Why Won't (Can't) Unemployed Lawyers Find Jobs in Other Fields?
In response to a post at Law.com's Legal Blog Watch (responding to one of my posts), I explained why lawyers cannot easily strike out into other fields.
A poster named Rhymes with Right said:
"Am I to take it that these bloggers have no other marketable skills -- perhaps skills the acquired during their undergraduate careers? Why not go into that field -- or perhaps courageously strike off into other fields now?First off, the U.S. job market is atrocious in almost all fields right now, not just law. So even if you do have marketable skills in another field, it will not necessarily be easy to find work in it.
Seems to me like they are just trying to cut down on the number of future competitors."
Secondly, after having spent three years in law school, employers will perceive that your skills in those other fields have atrophied (or gone stale) and that you must have forgotten everything you knew before.
Thirdly, even if employers in another field would regard you as being qualified, they will wonder why the hell you are not working as an attorney since the general public perceives that all lawyers are rich. They will assume that you are a loser since you could not find an attorney job.
Fourthly, a great many law school graduates really do not have any other tangible marketable skills. These would be the political science majors, the art history majors, the philosophy majors, etc. It might be tempting to argue that in that case, they should not be complaining. However, they have still been injured because they cannot find jobs as lawyers AND they have $100,000+ of non-dischargeable student loan debt, and they could have spent their three years obtaining a second bachelors degrees in more marketable fields.
Do not underestimate the difficulty of "courageously striking off into other fields" when you already have $100,000+ worth of debt over your head. Is it then a good investment to take on another $40-60,0000 worth of debt to retrain for another field? Retrain for what? What field would you roll the dice on? Even if someone were able to gain admission to nursing school and wanted to become a nurse, by the time he graduated that field would probably be glutted too (or filled with imported Filipino nurses on visas).
I know that finding a job in another field might seem like a piece of cake to someone who has never faced real adversity in the job market or who has never had to involuntarily change careers before or who has never had to confront a depression-era job market, but when you are staring at $100,000+ worth of student loan debt, it is a very daunting prospect that cannot be taken lightly. That further education and training would give you the opportunity to find a job in another field is not good enough; you would want a 95% probability of success.
Is my goal to cut down on the number of future competitors in the legal field? Yes, yes it is, as well as to prevent human suffering. Our society is suffering tremendously from economic waste in the form of unused education, not just in the legal field, but in almost all fields. (Our nation even has an oversupply of PhD scientists, which is a fact that is unfathomable to most laypeople.) This is very expensive and it hurts our nation's economy because money that people might otherwise spend on goods and services ends up being spent on student loans.
In the case of very expensive graduate and professional school, it is in our society's economic selfish interest to produce no more than a 5% or 10% oversupply of graduates. Note that consumers of legal services are not benefiting, price-wise, past a certain point from our nation's huge oversupply of lawyers--many of them are unable to earn a living offering legal services and thus are not part of the legal services market; it's already very saturated.
11 comments:
I like that you mention the sad Ph.D field. A co-worker is looking at paying full sticker to get a Ph.D in a very over-saturated field of study.
I guess we hold up this belief as an article of faith, i.e. "Education is the key to your future." Too bad, it often leads to the doors of permanent unemployment, under-employment, grief and frustration. (But at least university and law school administrators make out like bandits. And the banksters get to make a killing, too.)
It's also bad in the science field. Science research at our universities is essentially a pyramid scheme were the universities bring in graduate students and postdocs to do the work. These bright people put in 65 hours/week to earn their PhD's only to discover that chemistry, the life sciences, and the physics fields are oversaturated. Many then end up working low-wage (think $30,000/year for about 65 hours/week) gypsy scientist 2-3 year "gypsy" scientist positions called postdocs in the hopes of being able to eventually find assistant professor positions (good luck) or jobs as private sector scientists. After a couple postdocs many of them wash out of science. Those who are able to find positions as assistant professors need to obtain very competitive research grants or they'll be out in a couple years.
I don't think the scientists are in as bad of a position as JDs; they don't have the kind of debt we have since their graduate tuition is paid for and they actually receive stipends to live on. However, they have much larger investment of time (5-6 years to earn a PhD plus any postdoc time).
In recent years many have been fleeing the science career graveyard for--you guessed it--law school in the hopes of becoming well-to-do patent lawyers. The end result is that now we have an oversupply of patent lawyers! (Imagine that, an oversupply of people with two advanced degrees, science + law.)
Back in the 90s I had the opportunity to pursue my PhD in engineering, but after my Masters degree I just couldn't. I had hit my personal wall with classes (post-dif-eq math classes to name a few) and just was unable to go farther. So I got a job. It seemed PhDs were considered an economic liability and the first to be fired at corporations anyway, except the ones who managed to get "tenure" on some high-visibility research projects.
After years of working, I felt that more "cross-training" education would make me more valuable and upwardly-mobile, so I got the bright idea to go to law school. Oops.
You still hear today about all the emphasis on "math and science" education, as though that were the panacea to all the economic woes of young students everywhere. It has become a political catch-phrase that sounds good but means nothing, as usual. A lot of people followed that seeming-demand in the marketplace, and here we go - too may PhDs for jobs that pay crap wages. Welcome to the JD world, unfortunately.
Take-home message - most people do what they have an in-roads into, despite their efforts to the contrary. I'm not saying that serendiptiy and hard work don't matter, but the practical effect is that, like it or not, a large majority do what their daddy (or mommy) does. Not because they are lazy or have no dreams, but because the socio-economic machinery tends to turn a certain way. The pieces are set in motion almost from birth.
To put it another way - it's a virtual cinch to be King or Queen if you are the heir-apparent to the throne (just don't get knocked off by another claimant to the throne, if there is one, and make sure your religion is the popular one at the time). If you are a peasant, well, good luck with that. All the education in the world won't infuse you with royal blood.
People are looking for a simple solution to a complex problem. IT was not long ago, in the US, they were taking English, psych, and phil majors and training them to code computers. They desperately needed people to fill these positions. Nowadays, You could see this in India and China where they are taking AGri majors and teaching them to be coders and number crunchers. The US Economy is messed up at deep level.
One field that is often mentioned as a possibility for underemployed professionals is teaching, but these days, I would not recommend it. The teaching shortages that have been prophesied for a generation have never come about, except to some extent in math and science. The country produces substantial numbers of education grads with both undergraduate and graduate degrees every year. The cost of re-training for mid-career professionals from other fields is substantial; I went $30,000 into debt for a three-term master's program. The salaries in K-12 teaching are generally not high enough to allow for paying off the debt easily. This year, state and local budget crunches are leading to hundreds of thousands of teachers and professors receiving lay-off notices (and when they file, between May and August, that may considerably spike the nation's unemployment numbers). Newer teachers without multi-year contracts are especially vulnerable. Teaching skills are not generally perceived as being transferable to the business world; in fact, I think the whole notion of "transferable skills" is over-touted, since employers are always looking for specific skills. I see that even in the new 2010 U.S. News and World Report Money Guide, there is an article on "your new career as a teacher," but it is way out of date; states that were recruiting a few years ago (Florida, North Carolina, Nevada) can afford to do so no longer. Last year, after a lay-off from a corporate education and training job, I spent six months looking nationwide for a job teaching high school/middle school English or social studies, and got precisely one offer, from a Nevada charter school that proved to be dreadful and is being shut down at the end of this school year by the state. My bachelor's degree is from Yale University, my master's degree is from Boston University, I've been published, I've won awards, I'm currently certified in four states, etc., and none of it made a bit of difference. So I'm going overseas to teach business English to adults in Korea, a job that I was able to obtain readily, but the sort of thing that is clearly not an option for most teachers with spouses and families and other obligations.
Dear Patrick,
Thank you for your insightful comments about the possibility of retraining to become a teacher. I too have contemplated it, but I figured that the situation was close to what you described. Would schools even want to hire people with advanced degrees today knowing that their teachers union contracts would require that they be paid more, or would they rather import educators from the Philippines and pay them low wages? Perhaps they'll just cram more and more students into a single teacher's classroom.
They will cram, yes. The Los Angeles United School District, in addition to just sending layoff notices to 4,700 personnel, approved an expansion of class size in certain grades (including middle school) to 44 students per class. Anyone who has taught even 25 middle school students at a time will barely be able to contemplate handling 44; it truly can't be done.
There is a shortage of doctors estimated to reach 200,000 by 2020 according to Dr. Richard Cooper of the University of Pennsylvania.
There are serious concerns about doctors' career-satisfaction and income under ObamaCare.
See www.SemmelweisSociety.net and please contact me if you have questions or corrections.
HButler@pol.net
I am an european and have never been in the US but I may provide some inside.
First of all, never believe propaganda of company associates or university officials. Always check out whether your source of information has any self interest. Concerning PhD oversupply, in fact there was a big need, but its the last protected field in terms of immigration and the huge outsourcing of US companies to cheap countries created an oversupply. However, PhD education is unique regarding its specialization to a certain field. In fact there are specialities were candidates would get immediatelly jobs even now, but all too often prospective candidates enter graduate school with closed eyes or get missinformed by bad sources.
Yes, the report composed by universities and companies submitted to the government adressing an undersupply of PhD scientists in the US "Raising above the gathering Storm" is a big lie.
Concerning JD, why is school so expensive, maybe its a cashcow for something else. I understand that medical or pharmacy schools are expensive because of equipment, lab work, cadavers..., but law school? Something is wrong here. Always investigate where your money goes.
I believe the MD degree is still a safe bet, although their salaries may decrease under a new healthcare system. In addition, burnout is frequent under physicians and other health care providers such as nurses and pharmacists.
In europe its a bit different. Less companies have outsourced, more high quality jobs have remained. In addition we dont have that great oversupply. Universities select according to ability already at the undergaduate level.
But another important factor, language barrier.
The fact that english is the world language provides opportunities to its native speakers, but at the same time also disadvantages. Everbody in the world starts to learn english at a young age, able to advance more or less rapidly when needed later. This fact maintains an enormous immigration pressure. But how many chinese or indian citizens are learning german or french? Of course you can always start to learn it later in life during graduate study or postdoc, but it gets much harder at this age and stage of career development. Even many PhD level jobs frequently require fluent knowledge of the local language at a companies place. I am calling that "natural protectionism". In europe we like protectionism. With europe of course I mean continental europe, excluding the UK.
I am an european and have never been in the US but I may provide some inside.
First of all, never believe propaganda of company associates or university officials. Always check out whether your source of information has any self interest. Concerning PhD oversupply, in fact there was a big need, but its the last protected field in terms of immigration and the huge outsourcing of US companies to cheap countries created an oversupply. However, PhD education is unique regarding its specialization to a certain field. In fact there are specialities were candidates would get immediatelly jobs even now, but all too often prospective candidates enter graduate school with closed eyes or get missinformed by bad sources.
Concerning JD, why is school so expensive, maybe its a cashcow for something else. I understand that medical or pharmacy schools are expensive because of equipment, lab work, cadavers..., but law school? Something is wrong here. Always investigate where your money goes.
In europe its a bit different. Less companies have outsourced, more high quality jobs have remained. In addition we dont have that great oversupply. Universities select according to ability already at the undergaduate level.
But another important factor, language barrier.
The fact that english is the world language provides opportunities to its native speakers, but at the same time also disadvantages. Everbody in the world starts to learn english at a young age, able to advance more or less rapidly when needed later. This fact maintains an enormous immigration pressure. But how many chinese or indian citizens are learning german or french? Of course you can always start to learn it later in life during graduate study or postdoc, but it gets much harder at this age and stage of career development. Even many PhD level jobs frequently require fluent knowledge of the local language at a companies place. I am calling that "natural protectionism". In europe we like protectionism. With europe of course I mean continental europe, excluding the UK.
From personal grievous experiences I find lawyers and doctors lacking greatly in ethics, morality and social conscience. Lawyers can be compared to prostitutes who will sell their services to the highest bidder. This group will sell out a client if the opposing side will pay a higher fee. They consider the rights of people and the observance of duty and law as a ploy to be used for their personal benefit and gain. I had a civil case where "my" four attorneys were scoundrels of the lowest order. The first two were involved in the disappearance of a perjurious document of the defendant, a VP of a national grocery chain, from my case file and and from the file of the court. The 2nd two used deceitful actions to aid and conceal the actions of the 1st two. Because of their involvement in the disappearance of the perjurious document the 1st two back-yard type attorneys were ascended to jurists-one became a federal magistrate and the other became the presiding judge of the Los Angeles County court system. What kind of justice can people expect to receive from individuals with such ethics/morals. But such are the persons that occupy the judiciary system.
As for the doctors, this group will not only hide and conceal the death and harm caused by their colleagues and by the drugs that are prescribed but will deny proper care to the harmed patients. This group through their payola paid to legislators is not held accountable for the carnage which they cause but are instead rewarded year by year through higher premiums, co-payments and fees.
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