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

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?

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!

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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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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.