Yesterday I made a new animated political cartoon satirizing the law school scam. It isn't as good as my first two, but I hope that some of you enjoy it. I was inspired by the prospect of people being able to purchase law degrees at drive-thru windows.
In other news, I am gushing over the report that the motion to dismiss in the Thomas Jefferson School of Law class action lawsuit has been DENIED!
You know that the economy is bad and that the situation is dire when...porn actresses speak of finding alternate means of earning a living! Thanks goes to the poster YouGottaBeShittingMe for bringing this article to our attention at the JD Underground forum. Here are some quotes from the article "Porn Stars: The Death of a Sex-Industry Profession" published at The Daily Beast interspersed with my commentary.
“The market is oversaturated now,” says Brooklyn Lee. Lee is porn’s latest It girl. At the AVN Awards, Lee, 22, won five awards, including Best New Starlet. She says: “There used to be a few hundred girls and now there are thousands. So porn superstars have fallen by the wayside."
“A few years ago there were 100 girls in the entire industry, and now 100 girls enter the industry each week. They used to all be stars; now they all just think they’re stars.” The result, [Mark] Spiegler says, is that “they’ve become interchangeable.”
The recession may be one reason, again, for the unprecedented number of women who want to shoot sex scenes. Another reason offered by Spiegler is the change in a porn star’s status from the stigmatized margins. “Ten years ago a girl fell into porn,” Spiegler says. “Now there are a lot of girls who dream of doing porn.”The field became glutted. Who would 'a' thunk it? The economy is so bad that many young women have been reduced to working as porn actresses. Another contributing factor might be that student loans have become so onerous at a time of decreasing entry-level career opportunities that sexy graduates really need to "sell" themselves.
Many of these underemployed performers find alternate ways to earn a living, all of which further erase boundaries between porn stars and fans. “A lot of girls will do movies as publicity,” says [Jesse] Jane. Then the women monetize that publicity via social media, selling custom DVDs, live cam shows, and, of course, prostitution.What does it imply about the state of the U.S. economy when people who are working one of the most alternative means of earning a living possible need to find alternative means to earn a living? It almost sounds as though some of the women are shooting porn scenes for free (almost like an unpaid internship?) in the hopes of using it to market themselves over the Internet.
In the legal field we speak of Big Law, Mid-Law, and ShitLaw. Is there a porn industry equivalent in the form of Big Porn, Mid-Porn, and Shit Porn? (No scatological jokes in the comments, please.) Is there such a thing as starving solo porn actresses?
Despite the smaller stakes, success in porn now requires all the schmoozing of any competitive career. Lee says: “I spend most of my time trying to make contacts and do the business side. The sex is the only part about being a porn star these days that is not hard work.”So, if you are an unemployed or underemployed porn actress the solution is to...Network!***
On the bright side, these porn actresses are better off than most college graduates. I suspect that they probably didn't have to take out student loans to enter into the porn industry. Also, the porn actress job market is probably much better than the legal job market and many other knowledge-based job markets.
***If you are new to the law school scambuster community, the term "Network" has become an inside meme used to denote futility and to humorously mock naive successful people (well-off know-it-alls, mostly from older generations) who mindlessly advise the college educated unemployed and underemployed to "network!". It's almost like our own "Who is John Galt?"
I think this photo of an Occupy Wall Street protestor shot by Jena Cumbo is worth at least 10,000 words. So, I thought I'd post it. Can you say overeducated, overqualified, and unemployable? It's a great illustration of what's wrong with our higher education system today where such a large excess of college graduates are produced that their degrees have little employment value.
Photo credit: Jena Cumbo, image linked from SOMA Magazine.
I am pleased to announce that last night the CBS Evening News provided credible national publicity for the Law School Scam with a 2.5 minute piece that featured Professor Paul Campos. (Credit is due to OhioDocReviewer for posting about it on JD Underground.)
Even Lawyers Struggle to Find Jobs These Days
CBS News correspondent Chip Reid reports:
"You wanted to be a lawyer all your life and now you are a lawyer. Do you take pride in that?"
"I am not a lawyer. I'm a server."Thirty year old Kevin Johnson graduated from New York Law School last February. His lifelong dream is to serve the needy as a lawyer, but for now he's serving pizza.
"Lawyers do lawyer things. Lawyers work at law firms. Lawyers do public policy work. Lawyers don't serve pizza."Johnson graduated in the top 25% of his class and was confident he'd find a job, especially when he saw his law school reporting an employment rate of around 90% on its website.
Paul Campos said:
"Used car salesmen cannot get away with the kind of claims that law schools get away with all of the time."The story was introduced by Scott Pelley, the CBS Evening News anchorman who also reports for 60 Minutes. It's difficult to expect much from a very brief report, but it was great! This news clip may be the best TV coverage I have ever seen of the Law School Scam, and it was prominent! Hopefully it will compel NBC and ABC to do produce similar stories. Also, I sure hope that this encourages 60 Minutes to produce a full report.
I do not know if this specific piece was made possible by Paul Campos, but he deserves tremendous credit for giving credibility to our views. I admire his bravery for going against the pecuniary interests of his colleagues and the law school establishment. Paul, if you are reading this, thank you for providing a credible public voice for the hundreds of thousands of disgruntled JDs who are cheering for you. I hope that you receive a 30 or 45 minute slot on NPR's Talk of the Nation and On Point.
Also, we should give credit to the three lawyers who are handling the class action lawsuits against the law schools; they have also brought publicity to the Law School Scam. They are David Anziska, Jesse Strauss, and Frank Raimond.
Professor Campos recently participated in a discussion at Stanford which you can watch on YouTube. It's worthwhile.
In the comments to my "Persuading the 'Personal Responsibility' Crowd" thread a debate broke out about whether or not the law schools are committing fraud. In my view the answer is a resounding Yes, in the context of actuality and not legality. From a legal perspective it will depend on individual states' fraud statutes and case law, the specific facts at issue, etc.
In one of the comments to that thread, poster "Just Sayin" responded in part:
And no they aren't screwing people over by publishing false employment numbers. That's to be expected. More so we were all encouraged to go to law school by family members and the thought of being rich.To which I responded, Anonymously (being too lazy to log in):
In your view, should it be perfectly permissible for used car dealers to "rollback" the mileage on cars and then tell purchasers that the vehicles have much less mileage than they actually do? If a buyer purchases a vehicle with 60,000 actual miles on it but pays the price for a vehicle with 25,000 miles after relying on the odometer that showed 25,000 miles, is that the buyer's fault?To which "Just Sayin" responded:
That analogy doesn't hold up. Sorry. When law schools say hey 95% of people with law degrees from our school gets a job. So when one buys X, there's a high possibility that you can do Y. They aren't selling you a future job, their product is a law school education. Whatever you pay, or whatever the market is saying, you will still get a law school education. Essentially, they can lie all they want about a future job, because that's not what they are selling. Its shady nonetheless, but fraud no.This brings us to the crux of the issue. What exactly are the law schools selling? Are the law schools at the very least guilty of fraudulent inducement?
Onto your analogy where a used car salesman sells you a car that they purposefully rolled back the meter. Pretty much they are selling you a crappy car, not the potential of X happening do to you buying the car. This is more equivalent to a law school promising you a great education but instead giving you crap..... actually this is true too.
Lastly, sooner or later, we have to stop lying to ourselves as to why we went to law school. We all were either talked into it by family, who said "wow you can argue well, you'll be a great lawyer some day" or by watching an endless number of law dramas. Really, no matter what the job numbers were, we weren't going to not go. We had to prove how smart we were, or to make their degrees worth something.
The Huffington Post published an article that, if factual, provides a scathing indictment of some members of the top "1%". Allegedly, a petty banker stiffed a waitress for a $135 meal, leaving a 1% tip of $1.33 with a circle around the printed word "tip" and an arrow pointing to "Get a real job." Supposedly, the photo of the receipt was taken by the banker's employee and posted on his blog, Future Ex Banker.
The restaurant claims that they found their copy of the receipt and that the receipt (or photo) had been altered. In the meantime, the blog has since mysteriously disappeared from Wordpress. The Smoking Gun published an article with more information about the purported hoax.
So, what do you guys think? Was this real or was it a hoax? Was it Photoshopped? Is the restaurant covering up this incident to please its wealthy clientele? Could the supposed banker have threatened Wordpress and the restaurant? Why would a well-paid employee be so stupid as to publicize his boss's embarrassing indiscretion knowing that it would probably result in an immediate termination if it were traced back to him? If it were all a hoax, then someone took quite a risk knowing that the photo and blog post could be traced back to him. (Somebody paid for that receipt with a credit card). Maybe he found a discarded receipt and altered it.
I'd like to believe that it's real since it would reinforce my belief that many members of the wealthy elite are arrogant, vicious, and out-of-touch with the lower classes. I don't know if it's real or not, but the story certainly isn't unbelievable and it's rather delicious. It would be great if we could hear from the waitress, but I'm sure she won't be talking, at least not until she finds another job.
Addendum: Here is a link to a news report video where you can see the restaurant's manager discussing the incident. She seems pretty credible to me and upon taking a closer look at the photo, it does indeed appear as though the "1" is out of alignment. According to her someone Photoshopped a "1" in front of the 33.54 on the bill and the server actually received a 20% tip.
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I am posting to publicize one seldom used term and to introduce a new term, two bullets that we can use in our war against the higher education scam. Both of these concepts contradict the Doctrine of Meritocracy that Americans almost ubiquitously accept as an unquestioned axiom, probably because they were indoctrinated to believe it. So, using and popularizing these terms will help us spread our cynicism.
The new term is "reciprocal proxy nepotism". (A Google search does not return any hits, but perhaps another term exists.) Reciprocal proxy nepotism is when two or more people at different companies bestow reciprocal favors for each other's relatives.
For example, suppose that Partner A and Partner B work at different businesses that have anti-nepotism policies. Over lunch Partner A says to Partner B, "Boy, it sure is tough out there today for new graduates. My Daughter A can't find a job in our field." Partner B says, "My Son B can't find a job in the field either." So Partner A agrees to hire (if he can) Son B and Partner B agrees to hire Daughter A. Or maybe they just make very strong hiring recommendations at their firms. The reciprocity might be unspoken and assumed, and it might also have a temporal separation. An unspoken expectation might be, "I'll hire your niece this year, and I'm sure you'll return the favor for my son when he graduates two years from now."
I don't know how often these types of arrangements actually occur, but I wouldn't be surprised if they occurred frequently in tight, competitive job markets. Such occurrences obviously contradict Meritocracy where people are supposed to obtain jobs and opportunities based on objective merit and not the circumstances of their birth and family connections.
The other intriguing term is "resume deflation". Resume deflation is when a person crafts a resume that purposely omits what should be a valuable credential that shows that he possesses what should be an attractive character trait (educational attainment, intelligence, ambition, skill, professional experience, etc.) in the hopes of improving his candidacy for a job. Sadly, resume deflation has become a sign of the wretchedness and perversity of our society and the times we live in and it isn't a secret, but few people have a formal term for it.
The concept of resume deflation contradicts the Doctrine of Meritocracy because, according to the doctrine, people should receive rewards for their positive character traits and hard work. However, in reality many employers will discriminate against people who are overqualified or who are trained to work in other fields for various reasons, some of which may, as a practical matter, be understandable and legitimate from an employer's perspective. This kind of discrimination reminds of a concept that novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand once introduced, a "hatred of the good for being the good".
I came across "resume deflation" while listening to an NPR story, The Long, Winding Road Back from Unemployment. I was intrigued and a Google search returned only 163 hits. One of the hits was for an article at the Workplace Diva blog titled "Is Hiring Smart Applicants a Dumb Move?". It's a short blog post that cites a study purporting to show that hiring overqualified applicants is often a good move. I enjoyed this quote:
No employer wants to feel like a quick rest stop on the road to Careertown.What most hiring managers and other employment decision-makers don't realize is that in today's post-apocalyptic world (in an economic sense), there may no longer be a "Careertown" for many people to go to and/or the road is fraught with huge and often insurmountable obstacles. Jobs in many fields have been outsourced and/or many fields have contracted. Also, many people who can objectively perform career jobs well may have been rendered unemployable in their fields simply by virtue of their having been unemployed or undermployed-and-involuntarily-out-of-field for a period of time. Hiring managers are generally successful people, so it's difficult for them to understand just how bleak the job market is for many college and professional school graduates.
While reading Professor Campos's most recent post, "The Message" and while ruminating over the negative comments received from non-JDs to many news articles about the law school scam, it occurred to me that we need to incorporate a core argument into our message (which probably won't be news to many of you). I make mention of it all the time, but when we're dealing with the general public, it needs further emphasis.
We need to present a compelling argument that will help convince non-JDs of the "meritocracy/personal responsibility/free market" dogma persuasion (hereinafter known as the "Personal Responsibility Crowd") that the law school scam (and the higher education scam in general) is bad and worthy of opposing. The Personal Responsibility Crowd objects to our message by reflexively responding, "Caveat Emptor!" in snide comments. Their callousness and almost complete lack of empathy is an expression of the "I've got mine, Fuck You!" mentality. In their eyes the higher education scam does not impact them.
However, the Personal Responsibility Crowd, which tends to be right-wing, is very concerned about an issue that ties in well with the law school and higher education scams: The Economy. Thus, our message would probably be more compelling to them if we could convince the Personal Responsibility Crowd and the general populace that educating large excesses of people relative to the number of jobs available for college graduates damages the economy. This would hit the Personal Responsibility Crowd close to home.
Very simply, our economy, our well-being, and our prosperity suffer when resources (human time and effort, raw materials) are wasted on educating far more people than there are jobs available for them. Instead of being wasted, those same resources could be better spent on goods and services that have actual value. For example, those resources could be used to construct more roads or more houses or to provide better medical care. This would result in an increase in our society's net wealth which would benefit everyone, including members of the Personal Responsibility Crowd. Instead of being burdened by student loans used to pay for unneeded higher education, people could instead purchase more goods and services which would increase the amount of employment in fields where those goods and services are produced. Also, presumably, one element of our nation's housing crisis is that unemployed and underemployed-out-of-field college graduates cannot afford to purchase houses; they already have student loan mortgages hanging over their heads.
A terse response to Caveat Emptor comments might be, "You guys don't realize how much damage all of this unneeded excess higher education is doing to our nation's economy. This isn't merely about sob stories and personal responsibility. It's about the economy, stupid!"
While listening to yesterday's NPR Talk of the Nation discussion, Keeping Your Resume Out Of Online 'Oblivion', reporter Lauren Weber said that Starbucks receives 7.6 million job applications every year for about 65,000 openings. That's about 117 applications for each job, and this is a low-wage job! This isn't earth-shattering or particularly profound, and it's not really anything we didn't already know, but it does help illustrate just how tough the job market is out there, even for menial poverty-wage jobs.
Middle Finger Law: In other news, if you're bored and want to listen to a short, entertaining NPR story about the legality of flipping the bird (the "impudent finger") to police officers, check this out: Flipping 'The Bird' Just Isn't Obscene Anymore, Law Professor Argues. Perhaps this will create some more business for struggling solos.
ROBBINS: It is considered illegal in many jurisdictions, but there is a case from Oregon in 2010 in which a regular guy thought that he had an absolute First Amendment right to give the finger to police officers whenever he saw them. Not just if he was being ticketed. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of times a day, whenever he would pass a police officer, he would give the finger.And they brought him to court on this on disorderly conduct charges. He ultimately won. He settled for $1,000, but in other jurisdictions in which the application of the disorderly conduct statute has been tested, there have been settlements for as high as $50,000.
Don't try this at home. It's probably a YMMV sort of thing depending on your jurisdiction.
Recently, in his State of the Union address, President Obama suggested that every state should require high school attendance until age 18 (in the hopes of increasing high school graduation rates).
As a highly educated person, I cannot imagine why anyone in their right mind would want to drop out of high school. Why would you want to fuck up your life like that? However, I wonder, as a practical matter, from an economic standpoint, might it be OK or even good if a certain percentage of our society were composed of high school dropouts? Also, are our politicians and other intellectuals fretting too much about the high school dropout problem? (It's much easier for our politicians to pacify the masses with warm-and-fuzzy touchy-feely platitudes about solving the high school dropout problem than it is to actually fix our nation's economic problems.)
As difficult as it may be for us to accept, the sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of jobs that need to be done in this country do not require a college education. In fact, a great many of those jobs do not require a high school diploma either or even the ability to read or to do math beyond an eighth grade level. Those jobs are not glamorous nor desirable. They are menial and low-paying, but they do need to be done. Therefore, our nation needs people who will be content (or at least as non-discontented as humanly possible) to work those menial low-paying fast food, retail service, and lawn mowing jobs. They may not be happy at those jobs and they might gripe about their poverty-wages, but at least they cannot legitimately expect much more and they won't (or shouldn't) feel that they have been screwed by society because they played by the rules and failed to obtain a return on their educational investments.
I like to say that if 100% of Americans went to college, then 100% of Americans would expect to have a solid middle class job when in reality only 10-15% of the jobs require or make real use of a college education, which means that the same percentage of the populace that currently works low-wage jobs that don't require a college education would end up working those very same jobs--but with student loan debt and legitimate feelings of anger, failure, entitlement, and tremendous disappointment. Likewise high school graduates, vocational graduates, and technical school graduates might expect to be able to earn solid lower-middle or middle class jobs, too, such as skilled trades jobs and factory jobs, and if everyone graduated from high school then we might have more high school graduates than decent jobs available for them (which is already the case).
"The world needs ditch diggers," and it's better to have contented ditch diggers than angry ditch diggers who are ready to foment violent revolt and social upheaval. So, as ridiculous as this may sound, it may be OK and even good that some people want to drop out of high school. In that case, our politicians' (and the media's and educators' and almost all other intellectuals') concern about high school dropout rates may be overblown and thus boil down to consisting of touchy-feely platitudes.
That having been said, I don't think we should celebrate people dropping out of high school because in almost all cases it probably means that they are complete dumbasses who will end up imposing all sorts of negative costs on our society. They are probably more likely to commit crimes, to pop out babies they cannot afford to care for like rabbits, and to end up on welfare, etc. However, I don't see how bad students' barely graduating from high school or being socially promoted and waived through to graduation will change that. Extra hours spent goofing off or sleeping in a classroom won't cure a low IQ or a self-destructive and/or sociopathic mindset and/or horrible parentage. Living irrationally, making personally and societally destructive life choices, and being a dumbass isn't something that will be solved by a piece of paper that says "High School diploma". Some people just have low IQs and no amount of class time spent on reading, writing, science, social studies, foreign language, Shakespeare, and arithmetic will change that. It would be wonderful if Americans' minimum IQ were 90 or 95 and if no one had an irrational mindset, but sadly that's just not the case.
From an economic and Machiavellian standpoint, we need these people to work our nation's low-paying menial jobs and to feel as contented as possible. The real problem (aside from not having enough solid middle class and lower-middle class jobs for everyone) is not that some people are dropping out of high school because if everyone graduated from high school then the same percentage of people who are currently working low-paying menial jobs would still be working those very same jobs. The problem is that high school dropouts are also almost always complete dumbasses who will end up imposing all sorts of negative costs on our society.
Our politicians and intellectuals are right to be concerned about that problem, but it's not a problem that can be solved by a high school education, at least not by a traditional high school education. To solve that problem (destructive consequences of a low IQ, irrationality, stupidity, and/or being a sociopath) to the extent that it is possible, we would need some sort of high school program or education camp that would indoctrinate high school dropouts with a religion of rules to live by. "Don't get pregnant (or get someone pregnant)." "Don't do drugs." "Don't commit crimes." Etc. That sort of indoctrination in the hopes of countering the results of bad parentage probably wouldn't work anyway, but forcing high school dropouts to stay in high school won't solve that problem, either.
Our politicians and intellectuals are right to be barking about the social and economic problems caused by high school dropouts, but they're barking up the wrong tree.
I am pleased to announce that both NPR and Bloomberg News recently gave some coverage to the law school scam.
NPR's All Things Considered aired a four-and-a-half minute segment titled "Do Law Schools Cook Their Employment Numbers." The story page also links to the Exposing the Law School Scam blog.
Bloomberg aired an interview with New York Times reporter David Segal titled "NY Times Reporter: Business of Law Schools Is 'Crazy'". David Segal has done some great work reporting on the law school scam in the New York Times, though some people on JD Underground thought he may have pulled some or all of his punches on the TV interview.
Hopefully the media establishment will increase its reporting of the law school scam. One impetus for the NPR story may be the class action lawsuits against a few of the law schools. My wet dream is for 60 Minutes to air a hard-hitting piece that excoriates the law school industry and the ABA. Perhaps Paul Campos could star in it.
DISCLAIMER: Honestly, I don't have anything new to say in this post, and to some of you it may sound like a broken record. However, I haven't posted much since 2010, so I thought I'd post a comment that I just made on a thread at JD Underground forum. The only potentially new content might be my point that our politicians need to maintain the higher education scam to help reinforce the notion (amongst the sheeple) that social mobility is very possible and that we live in a meritocracy where hard work is all people need to secure at least middle class status. Admittedly, I wouldn't call this post a completely comprehensive explanation as to why ending the higher education scam will be so difficult, but the essential elements are contained below.
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The higher education scam is very deeply entrenched in this country for a couple reasons, which will make it difficult to end.
(1.) Many parties have interests in maintaining the scam--student loan companies, university administrators, faculty, and general college employees.
(2.) Our politicians have been successful in selling the promise of higher education to the masses. They need the higher education scam to continue so that they can distract the public. It's easier to tell the sheeple that the solution to our nation's economic problems is more and better education than it is to say that we need to address foreign outsourcing, end mass immigration, and end the H-1B and L-1 visa programs. This way, the sheeple won't riot. The overwhelming majority of Americans really do believe that higher education guarantees economic and vocational success. They believe (and have been taught to believe) that if someone graduates and cannot find a job, it is their fault. Heck, unemployed and underemployed college graduates (and their families) blame themselves too. It's a beautiful scam, isn't it? For our politicians, the nation's having to (quietly) pay for defaulted student loans is a small price to pay for a contented populace.
For example, Obama is concerned about high school dropouts, and he probably claims or seems to imply that everyone should go to college. Nevermind the fact that if everyone graduated from high school and if everyone went to college no one would want to work the huge boatload of low-paying menial jobs that need to be done in this country. At least high school dropouts who work fast food jobs don't have a legitimate reason to honestly feel that they deserve more.
(3.) The promise of higher education also pacifies the masses and prevents them from adopting the "Occupy Wall Street mentality". Our politicians need to maintain the illusion that social mobility is very possible and that we live in a meritocracy where hard work is all people need to secure at least middle class status. If the sheeple stop believing in that notion, they might rebel against the wealthy. (They might even (gasp) go socialist and want to tax them at more than 15%.)
So, ending the higher education scam is a steep uphill battle. In fact, the notion that too many people are going to college is completely foreign to the vast majority of the populace. It's not even an issue. It isn't on anyone's radar. The sheeple might be aware that student loans are a big problem for many people, but the notion that the reason so many people can't pay their student loans is because there simply aren't enough appropriate jobs for all of the graduates in most fields never occurs to them. The other side of the ravine that needs to be logically bridged in order to connect those dots is too wide for most people.
ADDENDUM: In the JD Underground thread poster "tsmonk" made the point that many localities are supported by colleges and universities. So, ending the higher education scam would not merely put many college administrators, faculty, and other employees out of work, but also people who work in other industries that depend on the colleges and students.
Of course, the end result of overeducating people is not a fiscal stimulus any more than starting a war or destroying perfectly useful buildings so that people can be employed rebuilding them is a fiscal stimulus. In reality, no actual economic value is created and human effort that could have been spent producing goods and services with actual tangible value has been squandered. Thus, maintaining excess colleges that sustain certain localities might look good on the short-term front-end, and a small amount of people may selfishly benefit from it. However, long-term and in the almost invisible back-end it impoverishes our society. That is to say, the aggregate benefit that might accrue to a small number of people is much smaller than the total aggregate harm done to our nation's well being.
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:
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.
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.
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."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).
"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."
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.From a follow-up post in the same thread, also by "SoDespondent":
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
EDIT April 5, 2012: A recent article published in Esquire sheds some light on the statistics:
Once you're out of college, you'll have to intern. Again, no choice. The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we've forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is. In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.Yup. I knew it. Previous generations didn't have to suffer working at free internships. So, when know-it-all Baby Boomers tell you to work for free, almost all of them are telling you to do something that they themselves probably would have regarded as being beneath them or as extremely distasteful forty-five years ago.
