Fluster Cucked

New Video -- Why Colleges Are Opening New Law Schools and Joining the Scam

2012-01-29T23:30:00.001-05:00

This afternoon I thought it might be fun to make a new Xtranormal video critiquing the education industry for opening more unneeded law schools which will increase the number of destroyed lives. I pretty much winged it as I wrote the text, and I think it came out pretty well. I hope people enjoy it. It sure felt good to throw another rock at the law school industry and the ABA.

Here's the URL in case anyone wants to share it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tSiGME6fw8

Overeducated and Underemployed: Does That Make You a Philanthropist?

2011-11-17T15:49:00.001-05:00

I know I haven't blogged for a long time, so maybe I'll get started again with a softball post. While listening to a YouTube video of Barbara Ehrenreich, I came across a great quote. I've contemplated this notion before, that the upper classes are living off the backs of the lower classes, but not in these terms:

"The real philanthropists in our society are the people who work for less than they can actually live on because they are giving of their time and their energy and their talents all the time so that people like you can be dressed well and fed cheaply and so on. They're giving to you."

Likewise, those who are overeducated and underemployed might arguably be philanthropists in that they could be providing additional value at the workplace over employees who meet the bare minimum requirements for the job. Also, it could be argued that they have essentially donated their money to colleges and universities if they are not obtaining a proper return on their investment.

You can find Ehrenreich's quote at around 5:00 in this YouTube video:

I hope to post about another great video of hers that resonates deeply with me soon.

Summarizing the Law School Scam--a comment I posted at the ABA Journal in response to an article.

2011-07-22T14:51:00.005-04:00

Here is a comment that I posted at the ABA Journal in response to the article itself and to another poster's comment.

Zack, ABA Respond to Grassley Inquiry: Schools Aren't Misleading Scholarship Students

In response to Marcia's post, it's very possible that far fewer than 50% of all new law school graduates are able to find jobs in the legal profession. In fact, using the ABA's statistics for the number of new JDs minted every year and summing up the number produced over the past 40 year period and comparing that to the Bureau of Labor Statistics's number of people employed as lawyers, I have calculated that fewer than 54% of all JDs produced over the past 40 years work in the legal profession (at jobs of unknown quality, many of which may not provide compensation and actual after-tax wages commensurate with 7 years of college education and the costs of attending law school--solo practice, document review, "shitlaw", etc.). See:

Statistics suggest that only 53.8% of all lawyers are employed in the legal profession

I have also constructed a model and made some back-of-the-envelop calculations to show that the percentage of recent graduates who were able to find work in the legal profession may even be less than 30%. See:

Statistics may suggest that less than 30% of all new JDs were able to find work in the legal profession over the past 10 years.

The general public is unaware that a serious humanitarian crisis is occurring in the legal profession. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of recent law school graduates have been unable to find work in the legal profession while being burdened with often over $100,000 and in some cases even over $150,000 of law school loan debt (tuition + living expenses) without even considering undergraduate student loan debt. This debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Because the general public believes that all lawyers are rich, unemployed and underemployed-involuntarily-out-of-field lawyers look like huge losers to non-legal employers, and as a result they often have difficulty securing non-legal white collar employment because they are perceived as being overqualified, as being losers who couldn't make it in a profession where everyone is guaranteed to rake in gobs of money (as the general public believes), or as being a job flight risk (leaving as soon as one of those abundant $160,000/year entry-level jobs comes along).

In short, many new JDs' lives have been almost completely destroyed by JD overproduction. In my opinion, this sort of economic devastation--unemployment, underemployment, and the poverty brought on by non-dischargeable student loan debt amongst otherwise hard-working, ambitious, well-meaning, often highly intelligent young people is a national tragedy and humanitarian crisis. It is very probable that some of these poor souls, drowning a deep sea of despair, even commit suicide.

JD overproduction appears to have began in the 1970’s and has continued unabated through present times. See:

40 Years of Lawyer Overproduction, a Data Table, and 2 Charts

The ABA and the Federal Government need to address this crisis. I propose reducing the number of law schools or law school seats in this country by 75% until 95% of JD-holders can obtain work in the legal profession that provides remunerative compensation commensurate with the investment of time and money in becoming a JD.

The recent must-read New York Times article by David Segal (Law School Economics: Ka-Ching!) said that 49,700 law students matriculated according to the Law School Admission Council:

Law School Economics: Ka-Ching!

At that rate of production, we would have almost 2 MILLION (!!!) JDs who would be of working age in 40 years. If we cannot employ (as working lawyers) the (about) 1,467,000 JDs who graduated over the past 40 years, how the heck are we supposed to employ 2 million JDs? In fact if the amount of new JDs produced each year continues to increase as new law schools (university cash cows) continue to open, we may reach the 2 million mark sooner rather than later:

2 million attorneys?

2 million attorneys? Not as far-fetched as it might seem

Hopefully Congress and the ABA will act to end this humanitarian crisis before more bright ambitious young people (who have been heavily and continuously indoctrinated with the propaganda that higher education and advanced degrees are a guarantor of economic and vocational success since early childhood and arguably confused by what may be misleading JD employment statistics published by the law schools) become unwitting victims of the "Law School Scam".

However, I truly doubt that it will happen absent federal government pressure. Reducing the number of law schools and law school seats would probably need to be done over law school stakeholders' dead bodies. That is to say, the "Law School Scam" is very lucrative and beneficial for the people who work in the law school industry ( at the expense of the poor law students and hundreds of thousands of preexisting JDs (who suffer from an influx of new JDs).

Those of us who are compassionate, conscientious people need to organize and unite so that we can compel Congress and the ABA to end this worsening humanitarian crisis by dramatically reducing the number of law schools and law school seats. Employment markets may be tight in all fields, but it is better to not have a law degree and law school debt and no legal job than it is to have a law degree and law school debt and no legal job.

Why Politicians and Intellectuals (perhaps unwittingly) Support the Higher Education Scam

2011-07-20T18:08:00.002-04:00

I haven't had much time or inclination to post in the past three months, but I wrote a long post on the JD Underground forum and thought I'd turn it into a blog post.

Why is it that our nation's politicians and intellectuals (perhaps unwittingly) support the higher education scam by advocating higher education as a solution to our nation's employment problems?

Basically, the promise of higher education as a means of upward economic mobility serves a function similar to that of religion--it's a means of social control. That is precisely why our politicians, intellectuals, and university elites love to advocate it so much. Also, it is completely uncontroversial. The upper classes are being confronted by an increasingly angry populace that feels that our nation's social structure is becoming akin to a caste system with a lack of upward (but not downward) economic class mobility. If the masses began to believe that our society were structured against them and that it suffers from some sort of a gross unfairness, they could revolt like unruly Frenchmen protesting a proposal to raise the retirement age (or worse).

So, our politicians, intellectuals, business executives, and their media lackeys have been falling all over themselves to sell the promise of higher education to the masses as though it were an opiate. This goes for practically all of our politicians on both sides of the aisle; this is non-partisan. The implicit and sometimes explicit message is:

"Your unemployment and underemployment problems will be solved if you earn a college degree or obtain an advanced degree."

"The reason you're unemployed (or that your wages are low) is because you only have a high school education."

"Even though you have a bachelors degree, you're unemployed because your grades weren't high enough...or you don't have an advanced degree...or you didn't major in the right field but if you go back to school and major in a science-technology-engineering-math (STEM) field you're guaranteed to find a good solid middle class job."

Thus, unemployed and underemployed Americans will tend to blame themselves for not being educated enough, for not having been smart enough, for not having worked hard enough, or for not having networked hard enough rather than to blame the state of the American economy, our politicians, and the upper classes. At least the masses won't blame our politicians as much as they otherwise might. Also, many people really do believe all of that claptrap, especially older people (who entered the labor market in a very different time) and people who are currently happily employed. Also, people who tend to support free market ideology, such as Libertarians, Republicans, and the TEA Party types are liable to buy into the propaganda because it is consistent with their faith in Meritocracy (work hard and take responsibility by preparing yourself through higher education and you will get the jobs and vocational success that you deserve).

I have been writing, for a long time, that it's much easier for politicians to say that we need more and better education than it is to actually address our real economic problems. Advocating higher education is warm-and-fuzzy and touchy-feely. What kind of a monster would oppose higher education? In contrast, it's much more difficult to even merely acknowledge nation's our real economic problems--Global Labor Arbitrage and population explosion:

(1.) We've sent millions of jobs including many college-education-requiring knowledge-based jobs to Mexico, India, and China (foreign outsourcing or offshoring).

(2.) We've also imported hundreds of thousands of foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas to displace Americans domestically from what are often college-education-requiring knowledge-based jobs (often the ones people are supposed to retrain and re-educate for).

(3.) We've imported tens of millions of impoverished immigrants (legally and illegally) to displace working class Americans from their jobs and to drive down wages while also saddling ourselves with the costs of having to care for millions more poor people (health care for illegals, education for their kids, any associated criminal costs, etc.).

(4.) As a result of this mass immigration, we've suffered a population explosion. This means that we have fewer resources available per capita that can be used for consumption and economic growth, resulting in higher prices for those limited natural resources and a degradation of our environment (arable land, land around cities for housing, domestic oil supplies, freshwater, clean air, lumber, food, etc.). See the must-watch video: Immigration by the Numbers (aka "Immigration Gumballs").

Who does Global Labor Arbitrage benefit? The upper classes who own the businesses of course! They're also the same people who purchased our politicians. As a result of this gigantic increase in the amount of available labor, business owners can keep larger percentages of workers' contributions to the act of wealth production for themselves as profits. That is to say, the increase in the amount of labor relative to the amount of capital (jobs) serving the American market means that the price point where the supply and demand curves intersect must decrease. Facial prices for some goods and services may also decrease, but the end result is that workers' compensation in terms of the amount of goods and services they can afford to purchase must decrease. So, the Rich will get richer and the middle and lower classes will become poorer.

It's so much easier for a politician to say, "I propose to solve our economic problems by strengthening K-12 education, by increasing funding for college education, and by making college education more accessible," than it is to say, "I propose trade protectionism, an end to the work visa programs, and a moratorium on immigration."

Sadly, the sheeple just guzzle down this higher education message as though they were drinking Jonestown Kool-Aid. Then, when they lose their jobs, fail to find jobs with their college degrees, or suffer wage and benefits cuts, they blame themselves for not having enough education. Higher education also removes people from the labor market, decreasing the unemployment numbers. (In the absence of a labor shortage, I think that college students should be counted as unemployed, or at lest some percentage should be counted as unemployed.) Ultimately, the American people are themselves to blame for buying into this message, failing to understand what's really going on, and for electing our current politicians and for failing to drown all of them in the Potomac.

Will this higher education problem ever get resolved? As the force of Global Labor Arbitrage transforms our nation into a third world country and as student loans spiral out of control, eventually college graduates will end up defaulting in mass, making government-backed student loans untenable. Over a period of decades, the populace (many of whom will already be used to third world standards of living having emigrated from third world countries or being one generation removed) will become complacent about the "New Normal" and accept their impoverished standard of living, the student loans will disappear, and many colleges will shut down.

The United States may transform itself into a third world economy, but the Rich will enjoy large amounts of low-wage labor and our current politicians will have been able to successfully deflect a terrified populace's angry wrath.

Graduate from Law School and You Too Can Sign Up for Food Stamps!

2011-04-21T19:35:00.004-04:00

According to a recent post by "SoDespondent" on the JD Underground forum, a Top 20 law school's career services office helped a 3L sign up for food stamps! Considering how extremely over-glutted the legal profession is and how having a JD often makes you overqualified and unemployable for non-legal jobs, a great many law school graduates are going to need food stamps.

If you are a college graduate and you qualify for food stamps, I think you should take the food stamps without guilt. Our government's policies and our society's support for those policies have resulted in huge oversupplies of college and law school graduates. So, smugly employed taxpayers and our government should help pay the price for the unemployment and underemployment crisis confronting many college graduates.

Here are some excerpts from "So Despondent's" initial post titled, Confirmed By Prof: Career Services Helping Students Sign Up for Food Stamps:

By telling them that yes, in fact, career services IS HELPING CERTAIN 3Ls LEARN HOW TO APPLY FOR FOOD STAMPS (EBT). They tried to provide some context and explain that the student who approached his counselor about how he would live has $140,000 in debt and will be working for "almost no money" at a nonprofit. They are trying to paint this as an atypical case and billing it as "noble self-sacrificing law student goes into poverty in order to do good works at nonprofit." Students aren't buying it, neither was the prof.

But apparently the word is out, now. I wonder how many more 3Ls, now that it's been confirmed, will slink into career services in the next couple of weeks to see if they too are eligible? Just another day at a TTTop 20 law school!

From a follow-up post in the same thread, also by "SoDespondent":

Well, I don't know how well it stuck, but from talking to other students tonight, apparently this is in response to students asking them to start providing information on medicaid and food aid.

The big question on my mind, is, which law school is it and how many other law schools are doing the same? Maybe the law schools can start advertising about how their career services offices will help graduates apply for food stamps, welfare, public housing assistance, and Medicaid.

Dear ABA, it's all your fault!

Even Medical Tech Types Can't Find Entry-Level Jobs (the Higher Education Scam Continues)

2011-04-20T17:07:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room with my laptop where I have just stumbled across an industry journal for surgical technologists. I don't know much about this field, so I quickly browsed through it and came across a short op-ed written by a newly-minted surgical tech lamenting the difficulty she is having finding an entry-level job. This is interesting because according to current conventional wisdom, jobs in health care are supposed to be abundant. (I'm under the impression that surgical techs assist surgeons in the operating room.)

The short article is titled, "In Search of that Perfect (Any) Job" by Sharon Goff, CST, published in the April 2011 edition of The Surgical Technologist. She wrote that she is a mother in her forties who graduated with honors with an associates degree. Here are three quotes:

Despite it all, I had no job. As a matter of fact, only two girls out of my graduating class have gotten a job.

I have visited many online surgical technology forums and seen the disappointment and anger from techs all over the country experiencing the same thing.

I quit visiting the forums after that because they are too depressing. Shattered dreams, mounting debt, many feeling lied to or manipulated by the schools they attended.

Presumably, thousands of unemployed and underemployed people have invested time and money retraining and re-educating for medical support fields. It all sounds like another instance of for-profit (and even public) colleges raking in the dough by making false promises.

In the meantime, as Americans' aggregate student loan debt reaches record levels (daily?), the media and our government will continue to promote the higher education scam. For example: Ohio Universities Told to Develop 3-Year Degrees so that higher education is more accessible to people, allowing them to become "productive members of society" with solid middle class jobs. Of course, our politicians and media commentators completely fail to realize that increasing the number of college graduates will not magically increase the number of middle class jobs, just the number of rightfully angry unemployed and underemployed people with student loan debt.

Even Law Students at a Top 10 Law School Are Suffering from Entry-Level Job Hunting Woes

2011-04-05T20:25:00.002-04:00

Evidence that the legal profession is a severely glutted field and that going to law school may be a horrible investment continues to pile up. The problem of JD overproduction has become so bad that even graduates at one of the nation's traditional Top 10 law schools are having difficulty securing decent entry-level employment.

According to a recent post at the Above the Law blog, students at the very prestigious University of Virginia School of Law have been airing out their frustrations recently. One artistic student took a stack of rejection letters and constructed a rejection letter replica of one of the law school buildings. Other students wore t-shirts saying, "Virginia Law $40,000 a year and No Job". (Follow the links to see the photos.)

OK, ABA, what now? Will you guys continue to accredit more unneeded law schools? What does it say when students at one of the top 5% of the nation's law schools are having difficulty securing entry-level legal employment?

Less Than Slavery: Unpaid Internships

2011-03-28T01:19:00.006-04:00

A very depressing and poignant consequence of our nation's Education Arms Race and college graduate overproduction is employers' growing expectation that college graduates should slave away at unpaid internships. This is like adding insult to injury. It is no longer sufficient to invest four years in college and tens of thousands of dollars to prove that you are serious about working in a field and building a career. Now you need to work for free. In economic terms, people with college degrees and often advanced and professional degrees are now a dime-a-dozen and the base ability to perform white collar labor no longer has much value.

As people graduate into glutted fields, they seek out these unpaid internships in the desperate hopes of maintaining their employability and the value of their college degrees. Sadly, many if not most interns will probably fail to find work in their fields. It's easy to understand why people do it, and I don't blame them, but often they are just prolonging having to face reality while their hopes for middle class lives die slowly. The competition for good internships has become so bad that various sources have reported that some people are even paying money to work for free!

I have always taken offense to this notion that college graduates should work for free. They've paid their tuition, they've done their time, and they're ready to contribute. Perhaps decades ago it wasn't so awful. In the past, perhaps people were able to obtain career-building employment through internships, but today it seems like they are just providing free labor. It's somewhat understandable that employers would prefer to hire people who are working for free as opposed to moping around at home unemployed. Sadly, this social convention is victimizing hordes of unemployed and underemployed people.

If unpaid internships no longer provide a high chance of obtaining career-building employment in your field, then they are worse than slavery. At least slaves receive room and board. Interns only receive pats on the head while they pile on credit card and student loan debt. Modern day internships may thus be a form of neo-slavery imposed on unemployed and underemployed college graduates by our social conventions. This is just another aspect of our nation's decreasing quality of life and transformation into a third world country.

EDIT: For clarification, I don't deny that it's better to be a free intern than to be a slave. Slavery is a horrible thing and the suffering you might experience as an intern does not in any way compare to the suffering of being an actual slave. However, from a strictly economic perspective, it seems to me that a slave receives more compensation. That is not to say that it is good compensation or desirable compensation or that anyone would prefer to be an actual slave over an intern. I'm just saying that unless an unpaid internship leads to an actual job, a slave, or at least most slaves, receive more compensation in the form of some sort of food and shelter. My intention with this post was not to comment on slavery, but on unpaid internships. I hope this additional paragraph clarifies the context of my post for people who might wish to take it out of context.

BLS Projects a very optimistic 98,500 new jobs for lawyers. In that time I project a very conservative net increase of at least 189,442 new JDs.

2011-03-13T14:09:00.003-04:00

In a comment to Friday's post, the author of the Law School Tuition Bubble blog pointed out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of jobs for lawyers will increase by 98,500 over the ten year period from 2008 to 2018. (See the "Projections" data.) Adjusting for lawyer retirements, what is the net increase in the number of lawyers produced over those ten years?

Let's use my standard assumption that a lawyer would want to practice or would end up practicing for 40 years. (If someone graduated at age 25, he would earn their living working as a lawyer for 40 years before retiring at age 65.) We have ABA data for the number of JDs produced between 1969 and 1978 (corresponding to JD production 40 years in the future from 2009 to 2018). The net change in the number of JDs will be the difference between the number of JDs produced between 2009 and 2018 and the number produced from 1969 through 1978.

Year	New JDs
1969	16,733
1970	17,477
1971	17,006
1972	22,342
1973	27,756
1974	28,729
1975	29,961
1976	32,597
1977	33,640
1978	33,317

Unfortunately, we don't know how many new JDs will be minted between 2011 and 2018. The only data I have in those regards is that 44,000 were produced in 2009. Let's assume that 45,000 new JDs will be produced for each of the 9 years between 2010 and 2018. (In reality, the number will probably be higher since the ABA continues accrediting new law schools.)

Years	Law School Grads	Law School Grads	Difference
2009 - 1969	44,000	16,733	27,267
2010 - 1970	45,000	17,477	27,523
2011 - 1971	45,000	17,006	27,994
2012 - 1972	45,000	22,342	22,658
2013 - 1973	45,000	27,756	17,244
2014 - 1974	45,000	28,729	16,271
2015 - 1975	45,000	29,961	15,039
2016 - 1976	45,000	32,597	12,403
2017 - 1977	45,000	33,640	11,360
2018 - 1978	45,000	33,317	11,683
Sum			189,442

So, for the BLS's projected 98,500 new lawyer jobs, the law schools and the ABA will produce a net increase of 189,442 new lawyers. Assuming that these optimistic numbers are correct, only 52.0% of all new law school graduates will be able to find lawyer jobs.

I think that projection is very optimistic. First, it assumes that the number of jobs for lawyers will actually increase. Last week the ABA reported that the legal profession lost 2900 attorney jobs last month (when jobs in other sectors supposedly increased). In the meantime legal process outsourcing is shipping lawyer jobs overseas and computers may become capable of basic document review. Also, our nation's economy will probably continue to suffer from malaise, and as a general rule, less economic activity means fewer business transactions and less work for lawyers. Moreover, historically the amount of new lawyer production increases over time. In other words, in reality more than 45,000 new JDs will probably be produced each year while the increase in the number of jobs for lawyers will probably be smaller than 98,500, assuming that it increases at all. Consequently, I suspect that the percentage of new graduates who are able to find entry-level law jobs will be much closer to the 29.1% and 27.35% figures I calculated previously.

Of course, in response, the ABA will probably continue to accredit new law schools and the law schools will probably continue to increase tuition and keep raking in the bucks.

Two Profound Articles. (That's Right JDs Rising Blog. It Is Very Much the ABA's and the Law Schools' Fault.)

2011-03-11T09:07:00.009-05:00

I want to highlight two profound articles about the law school scam. Other scambuster bloggers have posted about them. I probably first became aware of these articles from reading the excellent Exposing the Law School Scam blog, but I want to mention them on my blog in the hopes of increasing publicity for these two pieces.

The first article is one of the best pieces I have ever read about the law school scam. It was authored by Jason M. Dolin, Esq., a self-identified solo practitioner and adjunct law professor who sometimes teaches at a fourth tier toilet, Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio. (It appears to have been presented at a conference.) This article should be required reading for anyone who is considering the LSAT.

Opportunity Lost: How Law School Disappoints Law Students, The Public, and The Legal Profession (This link is to a PDF.)

He begins by noting that almost all new lawyers are unprepared for the real-world practice of law and then points out that lawyer overproduction is a serious problem.

In my view there are two interconnected problems, both of which emanate from failings in the world of legal education. The first, is that law schools continue to produce large numbers of lawyers, flooding an already drowning market. The second is, that having flooded the market, law schools have refused to teach new lawyers how to swim – how to practice. Individually, the effects of either would be bad enough. Together, however, the effects of these two shortcomings have had a tremendously damaging effect on law students, the legal profession, and most importantly, the public.

Later he goes on to say:

Driving a lot of the change in the world of law practice has been the glut of lawyers on the market; a glut fostered and even encouraged by the ABA and by law schools. According to the American Bar Foundation, in 1951 there was one lawyer for every 695 Americans. Since then, in the year 2000 there was 1 lawyer for every 264 Americans.4 At that rate, in the year 2050 there will be 1 lawyer for every 100 Americans. I think it is safe to say that, as a nation, the supply of lawyers long ago outstripped the demand for their services. There are simply too many lawyers and too many law schools in the United States. Given the oversupply of lawyers, if law schools were at all sensitive to market forces they would be shutting their doors or at least reducing their student headcount. Instead, new law schools continue to open each year.

(Emphasis is mine.)

This is a profound admission coming from someone who sometimes teaches at a law school. Note that I have calculated that the lawyer-to-population ratio is about 1 (accredited) JD for every 215 Americans based on ABA and Census Bureau stats, only counting JDs produced over the past 40 years. (In previous posts I calculated what the lawyer-to-population ratio would be if the population and rate of lawyer production remained static for 40 years and concluded that over the past forty years the average of that figure would be about 1 JD for every 172 people.)

Here is another profound quote. Here Dolin explains how JD overproduction is bad for consumers of legal services. Prices decrease and access to a lawyer might increase, but at what cost? He explains how it is actually a disservice to the public. That's right, the ABA, in its seemingly ever incessant quest to increase new lawyer production (such as the publication of knowingly misleading stats about lawyer incomes) is doing a disservice to the public! (The ABA article is misleading because the ABA very well knows (they would have to be retarded not to know) that they are a high-profile and presumably authoritative and reliable source of information, that prospective law students and their families might read it when deciding whether to go to law school, and that those income stats fail to account for the "incomes" or lack of income of unemployed and underemployed JDs.)

The overabundance of lawyers is not without consequence. It is not benign. It has hurt the practice and, more importantly, it has hurt the public. This glut of lawyers has made competition for clients greater than it has ever been. While the overabundance of lawyers may have the short term consumer benefit of depressing legal fees, there is more to competent lawyering than cost. The low cost provider is not always the competent provider. The oversupply has caused sometimes vicious and underhanded competition for clients. When there are too many lawyers and not enough clients, there is a greater temptation for attorneys to over promise and, once the client has been landed, to overbill. Stories of bill padding are legion. The lack of business can encourage those on the margin to file frivolous lawsuits, built on little evidence, in the hope of a fast settlement. Further, in a too-competitive market lawyers are tempted to handle cases that are beyond their competence or outside their area of expertise. The results can be disastrous and the clients pay the price.

(Emphasis is mine.)

That is profound! Consider the source. The author is an adjunct law professor who seems to have presented this paper at a conference and who published it as a formal paper and not just a hot-headed scambuster blogger. So, JD overproduction encourages potentially unethical behavior and exposes the public to incompetence or at least amateur work product! Thus, the ABA and the law schools, rather than doing a service to American society, are, in essence, potentially exposing the public to unethical behavior and bad counsel!

A survey conducted for the State Bar of California in 1994 found that two thirds of the attorneys surveyed believed that lawyers “compromise their professionalism as a result of economic pressures.”[8] Is it just coincidence that the increased loss of civility and professionalism coincides with the explosive growth of law schools? While you can’t blame the loss of professionalism entirely on the glut of lawyers, it is certainly a large contributing factor.[9] The glut has turned lawyering almost entirely into a business, with an attendant loss of the professional values that once made lawyering a great and justifiably proud profession.

The result of all this is that law practice today is faster, more competitive, and more pressurized than ever before. Lawyers today face pressures and challenges unknown by those who practiced as recently as twenty or thirty years ago. Lawyers, many new but some old, struggle to survive in such a marketplace. The temptation to cut ethical corners increases as it becomes more difficult to make a living. According to former Chief Justice Rehnquist, “The greater the pressure of maximization of income, the more likely some sort of ethical difficulties will be encountered….”

So, why are the law schools continuing to pump out new JDs? Why are they providing fraudulently misleading employment and income statistics?

Why then, given the glut of lawyers, do new law schools continue to open and existing law schools continue to graduate new lawyers in large numbers? The answer, of course, is that by and large law schools make money. Law schools and their affiliated universities have benefited handsomely from the increased number of those who desire law degrees and they continue to mint graduates in large numbers. Whereas many, if not most, graduate programs are money losers for their universities, law schools are moneymakers and profit centers.

It's a great paper that succinctly excoriates the law schools and, by implication, the ABA that accredits them.

The other article is the famous recent New York Times piece, Is Law School a Losing Game. The content is nothing new, and while this article may not be a scholarly paper like Dolin's, it is profound because it was featured in a preeminent newspaper, exposing millions of non-lawyers to the truth. Many readers probably believed that becoming a lawyer was like purchasing a golden ticket to the gravy train. This op-ed probably discouraged some pre-laws from fucking up their lives and it probably dampened parents' and families' enthusiasm for sending their kids to law school.

Here is one of the gems from near the beginning of the article. Once again, the ABA is implicated as a promoter of the law school scam.

How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves. “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”

IT is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

(Emphasis is mine.)

The surveys themselves have a built-in bias. As many deans acknowledge, the results are skewed because graduates with high-paying jobs are more likely to respond than people earning $9 an hour at Radio Shack. (Those who don’t respond are basically invisible, aside from reducing the overall response rate of the survey.)

Here is a profound quote from Professor Henderson. He has the cajones (and I assume tenure) to come out and identify, in public, the only real solution to the problem of JD overproduction:

Solving the J.D. overabundance problem, according to Professor Henderson, will have to involve one very drastic measure: a bunch of lower-tier law schools will need to close. But nobody inside of the legal establishment, he predicts, has the stomach for that. “Ultimately,” he says, “some public authority will have to step in because law schools and lawyers are incapable of policing themselves.”

(Emphasis is mine.)

I have been saying this since long before I started this blog. The solution is not to increase the preparedness of new lawyers. Practical skills training might make us feel better, but it won't address the real problem. Rather, the only real solution is JD birth control. Since the law schools have a financial interest in JD overproduction, some outside authority will need to step in. Perhaps the student loan spigot will be shut off when the bubble bursts and impoverished unemployed and underemployed JDs begin defaulting on their law school student loans in mass or having their federal loans discharged by Income Based Repayment (IBR). Humanitarian concerns probably won't end the law school scam. Instead, economic practicalities might catch up to it, eventually.

Hopefully these two pieces are just the beginning of a tidal wave of information that will change the general public's perception of the value of law school and higher education.

For those of you who are wondering about the JDs Rising reference in the post title, here is a link to the post I was referring to: Dear Law School: It's all your fault. Signed, recent grad.

EDIT: The ABA Journal just reported a story that is a great example of how JD overproduction can act as a disservice to the public and how it can encourage unethical behavior. In this case an inexperienced (and probably desperate for business and income) lawyer defended a client in a murder trial, but was in over his head. Also, according to the ABA Journal's report, it sounds like he may have even attempted to engage in something akin to witness tampering.

Mayhem in Madison

2011-02-22T20:56:00.010-05:00

If you've been following the national news, then you've probably seen videos of the large teacher and state employee protests in Madison, Wisconsin.

The protesters are challenging the Republicans' and new governor Scott Walker's plan to end state employee unions' ability to engage in collective bargaining. As I understand it, the Republicans are hoping to cut state employee's pay, health benefits, and pension benefits. They claim that state employees receive higher compensation than workers in the private sector and that since Wisconsin has a large budget deficit, it can no longer afford generous benefits for state employees. These claims are probably factual.

The proposed pay and benefit cuts might be justified, and they may make economic sense. What does this foretell for the future of the American middle class? How did our nation's economy devolve to this point? Earlier today I heard a radio interview where a supporter of the new policy said that the problem is that state employees are receiving more compensation than people in the private sector. I disagree. I think the root cause of the problem is that our nation's economy and labor markets are depressed and have been trending downward for years resulting in compensation and job security inferior to that of state employees. In other words, the problem is not that teachers and state employees are paid too much; the problem is labor market conditions that dictate low pay for everyone else.

Unfortunately, the proposed Wisconsin cuts are not the opening shot in a war against the American middle class. Rather, it's just another salvo in a war that our politicians (on both sides of the aisle) and the wealthy elite have been waging against the lower classes for decades. Presumably, Wisconsin's budget deficit is the product of a vicious circle of decreasing tax revenue and an increased demand for social welfare services (unemployment compensation, welfare, etc.). Increased unemployment and underemployment decreases state tax revenues and increases the need for social welfare services.

As I pointed out in my last post, our nation's job markets have been racked by global labor arbitrage. Over the past several decades our government's economic policies have displaced American workers and depressed their wages by sending millions of jobs (including many knowledge-based jobs) overseas, by importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers on H-1B and L-1 visas to displace college graduates, and by encouraging millions of poor immigrants to flood into the country, displacing lower class Americans from their jobs and putting downward pressure on their wages. (Does your nation have unemployment and underemployment problems? Do millions of people live in poverty? Solution: import millions more poor people and send jobs overseas. Brilliant!)

Thus, it was inevitable that Wisconsin and other states would eventually be forced to reduce compensation for teachers and state employees. Public school teachers and other state employees could enjoy decent pay and generous health and pension benefits for only so long while the rest of the populace became increasingly impoverished. It's easy to understand how taxpayers could resent state workers' job security, yearly raises, and generous benefits. (Pension? Who the hell has a pension these days other than government employees and perhaps some unionized auto workers?)

What many people don't realize is that the unions they resent also benefit non-union workers in various ways. It's regrettable that they are too ignorant to direct their ire at the real causes of our nation's and states' economic problems. Instead, middle class Republican supporters and union busters are unwittingly cheering on the the demise of solid, secure middle class jobs in the name of fiscal responsibility and free market principles (which they hold in a manner akin to zealous belief in religious dogma).

Welcome to the plight of the American middle class, Wisconsin public school teachers and state workers.

Congress and the White House battle over the budget but won't fight the real war

2011-02-18T15:37:00.002-05:00

What do you do when, as a result of widespread economic malaise, your nation's tax revenue can't keep pace with your nation's expenditures and states' and the populace's need for federal government spending (impoverished and unemployed Americans) has exploded? Would you address the root cause of the problem--your nation's economic malaise, or would you address a symptom of the problem--an exploding federal budget deficit?

Congress and the White House have decided to valiantly address the budget deficit while completely failing to even acknowledge the existence of our nation's fundamental economic problems. By squabbling over the budget, they can fool the sheeple and the Tea Partiers into thinking that they are hard at work. However, in reality Congress and the White House are blithely distracting the American people from our nation's real problems.

Of course, Congress wouldn't consider increasing tax revenue by raising taxes on the rich, a class of purportedly downtrodden folks who are enjoying all of the increased riches that have come from alleged productivity gains and who seem to own increasing percentages of the nation's wealth. They wouldn't dare consider tax increases because it would be like cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Why would you want to bite the hands that feed you with campaign contributions? Besides, Tea Party morons and Joe-the-Plumber types would regard that as an assault against everything America stands for even though higher taxes for the rich would be in their own rational economic self interest. (I might be poor working stiff today, but I'm planning to own a business if I ever get my plumber's license!)

If the Republicans and Democrats really wanted to address our federal (and state) budget problems they could start by resurrecting our nation's comatose economy.

(1.) Over the past several decades our government has allowed millions of formerly middle class jobs to be sent overseas, which increased domestic unemployment and social welfare expenditures.

(2.) Then Congress allowed businesses to further depress wages and to displace Americans from often college-education-requiring, knowledge-based jobs (the ones Americans are supposed to retrain and reeducate for) by importing hundreds of thousands of foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas. The resultant laid off, unemployed, underemployed, and student loan-ridden Americans also increased the need for domestic social welfare expenditures.

(3.) Then our government allowed corporations to further depress wages and displace Americans by allowing tens of millions of impoverished immigrants to enter the country (legally and illegally). Aside from having to spend money on health care and education (Arizona, California, etc.) for imported poor people and their families, the government also needs to spend money on social welfare for resultant unemployed Americans and working poor Americans whose wages have been further depressed.

In other words, federal government policies have exposed the U.S. economy to an economic force called Global Labor Arbitrage. In essence, our nation's economy and job market are being merged with the economies and job markets of billions of impoverished people in the third world (Mexico, India, China). Anyone who understands basic economics knows that when you increase the supply of a good (such as the supply of labor) relative to a static demand (capital, jobs, the need for employees) that the price point (wages, purchasing power, standard of living) must decrease. Basically, the U.S. standard of living is going to average out with that of the third world. Lost middle class jobs are being replaced with poverty wage jobs.

What a brilliant economic policy! Of course, it benefits the wealthy who own the businesses that can now purchase labor at much lower price points, allowing them to keep a larger percentage of the value of a worker's contribution to the act of wealth production. Prices for goods and services haven't decreased in proportion with Americans' decreasing wages, so in a sense this is a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes to the rich.

Consequently, tax revenue is decreasing or at least failing to keep pace with the increasing need for social welfare (and warfare) expenditures. In response, Congress and the White House want to balance the federal budget deficit without acknowledging our underlying economic problems. Ever heard of a tariff? Has the thought of completely eliminating the H-1B and L-1 visa programs crossed your pea-sized Tea Bagger minds? How about a moratorium on immigration and deportation of all the illegals? Traitorously, instead of addressing our nation's fundamental economic problems, our Congressmen are going to accept that the U.S. is now impoverished nation.

It gets even better! Obama thinks that the solution is for Americans to go to college. This way Americans will be prepared to fill the knowledge-based jobs that were sent overseas or taken by visa holders. Selling education to the American sheeple assuages a panicked and terrified populace and tricks them into believing that they are unemployed and underemployed because they either don't have enough college degrees and/or just aren't good enough to compete for work. What's sad is that Americans are imbibing this message like Kool-Aid at Jonestown.

White House? Congress? Republicans? Democrats? Genius!

Why claims that college degrees have value for "alternative careers" are almost always horse puckey

2011-02-13T21:00:00.006-05:00

College presidents, deans, and professors are very much aware that many of their students (if not most depending on the field) will not find jobs in their fields of study. To assuage their guilt and the concerns of their students (aka meal tickets), academic and industry shills attempt to sell students on the value and promise of "alternative careers". "Don't fret. You can do anything with a (insert major here) degree!", they exclaim.

For example, if you're slaving away in a science laboratory working towards your PhD. and lamenting the prospect of having to invest several more years afterward working as a low-paid ($30,000/year often without benefits or job security) and overworked (think 65-70 hours per week) gypsy scientist postdoctoral researcher, don't lament the lack of solid career jobs for scientists. Look on the bright side! Now you too can pursue an alternative career! In fact, years ago Science magazine (a very prestigious flagship publication) even started a "Science's Next Wave" website, perhaps in part or wholly to assuage graduate students' and prospective graduate students' career anxieties. (This is important to the industry because academic science research and undergraduate teaching assistant instruction would grind to a halt without armies of science graduate students. It's a pyramid scheme.) I haven't paid attention to Science's Next Wave for years, but if I remember correctly, in the Nineties alternative careers were regularly discussed.

In the heavily glutted legal profession we have books such as "The Lawyers Career Change Handbook: More than 300 Things You Can Do With a Law Degree". That's just one of the many advice books aimed at unemployed and underemployed lawyers. The legal field is so heavily glutted that the market can support several different books, such as the aptly named Alternative Careers for Lawyers.)

Almost all of the academics' and institutions' claims are bullshit. If our nation had a glut of people in only two or three fields and shortages in many others, then the claims of wonderful alternative careers might be truthful. However, for years, even before the recession, we have had oversupplies of college graduates in just about every field. How are graduates supposed to find alternative white collar career jobs if graduates in almost all of the other fields are also having to pursue alternative careers? How are you supposed to compete for a job in another field when people who majored in that field are desperately competing for those same jobs? Thus, claims by academics that the overproduction of graduates in their fields is justified because their graduates can find alternative white collar careers in other fields are almost completely disingenuous. Consequently, according to one study, 17 million college graduates are working in (presumably low-paying non-white collar) jobs that do not require or make real use of a college education.

Hoping that unemployed and underemployed graduates can build productive and financially rewarding lives working alternative careers is a nice gesture, but it won't address our nation's social and economic problems. Instead, the solution is to restore some sense of market forces to higher education so that college graduate production more closely matches the real world demand.

College Tuition Insanity: Tuition Increases Outpace Inflation (a visual)

2011-02-06T12:08:00.005-05:00

I just found a chart that shows how the price of college tuition has dramatically outpaced inflation, including health care costs. I think it provides a great visual of what happens when market forces (such as the ability to discharge loans in bankruptcy) are completely removed from higher education and when student loans are passed out like candy on Halloween. The chart seems to show a doubling of college tuition costs since 2000 whereas health care costs have only increased by about 53%. You can find it at the DShort blog.

Coincidentally, as tuition has skyrocketed, the value of a college education has plummeted. It's too bad we can't quantify and plot the decreasing value of a college degree and juxtapose it with a plot of the increasing tuition on the same chart. In the meantime our politicians and media pundits are still hawking higher education as a solution to our nation's economic problems and even people with Down Syndrome can go to college today.

This chart is from the DShort blog.

Law Degree Burns

2010-12-17T22:59:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry I haven't posted much lately. I've been pretty busy for the past two months but hope to start blogging again soon.

Anyway, enjoy watching this rather bittersweet video that implicitly protests the overproduction of college graduates. What would happen if angry JDs banded together to burn their law school diplomas in front of the ABA's headquarters as a publicity stunt?

Pharmacy School Scam?

2010-11-04T20:41:00.000-04:00

If you have a science degree and you are languishing in the science career graveyard, then you may have considered going to pharmacy school. In the past, being a pharmacist was a solid, stable, perhaps rather boring occupation. However, this field, too, may become glutted in the future, especially by the time someone who starts in the Fall of 2011 or 2012 graduates (four years later).

I have contemplated pharmacy as a career in the past and was bothered by my perception that the field was changing in a way that would be bad for pharmacists. Increasing amounts of prescriptions are being filled by mail order, reducing the need for retail pharmacists. Also, it's bothersome that employers for pharmacists almost have an oligopoly on the employment market; there aren't that many potential employers for you. What happens if you piss off the Target or Walgreens chain for some reason, permanently barring yourself from employment in a large percentage of the market? What if you get blackballed? What if Congress decides to allow foreign pharmacists to fill prescriptions by mail order? What if automated machines start dispensing medication instead?

I haven't really paid much attention to the field of pharmacy, so it's possible that what I am posting is naive and ill-informed. However, I recently came across an article that confirms my suspicions and, worse, claims that the amount of new pharmacist production has increased dramatically: Pharmacists Face Challenges of Oversupply, Changing Roles.

The allure of graduating into a six-figure job has swelled the number of pharmacy schools and thus graduates. In 2000, there were 81 accredited pharmacy schools and programs in the United States; today there are 111, data from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy shows.

Does the dramatic increase in the number of pharmacy schools and thus new pharmacist production sound familiar? A 30 school increase is a 37% increase in the number of pharmacy schools and perhaps a 37% increase in the number of new pharmacists.

On its Web site, Pharmacy Today posted a comment from a reader who likens the situation to the late 1970s "when pharmacy schools were utilizing capitation funds generated by greatly increased class size. My class headcount went from 49 to 108 in the course of one year. Wages were suppressed, opportunities absent, chains were in charge of our lives." The writer concluded by saying, "We can see the full circle of supply, demand, and compensation issues completed."

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the universities opened new pharmacy schools so that they could become profit centers. In the meantime:

The rise in interest and enrollments – though academic programs have expanded, they still only admit a fraction of applicants – collided with cost-cutting efforts by employers and technological innovations that have reduced the demand for pharmacists in some settings.

This sounds eerily like what happened to law schools and the legal profession.

Today's pharmacist, if he or she doesn't want to move away from the "lick and stick" role of prescription-filler, may soon find his job headed toward obsolescence, says one state leader.

Dennis Bryan, RPh, MBA, FAPA, a semi-retired former pharmacy store owner and president of the Illinois Pharmacist Association. "Standing behind a counter and filling a prescription is going to disappear."

To illustrate what just might be on the horizon, Bryan points to some drug store chains exploring centralized filling – where prescriptions are filled in a regional facility and sent out to stores – and self-serve kiosks. The latter are designed to remotely dispense prescription medications and soon may be rolling out in the United States and Canada, reports Selfservice.com.

Yup, I knew it. I thought something about going to pharmacy school smelled funny. It looks like another educational undertaking where you will end up going $120,000+ into student loan debt to enter a glutted, contracting field. Of course, you can bet your bottom dollar that as vending machines start to replace retail pharmacists, pharmacy schools will eagerly advertise misleading employment and income stats to entice naive undergraduates, medical school rejects, and disgruntled scientists into going to pharmacy school. Another car on the college-education-requiring jobs gravy train is falling off the tracks.

YouTube Video Parodying the Value of Going to Law School Goes Viral

2010-10-25T10:22:00.002-04:00

Many of us enjoyed the "So You Want to Go to Law School" video and now it has gone viral. (The video was produced by a guy who calls himself David and who has his own blog, The Corner.)

I think most of its publicity came from its being on CNN, though I can't find the video. However, I was able to find a transcript. The hosts were discussing how easy it is to produce an Xtra Normal video:

LEVS: Now the next thing I'm showing you is what might become a new phenomenon. There's a program out there called Xtranormal that will allow you to create your own animated video.
WHITFIELD: OK.
LEVS: By just typing in words, and watch what happens, here's an example of a guy. This guy put one together called "You're sure you want to go to law school?" Take a look.

I had seen "So You Want to go to Law School" before but didn't know it had gone viral. I learned about it when I discovered that my own XtraNormal video (on YouTube) had started picking up thousands of new hits and I began searching for the reason. Apparently my video is piggybacking on "So You Want to go to Law School", being listed as the second video reference for it.

David discussed his XtraNormal video in two posts on his blog, which does not appear to be a law school scambuster blog:

How a Video Goes Viral

So You Want to Go to Law School...

Congratulations, David, and awesome job with your video!

EDIT: I just found out that Elie Mystal cited my cartoon in one of his Above the Law posts. Thanks Elie!

Are Americans Giving Up on the Notion of the American Dream?

2010-10-19T20:11:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago NPR's Talk of the Nation show produced an interesting report about the American Dream: More Americans Giving Up on the American Dream. Both the primary guest and the two callers made for an illuminating segment.

First, LA Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez discussed the role the illusion of the American Dream plays in maintaining social stability.

Mr. RODRIGUEZ: Well, I mean, if you imagine sort of freedom being sort of the ideological force behind the American experiment and democracy, lets say its the operating system, then the source of the glue, the social cohesion is that dream. It's what really - as if we're - whatever indignities we may be suffering at any given moment, we'll put it aside. We won't resort to violence. We won't give up hope. We won't, sort of, lead to the behavior that'll shatter a society because we hope that things will get better.
The great diversity of this country has always struggled with, we could've done worse over time if people hadn't had that sense of moving forward. I think it's that - it's the one thing that takes this hyper-individualism, these millions of competing separate dreams and puts them together in a collective enterprise. It is, as I see it, the glue - and it is really odd, actually, when you think about it, this amazing nation, this extraordinary powerful nation that rests upon this nebulous, ephemeral notion that things will get better, whatever that means.

The role the illusion of the American Dream plays sounds similar to the role of the promise of higher education. This promise of upward mobility in the future as a result of hard work and "doing everything right" prevents the proletariat class from rioting in the streets like they do in France when the government threatens to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Perhaps if you are part of the French wealthy class, you don't mess with the French proletariat because you know that they aren't as stupid and as gullible as the Americans and that they have it within themselves to rise up and cut your head off.

Supposedly, studies show that Americans who are more highly-educated, or at least those who are doing well, think that the American Dream is still alive. However, the callers to this show seemed to contradict that.

Wendy (caller): I think I feel more akin to the children of the '60s and the great disillusionment they wound up having with the kind of flower child movement than people in my own generation because I did all of the right things. I worked in high school. I went to college. I worked hard. I made great grades. I got full scholarships. And I am 35 years old and not able to find employment where I can afford to pay my mortgage. So it's very like, I feel very disillusioned with America and the American ideals where you almost feel lost and like you grew up in a culture where you were just kind of fed a load of malarkey and lied to. It's almost like when you find out that Santa Claus doesn't really exist.

Santa Claus doesn't exist? That realization reminds me of what law students must feel when they realize that they've been duped by the ABA and the law schools' fraudulent employment statistics and that the big law jobs and even mere entry-level shit-law jobs don't exist for them.

Mr. RODRIGUEZ: She's getting at the heart of it, the disillusionment, the sense of being lied to, the sense that it doesn't pay to play - what she said - do the right things. And what do people do when the feel that it no longer pays off to do the right thing? They no longer do the right thing. And those are the type of behaviors, the type of sort of angry voting, the type of - sort of dismantling the system you don't - no longer believe in. This is precisely pointing to the potential dangers when enough people don't believe.

When people no longer have an American Dream to believe in, when they no longer believe in economic mobility and meritocracy, do they riot like Frenchmen?

The next caller also graduated from college and reported that he earned more money before he dropped $30,000 on higher education.

KEVIN: Hi. I just wanted to make a quick comment. I graduated about a year and a half from college, so the dream is kind of going away for me. I havent been able to find work. I'm, like, I've been married for a little over a year. I'd like to be able to have kids, pass the dream onto them but it's, like I said, without being able to even afford to have kids, it just seems harder and harder.
CONAN: And so, would you - do you have faith that with hard work, if you can find it, things will be better for you and your kids?
KEVIN: I'm hoping so I work everyday to find a job, but I made more money 10 years ago before I even went to college. It's like I make less money now than after I spent $30,000 on college.

Yes, Virginia. If you've been to college and were unable to find a job in your field and are now worse off than you were before (saddled with student loan debt), the American Dream is in fact dead for you.

Got Down Syndrome? Now you too can go to College!

2010-10-19T13:40:00.002-04:00

Do you suffer from Down Syndrome or some other form of mental retardation? Good news! The Associated Press reports that now you, too, can go to college!

Decades ago attaining a college education meant that you had demonstrated that your IQ was probably above average. Today, everyone and even their brother with Down's Syndrome can go to college. Is it any wonder that college degrees have lost much of their economic value? Who's paying for all of this? Our tax dollars, of course.

That growth is partly because of an increasing demand for higher education for these students and there are new federal funds for such programs. The federal rules that took effect this fall allow students with intellectual disabilities to receive grants and work-study money.

At least one commentator gets it:

The infusion of federal money has generated some criticism. Conservative commentator Charlotte Allen said it's a waste to spend federal tax dollars on the programs and insisted that calling them college dilutes the meaning of college.
"It's a kind of fantasy," said Allen, a contributing editor for Minding the Campus, a publication of the fiscally conservative Manhattan Institute. "It may make intellectually disabled people feel better, but is that what college is supposed to be all about?"

Will for-profit, predatory colleges start offering associates and bachelors degrees for mentally retarded people? My guess is yes, as long as the federal dollars are available.

----------------------------------------------------------------

EDIT: Apparently someone linked to my blog at a Down Syndrome forum or community website. (How the hell did anyone even find this post on an obscure blog?) Anyway, welcome to Fluster Cucked. Please allow me to clarify the context which regular readers and the target audience of this blog would understand.

I only have sympathy for people with Down Syndrome and other cognitive disabilities. The purpose of my post was not to mock people with mental disabilities, but rather to point out the absurdity of the notion that everyone should go to college and to publicize the fact that our government and colleges are bending over backwards to send everyone to college.

In my view, our nation is wasting a huge amount of economic resources--people's time and money--on higher education that has no real economic value. The result is that our nation has a large oversupply of college-educated people who end up unemployed or underemployed-and-involuntarily-out-of-field, including people with PhD's and professional degrees. In my opinion, only the brightest and most ambitious people should go to college, at least to traditional four year colleges, because the overwhelming majority of jobs make little or no use of college education.

Many jobs require people to have a college education in order to obtain employment, not because a college education is directly useful, but rather as a proxy for separating out candidates by IQ, a sense of ambitiousness, and responsibility. Decades ago these very same jobs were filled with people who had mere high school diplomas and they received training and learned on the job without an expenditure of four years' worth of time and student loan debt. I think our society would be wealthier and fewer people would be saddled with non-dischargeable student loan debt if unneeded college education were no longer required for employment that doesn't make direct use of higher education. In my view, college graduate production in a certain field should correspond more closely to the real-world demand for college graduates in that field.

Thus, in my opinion people with Down Syndrome and other cognitive disabilities simply should not be able to gain access to college, at least not on the taxpayers' dime, nor should they feel a compelling need to do so. I suspect that the kinds of work most people with cognitive disabilities would perform make little real use of a college education. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm under the perception that they aren't going to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, accountants, or computer programmers--things that make real use of a college education and that have economic value.

John Stossel questions the value of college education on ABC's 20/20. Rare Mainstream Media report.

2010-10-18T13:10:00.001-04:00

A poster on JD Underground reports that John Stossel did a segment for ABC's 20/20 questioning the value of college education. It is very rare if not unheard of that any mainstream media would ever question the dogma of the value of higher education. Hopefully Stossel will investigate this in greater depth and more media outlets will pick up on it.

You can find the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V122ICNS8_0

Loan Fraud by any other name

2010-10-15T12:54:00.001-04:00

I came across a great quote while reading an op-ed at AOL News (which was originally posted by Hardknocks at the But I Did Everything Right Blog). It was a quote from Brian Leiter, a law school prof and critic of the U.S. News rankings:

This [employment]data is entirely self-reported by schools, and should be treated as essentially fiction: it may have elements of truth, but basically it's a work of the imagination. Schools report it, and U.S. News has no way of checking. In addition, we know nothing about the nature of the employment-it could simply be as a research assistant, which is what Northwestern did a few years ago for its unemployed grads.

Since LSAT test takers rely on this kind of data to decide where to attend law school or whether to attend at all, could negligently inaccurate or outright fraudulent data be a form of indirect student loan fraud perpetuated by the law schools (and implicitly sanctioned by the ABA) against private lenders and the federal government?

2 million attorneys? Not as far-fetched as it might seem.

2010-10-13T15:17:00.010-04:00

In a recent post I determined the year when our nation would surpass having 2 million attorneys and concluded that it would happen in 2035. I used a year-to-year rate of increase in the amount of new JD production based on the average rate of increase over the past ten years and assumed that new graduates would work for 40 years on average. Privately, I had thought that the increasingly large class sizes were a little far-fetched.

However, as evidence that this seemingly nonsensical scenario may not be as implausible as it may seem, consider the fact that several colleges are planning to open new law schools in the near future (and to presumably seek ABA accreditation). Some of the new or planned schools are: Concordia University School of Law, Louisiana College School of Law, University of North Texas College of Law, a law school at Binghamton University, Southern New England School of Law (U. Mass), and Belmont University College of Law.

As long as students can continue to easily obtain loans and law schools continue to serve as university profit centers, more and more two-bit colleges will want to open their own law schools. Two million lawyers, here we come!

EDIT. I've also come across talk about the a school in Delaware's wanting to open up a new law school. Same for the Kaplan test prep company. Also, now the ABA is contemplating accrediting foreign law schools! You may soon also be able to add schools in Peking and one in India to the list.

EDIT May 16, 2011. I've just read a post reporting that Indiana Tech is planning to open a new law school. Since the time of the last edit, I've come across several similar reports about other new law schools.

EDIT July 17, 2011. According to this profound article in the New York Times about law school economics, the law schools pumped out 49,700 new JDs (either this year in 2011 or 2010; I can't tell which specific year was referred to). I had previously thought that the new JD production rate was about 45,000/year. That amount of increase in the rate of JD production makes the prospect of having 2 million attorneys increasingly realistic.

Professor X's Tale of Teaching at a College of Last Resort

2010-10-11T14:17:00.003-04:00

The June 2008 edition of The Atlantic published an excellent article that helps illustrate the inanity of encouraging everyone to go to college. Written by an anonymous adjunct professor of English at a community college, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is an entertaining read. The caption under the title reads: The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a 'college of last resort' explains why.

In the article Professor X describes what it is like teaching basic essay writing skills to people who probably aren't qualified for community college (and perhaps not even for high school). The students are attending because their jobs require them to attend (apparently you need to go to college to become a police officer) or because they are hoping to improve upon their poverty-wage jobs by obtaining a college education. One of his students, "Ms. L", is woefully unprepared and perhaps even barely literate. Ms. L is proud of herself for having written a college paper, but Professor X feels obliged to fail her with an F. (What if she were a plant from a newspaper and would go on to publish an article about how an incoherent, pathetically short mess of a paper garnered a C grade at the local community college?)

This narrative is profound because it is one of the few published articles that dares to question the dogma that everyone should go to college and that college will magically cure all of our social ills when in reality it merely creates new ones. It also provides a memorable demonstration of just how ridiculous that notion is. Here are a few excerpts:

The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty.

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish.

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines.

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college—but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature.

Sadly, Professor X's narrative will probably fall on deaf ears. For-profit colleges are springing up like dandelions and advertising aggressively, eager to devour federal student loan money and funnel it to Wall Street. It's easier for our politicians to sell a panicky populace on the notion that higher education will magically solve our economic and social problems than it is for them to address foreign outsourcing, the displacement of Americans from jobs by foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas, and mass immigration.

Does our nation's culture of promoting higher education fill a role akin to that of religion?

2010-10-10T14:45:00.000-04:00

As I was typing up my last post, which was started as a submission to JD Underground, I had a thought that had not previously occurred to me.

Our nation's Education Arms Race and culture of promoting higher education essentially constitutes a de facto form of class warfare and is an essential tool for social control. The rich (and our politicians and other powerful parties) have an interest in maintaining a widespread belief that people can work their way up and use education to lift themselves to a better economic state. (This way, people will accept gross income inequality because they will think that it's fair and the result of meritocracy and justice.) If someone goes to college and fails to attain a better life, our culture's belief in meritocracy leads people to believe that it is their fault. You didn't study hard enough or network hard enough, etc. If you didn't go to college then you are supposed to think that the reason why you are earning poverty slave wages is because you didn't go to college.

The promise of a better life through higher education almost fills the same role that religion did centuries ago. It helps maintain social control over the masses. It assuages feelings of anger and resentment at the upper classes by replacing them with feelings of hope for those who haven't pursued higher education and feelings of guilt for those who have but couldn't find a job commensurate with their investments in higher education.

Why prospective law students will never get the message.

2010-10-09T16:46:00.001-04:00

Recently on JD Underground, someone posed the question as to when or whether prospective law students would ever learn the truth about the legal job market and stop applying to law school in mass.

My answer is, No. I don't think word will trickle down to enough people. There will probably always be a perception among some people that becoming a lawyer will guarantee you an at least solid middle class quality of life and offer an excellent chance of attaining an upper middle class income, at least amongst enough people to fill the law schools.

Perhaps students from middle class and upper middle class families will get the message from their sisters, brothers, and cousins, but legions of students from poor and minority families who think that just gaining admission to a for-profit college is a huge achievement will continue to believe that going to law school is a golden ticket (just as they think that higher education in general and especially graduate degrees will guarantee a ride on the gravy train). If the students from middle class and upper middle class families stop coming, the law schools will simply lower their admissions standards rather than deprive themselves of tasty tuition dollars, and students from lower class backgrounds will eagerly break down the doors, starry-eyed and giddy at the thought that they could become the first lawyer or professional in their families.

Our society has been indoctrinating people about the value of higher education for decades and people from poor and minority backgrounds are especially susceptible to that message because they often don't have any family members who can tell them otherwise. As evidence, I cite the hordes of people who have no business going to college who are flooding into the community colleges and for-profit schools. This notion that higher education is a guarantor of at least a solid middle class lifestyle is deeply, deeply entrenched in the American psyche and exactly zero voices are saying otherwise on a public scale. (Little guys like you and me who gripe on blogs and specialized forums don't count. I want to see Oprah or the President or Brian Williams spread the message.)

Read this article about "Professor X" who teaches at a "College of Last Resort" to get a better sense of what I'm talking about. Hordes of people, including people who have no business going to college, feel desperate to go, believing that higher education will give them a golden ticket on the gravy train. Also watch the Frontline program College, Inc. and read the New York Times article about how well-intentioned people are being suckered into for-profit college debt.

Thus, even if a great many undergraduates learn the truth, a great many will still continue to succumb to the propaganda put out by the ABA, NALP, the LSAC, the law schools, Hollywood, politicians, pundits, and society in general.

ABA (Law School) Accreditation Chairman speaks.

2010-10-08T14:41:00.003-04:00

The Minnesota Lawyer blog's JDs Rising blog recently published an article about a lawyer's interview with ABA (Law School) Accreditation Committee chair Jay Conison, who is the Dean of the TTT Valparaiso University School of Law. It was reported that Conison doesn't have the authority to speak for the ABA or the Committee, but could speak based on his own experience.

The interview (or at least the article) produced few revelations other than standard claptrap about how the ABA can't really do anything to remove accreditation from law schools and how the ABA wants to increase the standards and transparency in employment statistics.

The article didn't seem to mention whether or not Conison addressed the real issue nor whether the interviewer asked any substantive questions: Is the ABA at all concerned about the problem of lawyer overproduction? If so, what is the ABA doing to address this humanitarian crisis of having tens of thousands of highly-educated yet student-loan-debt ridden and impoverished lawyers?

I suspect that the ABA is not concerned about it all. The people who sit on these committees have done very well for themselves and many, such as Dean Conison, have a pecuniary interest in lawyer overproduction. (What would Conison do if Valparaiso's law school closed because no one wanted to enroll at TTTs anymore?)

If the ABA were truly concerned, it could probably address the problem of lawyer overproduction without violating any antitrust consent decrees. The ABA could probably increase the standards for accreditation and require a very detailed and transparent reporting of employment statistics. Most importantly, the ABA could warn prospective law students about the reality of the legal profession and strongly recommend against going to law school. If the ABA did this, it would send a loud message and might reduce the amount of JD production.

That the ABA has refused to do any of that is evidence that it is not sincerely concerned about lawyer overproduction, lawyers’ financial well-being, and the quality of lawyers’ lives. Also, I doubt that the ABA's consent decree requires it to accredit foreign law schools and to approve the foreign outsourcing of legal work.

If Dean Conison were willing to discuss this further and face the scambuster blogger and JD Underground crowd, what questions would you want to ask him?

2 million attorneys?

2010-10-06T18:11:00.002-04:00

On the JD Underground forum a poster suggested that our nation would surpass having 2 million attorneys within 20 years. So, I thought it might be fun to guesstimate when we might actually attain that number, assuming a consistent rate in the increase of JD production, that the federal government and banks will continue to loan students gobs of money for worthless degrees, and that ambitious but naive people will continue to want to enroll in law school (and burden themselves with $120,000-$185,000+ of debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.) Also, as we have done in the past, let's assume that lawyers only stay in the labor market for 40 years.

First, let's determine the rate of the increase in JD production based on data from the past 10 years. To determine the percentage increase, take the number of JD's awarded in one year (year A), subtract it from the number of JDs awarded in the next year (year B) and then divide by the previous year (year A). Then we add up the differences from those ten years and divide by ten to obtain the average increase. I calculate that the average increase is 0.01684 or 1.684%.

Year	JDs Awarded	Difference
2000	38,158	-0.0065
2001	37,910	0.0184
2002	38,606	0.0070
2003	38,875	0.0296
2004	40,024	0.0662
2005	42,672	0.0284
2006	43,883	-0.0083
2007	43,518	0.0016
2008	43,588	0.0095
2009	44,000	0.0227
Sum		0.1684
Average Increase		0.01684 or 1.684%

Without any year-over-year increase the amount of new JD production would be stuck at about 45,000 per year (the number for 2010). At that rate the total amount of JDs in the U.S. would max-out at 1.8 million in 40 years. However, since the ABA continues to accredit new law schools and is even considering accrediting foreign law schools, it seems unlikely that the amount of JD production won't increase.

So, assuming a consistent rate of increase of 1.684%, we can calculate future JD production. (Multiply the previous year's amount of JD production by 1.01684.) Then we need to gather the data in 40 year chunks and add it up.

Year	JDs Awarded
1963	9638
1964	10491
1965	11507
1966	13115
1967	14738
1968	16007
1969	16733
1970	17477
1971	17006
1972	22342
1973	27756
1974	28729
1975	29961
1976	32597
1977	33640
1978	33317
1979	34590
1980	35059
1981	35604
1982	34847
1983	36390
1984	36688
1985	36830
1986	36122
1987	35479
1988	35702
1989	35521
1990	36386
1991	38801
1992	39082
1993	39915
1994	39711
1995	39355
1996	39921
1997	41115
1998	39456
1999	39072
2000	38158
2001	37910
2002	38606
2003	38875
2004	40024
2005	42672
2006	43883
2007	43518
2008	43588
2009	44000
2010	45000
2011	45758
2012	46528
2013	47312
2014	48109
2015	48919
2016	49743
2017	50580
2018	51432
2019	52298
2020	53179
2021	54074
2022	54985
2023	55911
2024	56852
2025	57810
2026	58783
2027	59773
2028	60780
2029	61803
2030	62844
2031	63902
2032	64979
2033	66073
2034	67185
2035	68317

I calculate that in 2034, the number of JDs will be 1,994,766 (JDs produced from 1995 to 2034). We pass the 2 million mark in 2035 when the 39,355 produced in 1995 retire and are replaced by 68,317 freshly-minted JDs from 2035, bringing the number up to 2,023,728.
Thus, by 2035 the number of unemployed and underemployed-involuntarily-out-of-field JDs will be staggering and could conceivably pass the 1 million mark. Will the ABA and/or the federal government ever stop this madness? I highly doubt it.

---------------------------

EDIT. As evidence that this seemingly nonsensical scenario may not be as far-fetched as it may seem, consider the fact that several colleges are planning to open new law schools in the future (and to presumably seek ABA accreditation). Some of the new or planned schools are: Concordia University School of Law, Louisiana College School of Law, University of North Texas College of Law, a law school at Binghamton University, Southern New England School of Law (U. Mass), and Belmont University College of Law.

As long as students can continue to easily obtain loans and law schools continue to serve as university profit centers, more two-bit colleges will want to open their own law schools. 2 million lawyers, here we come.

Trickle Down Tax Cut Fairy Tale

2010-09-02T14:52:00.003-04:00

I really liked Mark Fiore's new animated political cartoon. Enjoy!

60% of our nation's Law Schools need to Close. Actually, 75% of them should be closed.

2010-08-27T14:04:00.001-04:00

If the law schools are producing 45,000 new JDs annually and our nation only needs 19,000 or 16,245 new attorneys to replace the 1/40 that retire, then 57.8% or 63.9% of the law schools need to close, assuming that they all produce the same number of new JDs each year.

So, now we finally have a number to use--60%. As in, "Cut the number of law school seats by 60%." Or, "We need to close 60% of the law schools." However, since our nation already has a huge backlog of unemployed and underemployed-involuntarily-out-of-field attorneys, it would be better to cut the number of law schools by 75%.

Of course, if the ABA ever gets wind of this post it will fall on deaf ears; they are contemplating accrediting foreign law schools which will only further increase the number of new JDs produced every year. Of course, as the value of a JD decreases, the law schools will respond with tuition increases.

45,000 New Lawyers every year and the Rate of Attorney Overproduction

2010-08-26T15:19:00.005-04:00

It's possible that our nation only needs 16,245 new JDs per year, or at most 19,000 In that case, the law schools are pumping out 177% or 137% more JDs each year than we need.

If the law schools are producing 45,000 new lawyers per year, what is the rate of lawyer overproduction? Earlier I pointed out that BLS stats show that only about 759,200 people are employed as attorneys. Of course, that stat does not tell us how many have worthwhile jobs; many could be starving solos, low-paid document reviewers, or working low-paid part-time gigs.

Let's assume that the number 759,200 represents only 90% of "happily employed attorneys" with the other 10% having happily found jobs outside of the legal profession that pay $75,000 or more per year. In that case, over a 40 year period of time, we need about 843,555 attorneys. Now let's assume that 15% of those 759,200 people who are counted as "employed" attorneys are working in crappy jobs such as sporadic, low-paid temporary document review, low-paid part-time work, and struggling solos.

(759,200 / 90%) - (15% x 759,200) = 843,555 - 113,880 = 729,675.

We're about where we started. For the sake of argument, let's just say that our nation's economy can happily employ 759,200 attorneys. Besides, even if you are "happily employed outside of the legal profession" in all likelihood your job doesn't require or make much use of your legal education, in which case it was a waste of time and money.

At a rate of 45,000 new lawyers per year, how long will it take to replenish the 759,200 lawyers that our nation's economy actually needs or at least can employ with appropriate compensation?

759,200 divided by 45,000 = 16.87 years.

Assuming that a lawyer would want to work for 40 years, we are producing:

40 divided by 16.87 = 2.37 new JDs for every lawyer job available.

This means that our nations law schools are producing an excess of 137% more lawyers every year than what our nation needs, or almost two-and-a-half times more new lawyers than we need. Conversely, our nation only needs about 19,000 new attorneys per year (45,000 divided by 2.37 = just under 19,000).

Assuming that our nation's population is 310 million, ideally we only need one lawyer for every 408 people. Previously, I calculated that our nation has about one attorney for every 172 people. Dividing 408 by 172 gives us 2.37. This isn't profound; it just shows that my calculations are internally consistent since the number of 172 can also be obtained by dividing 310 million by 45,000 x 40.

For shits and giggles, let's discount attorneys who are "happily employed outside of the legal profession" and regard them as having suffered a loss of 3 years worth of time and law school costs. In other words, let's just consider how many lawyers our nation really needs and can employ at compensation at least commensurate to the cost of becoming a lawyer. If 85% of the 759,200 counted as employed by the BLS meet that criteria, then our nation's economy can support:

759,200 x 85% = 645,320 attorneys.

645,320 divided by 45,000 = 14.34 years.

Assuming that a lawyer would want to work for 40 years, we are producing:

40 divided by 14.43 = 2.77 new JDs for every lawyer job available.

This means that our nations law schools are producing an excess of 177% more lawyers every year than what our nation can employ as lawyers at a rate of pay commensurate to their educational investment, or almost two-and-three quarters times more new lawyers than we need. Conversely, our nation only needs about 16,245 new attorneys per year (45,000 divided by 2.77 = just under 16,245).

One Lawyer for every 172 people -- What does it mean?

2010-07-29T16:07:00.229-04:00

Previously, I used ABA stats for the number of JDs awarded annually since 1963 to calculate that since 1973 the average number of new lawyers produced by the law schools is enough to sustain having a lawyer to population ratio of one lawyer for every 171.9 people. Forty years is a long span, so let's just assume that the current lawyer-to-population ratio is one for 171.9 people. What are the implications of that number and how should a prospective law student interpret it?

In other posts I have shown that only 53.8% of all lawyers produced in a 40 year span from 1969-2008 work in the legal profession and that it is a very good assumption that the percentage of lawyers produced in the past 10 years who were able to find work in the legal profession may be less than 30%. Of that 30%, the percentage of new lawyers who were able to find jobs that provided compensation commensurate with the costs of their legal education--jobs at large firms, medium-sized firms, high quality small firms, and quality government positions--career-building jobs, is probably much less than 30%. (A new graduate might find a job at "shit law" earning $30,000/year and would count as part of that 30%, but that is not a successful outcome.) Those studies alone should be enough to convince prospective law students that going to law school is probably a foolish investment. Additionally, what can we imply about the value of a law degree using the statistic of one lawyer for every 171.9 people?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 26% of all lawyers are self-employed either as partners at law firms or as solo practitioners. (I assume that this 26% number refers to 26% of the 759,200 people employed as lawyers in 2008 and not 26% of everyone who has a JD.) This implies that 74% of those 759,200 employed lawyers work for other lawyers or for the government. So, about 26% * 53.8% = 13.99% or about 14.0% of everyone with a JD either works as a partner at a law firm or as a solo. Let's assume that half of those people work as solos, or 7% of everyone with a JD. Let's also assume that 5% of the 1,141,328 people with law degrees (produced over the 40 year period from 1969-2008) work at non-legal jobs where their law degrees add tangible value to their work and where they are paid commensurate with their investment in legal education.

This means that if all of the lawyers who could not find work at law firms, non-profits, with the government, or in non-legal positions that make use of their legal education still wanted to work as lawyers (which, presumably, a great many would) then our nation would need to support 680,260 solo practitioners.

(7% + 46.2% - 5%) * 1,412,328 = 680,742

This works out to a wannabe-solo-lawyer to population ratio of 1 to 450.9.

306,947,000 (2008 U.S. population estimate) / 680,742 = 450.9

So, in order for everyone who graduates with a law degree to benefit from having gone to law school, every 451 U.S. citizens needs to support one lawyer as a solo. Is that possible? Ask yourself, when was the last time you personally needed a lawyer? When was the last time someone you knew needed a lawyer? Did they need a lawyer's services every year? Once every ten years? Once or twice in a lifetime?

Let's assume that your average person will need a lawyer three times in their life to handle matters that can be billed for $2000 after charges for incidental expenses and that the average U.S. lifespan is 78.7 years. This means that on average, a person will need a lawyer for a $2000 matter once every 26.23 years. So, 450.9 people is enough to provide a lawyer with 17.19 $2000 matters per year, or $34,380 of gross income each year without benefits that will suffer a 15% social security tax. Some of that money will be needed to pay for overhead such as advertising, the costs of an office, bar fees, CLE fees, and malpractice insurance, etc. If the cost of overhead and the additional 7.5% social security tax is $1000/month, then a lawyer could take home about $22,380/year (without benefits). Given the exorbitant cost of attending law school today, In order to obtain a sufficient return on one's investment, a lawyer would probably need to gross about four times that, or about $89,000 without benefits. You can obtain different results using the same methodology while making different assumptions.

This is all just mental masturbation and it is probably a silly post that fails to provide significant insight. The point I am trying to mathematically demonstrate is that having 1 lawyer for every 172 people means that a great many lawyers will never obtain a return on their investment, especially when going to law school could cost you $120,000-$185,000 and 3 years' worth of opportunity cost.

Statistics may suggest that less than 30% of new JDs were able to find work in the legal profession over the past 10 years.

2010-07-28T22:40:00.009-04:00

It's time for more fun with numbers and statistics. Previously I used ABA and BLS stats and some seemingly reasonable assumptions to estimate that only 53.8% of all law school graduates in a 40 year span from 1969 to 2008 worked in the legal profession. I later speculated that the percentage of more recent grads who were able to find work in the field was probably significantly less than 53.8%. In this post I want to demonstrate that mathematically. This is just a back-of-the-envelop calculation that is not suitable for formal publication and it depends very heavily on certain assumptions.

If we assume that 75% of the graduates in the 10 year period from 1969-1978 found jobs as lawyers, that 65% of the graduates from 1979-1988 found jobs as lawyers, and that 55% of of the graduates from 1989-1998 found jobs as lawyers, what percentage of graduates from 1999-2008 were able to find jobs as lawyers?

Years	JDs Awarded	Estimated Percentage Who Found Legal Work	Estimated Number Who Found Legal Work
1969-1978	259,558	75%	194,668
1979-1988	357,311	65%	232,252
1989-1998	389,263	55%	214,094
1969-2008	1,006,132	63.7%	641,015
1999-2008	406,306	29.1%	118,185

According to the BLS stats, 759,200 people work as lawyers. 759,200 - 651,015 = 118,185 jobs left for graduates from 1999-2008. 118,185 divided by 406,306 = 29.10% So, using my model for the percentage of new lawyers who were able to find work in the legal profession, only 29.1% of all new graduates between the years 1999-2008 were able to find work in the legal profession. Of course, this number all depends on the accuracy of my assumptions.

Now let's calculate the number using a model based on similar assumptions and 5 year periods.

Years	JDs Awarded	Estimated Percentage Who Found Legal Work	Estimated Number Who Found Legal Work
1969-1973	101,314	75%	75,985
1974-1978	158,224	70%	110,771
1979-1983	176,490	65%	114,718
1984-1988	180,821	60%	108,493
1989-1993	189,705	55%	104,338
1994-1998	199,558	50%	99,779
1989-2003	192,621	45%	86,679
1969-2003	1,198,753	58.5%	700,783
2003-2008	406,306	27.35%	118,185

Using this model, only 27.35% of all new graduates between the years 2003-2008 were able to find work in the legal profession.

Of that 30%, the percentage of new lawyers who were able to find jobs that provided compensation commensurate with the costs of their legal education--jobs at large firms, medium-sized firms, high quality small firms, and quality government positions--career-building jobs, is probably much less than 30%. (A new graduate might find a job at "shit law" earning $30,000/year and would count as part of that 30%, but that is not a successful outcome.)

This is not a scientific study by any means; it's merely back-of-the-envelop calculations based on assumptions that may or may not be accurate. However, I think it validates my claim that if only 53.8% of all lawyers produced between 1969 and 2008 are working in the legal profession, then the percentage of more recent law school graduates who found work as lawyers must be significantly lower than 53.8%.

In the current recession (which may prove to be a permanent "New Normal"), the percentage of new law school graduates who are able to find legal jobs may be much lower than 30%, and the percentage who are able to find good jobs may be even lower.

Statistics suggest that only 53.8% of all lawyers are employed in the legal profession.

2010-07-10T21:32:00.002-04:00

Blogger "A Law School Victim" of the Life's Mockery blog alerted me to Bureau of Labor Statistics stats saying that "Lawyers held about 759,200 jobs in 2008," and that "In May 2008, the average yearly wages for lawyers were $124,750."

I'm a stats wonk, so I thought it might be interesting to combine some of this data with other data and see what conclusions we might be able to draw. According to the ABA,'s stats, in 2008 the U.S. had 1,162,124 "resident and active attorneys". Taking the data that I compiled from ABA stats going back to 1963 in my prior post, in the 40 years from 1969 to 2008 the law schools pumped out a total of 1,412,328 attorneys. (It seems like a reasonable assumption that, on average, a lawyer who graduates at age 25 would want to practice until at least age 65 with some retiring earlier and some retiring later.)

So, using the ABA stats, of those 1,412,328 lawyers produced between 1969 and 2008, only 82.3% bothered to maintain their law licenses in 2008. I don't know if that data accounts for lawyers with licenses in more than one state; I assume that it does not and simply lists the number of people registered to practice in each state. It also may not account for 2008 JDs who had not yet taken the Bar Exam. However, presumably there were more than 43,588 lawyers with licenses in more than one state, meaning that if anything the actual percentage is probably lower than 82.3%.

Using the BLS's number of an estimated 759,200 lawyers (presumably employed as lawyers), only 53.8% were employed in the legal profession.

Given that, it's hard to take the alleged income statistic of $124,750/year seriously because it fails to account for the 46.2% of all lawyers who are not working as lawyers. That number also fails to tell us about the distribution of income amongst attorneys. It's thus possible that 20% of those 759,200 employed lawyers might earn very high incomes while the other 80% aren't doing nearly as well.

Another problem with the $124,750/year statistic is that it fails to tell us the distribution amongst lawyers who graduated in different years. For example, if you graduated in 1975 you may have had a very good chance of building a career that would allow you to earn a high income today. However, if you graduated in 2005 your chances would be much, much smaller. What we really need are average income statistics for all JD-holders (not just those actually employed as lawyers) for each graduation year and then stats for graduates in five year groupings.

This reminds me of that stale study which says that going to college allows you to earn $1.X million dollars more than a high school graduate over time yet completely fails to account for the fact that the return on investment of a college degree has decreased every year. The issue is not whether college graduates from 1950-1990 earned a good return on their investment, which, presumably, is a large percentage of the basis for that stale claim. Rather the issue is whether that claim holds true today, in which case an examination of the income earned by graduates over the past 10 years would be more insightful.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics page is just one more example of how naive undergraduates do not have good information about the realities of the legal job market. On the surface it appears as though the average income for a lawyer is $124,750/year. However, my back-of-the-envelop study suggests that only 53.8% of all lawyers worked as lawyers in 2008. Furthermore, that income statistic completely fails to account for the distribution of income amongst lawyers and it doesn't tell us about the incomes of graduates over the past decade.

EDIT. It would be really nice to know or to be able to calculate what percentage of graduates from the past 5, 10, and 20 years were able to find employment in the legal profession. If the statistics suggest that only 53.8% of all lawyers since 1969 are working as lawyers, then presumably the percentage is much lower for more recent graduates since we can expect that the percentage of older graduates working as lawyers is higher since they entered into a better job market. It would be insightful if I had sufficient data to be able to plot the percentage of each class that works in the legal profession going back to 1969. I doubt the data I need exists.

Old News: Wiki-hooliganism strikes Seton Hall Law School.

2010-07-09T21:22:00.000-04:00

This is old news, but it's still funny. I'm sure this story was blogged about to death when it was fresh, but I'm linking to it anyway for those who missed it and who didn't see Hardknock's post at BIDER.

Blog hooligan "Scaddenfarts" dropped a big stinker on the Wikipedia entry for Seton Hall Law School. Referring to the Dean:

"The man takes more liberty with salary statistics than Michael Jackson did with 4 year olds at a Chuck-E-Cheese playpen."

"Scaddenfarts" or a group of people engaged in an edit war that went on for three months from May 6 through August 9 of 2009 until the Wikipolice finally corralled him/them. (See the edit history for May-August 2009.)

Imagine what would happen if a group of thirty blog hooligans versed in Wikipedia Edit-ese descended upon an unsuspecting TTT's entry and engaged in a prolonged edit war, citing Wikipedia rules and arguing with shills on the entry's discussion page.

40 Years of Lawyer Overproduction, a Data Table, and 2 Charts

2010-07-05T16:31:00.005-04:00

In my last two posts I explored the rate of new lawyer production in terms of the inverse number of attorneys per capita that could be sustained by graduation rates (expressed in terms of one lawyer for every X-amount of people) using the assumption that a new lawyer would want to practice for 40 years. Let's call this number the Sustained Inverse Lawyers Per Capita, or SILPC.

I was curious about the historical trend, so I conducted a study and was surprised to discover that the law schools have been overproducing lawyers for almost 40 years! In other words, the rate of production in terms of SLPC has averaged one lawyer for every 171.9 people since 1973. I knew that lawyer overproduction had been a problem for decades, but I had never imagined that it was this bad! I had previously assumed that the SILPC had decreased steadily over time, but apparently this is not the case.

I calculated this data using U.S. Census Data for the U.S. population and ABA statistics for the number of JDs awarded each year since 1963.

Assuming that, on average, a lawyer would want to practice for 40 years, SILPC = Population / (JDs Awarded * 40)

Year	JDs Awarded	US Population	Inverse Lawyers Per Capita (SILPC)
1963	9,638	189,242,000	490.9
1964	10,491	191,889,000	457.3
1965	11,507	194,303,000	422.1
1966	13,115	196,560,000	374.7
1967	14,738	198,712,000	337.1
1968	16,007	200,706,000	313.5
1969	16,733	202,677,000	302.8
1970	17,477	205,052,000	293.3
1971	17,006	207,661,000	305.3
1972	22,342	209,896,000	234.9
1973	27,756	211,909,000	190.9
1974	28,729	213,854,000	186.1
1975	29,961	215,973,000	180.2
1976	32,597	218,035,000	167.2
1977	33,640	220,239,000	163.7
1978	33,317	222,585,000	167.0
1979	34,590	225,055,000	162.7
1980	35,059	227,726,000	162.4
1981	35,604	229,966,000	161.5
1982	34,847	232,188,000	166.6
1983	36,390	234,307,000	161.0
1984	36,688	236,348,000	161.1
1985	36,830	238,466,000	161.9
1986	36,122	240,651,000	166.6
1987	35,479	242,804,000	171.1
1988	35,702	245,021,000	171.6
1989	35,521	247,342,000	174.1
1990	36,386	250,132,000	171.9
1991	38,801	253,493,000	163.3
1992	39,082	256,894,000	164.3
1993	39,915	260,255,000	163.0
1994	39,711	263,436,000	165.8
1995	39,355	266,557,000	169.3
1996	39,921	269,667,000	168.9
1997	41,115	272,912,000	165.9
1998	39,456	276,115,000	175.0
1999	39,072	279,295,000	178.7
2000	38,158	282,434,000	185.0
2001	37,910	285,545,000	188.3
2002	38,606	288,600,000	186.9
2003	38,875	291,221,000	187.3
2004	40,024	293,842,000	183.5
2005	42,672	296,463,000	173.7
2006	43,883	299,084,000	170.4
2007	43,518	301,705,000	173.3
2008	43,588	304,326,000	174.5
2009	44,000	306,947,000	174.4
2010		309,565,000

From 1963 to 1970 the SILPC decreased steadily until a huge jump occurred between 1971 and 1973. The worst year was 1983 when the rate bottomed out at 161.0. Perhaps the market was able to comfortably absorb this amount of lawyer overproduction in the Sixties and Seventies. Presumably, new attorneys have suffered difficulty finding career-building entry-level jobs and earning a living practicing law since the late Seventies or early Eighties, but the Internet was not available to chronicle it. It is also possible that lawyers were more easily able to obtain upwardly mobile white collar jobs in those decades at a time before hordes of people went to college. In other words, the Law School Scam took root 40 years ago.

If I can obtain the data, I would like to plot the number of attorneys who maintained licenses every year since 1963. A plot of the data shows that JD production has outpaced U.S. population growth by a tremendous margin since 1963:

The red data in the chart above is SILPC. It has remained fairly steady since 1973 with an average SILPC of 171.9.

This last chart expresses U.S. population growth and the growth in the amount of JDs awarded as a percentage since 1963. So, a data point of 50% population growth would mean that the population had increased by 50% since 1963. A data point of 300% JDs awarded means that the number of JDs awarded that year was four times the number awarded in 1963. (A number of 0% would mean that the number is the same as it was in 1963, and a number of 100% would mean that it was double the amount in 1963.)

------- EDITOR'S NOTE -------

March 11, 2011. I want to clarify that the 40 year average lawyer-to-population ratio that new JD production can sustain (which I eventually calculated to be 1 lawyer for every 171.9 people) is NOT the same thing as the actual lawyer-to-population ratio. The number I calculated for a given year of new JD production would only reflect the actual lawyer-to-population ratio if the U.S. population remained the same for the following 40 years. This is because while the U.S. population continues to increase, the number of JDs produced in a given prior year is static and cannot increase proportionally with population growth.

Consequently, Using ABA and BLS stats, the actual lawyer-to-population ratio is about 1 lawyer for every 215 people (only counting JDs minted over the past 40 years).

Correction: The number is closer to one lawyer for every 174 people.

2010-06-21T16:09:00.002-04:00

I had previously calculated the number of 165 people per attorney erroneously based on a new lawyer production rate of 46,124 new attorneys per year, which is the sum of all law students in the U.S. divided by three. However, my calculation failed to account for the fact that not all law students will matriculate. The calculation of 165 was also based on an earlier U.S. population number of 304,060,000.
304,060,000 / (46,124 * 40) = 164.8

Using the number of 44,000 new lawyers per year (as Nando pointed out) combined with the U.S. Census Bureau's population clock and a downward adjustment of 3 million (to estimate the population in June of 2009) , I arrived at a slightly less-depressing number of 174.2. The number of new graduates for 2009 was based on the NALP's number of 40,833 respondents constituting 92.8% of the 2009 class (40,833 / 0.928 = 44,001).

This number is a back-of-the-envelop calculation and depends heavily on the population estimate and exactly when it is counted. Using the number of 309,557,000 at the U.S. population clock and then estimating a population growth of 3 million people over the past year, we arrive at the figure of 306,557,000 for June 2009.

306,557,000 / (44,000 * 40) = 174.2.

If the population were 300 million then the number would be 170.5. If the population were 310 million then the number would be 176.1.

So, assuming that the number of 44,000 JDs awarded in 2009 is reliable, I think we can safely say that right now the law schools are producing new lawyers at a rate to sustain having one lawyer for every 174 people. Assuming that over time the number of new lawyers produced increases proportionally with population growth then eventually our nation will have one lawyer for every 174 people. However, as is clear from the increase in the lawyer to population ratio that occurred between 2004 and 2009, the increase in the number of new JDs minted each year is outpacing population growth.

------- EDITOR'S NOTE -------

One Lawyer for Every 165 Americans?

2010-06-21T11:12:00.009-04:00

Based on calculations I have made over the past couple of years using ABA stats for the number of licensed attorneys in 2004 and 2009, LSAC data for the number of students enrolled in the law schools, and Census Bureau projected population data, one out of every 275 people in the United States was a licensed attorney in 2004. This inverse attorney-to-population ratio decreased to about 258 in 2009, just five years later. At the current rate of lawyer overproduction where about 44,000 new JDs are produced every year, assuming that a new 25 year old lawyer would want to work for 40 years and that enough new law schools open so that the current pace of new JD production increases proportionally to population growth, enough new lawyers are being produced so that eventually one out of every 165 people will be a lawyer.

If (as reported at various places) students at top schools have been having difficulty finding entry-level jobs in the legal profession when one out of every 258 Americans is a lawyer, how hard will it be to earn a living as an attorney when one in every 165 people is a lawyer?

------- EDITOR'S NOTE -------

Law Professor Writes excellent editorial about the Education Bubble. It's a Gem.

2010-06-20T14:52:00.012-04:00

I am envious of Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee, for writing an excellent piece about the higher education bubble: Higher Education's Bubble is About to Burst. I am envious because he presented the issue in a clear and concise manner and I'm not sure I could have done a better job.

Maybe this op-ed is old news, but I only just discovered it today, in which case it probably hasn't made the scamblogging circuit which is why I wanted to share it with you. (I found it from a link to this post which I must have found on a fellow scamblogger's post, but I don't think a direct link to Reynolds's article was posted.)

First, Reynolds's did a good job of explaining the bubble victim's mindset:

The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.
Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.

He then goes on to explain the potential value of college:

College is often described as a path to prosperity, but is it? A college education can help people make more money in three different ways.
First, it may actually make them more economically productive by teaching them skills valued in the workplace: Computer programming, nursing or engineering, say. (Religious and women's studies, not so much.)
Second, it may provide a credential that employers want, not because it represents actual skills, but because it's a weeding tool that doesn't produce civil-rights suits as, say, IQ tests might. A four-year college degree, even if its holder acquired no actual skills, at least indicates some ability to show up on time and perform as instructed.
And, third, a college degree -- at least an elite one -- may hook its holder up with a useful social network that can provide jobs and opportunities in the future. (This is more true if it's a degree from Yale than if it's one from Eastern Kentucky, but it's true everywhere to some degree).
While an individual might rationally pursue all three of these,
only the first one -- actual added skills -- produces a net benefit for society. The other two are just distributional -- about who gets the goodies, not about making more of them.

It's refreshing to see someone else point out that college education often has no value other than to serve as a proxy for IQ for employers. In other words, oftentimes college education has no real economic value and a great many jobs that require a college education do not really require it. Decades ago these types of jobs were filled by people with high school diplomas who worked their way up. However, as a result of the Education Arms Race we now have a huge abundance of people with college educations so employers can make bachelors degrees a precondition of employment.

My only real issue with Reynolds's op-ed is the implicit suggestion that if everyone majored in a useful degree program such as nursing or engineering that the education would now have economic value.

Post-bubble, perhaps students -- and employers, not to mention parents and lenders -- will focus instead on education that fosters economic value. And that is likely to press colleges to focus more on providing useful majors.

In reality I think it would result in a huge oversupply of unemployed and underemployed nurses and engineers. If everyone majored in fields that "foster economic value" the education would not have economic value because much of that education would be unneeded excess education that the employment market cannot absorb and thus that society cannot utilize.

The real problem in higher education is simply that we have too much higher education. In other words, far more people are going to college than our society and economy really needs. Relatively few career fields actually make use of Reynolds' first category, "education that fosters economic value". Rather, most college education today is "distributional" in nature in that it merely serves to help employers separate candidates by IQ, ambition, and responsibility. As a poster at another forum once put it, "If everyone went to college we would have the world's most educated Walmart and McDonalds employees."

Coming from a law professor, Reynolds's op-ed may be profound. I wonder what he thinks about lawyer overproduction and Professor Tamanaha's recent wake up call.

Facelift for JD Scambusting Resources Page

2010-06-18T11:15:00.006-04:00

I've just given a facelift to my JD Scambusting Resources Page. I am hoping to turn it into a central one-stop shopping page for anyone who is thinking about going to law school or who wants more information about the law school scam. I also added the list of links to articles for further reading, which I hope to continue expanding with worthy links. The page also includes links to the most active scambusting blogs and the JD Underground forum.

Please check it out and refer prospective law students here:

http://JDScam.blogspot.com

The Chinese Want to Innovate, Too. (Innovation Will Not Save the U.S. Economy.)

2010-06-17T18:43:00.128-04:00

If you have ever followed or participated in the debate over Global Labor Arbitrage and foreign outsourcing, then you probably know that one of the common arguments put forth by the free market dogmatists is that we don't need to worry about filthy low-value-added manufacturing jobs because innovation is the future. They argue that we must become a nation of innovators producing high-value-added goods and services and that innovation will produce tomorrow's jobs. They will also sometimes argue that Americans almost have a monopoly on innovation and that we are the best at innovating, as though we have some sort of a racial advantage on innovation.

I don't disagree that innovation is good and that it's important. It is certainly a touchy-feely notion that just about everyone would agree with. However, I do take issue with their claims that we don't need to worry about global labor arbitrage because innovation will save us.

First off, any manufacturing or production-type jobs created by innovation can be performed less-expensively with fewer environmental and labor regulations in a far less litigious environment overseas. Secondly, "necessity is the mother of invention", and the people who are directly involved with the act of manufacturing will end up making many of the improvements to the manufacturing process. Thirdly, the cost of innovation--the cost of R&D--might very well be less expensive in other countries. (We have been training foreign graduate students for years with our taxpayer supported universities.)

High Tech Research Going to China with Devastating Effects on Our Ability to Compete and on Our Future by Craig Harrington

It was one thing when America lost its textile industry, its toy making, and the production of basic consumer goods. It is another when we begin losing the core research and development that makes our companies operate. There is a growing shift in innovation. We are now outsourcing more than basic goods and simple service jobs. We are outsourcing high-paying work and sparkling facilities that were once Silicon Valley staples.

Multinational corporations have no reason to stay in the United States; they have no incentive to remain in our expensive market. We cannot expect them, and the jobs they support and create, to stick around based on altruism alone. Industries locate, relocate, and grow wherever the economy presents them with the best opportunities. The U.S. was once the focus of those opportunities, but it is no more.

Furthermore, people in other nations want to innovate, too. For example, in 2004 India produced about 290,000 new engineers. And guess what? China wants to innovate too! Surprise surprise! According to this NPR report, the Chinese Aim to Build the Next Silicon Valley.

According to the free market dogmatists, we don't need to worry about the loss of manufacturing jobs and we don't need to do anything to protect ourselves from global labor arbitrage because innovation will save us and only Americans are capable of innovation and the Chinese will be content to work the filthy low-value-added manufacturing jobs. I call bullshit!

Solar Panel Jobs Go to China -- New Jobless Claims Increase -- Surprised?

2010-06-17T12:23:00.004-04:00

According to MSNBC, new jobless claims are up and it's a "surprise". (A surprise to whom, I do not know.)

In other news, last night ABC News reported that a solar panel innovator was unable to obtain funding from the U.S. government to develop allegedly innovative, improved, less-expensive solar panels in the United States. He said that he had wanted to set up shop in the U.S. However, the Chinese government welcomed him with open arms and offered him funding and other assistance. So, now he is setting up his business in China!

Given that, I don't see any reason why an increase in new jobless claims and persistent high unemployment should come as a surprise to anyone.

This story is also notable because it helps refute the mythological notion that innovation will save the U.S. economy. Many economists, politicians, and pundits have argued that the U.S. doesn't need to worry about the loss of manufacturing jobs because we will innovate our way back to prosperity. Domestic innovation, they say, is the key to the future and innovation will create new jobs for Americans tomorrow. Surprise surprise! Those highly-anticipated new jobs that will be created by innovation can be performed in China by Chinese labor and probably for far less monetary expense than it would take to perform those jobs in the U.S.

"Unemployed People Need Not Apply"

2010-06-11T14:46:00.003-04:00

The Huffington Post recently published an article reporting about job advertisements that explicitly state, "The Unemployed Will Not Be Considered."

Still waiting for a response to the 300 resumés you sent out last month? Bad news: Some companies are ignoring all unemployed applicants.

In a current job posting on The People Place, a job recruiting website for the telecommunications, aerospace/defense and engineering industries, an anonymous electronics company in Angleton, Texas, advertises for a "Quality Engineer." Qualifications for the job are the usual: computer skills, oral and written communication skills, light to moderate lifting. But red print at the bottom of the ad says, "Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason."

Obviously, I find this absolutely outrageous even though this policy is probably nothing new other than its being mentioned explicitly. The only good thing about these types of ads is that they provide yet more evidence that our current free market system does not work. It reeks of class stratification and immobility whereas a free market is supposed to be about opportunity and meritocracy. It also suggests that having a college education is not a guarantor of vocational success because if you have a college degree and you are unemployed you are automatically disqualified from consideration for these types of jobs.

This form of "classism" almost reminds me of racial discrimination--a person could not possibly be qualified for a job simply because they are unemployed and thus necessarily lack the ability to perform the job. It seems almost Orwellian. Applicants will not be considered for a job because they need a job.

If the hiring personnel who decided that being unemployed should automatically disqualify one from a job lose their heads to the guillotine I won't feel badly for them. I'll say, "Good riddance to bad rubbish."

Edit--the company that placed the ad at The People Place is allegedly Benchmark Electronics. According to the HuffPo article, Sony Ericsson is also supposed to have placed a similar ad but later retracted it and claimed that that is not their policy. (Wanna bet that it actually is for the position that was advertised?)

Sony Ericsson, a global phone manufacturer that recently announced that it would be bringing 180 new jobs to the Buckhead, Ga. area, also recently posted an ad for a marketing position on The People Place. The add specified: "NO UNEMPLOYED CANDIDATES WILL BE CONSIDERED AT ALL." When asked about the ad, a spokeswoman said, "This was a mistake, and once it was noticed it was removed."

Is the Housing Crash Over?

2010-06-10T19:00:00.030-04:00

The Economic Collapse Blog has published a list of 12 Reasons Why the U.S. Housing Crash is Far From Over.

I have been following the housing bubble crisis for years, and I have long believed that housing prices are overpriced relative to Americans' incomes. I still think housing prices are too high and that they will continue to decrease. The My Budget 360 blog has a great article showing that housing prices are still high relative to people's income. I wonder, how will a nation of student loan-indebted people who work low-wage service jobs be able to afford all of those houses valued at over $150,000?

The Economic Collapse blog's article needs to add a thirteenth reason for a continued plunge. As Baby Boomers age they will start selling their houses, adding houses to the market, in the hopes of downsizing to smaller condos and eventually to nursing homes (and ultimately to cemetery plots). However, a great many people in the generations behind them who didn't do as well financially don't have the income needed to purchase all of these houses at current prices. (The people who have the money will be leaving the market.)

Call for Article Links Related to the Education Arms Race

2010-06-10T13:21:00.000-04:00

I am in the process of putting together a list of links to articles and other resources related to the Education Arms Race and the legal job market. My goal is to create a resource where people can find links to the evidence--news articles and documentaries, etc.--that higher education is often a scam.

If you know of some good articles, videos, or studies that I am missing, please send me an email or post a comment with the link.

Is the Recovery Real? 25 Questions.

2010-05-26T01:08:00.001-04:00

If you think that the U.S. economy is recovering, think again. Check out this list of 25 Questions To Ask Anyone Who Is Delusional Enough To Believe That This Economic Recovery Is Real which was posted at The Economic Collapse blog. The author's compilation of the many problems our nation's economy has is very sobering when you see it all in one place.

Excellent Frontline Program About the Effects of the Recession on New York's Upper East Side

2010-05-22T17:38:00.003-04:00

I just finished watching the PBS Frontline documentary Close To Home. I never thought I would have an interest in watching a documentary filmed in a hair salon, but the documentary consisted of interviews with patrons at a (seemingly) upscale hair salon describing how the recession and job loss has affected them.

It isn't a profound documentary, but I think it has value in that it helps to chronicle the depression and give people a sense of its depth. Most of the people interviewed had years of experience and college educations. It thus helps serve as anecdotal evidence that, contrary to what many smug free market dogmatists who downplay the recession believe, hard-working experienced college-educated people who are seeking employment can suffer great difficulty finding employment commensurate with their education, experience, and abilities through no real fault of their own.

I enjoy debating politics on various forums and I often end up in protracted debates with people who are employed and successful. They often have difficulty believing that global labor arbitrage is bad for Americans and that it's hard to find a job. Many of these free market advocates seem to maintain the delusional belief that the unemployed are turning down jobs and mooching government benefits. (To hear them tell it, "We wouldn't have so many unemployed people if only those lazy sots would get off the dole and start working all of those jobs that are out there!") They also argue that global labor arbitrage is good for us but can never provide an intuitively convincing argument addressing the supply-and-demand of labor aspects of it. (I'll discuss this further in a long primer I am preparing about global labor arbitrage.)

I'm sure that the message of this documentary will probably fall on deaf ears in regards to the free market dogmatists, but it is still good to have a documentary anecdotal that provides evidence to hopefully rattle their confidence in their position and weaken their resolve. Perhaps it will also help laid-off free market advocates question their economic belief system. (Long-term unemployment and underemployment can go a long way towards changing a person's world view.)

NPR Aired a Ho-hum Story About Georgetown Law Grads Having Difficulty Finding Jobs.

2010-05-22T15:00:00.007-04:00

NPR produced a rather mediocre story about the difficulties Georgetown Law School 3Ls are having with finding jobs in the legal profession. I think it aired Friday afternoon on All Things Considered. You can read a transcript and listen to the program here:

Economy Seems Bleak For Graduating Law Students

Of course, I left a number of comments at the NPR site along with links to a few other blogs and articles. It would be awesome if NPR actually did an in-depth story about the law schools reporting misleading employment statistics with the tacit approval of the ABA knowing fully-well that a great many if not most of their graduates would never find work in the legal profession and that they were impoverishing these students for their own pecuniary interests. I really wish we could educate the general public about the huge conflicts of interest that exist between universities, students, and society. I wish I could convince the public that colleges and universities are just as unethical, socially irresponsible, and self-interested as large for-profit corporations.

Here is a response someone posted to one of my comments:

John Johnson (JJ555) wrote:

Anonymous Frank, you wrote:

"NPR--if you would like to do a serious story about lawyer overproduction and whether or not law schools are providing misleading employment stats..."

Don't waste your time. I mentioned all of that during the discussion with my four co-panelists. It was all removed (or cut, or censored, however you want to say it) from the final piece.

It's actually rather surreal.

I don't know what NPR is like in other cities, but in my area NPR airs "support for NPR" ads from law schools, including one from Boston University (which airs nationally, I assume). Perhaps NPR doesn't want to risk angering its supporters. I suppose that that is a sensible policy, but it calls into question the network's journalistic independence.

Excellent 60 Minutes Report on the Causes of the Gulf Oil Spill (you can watch it online).

2010-05-17T21:06:00.004-04:00

60 Minutes has produced an excellent report about the cause of the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the subsequent oil spill in the Gulf. The report also includes a discussion and speculation about who exactly is responsible. (This is going to be a boon for lawyers.) The report is more worthwhile and informative than all of the national nightly news broadcasts combined. The heart of the report consists of a riveting interview with a crewman who was lucky to have survived and who remembers details about what led up to the failure of the blowout protector and the explosion. If you enjoy keeping up with current events and issues of legal liability you won't want to miss this. (I find the companies' maneuverings to attempt to shift liability rather entertaining.)

EDIT -- Click here for Part 2 or look for it on the page of Part 1.

Is Our Oil-Based Economy Absurd?

2010-05-15T19:29:00.004-04:00

I got a kick out of one of Mark Fiore's recent animated political cartoons. Enjoy.

EDIT--here is another oil-related cartoon that I enjoyed. I don't necessarily agree with all of these messages; I just find these political cartoons to be amusing.

Does State Spending on Higher Education Slow Economic Growth?

2010-05-14T13:22:00.008-04:00

While reading this Associated Press report (pointed out to me by the But I Did Everything Right blog), I came across the following profound material:

Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder [author of Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much] blames the cultural notion of "credential inflation" for the stream of unqualified students into four-year colleges. His research has found that the number of new jobs requiring college degrees is less than number of college graduates.

Vedder's work also yielded something surprising: The more money states spend on higher education, the less the economy grows — the reverse of long-held assumptions.

If what Vedder says is true, then his study would be absolutely profound. It makes intuitive sense that wasting a huge amount of resources on education that does not have economic value for society--educating more people than there are jobs for them in the fields for which they are training--would slow economic growth in some sort of way. However, that is all just theory and conjecture on my part. It would be great to have a formal academic study demonstrating this. It's too bad that it would be drowned out by all of the propaganda from the higher education industry, the media, other pundits, and our politicians.

You can listen to an NPR clip where Vedder is interviewed, here:

Is a College Education Worth the Debt?

A Law School is PAYING Students $250 to Post On Its Blog in an Attempt to Encourage Students to Attend (and to take on huge amounts of loan debt).

2010-05-11T11:14:00.001-04:00

Do we need any further evidence that the law school industry will stop at almost nothing to increase or maintain law school enrollments? The Jobless Jurisdoctor posted about this first, but I think it is so damning that it deserves separate mention on this and other blogs. According to the ABA Journal:

A new student blog at the Michigan State University College of Law may not provide all the answers. However, Kristen Flory, director of the school's marketing and communications department, promoted the idea and apparently sees Spartan bLAWg as a plus factor for persuading applicants about the benefits of attending school there.

About nine of the 18 law students who applied were accepted as bloggers and are now paid $250 to write at least two posts monthly, reports the Associated Press in an article reprinted in New York Lawyer (reg. req.).

If the law schools are willing to pay people to post positive content, proving that they are self-interested and in essence for-profit organizations, then why would they not attempt to manipulate their employment statistics or to at least present them in a misleading or fraudulent light?

I wonder, how do law school deans and administrators sleep at night knowing that their costly educational programs will destroy people's lives for decades? (They probably sleep very well on fine silken sheets in luxurious 5000 foot mansions.) Do any of these people have a conscience?

PBS Frontline Airs Excellent Program on For-Profit Colleges

2010-05-09T15:53:00.004-04:00

Earlier this week PBS's excellent Frontline documentary series aired an insightful program on for-profit colleges called College Inc., which you can watch online. Although this was not about graduate and professional education nor even undergraduate education at legitimate colleges and state universities, it was still very worthwhile. Rather, this was about education at the for-profit McColleges or College-Marts that have sprung up like dandelions across the land, such as the University of Phoenix, DeVry, ITT, and others. I found the program to be very interesting because I knew little about these businesses, my never having paid much attention to them. The New York Times also has an excellent article about for-profit colleges, here, which is worth reading: The New Poor: In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt.

Apparently, the cost of attendance is much greater than what I had ever imagined, perhaps reaching as high as a whopping $500 per credit hour. (If you need 128 semester credit hours to graduate with a bachelors degree from a legitimate university, then the cost of attending at $500 per credit hour would come out to a whopping $64,000 over four years for a podunk bachelors degree.) Much of this is funded by non-dischargeable federal student loans, and it sounds as though those loans are the lifeblood of these businesses. [End the federal student loans (or, in essence, the non-dischargeability in bankruptcy of these loans) and these businesses would probably die.] So, various types of accreditation that allow these businesses to fund themselves through students' federal student loans are essential. Guess who is involved with investing in these for-profit colleges? Wall Street, which is a sure sign that the owners of these for-profit colleges have students' and society's best interests at heart (not).

As with many for-profit businesses, advertising consumes a considerable percentage of some of the schools' budgets. It was also mentioned that the cost of the contract-based faculty at some of these schools was less than the advertising budget; the percentage of money spent on the educational product is not great. (I think it was reported that one school only spent around 10% on faculty--the educational product.) It also looked like some of the schools may have used telemarketers (!!!) to call people (in presumably low-income neighborhoods) in an attempt to sell them on the idea of going to college. Admissions and finance counselors may have even received commission-based or at least sales performance-based compensation for trying to convince people to go to college. So, in essence, some of the schools may have been telemarketing federal student loans and convincing people to take out federal loans on a commission-like basis!

The problem? Many of these people end up being burdened with non-dischargeable student loan debt and degrees that have questionable economic and employment value. Of course, many will not find jobs in the fields they trained for and won't be any better off than they were before but will have student loans to pay. The program also reported about a couple lawsuits. For example, some nursing graduates are suing one of the schools because, although the program was accredited and allowed them to obtain legitimate nursing licenses, their degrees were not credible in the job market and thus did not really allow them to obtain employment as nurses. They said that their pediatrics internship was held at a day care center. (On a side note, you have to wonder whether the accreditation has meaning any longer and whether the accrediting body was doing its job properly.) In another case, students who had entered into a psychology PhD. program allege that they were (fraudulently?) told that the program was accredited when it was merely seeking accreditation, which means that they cannot obtain licenses to practice as psychologists, essentially rendering their podunk PhD's worthless. I'm under the impression that these students received a hard-sell; they may have been sold on the program by people who were, in essence, salespeople for the college.

So who are these for-profit colleges marketed to? They seem to be marketed to the lower classes, especially to minorities and people who might be the first member of a family to ever go to college and whose relatives wouldn't know (better) to advise them to attend legitimate, more established colleges and universities. Also, presumably many of those people would be unable to gain admission to state universities. It was also mentioned that (far less expensive and "non-profit") community colleges are packed and that now people are having difficulty gaining admission to them, leaving the for-profit mills as their only higher education alternative.

So why are all of these people, non-traditional students whose backgrounds probably would not allow them to gain admission to state universities and perhaps even crowded community colleges, so desperate to go to college? Because our nation's economy is in the shitter and everyone has been indoctrinated with the notion that the only way to advance economically (or to merely be able to obtain a lower middle class job) is to get a college education. Presumably, the only jobs they can find otherwise are dead-end poverty-wage jobs, so why not roll the dice on these for-profit colleges? Since our politicians and economists, in their great wisdom, allowed American manufacturing (as well as knowledge-based) jobs to be sent to India, China, and Mexico, to be filled with foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas, or (more likely to affect the students attending these for-profit colleges) given to masses of immigrants (both legal and illegal) the students are under tremendous pressure to find knowledge-based employment.

The end result is that the job market will be flooded with these McBachelors degrees. (Traditional state universities and established private colleges were already flooding the market.) Also the bachelors degree will become the modern equivalent of a high school diploma, except it isn't free. However, in spite of all of this higher education, knowledge-based, college-education-requiring jobs will not magically materialize into existence to accommodate everyone who has a college degree. All of the time, money, and resources invested in this unprecedented amount of higher education will change almost nothing about the state of our nation's job market. It will not create jobs or wealth for anyone other than the owners of the colleges, some administrators, and perhaps some faculty (if they receive decent compensation at all which I highly doubt). Instead, in reality, it is all just a huge amount of economic waste. Consequently, our society will be filled with unemployed or underemployed-and-out-of-field people with student loan debt and our nation may gain the distinction of having the most well-educated Walmart employees.

I have been railing against the problems of degree overproduction in graduate and professional education for years. Prior to a viewing of College, Inc. I was aware of the existence of the for-profit schools, but I was unaware how expensive they were nor that the scope of these operations was so large. Thus, I highly recommend a viewing of this video. Hopefully Frontline will one day do a report about the law school and graduate school scams at "non-profit" state universities and private colleges, but I doubt it.

Only in America...

2010-05-06T13:19:00.005-04:00

...would a high school principal send American flag-wearing students home so as not to offend Mexican-American students on Cinco de Mayo. Being booted out of high school (for a day) for a non-incendiary display of patriotism could only happen in America. Would principal Boden find a t-shirt with an image of an American flag covered in excrement more appropriate and less offensive?

Will the huge oversupply of people with college degrees force you to take mind-enhancing drugs in order to compete?

2010-04-27T16:41:00.007-04:00

In professional sports, one of the reasons for banning steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs is to prevent those drugs from becoming de facto necessities. In other words, if a large percentage of the players you are competing against for roster spots on professional teams are taking performance enhancing drugs, then you, too, will be forced to take steroids in order to compete. Honest, ethical people thus have a competitive disadvantage.

According to a report on Sunday's episode of 60 Minutes, college students and professionals in the workplace are now taking prescription drugs (often the ones prescribed for ADD) to enhance focus and mental awareness in the hopes of earning higher grades or being able to produce faster and better work product. Many of these people do not have prescriptions and are purchasing these drugs in a second-hand manner, presumably illegally. One of the interviewees mentioned that lawyers have used these drugs (big surprise):

Adams says other drugs are also being used as neuroenhancers. One he has tried is Provigil, first developed to treat the symptoms of the rare sleep disorder narcolepsy.

"People found that it was helpful as a stimulant for, you know, working in law offices and in academics and stuff like this. So I would say it's in the past five to ten years that it's become popular as a performance enhancer," Adams said. (60 Minutes report: Boosting Brain Power.)

The state of our nation's economy, the Education Arms Race, and the tremendous amount of competition for knowledge-based and professional jobs is one of the primary motivators for this kind of drug abuse. Otherwise honest, hard-working, presumably ethical people are being driven, perhaps subconsciously, to take prescription mind-enhancing drugs so that they can boost their performance and outdo the competition. The pressure to use mind enhancing drugs is just one more symptom of Education Overproduction, the Education Arms Race, and our nation's hyper-competitive job market for knowledge-based, college-education-requiring white collar jobs.

Perhaps these neuroenhancers will prove beneficial to society by allowing people to improve their cognitive ability and focus. I don't have a position on whether or not they are good or bad or beneficial, but until they are completely legal and available over-the-counter, people might still feel compelled to purchase them illegally in order to compete.

Democrats Introduce Bill to Make Private Student Loans Dischargeable in Bankruptcy!

2010-04-21T21:10:00.014-04:00

Special thanks to"Lawsucks" at JD Underground for posting about this. (It was posted earlier at the Education Matters blog, but I am not a regular reader of that blog, though perhaps I should be.) If this bill passes, I think it would be profound, so I want to post about it here.

According to Dick Durbin's webpage, he and some other Democrats are working on a Bill that would make private student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, just like other loans. Combined with the Federal government's new Income Based Repayment (IBR) program, graduates who are unsuccessful in securing employment sufficient to allow them to pay off their loans might be able to free themselves from their shackles. If you are in the process of racking up mountains of private student loan debt, you might want to consider borrowing a little extra ahead of time so that you can afford to hire a bankruptcy attorney.

If this Bill were to actually become law it could revolutionize higher education by restoring a negative feedback loop to the higher education-student loan industrial complex. Imagine what would happen if the banks no longer wanted to risk $100,000 on law students who needed to borrow $150,000 for their JDs knowing that a very large percentage of those students will never find work in the legal profession. (If tuition is $35,000/year, which is now very common, and the cost of living is $15,000/year, then students may need to borrow $150,000+, ignoring undergraduate loans.) If students can borrow up to $56,000 in federal loans, they would need about $100,000 in private loans. (My numbers for the federal limit may be out of date.)

One consideration for law graduates might be whether declaring bankruptcy would make them "unethical" for the purposes of state bar's character and fitness examinations. So, declaring bankruptcy on your private student loans might also eliminate the possibility of your ever being able to practice law in the future. However, if you graduate from law school and cannot find a job in the field but do find yourself buried under mountains of private student loan debt, bankruptcy might become a serious consideration. In fact, in this economy you might find yourself without any viable alternatives.

Note that there is one potential loophole. Depending on the exact wording of the Bill that gets signed into law (if it gets passed at all), this may not apply to private lenders that are 'nonprofits" or that are associated with "nonprofits", in which case most private loans might not be dischargeable at all and thus it may not have any real effect.

Potential effects of this legislation might be that:

(1.) A negative feedback loop could be restored to the higher education-student loan industrial complex. This could also put pressure on universities and especially the law schools to reign in the spiraling costs of higher education.

(2.) Students might no longer be able to obtain private loans without having cosigners who have a significant amount of assets (parents). This might be one way the banks will try to circumvent bankruptcy. This might make it impossible for students from poor families and for students whose parents are not foolhardy enough to put themselves on the hook from being able to obtain private student loans.

(3.) As a result, the number of students who are able to pursue expensive graduate and professional degrees that have dubious economic value could be reduced. Banks might actually have to consider whether or not attending second, third, and fourth tier law schools (or all law schools in general) at a cost of $150,000 is a good investment.

(4.) Interest rates on private student loans could increase, which means that successful graduates will have higher loan payments in order to subsidize less fortunate graduates.

(5.) Some law, business, and other graduate schools might be forced to close their doors as a result of having too few students. Of course, they will scream to high heaven before that happens and the federal government will probably step in to provide federal student loans so that everyone can pursue higher education.

I am not an expert on legal ethics, so I am left wondering:

If you declare bankruptcy, are you essentially repudiating your JD and eliminating any possibility of ever being able to practice law? Would declaring bankruptcy magically make you "unethical" and "unfit" to practice law as far as character and fitness examination committees are concerned?

What would happen if you declared bankruptcy after you had obtained your law licenses and never reported it to the Bar? (Are you even required a personal bankruptcy to the Bar?)

Are there any states where a bankruptcy after having earned a JD would not preclude you from passing a character and fitness examination?

I did a Google search and found few articles about it in the newspapers. Here are a few blog posts I found after doing a Google search:

House and Senate Introduce Bills to Make Student Loans Dischargeable in Bankruptcy (Student Lending Analytics Blog)

Big News--Senators Durbin and Cohen Introducing New Bill (Education Matters blog)

Methinks This is a Huge Sign of Progress (Education Matters blog)

Saturday Morning Law School Cartoon Compilation

2010-04-17T12:08:00.003-04:00

I have finished compiling a list of satirical cartoons for the JD Underground and law school scambusting communities. Please let me know if I've missed any. Enjoy!

http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/p/funny-law-school-scam-cartoons.html

Price Manipulation in the Precious Metals Markets?

2010-04-15T16:32:00.005-04:00

The Economic Collapse blog has just posted an article reporting manipulation in the prices of silver and gold. The article also hints at corruption in the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (where Brooksley Born, who tried to sound the alarm about unregulated derivatives trading, used to work). Here is a stunning quote from the article:

When people think they are buying "gold", they are actually just buying pieces of paper that say they own gold.

In fact, during the CFTC hearings, Jeffrey Christian of CPM Group confirmed that the LBMA banks actually have approximately a hundred times more gold deposits than actual gold bullion.

Uh oh.

So what happens if everyone decides that they want actual physical delivery of their gold?

It would be such a mess that it is painful even to think about it.

The truth is that right now most of the trading activities on the London exchange are just paper for paper.

But people get into gold because they want to be in a real commodity.

In fact, there are thousands of clients around the globe who think they own huge deposits of gold bullion, and are being charged large storage fees on that imaginary bullion, but what they really own are a bunch of pieces of paper.

This almost reminds me of the housing bubble crisis. I have seen many ads peddling gold to the masses on television and wondered exactly who was making the money off of these sales. I suspect that the people purchasing the gold are the ones being fleeced. Of course, this is just one more example of our federal government's failure to properly regulate economic activity.

Do the Chinese think we are retarded?

2010-04-14T19:51:00.001-04:00

According to Donald Trump, some of the Chinese businessmen he knows think we are completely insane for allowing them to have our industries and our jobs. Perhaps this is what we need. We need to have some powerful, influential wealthy people who still have a conscience and some scintilla of concern for the lower classes to help change our government's self-destructive economic policies. The lower classes certainly don't have the ability to do it. You can find the interview here:

http://www.economyincrisis.org/content/trump-sounds-alarm-china

Excellent article at Seeking Alpha

2010-04-09T12:30:00.001-04:00

Sorry I haven't been keeping up with my blog lately; I've been preoccupied. Anyway, I just read a great article at the blog Seeking Alpha titled Why the Credit Bubble Cannot be Reinflated. Here is a profound quote that I'd like to share with everyone:

It's not the loss of factory jobs per se which has hollowed out the nation's manufacturing base--it's the loss of entire ecologies of production.

Most factories in advanced economies are filled with robots, not thousands of humans; that's the only way it makes financial sense in a global economy. But some company manufactures the robots, and someone has to maintain them and program them, and other firms supply parts, software, machine tools, etc. The end-product factory is merely the most visible part of a complex web of suppliers, toolmakers, and expertise.

So when production capacity leaves the country, it's not like certain trees got logged--it's like an entire ecology has been clearcut, leaving barren hardpan behind. It becomes very difficult to recreate that complex ecology and expertise.

This is consistent with one of the themes of this blog--that almost everything in our economy is interconnected. In this case, the loss of low-level manufacturing jobs, the ones that our politicians and intellectuals thought we could do without--also results in a loss of other high-level jobs that are dependent on doing the low-level jobs. Of course, that also results in a loss of jobs in other fields, such as lawyering (less economic activity means less work for lawyers). Additionally, the loss of manufacturing jobs drives people into the colleges to retrain for (fewer) high-level jobs, and some of the people who lost those high-level manufacturing-related jobs will return to seek advanced degrees or to retrain for other fields, resulting in an oversupply of degree holders in various fields.

Labor Department claims a gain of 162,000 jobs. It looks like 88,000 were temp jobs for an actual loss of about 76,000 jobs.

2010-04-02T13:51:00.007-04:00

It looks like the estimate based on the ADP report for March was wrong and that, according to the Labor Department (as reported at CNN Money), the U.S. packed on 162,000 new jobs in March. Of course, relative to population growth, it's only a gain of 12,000 jobs, which is certainly much better than the large losses we have suffered recently. However, 48,000 of those jobs were temporary Census Bureau jobs. So, the real number is closer to 114,000 (or a loss of 38,000 relative to population growth). Still, it does seem like good news. I had previously predicted another month of losses and apparently I was wrong (for the first time in, oh, about two years).

Another blog, Seeking Alpha, is claiming that 40,000 other jobs were temp jobs and that 37,000 jobs were health care jobs. I haven't come across a better source for this, but if so, that means that 88,000 of the jobs were illusory, reducing the number to 74,000 jobs for a loss of about 76,000 jobs relative to population growth. That blogger goes on to say:

Despite all the negative aspects to the employment report, including average hourly earnings falling 0.1%, the mainstream media trumpeted it as more evidence that 'happy days are here again' (the title of a song from the Great Depression). Coverage was filled with statements such as, "The increase is the latest sign that the economic recovery is sustainable and healing in the job market is beginning." Government hiring of census workers and more health care jobs (many of which are also government related) does not indicate a sustainable economic recovery. Instead, it indicates sustainable government spending to try to make a recovery look like it is taking place.

Is Having a Sense of Entitlement Necessarily Unfounded?

2010-04-01T21:07:00.002-04:00

I have been contributing comments to a debate at the Wall Street Journal's blog, and I might turn some of them into blog posts. Here is the first one.

I disagree that it is wrong that “Many law students and new lawyers feel entitled to a high paying, high quality job because they went to law school.” If you spent 7 years in college, busted your ass, paid a large opportunity cost, and accumulated $120,000+ worth of non-dischargeable student loan debt, shouldn’t you feel entitled to a reasonable return on your investment if you did a good job of training and preparing yourself to work as a lawyer? I encourage disenchanted law school graduates who graduated with 3.0’s and above to feel angry, cheated, and entitled. It is perfectly understandable and proper to feel that way.

If you are a law student or an unemployed or underemployed lawyer, please stop flagellating yourself and feeling guilty for having been misled after you had been indoctrinated with propaganda selling the value of higher education since childhood. The state of our nation’s economy and our nation’s Education Arms Race are not your fault. You made an effort to train to earn a living by going to college and graduating from law school. Grow a backbone and a sense of righteous, moral outrage. We are never going to be able to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy nor close excess law schools until we seize the moral high ground.

ADP data suggests loss of 23,000 jobs (more like 173,000 jobs) in March

2010-04-01T03:48:00.000-04:00

One of the nation's largest payroll companies, ADP, has just reported data suggesting a loss of 23,000 jobs for the month of March. Of course, since our nation needs about 150,000 new jobs every month to keep pace with population growth, it's really closer to a loss of 173,000 jobs.

Digging deeper into the stats, a loss of 51,000 jobs in good-producing industries was reported while 28,000 (presumably low-wage) service jobs were added. So, our nation lost 51,000 jobs in industries that produce physical wealth and gained 28,000 jobs in low-wage industries, consistent with our transformation into a third world country.

Science Grad School Scambloggers?

2010-03-31T17:21:00.004-04:00

Lawyers aren't the only people having trouble dealing with Education Overproduction. Even PhD. scientists (gasp!) of all people are having difficulty on the job market. I have a Masters degree in one of the physical sciences, so I have been aware of this problem for over a decade, and last night I stumbled across the remains of a blog dedicated to science graduate school scambusting. I haven't spent much time looking it over yet, but it's not hard to get the gist of it. So, I thought I would post a link to it here:

Science Ph.D. Job Issues Blog

Also, check out this NPR Science Friday discussion about the problem:

Young Scientists Issues (1996)--At least listen to the ten minutes to hear a funny skit and a list of 5 things unemployed PhD.'s (and JD.'s) do not need to hear..

Granted, science PhD.'s don't have the kinds of student loan problems that lawyers and liberal arts PhD.'s suffer under, but they have still invested years of their lives to train for a glutted field and they may have undergraduate student loans that compounded interest while they were in graduate school. Since it takes 5-7 years to earn a PhD., they have higher opportunity costs than law students. That number increases if you add on time served in postdocs or include half of the years (2) spent majoring in science as undergraduates. Normally, science graduate students do not pay any tuition and receive small stipends (think $15,000/year, often without any insurance). The rationale behind the stipends is that they work as teaching assistants and research assistants, often for 65+ hours/week. It really isn't a bad way to earn a PhD., and these degrees are not as useless as Art History or Philosophy PhD.'s, but these are bright people who might have been better served if they had gone into other fields where they could have found work with their Bachelors degrees (engineering, computer science, accounting, or business) or just headed Med.

After they finish their PhD.'s most end up working low-paid 2-3 year gypsy scientist positions called postdoctorates in the hopes of being able to eventually land an assistant professor position (good luck with that). After two or three postdocs, most wash out of science, the best years of their lives having been wasted.

Science research at the universities is essentially structured as a pyramid scheme, with deans and professors needing a horde of graduate students to teach the undergraduates (laboratory TAs, review classes, etc.) and most importantly, to do the repetitive grunt work that is science research. The institutions have no concern for whether or not our nation needs more PhD. scientists nor whether they will find real, solid middle class employment in their fields. Also, since they cannot feed enough Americans to the machine, they import thousands of foreign graduate students who later compete for postdocs and academic and industry jobs with the Americans. (The foreign grad students are good, hard-working, often very bright, rather likable people, and I have nothing against them personally, but this discussion and this blog is about what is in the economic interests of Americans, not whether or not people in other countries are good people or worthy of our jobs.)

The end result is that we are producing a large oversupply of frustrated and disenchanted science PhD.'s. But how will science research get done without the grad students? Some people have proposed that we train fewer people and create permanent research positions for PhD.'s at $50-60,000/year. They would probably be just as cost-effective if not more so than the graduate students because they are already trained and productive, just as postdocs are more efficient and productive than grad students.

Before you conclude that science professors are necessarily in on this and that they are doing well, unlike law professors, they suffer from the risk of losing their research grants and their jobs, and tenure is being eroded. (You might say that the "scientists career half-life is low.) I don't think they are paid nearly as well as law professors either. If you are an assistant professor you will have to work your ass off to make sure that your lab's research is productive and you will always be writing grant proposals, seeking extremely competitive grants.

Unsurprisingly, many of these unemployed, underemployed, angry, and disenchanted scientists have fled the science field to come to law school in the hopes of becoming well-to-do intellectual property lawyers. So now we have an oversupply of people with a combination of advanced science degrees and law degrees! That something like that is possible, that people who are so well-trained, well-educated, and skilled could have difficulty finding a job commensurate with their credentials is unfathomable to most Americans.

To an extent, I am also a science career scambuster, too. Of course, I am interested in the problem of our nation's Education Arms Race in general as well as other economic and societal issues.

A Facelift for Fluster Cucked

2010-03-31T04:59:00.001-04:00

After spending a number of hours messing around with a generic blog template and Blogger's new and improved WYSIWYG template editor, I am pleased to unveil a new look for my blog. I hope that it is more aesthetic and reader friendly.

It all started about a week ago when someone sent me an email alerting me to the fact that people could no longer post comments. So, I had to scrap my previous template, which I had designed using the Trix generator, and replaced it with one of Blogger's new templates. However, I thought it looked crappy.

So I found a generic blog template to mess around with and I learned some very basic CSS-HTML. (I further modified that template to make it even more customizable in the new Blogger template editor.) However, for some reason I still cannot get embedded commenting to work. Fortunately the popup window and separate window options work, so I'm going with the separate window option since some people might have popups disabled.

So, here it is. Please let me know what you think.

Why Won't (Can't) Unemployed Lawyers Find Jobs in Other Fields?

2010-03-27T13:33:00.005-04:00

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?

Seems to me like they are just trying to cut down on the number of future competitors."

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.

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.

Frank's First Movie!

2010-03-26T02:08:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends. I am pleased to announce the creation of my first-ever animated political cartoon! Please let me know what you think.

Is your job going to China?

2010-03-25T03:10:00.022-04:00

According to a new paper hosted at the Economic Policy Institute's website, 2.4 million American jobs migrated to China between the years of 2001 and 2008. So, that number does not include the hundreds of thousands if not millions of other jobs that must have been lost to China before 2001, nor does it include all of the jobs lost to other nations such as India and Mexico. Presumably, other jobs were lost as secondary consequences of foreign outsourcing.

One of the themes of this blog is that our vast assortment of economic problems (resulting from awful economic policies) sometimes compound one another. When American (manufacturing) jobs leave the United States (or when they are filled by foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas) through a process of global labor arbitrage, people in affected fields are motivated to retrain and reeducate, which means that those people will go to college to compete for jobs that require a college education even though the supply of college-education-requiring jobs will not magically increase to accommodate them. (However, cries from politicians, media pundits, and disconnected ivory tower intellectuals that more and better higher education is the solution to our nation's economic problems continue to increase.) Also, more high school graduates will feel compelled to go to college. Then, unable to find jobs with their bachelors degrees, they will add graduate and professional degrees to their arsenals, engaging in an education arms race, resulting in an oversupply of people with advanced degrees and boatloads of student loan debt, increasing the number of poor souls who are members of the indentured educated class.

Are you ready to join the third world?

LMAO -- very funny video

2010-03-24T13:44:00.003-04:00

I don't know who created this video, but I found a link to it on the Third Tier Reality blog (comment #4 of that post). I laughed hysterically to the point where tears came out of my eyes, so I thought I'd share it with everyone. Enjoy!

Jersey Shore law school graduate seeks job

This thread at the JD Underground Forum might explain the reference to the "Valvoline Dean".

Here's another funny cartoon from the same author.

Harvard Law Graduates having difficulty finding private sector jobs?

2010-03-23T18:57:00.001-04:00

An article in the ABA Journal reports that some Harvard Law students have been having difficulty finding jobs at (presumably large) law firms. I suspect that those students will eventually find employment at small and medium-sized firms. However, it makes me wonder how students at less prestigious law schools are doing. This is yet just one more piece of evidence that we are training far, far too many lawyers and that we need to dramatically reduce the number of seats available at the law schools, preferably by closing many of them.

Indoctrination and Higher Education

2010-03-17T02:34:00.012-04:00

Here are some (edited and improved) comments that I left on Angel the Lawyer's and Hardknocks's blog, But I Did Everything Right!. I think they are worth republishing as a blog post. Near the end of a post titled Second Chances, New Beginnings, Hardknocks asked:

What does it say about the state of our nation and the effectiveness of our educational system when a first generation college student with dual degrees from the best universities in America believes the only option left for her is to take out yet another private loan to get her PhD because she is unable to find a job – any job – even as a barista at the local Starbucks? What does it say when this blog gets thousands of hits each month with numerous young people telling us that they’ve given up, contemplated suicide, or have to lie on their resume because they have too much education to get a job? -- Hardknocks

It means that our society has a very serious problem with producing too many college graduates, not just in the legal field, but in almost all fields. We are also producing far too many MBAs and even PhD. scientists.

In fact, many people with science degrees, including many with PhD's and postdocs, fled the career graveyard of science for law school to become patent lawyers, resulting in a large oversupply of patent lawyers. That people could have two advanced degrees and have difficulty obtaining employment commensurate with their education is probably unfathomable to most laypeople, most of whom have drank the education Kool Aid and believe that higher education is a guarantor of vocational success.

The end result of our society's Education Arms Race is that our economy is suffering from a tremendous amount of economic waste and that as a result our society is poorer. Instead of spending human effort producing real wealth--goods and services--we are squandering it training people for non-existent job positions. Money spent on student loans is money that will not be spent on consumer goods and services. Of course, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans are also suffering from the excruciating pain and humiliation of having spent time and money on higher education only to find themselves unemployed and unemployable in their fields. If they do not find jobs in their fields shortly after graduation, they will probably lose the economic value of their degrees. The realization that you have really fucked up your life, permanently, and that you really are a loser can drive you to suicide.

How could all of this happen? It's happening because of the government's abject failure to regulate the numbers of people in college or to even acknowledge the existence of this issue. This is just another example of the government's failure to regulate a market that suffers from a lack of feedback loops and information asymmetry. Lenders don't need to worry about whether college education is a good investment because student loans are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, and colleges don't need to worry about whether the market needs more college graduates because they have an interest in having as many students as they can and they are fed by student loans, which means that their financial self interest runs contrary to the best interests of students and society.

Demosthenes then said:

If only we "elite, ""super-intelligent," "over-educated," yet "under-experienced" asshats had asked these questions before it was too late maybe we could have stood a chance. -- Demosthenes

That professional school education may not have economic value never occurs to most naive 21 year-olds who are trying to decide what the hell they're going to do with their English and Poly Sci degrees other than sling lattes. On other forums, such as the ABA Journal, commentators will chime in with the retort, "They should have known better before going to law school, I have no sympathy for them."

I suspect that most people do not understand that students have been heavily indoctrinated with the dogma that education is the key to success. This message can be found almost everywhere in our society. Just crack open a newspaper or turn on the radio or the TV and it probably won't take long until someone says that more people need to go to college to "train for the jobs of tomorrow" or that "unemployed workers need to retrain to obtain new skills for 'in demand' fields." Our politicians, smug economists, and the media believe this dogma unquestioningly and they try to sell it to the public as though it were an opiate of the masses. "We have unemployment problems in this state, and we're going to do something! We're going to invest in better education!"

This notion that higher education is a guarantor of an economically secure life permeates our society and it bombards people from all directions. We have all been indoctrinated with it since elementary school.

Is it thus any wonder that so many 21 year-olds almost unquestioningly believe that obtaining an advanced degree, especially a professional degree, will give them a leg-up in the job market? Misleading employment statistics put out by greedy self-interested institutions of higher debt (such as law schools) only help to confirm in people's minds what they have been indoctrinated to believe since nursery school.

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POLL -- Will Obama Win Reelection?

2010-03-15T21:33:00.004-04:00

Here's another one of Mark Fiore's cartoons which ties into my poll about Obama's reelection prospects:

I think the foundations of our nation's economy will continue to deteriorate, driven by the economic force of Global Labor Arbitrage, and that the percentage of working-aged Americans who are employed will continue to decrease. Even if there is job growth, it will still feel like job loss if the number of new jobs is not larger than the growth in the population of working-aged people. So, I don't think Obama will win reelection simply because people who would otherwise support him will either vote against him or will lose interest in taking the effort needed to come to the polls and vote for him.

Is Obama a wuss? I don't know, but from what I can tell he isn't much better than any other conventional politician on economic issues. He hasn't done anything other than to offer feel-good stimulus legislation while completely failing to attempt to address let alone acknowledge the real causes of our nation's economic malaise. (However, he's taken good care of Wall Street and irresponsible bankers.) Also, I can't say that I'm real impressed with his handling of health care.

What do you think? Am I the only person who voted for Obama and who rooted for him in the primaries now wondering how things might have been different if Hillary had been elected? I really not all that surprised by Obama's failure to address our nation's economic problems; I never expected too much out of him other than to be merely not as bad as the other candidates.

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One of Mark Fiore's better animated political cartoons

2010-03-14T12:06:00.006-04:00

Check out Mark Fiore's new animated political cartoon, Plummeting Death Reform, which mocks Congress's legislative paralysis. At first I thought it was a reference to Congress's failure to address our nation's economic problems, but it's really about health care. Did anyone else think that was good metaphor? I thought it did a nice job of capturing how the Democrats' concern for the Republicans will ultimately drive themselves into the ground (not that they need any more help).

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Insanity in Education--Law School Tuition Skyrockets as Employment Propsects Dwindle

2010-03-12T18:19:00.008-05:00

While browsing over my alma mater's webpage I looked at how much it wanted for law school tuition and thought to myself, "That's not much more than what I paid a couple years ago." Then I realized that that rate was not per year, but per semester!

This is another instance of Insanity in Education. While employment prospects for lawyers have decreased precipitously in the past two decades, the cost of becoming a lawyer has increased dramatically with tuition seeming to have skyrocketed by about 80% in the past ten years.

According to the law school rankings page at U.S. News & World Report, the sticker price to attend a top law school is now around $43,000/year. If you add in $15,000 for living expenses, the total cost is about $58,000/year or about $174,000 round trip. At least JDs from the top ten law schools have some employment value and many of the students will earn some money doing summer associateships.

What is even more sickening is that the prices have also increased at many no-name third tier toilet schools as well, some of which want as much as $40,000/year ($165,000 total cost) with many asking for $30,000/year ($135,000 total cost).

How their unemployed, underemployed, and mostly unemployable graduates are supposed to pay back those amounts in addition to whatever undergraduate student loan debt they have is beyond me. In the meantime, naive students continue to bust down schools' doors hoping to gain admission to these institutions of higher debt.

Blogger Esq. Never has an amusing take on what the Federal government's new Income-Based Repayment plan portends for law school loans--the taxpayers will end up footing the bill. I suspect that taxpayers would probably end up footing the bill anyway even without IBR because the Education Bubble will have to burst at some point.

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Welcome Barbara Ehrenreich forum readers.

2010-03-12T12:26:00.005-05:00

Are there any other forums where people seriously question the Education Arms Race?

I have been posting on author Barbara Ehrenreich's forum for years, anonymously, and today I spammed out some advertisements there for my new blog (in the course of posting).

Other than JD Underground, that forum is the only one I know of that caters to angry, disenchanted college-educated people who "get it"; which is exactly the kind of fan base that I am hoping to attract. The dogmatic notion that college education will magically solve individuals' employment problems is heavily ingrained and entrenched in the public's mind, and that is one of the dogmas that I hope to rattle with this blog. In the future I will probably write a post and provide links about the career graveyard that is the science profession.

If you just came here from Barbara Ehrenreich's forum (or not), please bookmark this blog and say hello in the comments.

Also, if anyone knows of any other forums where malcontents question the value of college education and graduate degrees, please post a link.

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U.S. suffers loss of 36,000 jobs (actually more like 186,000 jobs) in February 2010.

2010-03-12T03:05:00.004-05:00

The Associated Press is reporting that the nation suffered a loss of 36,000 jobs for February, 2010. Paradoxically(?) stock prices actually increased since some economists had previously predicted a loss of 50,000 jobs. When you factor in our nation's explosive rate of population growth (about 3+ million new people/year) we actually lost about 186,000 jobs relative to population growth. Thus, it's possible for the nation to gain jobs while the percentage of working-aged people who are employed decreases.

In the meantime our politicians, our economists, and our pundits are still optimistic about an economic recovery. A recovery based on--what? Since we offshored millions of manufacturing jobs and a great many knowledge-based jobs while also importing foreign workers on H-1B and L-1 visas to take domestic knowledge-based jobs, our economy no longer has the economic foundation it needs for a recovery. Besides, global labor arbitrage played a role in our entering the recession in the first place, and it has only continued to prolong it.

The good news is that the economy will recover--in China.

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List of Law School scam busting blogs added.

2010-03-11T22:33:00.004-05:00

I'd like to take this moment to warn anyone thinking about going to law school as a means of avoiding the rising tide of misery that has engulfed the lower and middle classes NOT to go! Sadly, the legal profession is horribly glutted and has not served as a ladder of upward mobility for most graduates for decades. What is even worse is that most law students graduate with mountains of student loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. They end up jobless, indebted, and pretty much unemployable in other fields. (Employers in other fields will wonder why the hell they aren't working in the legal profession because most non-lawyers mistakenly believe that all lawyers are rich.)

Unsurprisingly, the American Bar Association and the nation's law schools have done almost nothing to address or even acknowledge the problem of lawyer overproduction. They are, after all, in essence, self-interested businesses whose stakeholders are professors, deans, and administrators. In the meantime, the cost of one year's tuition at many law schools has skyrocketed to an almost unbelievable $45,000/year!

If you cannot gain admission to a top ten law school, don't go! Heck, even if you can gain admission to a top law school you really need to give the matter very serious thought. Recent articles have reported that even students at the top law schools have been having difficulty finding positions.

Lawyer overproduction might be good for the education and student loan cartels, but it isn't good for our society nor our economy. When a college graduate cannot find employment in his field or at least in a field that would utilize the knowledge he acquired, the time and money he spent on education constitutes economic waste. Sadly, this problem is not unique to law school. We are also producing too many MBAs, too many Ph.D. scientists, and probably too many degree holders in just about every other field as desperate students engage in what amounts to an education arms race.

Limiting the number of people who can obtain college and graduate education is not merely economically sensible, but also humane. The unseen tragedy is that tens of thousands of well-meaning, hard working, often highly intelligent people have had their lives destroyed by student loan debt and the inevitable feelings of anguish and humiliation that must come from having invested years of effort and gobs of money on college education only to discover that they cannot find positions in their fields. My heart goes out to them.

However, there are a couple people fighting the good fight. In the past few years a number of excellent blogs have sprung up to "expose the law school scam." (Aside from providing devastating satire, I think they are claiming that the law schools provide prospective students with very misleading employment statistics.)

Here are some of the blogs that I like to visit in no particular order. The first one is a discussion forum for angry, disenchanted lawyers.

JD Underground -- discussion forum
Exposing the Law School Scam
Esq. Never
But I Did Everything Right!
Third Tier Reality
Temporary Attorney: The Sweatshop Edition
The Jobless Jurisdoctor
The Last Ship to Leave Middle Earth
Children of Debt
JD Underdog
Big Debt Small Law

I guess I'm a law school scambuster too, but the focus of my blog is less about the value of a jurisdoctorate and more about the economic and societal irrationality that has plagued our country, including the spectacle of our society's educating people for non-existent job positions.

Our nation's myriad problems feed on one another. Global labor arbitrage has destroyed American manufacturing and cost us a great many knowledge-based jobs that require college education, which compels even more people to rush into the colleges, resulting in a large oversupply of people with bachelors degrees. That large oversupply drives people into graduate and professional school as they seek to outdo everyone else. In the meantime, many people are returning to college for second or third degrees and often for professional degrees. It's all connected.

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Talk Radio -- Tom Ashbrook interviews the guy who investigated the Madoff Scam

2010-03-11T02:09:00.005-05:00

One of my favorite talk radio shows is Tom Ashbrook's On Point. Today he talked to Harry Markopolos about his new book, No One Would Listen. Markopolos and some associate brokers took it upon themselves to investigate Madoff's operation and warned the SEC about it to no avail. It is an interesting story and one of the best On Point shows that I have listened to recently. I was intrigued by Markopolos's story about how he feared for his life and even contemplated killing Madoff himself in order to keep Madoff from ordering a hit on him. You can find the show here:

http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/03/markopolos-no-one-would-listen

Franky Goes to Bloggywood

2010-03-11T01:44:00.010-05:00

This morning it occurred to me that if I took all of the content I have contributed to the Internet over the years, content that is easily lost and forgotten, I could turn it into a political commentary blog.

I have been debating politics and ideas since the Seventh Grade. My first posts were to computer bulletin board systems (BBSes) back in the late Eighties, before the Internet, when people would dial into BBSes with their 2400 Baud modems on their Tandy 1000s. It was all simple text back then. We've come a long way. I absolutely love the Internet and the freedom of expression it offers us. Forty years from now I'll be able to tell my niece's and my nephew's children about a time before the Internet and how I was able to experience the birth of the computer age.

Throughout the years many people have admired my posts and my take on the issues. I used to be an adherent of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy, but I have since recovered and (hopefully) repented. While I still believe in the basic Objectivist metaphysics, epistemology, and much of the ethics, over time my ethical and political views diverged. Today I no longer pay much attention to nor spend much time thinking about Objectivism, which I now regard as a dogma. Now I have my own individuated and independent philosophy.

With this blog I want to share some of my better forum posts and to discuss current events and news talk radio clips. I am a proud American, or at least I used to be. In the past decade I have come to conclude that our once prosperous nation is transforming into an overpopulated, impoverished third world country for a variety of reasons, both political and cultural. It is a real cluster fuck, and I want to chronicle America's race to the bottom and rant about what ails us. I am specifically interested in these issues:

The U.S. Economy
Global Labor Arbitrage--Foreign Outsourcing, H-1B and L-1 visas, Mass Immigration
Health Care
The Education Bubble or Education Arms Race
The Value of Going to Law School
Population Explosion and Environmental Degradation
The nation's "Rationality Factor" (more about that in a future post)

This isn't a discussion forum, but I welcome comments and reasonable, polite debate. Enjoy my posts, visit my links, and have at it.

Frank the Underemployed Professional