SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the first-kill-all-the-lawyers dept.
Elizabeth Olson reports at the NYT that financially wobbly law schools face plunging enrollment, strenuous resistance to six-figure student debt and the lack of job guarantees — in addition to the need to balance their battered budgets. Nine months after graduating, only 57 percent of the 2013 class had full-time jobs that required passing the bar. Law schools are left in the unenviable position of trying to allay students’ fears that they will not be able to find a job that pays enough to repay $150,000 to $200,000 in education loans. With the declining interest, law schools have been working hard behind the scenes to trim their operations and to expand their offerings of joint degrees in, say, law and medicine. Still they are trying to avoid wholesale cuts in faculty or degrees, steps that would publicly eviscerate their business model and reputation. “I don’t get how the math adds up for the number of schools and the number of students,” says Professor Rodriguez of Northwestern, who is also president of the Association of American Law Schools. “We all know it’s happening, and we are all taking steps that urgent, not desperate, times call for.”
The history of another graduate school bust suggests what may be in store for the nation's 204 ABA accredited law schools. After peaking in 1979, dental-school enrollments precipitously collapsed (the reasons why included “improved dental health from fluoridation, reductions in federal funding, high tuition costs and debt loads,” among others). By the mid-1980s, they were down by about one-third. Then, over the next several years, six private universities closed their dental schools, including Emory University and Georgetown University, which had been the largest program in the country. Given there were only about 60 dental schools to begin with, this amounted to a pretty enormous bust. "The point is that law schools are facing similar pressures," says Jordan Weissmann. "Many institutions opened law schools precisely because they were supposed to be cash cows and won’t be particularly psyched to suddenly start subsidizing them. "
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Thursday December 04 2014, @04:18PM
Nope. If they drop their rates, how can they afford to pay their six figure loans back?
Chasing ambulances is expensive, and I have no idea how much these lawyers filing class action suits spend on TV advertising, but it seems like I see at least one lawyer commercial an hour.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @06:13PM
Most lawyers work in small practices. When you pay $300/hr to that lawyer, that lawyer is not making $300/hr by any stretch of the imagination. They have to pay for their office space, staff, equipment, supplies, etc. etc. And it isn't like a job where you punch in and get paid till you punch out -- there must be work to do and when there is no work, that lawyer is earning negative money. Of course, yellow pages ads are an old standby for getting work -- but that's going to run $1-2000 per month in even a moderately sized market (less in tiny ones, more in larger ones) and that's for modest ads. In other words, when you pay an attorney, you are also paying for rent, taxes, advertising, staff salaries, equipment, supplies, etc. etc.
Now, when it works, that lawyer can make a comfortable living. When it doesn't, they go bust. There's actually a lot of risk there considering the extra 3 years of education (no to minimal earnings), the massive liability for that education, the risk and anxiety of running a small business, and the responsibility for paying other people's salaries. There should be some compensation for taking on those risks.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday December 05 2014, @08:09AM
Is that unique to lawyers? Maybe if they leased fewer et ceteras…
Wait—what?