Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Gee, law schools play word games to screw people over

for money; whoda thunk it?
The law graduates posting on these sites know the score. They know that law schools pad their employment figures—96% employed—by counting as “employed” any job at all, legal or non-legal, including part time jobs, including unemployed graduates hired by the school as research assistants (or by excluding unemployed graduates “not currently seeking” a job, or by excluding graduates who do not supply employment information). They know that the gaudy salary numbers advertised on the career services page—“average starting salary $125,000 private full time employment”—are actually calculated based upon only about 25% of the graduating class (although you can’t easily figure this out from the information provided by the schools). They know all this because they know of too many classmates who didn’t get jobs or who got low paying jobs—the numbers don’t jibe with their first hand knowledge.

They know the score now. But they didn’t know it when they first applied to law school. They bought into the numbers provided by law schools. The mission of these sites is to educate, to warn away, the incoming crop of prospective law students—to save them from becoming victims of the law school scam
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1 comment:

Keith said...

One of the in-laws is doing a law course. In the local city, there are something like 400 applicants for every solicitor training place ie. 0.25% placement rate.

That said, short of a course in "post modern gender studies" or the like, I'm a great supporter of the idea of a (classical)liberal education as a developer of thinking skills, and have no problem with the annual output of media studies graduates being greater than the total size of the industry. Just go in with your eyes open to the realities.

The British masters with the best employment rate of all closed, due to lack of applicants! the late Ansel Dunham's industrial mineralogy course at Nottingham.