OK. I'm getting back on my feet. The bug is leaving me slowly in short honking coughs. Ian's still sick and is down for a nap after spending the morning with my mom. To get out of the house, I pulled myself together enough to go to my photography class. (Not entirely sure that I am learning a ton in this class, but I do love being back in an art school again.) Let me mentally stretch and send you some links.
Redneck Mommy hates the word "retarded."
The Cartier commerical.
Don't go to a second tier law school.
Does pre-school matter? No, not if you're rich. But it does even things out.
There are two lessons here. The first lesson is that upper-class parents worry too much. Although adults tend to fret over the details of parenting — Is it better to play the piano or the violin? Should I be a Tiger Mom or a Parisian mom? What are the long-term effects of sleep training? — these details are mostly insignificant. In the long run, the gift of money is that it gives a child constant access to a world of stimulation and enrichment, thus allowing her to fulfill her genetic potential. The greatest luxury we can give our children, it turns out, is the luxury of being the type of parent that doesn’t matter at all.
Apt. 11d 
Speaking of law school, this chart seems to suggest that there are two separate markets for lawyers. I’d really like to know if everybody getting the jobs in the lower mode of that distribution is still from 2nd or 3rd level schools or if the 1st tier people really are pushing down to take $50k/year jobs in significant numbers.
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I must disagree about the second tier law school post. Rutgers Law is a fine second tier law school, and many of its graduates practice at the highest levels of law in New Jersey, and a few even manage to shine elsewhere. And nobody from that school is taking on massive amounts of debt. I have long thought it would be a good fit for the author of this blog.
That said, it is certainly true that many second-tier law-school graduates are struggling, but this has always been the case.
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There are not members of the Harvard Law Review working at crappy $50K/year jobs. There are fewer good jobs, though, so some of the students toward the bottom of their class at the 25th or 35th best law school are being pushed into crappy jobs who otherwise would have gotten the good jobs.
Moreso, though, I think a lot of people who wanted to go to big law firm are now taking judicial clerkships for a year or two, which themselves pay as much as a crappy law job, but can be springboards for good jobs and not dead end jobs.
And third, some of the low paying jobs are actually good jobs that people might want but just don’t pay a lot — public interest or government jobs, mostly, that some top tier students “settle for” and then end up liking.
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As one would expect from something like Gawker, a somewhat reasonable but much more narrow point is put in a dumb way (perhaps for dumb people?) that makes it both less useful and less likely to be taken up. It also treats a problem that’s related to the current crisis as if it were permanent, though it is, at least, much to soon to say that. It would really be better to not link to such things. (It’s also worth noting that most, if not all, of the law suits against law schools are against schools below, sometimes well below, the “second tier”. That’s just one of the ways the article is misleading.) Please, don’t link to garbage. There are many good critiques of law schools, but this isn’t one.
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I want more garbage critiques of law schools, if you’re keeping a tally.
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Or lawyers in general.
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After I finished grad school I interviewed for a policy job with the state. When I was introduced to my potential colleagues I found out they were all JDs. I didn’t know anything about the prospects for lawyers at the time so I was incredulous that they would want a job like that.
I didn’t get that job and a lawyer did so I’m selfishly in agreement that people shouldn’t go to second or third tier law schools.
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There’s a huge market out there, lots of lawyers working. A wills-and-divorces practice, or immigration, you don’t need to have gone to Yale-Stanford-Harvard, nor even the next eleven of the top 14. Grinding out the details of alimony between two bitter people, it’s not so much fun, though.
Niches: they exist, and there are a lot of chances to be of service. Friend of mine did long term care arrangements for special needs adults who were reaching their middle age and their parents reaching their eighties, worried sick what would happen to their child after their deaths. Kind of social work with contracts. Nobody cared where she had gone to law school. Nor did she make a whole lot of money, but it was an honorable life – she got into it through wanting to ensure that her special needs kid would have arrangements after she died. There are various treaties and regulations both at the state and local levels, and if you can get work in the regulatory agency which deals with them and then go to law school, you can go on to a very nice afterlife, and people won’t care a lot where you went (as long as it wasn’t Golden Gate, or Suffolk, or something). But that can be fifteen-twenty years after college before the life you want starts – who needs that?
Gawker is absolutely right, if you don’t go to a top-3 school, or graduate high in the class in a top-14, you can find yourself in real trouble for a job which will let you pay off your loans.
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This guy says largely what I said, but better, and he is more optimistic about prospects for kids who go to top 4-14 schools: http://volokh.com/2012/03/09/richard-w-bourne-on-the-coming-crash-in-legal-education/
We have done our God-damnedest to dissuade students we know to stay away from law school unless they have offers from top schools.
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