10 thoughts on “No More Law School Debt!”

  1. The scary part of that graph is that it is clear that nearly everybody who applies is getting in now. Bad new

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  3. Is the drop a result of changes in the way graduate student debt is allowed? I vaguely remember there being some plan to end subsidized student loans for graduate school. Did this happen (or change) and amplify whatever other forces may have been in play with law school applications?

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  5. Maybe this will mean those attorneys already in the marketplace can demand a little more in terms of work/life balance. My attorney acquaintances seem to have more pressure to put in long hours than any other industry.

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  6. From the NYT piece: “In recent years there has also been publicity about the debt load and declining job prospects for law graduates, especially of schools that do not generally provide employees to elite firms in major cities.”
    I was told many years ago by a law firm hiring partner in the know that if you can’t gain admission to a top 15 law school, then you should never count on getting a BigLaw job or even earning a six-figure salary in the field. You can quickly determine the admission odds by looking at GPA and LSAT scores. The top 15 are the only law schools that can reliably get the top 75% of their classes into those types of jobs. Why anyone would want those jobs long term is, of course, another story entirely. Nevertheless, BigLaw generally will only hire the top 2 or 3 students from lower ranked schools, if that. Yet this is still some sort of odd, open secret because I routinely hear of 2Ls being shocked by this reality when BigLaw summer associate hiring begins.

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  8. And, yes, about the top 15 thing. You can get jobs out of the top 15 schools (though which jobs starts to differentiate even there). One of Ivy-laws recently did an analysis where they said that they (top 5) were still doing OK, but that there was a steep fall off after the top 5.
    “Why anyone would want those jobs long term is, of course, another story entirely.”
    Well, ’cause if you make it to the top, you can make a million dollars a year.

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  9. Maybe this will mean those attorneys already in the marketplace can demand a little more in terms of work/life balance. My attorney acquaintances seem to have more pressure to put in long hours than any other industry.
    Doubtful. The number of lawyers graduating will still be greater than the number of lawyers needed. There will just be fewer surplus graduates. The article says, “Last spring, the American Bar Association released a study showing that within nine months of graduation in 2011, only 55 percent of those who finished law school found full-time jobs that required passage of the bar exam.”
    Even if you eliminate the entire 45% who don’t get law jobs, your not doing anything to change the dynamics for the lawyers who are actually in law jobs.

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  10. Don’t eliminate the 45% – they are still there, noses pressed against the window, applying for law jobs from their legal-documents-discovery-mill or office-assistant-in-an-insurance-agency jobs, and depressing the wages which law employers have to offer.
    I think some of what’s going on with the employers who don’t want to look at anyone not from a top-5 or top-14 school is that it’s so overwhelming for the employer to try and distinguish.

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