The number of people applying to law school for the upcoming academic year shot up 8 percent—the only significant annual increase since 2010. The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) reported that 60,401 people applied for admission this fall, up from 55,580 the previous year.For fuck's sake.
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This year’s applicant pool was not only larger, but also more qualified, council data shows. The number of applicants with LSAT scores of 175 to 180—the highest score band—increased 60 percent over the previous year. Applicants with scores of 170 to 174 were up 13 percent, while those with scores of 165 to 169 were up 27 percent.
I gave my penchant for convoluted irony a few days off, so I'm going to put this bluntly; I apologize for offending delicate sensibilities but you all don't listen to rationality and you don't seem to grasp sarcasm: you're all a bunch of fucking stupid nutsacks, and I don't just mean the applicants.
First, the percentage of LSAT scores within a certain band and how it changes year-over-year is functionally meaningless. It does not mean, ipso facto, more "qualified" people are applying to law school this year than last. Read the goddamned news and take a fucking stats 101 course. Stop enabling this shit.
Second, what the fuck are you dim naifs doing? Cue the broken record. The nation has too many lawyers. The cost to become one is too high. It's a bad investment for like 2/3 of you people. I say this as someone gainfully employed as a lawyer who enjoys the work much of the time and as one who didn't have a bad undergrad record or LSAT score or anything like that. Listen up: I wouldn't do it again. The cost of the product was and is simply too high. If being a lawyer is that important to you, find a psychiatrist or a new dream.
I say this knowing many people for whom law has been an objective and rousing success by raw economic metrics or objectively positive accomplishments. I encourage you to develop the critical analysis skills that would be necessary in most legal careers, anyway, assuming they're even a possibility. Also, look up cognitive biases, like optimism bias and survivorship bias.
I say this because few other first-world industrialized nations waste so much intellectual capital on lawyering as the United States. We need smart people to do other things with their prime earning and intellectual years. We don't any more dumb lawyers, either.
I say this nonetheless because I can do basic fucking math.
But what does it matter? Do kids ever listen to their elders?
I do not say, categorically, to avoid law school. We need a replenishment on some level of good, common sense attorneys, and often the salt-of-the-Earth lawyers come from relative "toilets" as opposed to the lower-end prestige peddlers. But at least 40,000 of you fuckers are making a mistake, including many of you who think you scored well on the LSAT or can do anything with a law degree. Many of the rest of you have profoundly stupid ideas regarding law, justice, Donald J. Trump, or the Antarctic penguin.
One of the difficulties with the "scamblog" movement, and the broader information war with respect to law school applicants, is that the skeptics, pseudo-victims, I suppose, have little incentive to stick around too long or air grievances too loudly. Once you find a career and get a few years out, whether in the law or not, you "move on" and the fates of a bunch of young carbon-copy idiots hopping on a misleading conveyor belt of mediocrity no longer matter. Personally, because of how the legal market works, there's no real effect on my own fortunes whether there are 100k law school applicants this year or zero.
Meanwhile, law schools have every incentive to continue dancing to the same old rhythm year-in and year-out; buy high, buy low, buy buy buy. People like Larry Mitchell or Nick Allard show up, bang on the table, get their pie, and bail, sure, but the institutions of misinformation and exploitation remain as steadfast as the fucking sun, the relative victims not nearly powerful or instantly sympathetic enough to effectuate any real change in a hot-take, plug-and-play, meme society. It's ultimately those institutions who have a nonstop incentive - addiction, sorta - to market the fantasy - more like a mirage - whether that's the schools themselves, the insulated legal establishment, or the toady niche media.
On January 8, 2011, the New York Times published "Is Law School a Losing Game?" - a piece often seen as a breaking point for public consciousness regarding the dubious economics of this scratch-off game. That was over seven years ago. Many of the dolts entering law school this fall were sophomores in high school at the time. This broad and loose campaign no doubt steered many of their peers to other life ventures, maybe well before college, and certainly it took some toll on the lower-end institutions in the long-run. No eight percent "surge" will bring Indiana Tech back from the grave. But short of having studies that don't exist, we'll never know the exact effect of transparency, either in the volume or quality of deterrence.
But the marginal applicants today... why? It isn't just a failure of consumer rationality - though I blame the applicants to some extent - but a failure of entire fucking support systems; strict calls of "personal responsibility" are often a denial of the reality that no behavior exists in a vacuum. Where are the parents and guidance counselors? Where is the media? Where are the friends who tell you you're doing something stupid and decidedly uncool - and not like ironically uncool but straight-up dumb? Where are the policymakers, besides going after fish in a barrel?
You can say the information's out there, but it's not enough when trusted opinion leaders who should know better either don't know better or play dumb, whether with well intent or reckless malice. Discussing whether the transparency/"scamblog" movement has been a success or a failure misses the point entirely: "outside" voices never should have been needed in the first place.
Consider, too, that it's actually harder to have an outsider's voice heard today as compared to five years ago. Traffic here, at OTLSS, and broadly across the non-social media internet has steadily trended downwards, not because of shortcomings in content, but because of modes of delivery (see, e.g., this among many sources). If your content isn't "fit" to be insta-shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., it won't be seen unless someone knows it's there, and the algos used by Google, Twitter, etc., all prioritize the institutional, the recent, and the already shared - even though these blogs are hosted on a Google product. That we've now politicized these modes of information delivery with "fake news" fake and real isn't going to help "outsider" or anonymous voices in gaining traction.
That doesn't mean these ventures are pointless or that the blogs have been ineffective (which I don't believe), but there's a finite amount that lone voices can do in this internet wilderness, nor is there any real motivation to invest in a mode of information delivery that's more friendly to how the internet has changed in the last decade.
What we can do is continue telling the truth, and I implore those of you who are in positions of any influence over potential law applicants that you give them pause and direct them to balanced literature, because Lord knows the institutional actors aren't going to do it and the information game is almost as rigged as it's always been. It isn't enough that the information is "out there" or that the accreditation folks are going to close down the worst offenders. We need a broader consciousness and a broader will to communicate directly to the thousands of students still making an economically unfortunate and asocial decision.
From my own experience mentoring law students and law clerks, and teaching as a law school adjunct:
ReplyDelete1. OLs and law students are anesthetized to borrowing huge sums of money because their friends are all borrowing huge sums of money. Not one OL or law student I've ever spoken with has done the very simple calculation to determine how much they are actually going to have to pay back if they've borrowed $100K at 5% with a twenty year maturity date.
2. I taught as an adjunct at a trap school in a very cool city that students went to in order "to have an experience." THERE WERE NO JOBS THERE. Unless you ended up in the tippy-top of one of the three local law schools and had a dab of social capital, you had a fart's chance in a whirlwind of actually getting a job in the city. Yet, year after year, I saw law school graduates take that state's bar instead of heading to somewhere they might have some social capital and could get a job.
3. Following up on No. 2 above, most OLs never seriously think about where they want to practice. Instead they're mesmerized by the Above-the-Law either/or metric of "trap school at 25% off or higher ranked school at full." If you are not at HYS and you are not in an area where you have or can build contacts, you are more likely than not screwed if first semester grades come out and you are not at least in the top 1/3rd. Being in a city large enough to have the possibility of being able to work during the school year cannot be overrated.
4. And, lastly, law students are not acquainted with the fallacy of sunken costs and rarely quit even when it makes 100% sense to quit. Really, at probably 75% of the law schools, 1/3rd of the class should quit after the first year grades and ranks come out. But then they don't know anyone who has quit law school and the law school admin make them feel like a loser for walking away.
Maybe people don't listen to you and the other scambloggers because you exaggerate as much as the school administrations you despise to the point where you can't be believed.
ReplyDeleteFirst, you say that of 60,000 applicants, 40,000 of them are making a big mistake. But of the 60000 applicants, only 40,000 will matriculate, and of those, only 25,000 will actually pass the bar on the first try. There are about 23-24,000 new legal jobs every year. So if you are in the group which can actually pass the bar on the first try (i.e. the best 25000 applicants), law school isn't such a bad gamble. Moreover, as to cost, most law students don't pay full freight anymore. Law school tuitions are declining because law schools offer large incentives off the sticker price these days. Your intellectually honest compatriots like Professor Campos admit this.
There is a problem here in that the lower tier schools need to close so that students who pass the bar won't be admitted, but there's a need for about 30,000 law school slots nationwide (23000-25000 jobs + slots for people who drop out/fail out/ choose not to practice law).
Instead of honestly identifying the problem, you and the other scambloggers paint all schools and everyone's situation with the same brush. Moreover, many of your compatriots make obviously wrong and mean spirited contentions which have no rational basis to the market need for new lawyers (See Old Guy at OTLSS who regularly advocates for 190 out of 205 law schools to close; See also Third Tier Reality which spent months arguing that attending places like Yale and New York University are bad decisions) I am pasting an accurate statement of the legal market for new lawyers which backs up what I say See: http://taxprof.typepad.com//taxprof_blog/2018/08/update-on-2018-applicant-pool-growth-in-matriculants-likely-will-be-unbalanced-across-law-schools.html