Should You Go to College? Don’t Go To Law School.

The Boston College  Law School has long been considered one of the best law schools in the country.  While not in the same tier as the Ivy’s or Stanford, its rank in the top 15 to 25 has long promised graduates of BC Law a six figure job right out of law school and all the perks that accompany such a prestigious degree.  So, should it be any surprise that as the economy began tanking in 2008, the number of LSAT takers increased by over 20% and more students began applying to law schools like BC?  After all, with job prospects dim for people right out of college with little or no experience, what better way to insulate oneself from the throws of recession than by waiting it out for another three years in law school?  Sure, attending law school would mean anywhere from $50,000 – $150,000 in debt, but if that meant a six figure job at a global law firm, the investment must be worth it.  Not to mention the fact that while picking up this “valuable degree,” otherwise unemployed students are able to defer student loans until graduation.  Sounds like a smart move, right?

Only this isn’t the case.  In this excellent piece by Slate, the authors unravel the law school myth detailing how this “safe bet” is turning out to be anything but.  At BC Law, a current third-year student (“3L”) recently published an open letter to the dean requesting permission to drop out of law school in exchange for debt forgiveness, an arrangement he deems a win-win:

This will benefit both of us: on the one hand, I will be free to return to the teaching career I left to come here. I’ll be able to provide for my family without the crushing weight of my law school loans. On the other hand, this will help BC Law go up in the rankings, since you will not have to report my unemployment at graduation to US News. This will present no loss to me, only gain: in today’s job market, a J.D. seems to be more of a liability than an asset.

With the legal market already saturated by JDs, U.S. law schools continue to award over 40,000 degrees per year — 11.5% increase since 2000 — while demand for lawyers has actually decreased over this same decade!

Upset with what they see as the “false promises” offered by law school admissions offices, some students aren’t taking this matter lightly.  For example, when a recent graduate from the Charlotte University School of Law filed for bankruptcy under crushing law school debts, he named the law school in his filing requesting that the school “admit that your business knew or should have known that Plaintiff would be in no position to repay those loans.”

Like the author of the original article, I’m also surprised this doesn’t happen more often.

It seems all too easy to blame law schools for this glut in JDs (as noted here, the bureaucracy in most schools is absolutely appalling…at BU Law, the number of full-time administrators has grown from 6 in 1950 to over 70 today, while the number of law students has remained basically constant).  Even at bottom-tier schools, JDs are marketed as “recession proof.”   While law schools are undoubtedly guilty for overstating the value of a JD (especially at bottom- and mid-tier schools), the students and government regulators are also to blame.

The parallels between education debt and housing debt are unsettling to say the least.  Just as Barney Frank and his ilk attempted to make home ownership an American right, structuring Fannie, Freddie and a whole host of sub-prime mortgage institutions so that a single mother with no steady income could receive a $500,000 mortgage, President Obama is now promoting higher education as a way to strengthen the American economy and lower unemployment.  Um, what??

Somewhere around 60 percent of students who enter college fail to graduate with a degree, but they do get to leave with more crushing debt they are unequipped to pay (thank you government student loans?).  In my graduating class at a high school in South Dakota, all but a handful of students went on to college.  Why?  Because attending college was the obvious next step after graduating high school, not because each student was ready for college, needed a college degree for the field they wanted to enter or just because of a strong desire to learn (and if this was the case, podcasts are a better option anyway).  The college dropout rate for my high school class was probably around 50 percent.  Amazingly, this is below the national average.

To meet this rising demand for higher education, colleges and universities have responded in three ways: 1) growth in class sizes (the marginal cost of teaching one extra student is basically nothing); 2) lowering admissions standards (related to point #1); and 3) raising tuition as demand for a college degree continued to increase.  Of course, none of these responses actually help students succeed or learn.  Interestingly, the increase in college degrees awarded has not increased anywhere close to the number of students admitted to colleges, so it seems like admissions offices have figured out a nice little trick whereby they admit more students knowing that a large percentage will never graduate, keeping the “value” of the degree for those who do graduate higher than it would be if everyone actually finished.  These colleges also have slick marketing campaigns on their side that help convince everyone from the eventual dropouts to the politicians who support their programs that “attending some college or university, even if the student doesn’t graduate, is still a worthy investment.”

While the extraordinary number of college dropouts should be a clear sign that higher education is broken, politicians continue to support colleges and universities in the same way they have supported the market for home ownership.

So what about those students who do graduate college?  Well, the prospects aren’t that great for them either.  This month, the Chronicle for Higher Education ran a great piece that deconstructed what 17,000,000 Americans are currently doing with their college degrees: 482,000 customer service representatives, 317,000 waiters/waitresses, 311,000 secretaries, 107,000 janitors, 85,000 truck drivers, 54,000 telemarketers and even 18,000 parking lot attendants (full list here).  For these 17,000,000 Americans, earning that college degree was probably not worth the cost.

There are a few ways to interpret these statistics.  My take is that in addition to the plethora of college dropouts, too many college degrees are still awarded each and every year, oftentimes in pretty worthless fields like marketing and communications.  Part of this blame should undoubtedly go to the colleges and universities that continue to promote these programs and graduate students.  America’s colleges and universities need to start being honest about the value of the degrees they are being awarded.  For each communications major who graduates from my alma mater and is unable to find a job, the value of my degree decreases further.  Not only that, but the value of a college degree as a signaling device also decreases.

Ironically, many (most?) students attend college because of the signaling value of the degree.  Pretty much all blue chip employers require applicants to have at least a bachelors degree.  So what happens when having a bachelors degree no longer means that students possess the skills that employers are expecting?  As Ben Casnocha notes in one of his excellent pieces on higher education:

A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31% of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in ‘prose literacy’ — being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example. More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can’t calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalog.  Remember, this is 31% of the 25% of Americans who even have bachelor’s degrees.”

Where is the accountability for these schools?

I’ve long believed the United States requires a legitimate “third-track” for high school students who aren’t right for college.  We need more and better trade and vocational schools.  We also need to encourage internships and apprenticeships to prepare students for work in the “real world.”  But most of all, we need to have a serious conversation about how colleges are being marketed to prospective parents and their students and to ensure that the students who do attend college/university are both prepared for the task and understand all associated trade-offs.  Colleges and universities need improved levels of accountability to actually prove they provide value and learning to the students paying to attend.

Higher education should not be thought of an automatic next step for everyone who graduates high school, and colleges should be more honest in their marketing to these high school students/their parents about the actual value of the degrees.  Taking on $100,000 of debt to get a performing arts degree from NYU is not a responsible life move.

Revision: this post originally mentioned BU Law.  The letter actually came from a BC Law student and the post was updated accordingly.

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