed out by your school in exchange for taking a $35,000 yearly salary from some legal aid group...it ain't going to happen.

To anyone who has been living under a rock lately, government isn’t exactly a boom industry when it comes to jobs for law grads. Fluff news stories like to talk about how government is one of the only sectors growing. This is true...if you are a temporary census worker, or are willing to enter at the bottom of the pay scale as a Forestry Service technician making $9/hour. There are not, however, thousands of new legal positions being created. The tens of thousands of unemployed or temporarily-employed JDs out there are not going to find full-time attorney jobs with the government.

State and local government is much, much worse off than the feds. Several states that are home to a lot of unemployed lawyers are ready to implode for lack of funding. They aren’t exactly on a hiring boom. Many other states have severely constrained budgets and are trimming their judicial branches, county legal services, and the like. State-level judges are cautioning that this austerity, lack of funding, and lack of personnel is going to be long term (read: permanent).

No, you’re not going to be able to slide into a job as assistant city attorney or public defender with ease. As you may have noticed, every recent grad who hasn’t yet committed suicide is plastering the few remaining government jobs with resumes. There are tends of thousands of newly-minted, unemployed JDs trying to find ANY sort of paid work. Local governments are taking advantage of this bumper crop of unemployed law students and recent graduates by taking them on as volunteers, with no promise, prospect, or insinuation that they will ever get a job.

Back at the federal level, there are only a tiny amount of attorney positions open. They are being filled by biglaw refugees with fancy degrees and gold-plated experience at some of the nation’s premier firms. In other words, not slack-jawed recent graduates, or TTT lawyers looking to move up onto the federal general schedule. One of my good friends, from back in the day before I lost half of my brain mass and decided to go to law school, actually works for the federal government. The Department of Justice probably has a lot of lawyers and is a good place to sample what hiring at the federal level is like. Let’s see what he says:

“Even before the recession a lot of these jobs were only looking at 5% of applicants, now it's much less. No one looks at the thousands of USAjobs applicants, you need something stellar to stand out. We have a lot of solid talent from the private sector coming in, our division hired some experienced attorneys from big firms in the past year or so. All the people in my office who have degrees from places like UConn or non-Ivy schools were here long before the economy got bad. DOJ has its pick of experienced lawyers with white shoe credentials. Everyone is trying to get into the federal government because it’s more secure.”

Wait, where was the part about them hiring new grads or students from shitty schools?

Bottom line: government work is AT LEAST as hard to get as a halfway decent private sector job, if not harder. I think all but the most delusional students outside the very top schools have given up their dreams of biglaw. Students need to start giving up their hopes of government work: local government doesn’t have the money to hire you, and the feds would prefer experienced lawyers with excellent academic credentials from top schools. Your students and grads from the T14 are also shut out of biglaw and are trickling down to take entry-level government jobs that might have considered you in the past.

What does that leave you? Bankrupting yourself starting a solo practice, or working for some schlubby shitlaw practitioner in traffic court or family law for $25k a year. There is probably some of that work to be found, but still not enough for the 45,000 law grads emerging every year. So don’t lose heart, you might still find "a job." Do write back when your prelaw dreams of legal glory clash with the realities of shitlaw.

Every School is a TTT

A comment over on JJD’s blog caught my eye:

“As someone who attended (and did well in) a very "elite" school, I can personally assure everyone here that their employment figures are deceptive and manipulated.

It's not just the TTT's that are doing it. Most of the graduating class did not get decent jobs. My friends are mostly unemployed, doing part-time work with a stipend, or are trying to join the military.”

I’ve sounded this same theme on boards and comments on my fellows' blogs. It’s time we all realize: most schools are putting up TTT numbers these days. Double-digit unemployment and lack of prospects are no longer problems unique to TTTs. Okay, even I can admit that not "every" school is a TTT. But in this economy, plenty of highly-thought-of T1 schools are sending their graduates out and over a cliff. This metastasized rot has penetrated deep into the first tier, tinged the T14, and is even now lurking outside the gates of Harvard Yard.

TTTs get a lot of bad rap, and deservedly so. They ought to get a hundred times more, and then all be closed down, their facilities stripped bare and sold off to help recoup some of their victims’ tuition dollars. But as anyone at a “better” law school will tell you, things are hardly much different higher up the USNews ladder. Recently we’ve heard from 2010 Georgetown grads about how miserable their prospects from this T-14 are. We’re seeing students in the top third at 34-ranked Fordham wind up unemployed. The Wall Street Journal told us about 2010 grads from number 11 Northwestern who are unemployed and moving home to live in the basement. And these are grads who "had the grades," and were high-paid summer associates a year before. It is NOT merely the "slackers" or "wash-outs" who are being hung out to dry.
We’ve even heard from Harvard grads who didn't get a job. And no, you are not guaranteed a "good job" even coming out of vaunted Harvard.

These first-tier students are representative of the classes of 2009, 2010, and onward. They are largely unemployed or underemployed. One of the Georgetown students even surfaced on a law school blog, and noted that he tried to bring up the fact that the school lies and misrepresents its data, during the interview session. SURPRISE! It never made it on the air!

Apart from these examples, what do we have to rely on? Surely, oil-slick deans at other T1 schools will claim, these mainstream-media-documented examples are just outliers. Everything is just rosy-pink at other 20s-ranked schools, at other T-14 schools. Right? Right. Enter the scam-buster:

“Because a substantial portion of students at T14s are NOT getting full-time non-stipend positions (my guess is between 40 and 80 percent of non-HYS students are in this terrible bracket), but it's impossible to verify. This is not limited to the bottom of the class but extends to good students.

Even in the T14 it's an insane gamble. The jobs aren't there to justify the time or tuition. You can dream all day about how the T14 students are all getting pampered like Tom Cruise at the beginning of "The Firm," but it just isn't so.

Outside of T14 and you're looking at a total disaster. Vanderbilt? Boston College? GWU? UMinn? Those kids pay the same tuition you did and face a similar fate.”

Now before you pro-law school shills start attacking all of this as anecdotal, I must repeat: what else do we have? Data from schools CANNOT be relied on. All we can do is look at schools like Northwestern (11), Georgetown (14), Vanderbilt (17), Minnesota (22), and Fordham (34), and extrapolate. If these GOOD schools can't get grads, who are at LEAST in the top half of the class, ANY job, then what does that say? Alternatively, where is all the "good news" about how hiring is brisk, grads are all happy and content, and everything is peachy in law school land? There are none. Law school land looks like New Orleans after the hurricane, with well-qualified, elite grads left stranded on rooftops.

Let's revisit that commenter. 40-80% of non-HYS students. In other words, outside of the top three schools in the country, you may well have a 50% chance or higher of not finding meaningful employment. I’ll second the call that outside of the T-14 is a total disaster. We’ve seen number 17-ranked Vanderbilt students sounding the alarm about phony employment statistics and a lack of job prospects. UMinn (no. 22) just graduated a class where only a third of students are employed, in any capacity. To every law school shill or delusional 0L who thinks that just avoiding the “TTTs” will save them and still provide robust employment prospects, think again. Every law school outside of a HANDFUL of top schools is putting up TTT numbers these days.

“Things will turn around by 2013 or 2014,” 0Ls and law schools will claim. Sure they will, son. If you’re totally confident in that, gamble your 100k. Just remember that even before the recession, the bottom 2/3 of the class at 20-40 ranked schools were pressed for jobs. Things are unbelievably bad out there. Beyond-description bad. I try to pepper my jeremiads with actual evidence and stories from the trenches, but these 0Ls and law school cheerleaders are quick to write it all off.

So, I will end this post with a call for news from the first tier. Things are really bad in the first tier, but there are still surely some people getting good jobs (especially high in the T14). For every T1 grad who has a biglaw position or a nice clerkship, there are going to be embittered, scammed grads.

2010 grads from T1 schools, what is the view from your school? Where are you working? Is it a real, salaried, full-time position? Volunteer work? Deferred? Hourly doc review? For students still enrolled, how did summer employment turn out for you and your classmates? If, as our detractors claim, there is more good than bad out there, we should be inundated with rosy news. The WSJ and NPR must just be plain wrong to report on the dearth of legal employment. As these shills so often claim, scambloggers are just bitter, and we've got it all wrong. So here we go: let's prove us all wrong.

A new low in faking employment numbers

During a bit of self-reflection that inspired another post, I made my way back to my school’s “Prospective Students” page to see just what salary data and employment numbers they were currently baiting 0Ls with. Salary data has since been removed, although it was definitely there a few years ago (as I relied on it). Who knows why it’s been removed…I can even see how it might benefit 0Ls by not tantalizing them with dreams of fat salaries upon graduation. (Although I’m sure they will be told by other sources about the “huge” salaries they can expect.)

What really caught my attention was an insidious new way of calculating employment statistics. Instead of “employed at six months,” or “of those reporting back,” we have this new level of depravity from law school shills:



96.59% of graduates employed, out of those seeking employment. What the fuck is this shit?!?!?

How do you determine who is seeking employment? How do you gauge whether a grad is seeking employment? Isn't EVERYONE presumably seeking employment? How do you accurately represent what this metric means to a prospective student? Do you rule out students unemployed at graduation, and just shunt them off into the “not seeking employment category, to boost your numbers? (Yes.)

I can see the discussion down at career services now!
Dean: We need a way to boost our sagging employment numbers! I want to see this fall’s incoming class packed to the gills!
Shill: Well, dean, students are getting wise to our previous statistical shenanigans like “employed at six months” and “only those who returned the survey.” With 66% of the class graduating with no job, it’s becoming harder and harder to conceal this from naïve 0Ls!
Dean: Well if 2/3 of the class couldn’t get a job, it must be because they aren’t trying hard enough! They probably aren’t even looking for employment! I know…we’ll change our reporting to reflect only those students who WANTED a job and FOUND one. Something about “only those seeking employment were employed.” That sounds like a tautological mindfuck that ought to throw 0Ls and USNews for a loop!
Shill: *Awed, respectful silence at dean’s mastery of the scam.*

Watch out for this new level of scumbucketry and deception, gang. Count on the law schools to leave no stone unturned in their search for novel ways to assuage your fears about the economy and to get your tuition dollars. Matriculate at your own peril; odds are you’ll be one of those “not seeking employment” in a few years.

We Are All a Lost Generation

It’s certainly been said before: we are the lost generation.

I recently watched the Class of 2010 from our prestigious law school go off into the world unemployed and with no prospects. The grads themselves put the unemployment level at about two-thirds of the class, an unbelievably horrible statistic for a school that was reporting graduate employment in the high 90s when these students matriculated. A quick glance at the results of career services’ employment survey shows a 35% response rate. It’s amazing how closely that mirrors what the students themselves claim as far as their collective employment status. I’ve been pondering what the implications of this are for these former classmates and peers. This kind of catastrophe has never happened to many of us. Certainly, many people have overcome great obstacles, tragedies, and disasters in life. We all have our personal difficulties to surmount. However, I doubt many people have seen their future really evaporate.

What happens when you hit full stop and realize that there really is no job for you? You realize that all you have worked for over years, maybe close to a decade, is for naught. It’s one thing to be waylaid by life’s curves and detours. It’s quite another to come to the end of the journey, the culmination of your young adult life thus far, and find that the road is closed. We go to school for the first quarter of our lives so we can get a job, find a profession, in which to spend the rest of it. What happens when this long-established road to employment, to professional life, to success, becomes impassible? Who do you turn to for guidance when your parents and mentors lived through the biggest economic boom times in living memory, when jobs were plentiful and the sky, or at least the suburbs, was the limit? How do you relate to people whose only experience has taught them that the only people who can’t get a decent job are lazy, inefficient, or defective?

In days of yore, disenchanted 20-somethings could decamp to the City of Light to ponder their place in the world and get slammed with Ernest Hemingway. Sadly, this is no longer an option for most. How is an intrepid graduate going to scrounge up the dough to hit Europe, or even some more affordable third-world backwater, with 150,000 dollars in debt hanging over their head?

The tens of thousands of scammed graduates, this lost generation, will not be knocking around Europe, writing the Great American Novel, and ruminating on some grand poetry in a Parisian salon. They will be working the cash register at Walgreen’s, mowing lawns for the parks department, and hunching over a computer screen in a dank basement reviewing documents for $15/hour--if they’re lucky. At night, they will slink home and fire up the stove for a meal of delicious Ramen noodles. Occasionally, their eyes will wander to the forgotten corner of their efficiency apartment where their undergrad, masters, law, or doctorate degree sits in a dusty frame. Having thus triggered a night of uncontrollable sobbing and/or binge drinking, this overeducated, overqualified debt peon will catch a few winks of sleep before having to get up and grind it out again for $8 an hour.

Do you remember what it was like to dream big? High school graduation is, for me, only a few short years in the rear view mirror. Be it five, ten, or twenty, everyone remembers. Some of us dreamt of being big shots. Many others were just excited to get out into the world, go to college, and get a decent middle class job and live like their parents. I sure as hell didn’t expect to see scores of people go off to four-year private universities, come home, and only be able to get a job cutting grass and de-icing asphalt for the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Those of us who postponed this harsh reality and took refuge in law or grad school are only prolonging the pain. Our financial reality will be even bleaker. Many of us put off imagining what living under six figures of non-dischargeable debt while earning peanuts must be like. It’s easy to forget that the dream we’re all working for—a normal, stable job, decent salary, and ability to pay back our debts and keep a roof over our heads—has vanished for millions of young people. Reading “DEFERRED-CURRENTLY ENROLLED” on your loan statement every month is akin to taking a nice big dose of opiates. The pain is dulled, reality slips away. The realization that you have been sold down the river by higher education and your lenders is postponed.

The Boomers will cry foul. It’s your fault, we’re told. No one told you to take out 75,000 dollars in loans to study political science. You should have known a master’s degree is useless. You’re a moron for not realizing that there are not enough jobs to go around. You ought to have realized the legal economy was going to implode and there never were enough jobs for all of you. You think you have it tough, well we lived during the 70s oil crisis!

You went to college and law school in a time where a semester’s tuition put you back mere hundreds of dollars. You may have started out with nothing, but you didn’t start out 50, 100, 150 thousand dollars in the hole. And although you started out small, there were jobs for you. You were able to climb the ladder. Dramatically fewer people held college degrees when you were working your first jobs and building your careers. You had it easy, by every measure, but you didn’t bother to make things easy for us.

We did not subsidize any and all higher education. We did not give schools a free pass to raise tuition every year, for decades, in the knowledge that the money would always come in because the feds were putting up the cash. We didn’t wreck the global economy. We didn’t destroy the American manufacturing sector and outsource millions of service jobs. We didn’t approve of legal work being outsourced to non-lawyers for pennies on the dollar in India. We didn’t arrange things so that the only job you can get with a B.A. is being a barista.

But there is one thing we did do, and it’s cursed us ever since. We listened to you Boomers. We believed our teachers and parents who drilled into us the notion that higher education is the key to advancement. We believed the President when he told us that everyone should go to college. We believed you when you told us paying $40,000 a year for private college was an investment in our futures. We believed you when you said it was absolutely necessary to raise our public university tuition 15% year after year. We believed the bogus employment and salary statistics cooked up by unctuous law school deans who were eager to see Sallie Mae and federal loan dollars keep pouring in. We believed because we wanted to, but isn’t that what we are supposed to do? People are supposed to trust in their institutions: higher education, the government, the president. Their parents. Young people are supposed to be able to have faith in their elders. So yes, we believed in you, and now we’re doomed. While we figure out how to handle this student debt, forgive us if we have a hard time paying for your trillions in unfunded medical, retirement, and social security liabilities. You had the wheel; we believed you could bring us in safely. Well, now we can all go down together.

A big thanks from the Lost Generation.