Do NOT Go to Law School
Law School may be Financially and Vocationally Disastrous
Most of this content was originally published as a response to a U.S. News & World Report article, but I want to post it here for posterity and so that I can easily post it elsewhere as needed. I think that pointing out the conflict of interest that exists between the law schools, students, and society is a good way to help explain the situation to naive undergraduates who could not possibly imagine that the law schools may not have their best interests in mind.
Think very, very carefully before going to law school and perhaps ruining your life, permanently. The law schools have been flooding the market with a large oversupply of attorneys for decades. This has been a problem for a long time, not just in the current recession. The legal job market is horrible right now and it was only a little less awful earlier in the decade and in the 1990's. A huge amount of JDs, perhaps as much as 60%, never find work as attorneys and many who do find work don't earn enough to make having gone to law school worthwhile. If you are looking for something to do with a liberal arts degree, find something else. Also, because of the huge oversupply of attorneys, working as a lawyer can be very miserable. Attorneys work very long hours under intense pressure in Machiavellian environments and many do not earn high incomes unless they are at large firms.
The law schools, the universities, the ABA, NALP, the student loan companies, and other law school-dependent and related industries DO NOT NECESSARILY HAVE YOUR BEST INTERESTS IN MIND. These are NOT benevolent organizations that only look out for the best interests of students and society. They are self-interested, often greedy organizations that could care less about you and society. Colleges and universities are essentially greedy businesses that generate profits for deans and well-paid professors. They don't care if they are producing three or four times as many new lawyers as what the market needs. Some of these entities can and will purposely and knowingly publish inflated and misleading employment statistics so that the student-loan funded tuition dollars continue to roll in. These are not benevolent, socially responsible societal organizations. They are NOT your friends. There IS A CONFLICT OF INTEREST between these organizations' interests and students' and society's interests. Remember, someone who works at McDonalds after law school is technically "employed" for statistical purposes. Also, if only 20% of all employment survey recipients respond and they are the ones who obtained positive outcomes, the employment statistics will look good.
You can damage yourself severely by accumulating over $120,000 (if not much more) in student loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. That debt could haunt you forever and reduce your attractiveness to members of the opposite sex, delay (or prevent) important life events such as marriage and having children, and leave you impoverished and feeling like a member of the indentured educated class for the rest of your life.
Also, your law degree could make it difficult to find work in other fields because employers will assume that you are a loser if you couldn't find work as a lawyer because the naive public believes that all lawyers are rich and that the legal profession is a good field. Even if they know that law is a competitive field, they will regard you as a complete loser anyway since you couldn't make it.
