This is a follow up to my recent post regarding an insulting job listing on Craigslist. What follows is my take on the market for new lawyers and a general response to the majority of news releases I see on the topic
It seems as though once a month there is an article posted in some newspaper or blog about the worthlessness of a legal education. The articles key in on a few factors:
- A flooded market of lawyers and not enough law jobs.
- The ABA is over-accrediting schools that churn out JDs in exchange for copious amounts of federal funds and the off-chance a successful alum will give back.
- A bad economy leads to more students waiting out the job market in law school, leading to more people who don’t necessarily want to be or who should not be lawyers seeking out a legal career.
- The presupposition that unless you are graduating with a cadillac-brand degree or latin words after your grade, you are wasting your time.
To me, this borders on anti-intellectualism. Then again, this is written by someone with a Philosophy degree and a less-than-pristine academic transcript. I fully acknowledge that my JD could be just another tally in a series of academic mistakes. Yet I value my liberal arts degree highly, even if the job market does not. In the name of honesty, here’s some disclosure going forward, before I address each of those premises in turn:
- I did not get in to my first choice law school, so I went to the nearest school that accepted me, worked hard, and transferred out to my first choice school.
- My first choice school is not a “top” school. I’m not sure what tier to consider it. Some disgruntled alum accuse it of being a degree mill. I disagree; we have many high-profile alum, a decent ranking for large-firm placement, and I received an excellent education. Whatever shortcomings I have are my own fault.
- I am a B student. My school has not adjusted grades to make its students look better post-graduation, and the curve seems to be on-par with the majority of other schools that I’ve looked in to. This grade is not calculated using my 1L grades since they were transfer credits, however true to form, I’m relatively certain they would not raise or lower it because they, too, are B’s.
Anti-intellectualism
The reality is the market has undergone a shift, one that I think is anti-intellectual. My premise here is two-fold. First, a salary is a valuation of the intellect of the person applied to their field of work; second, a JD is really an advanced liberal arts degree. It teaches students how to do what a good liberal arts education should have prepared them for – excellent reading, writing, and analytical skills. Skills that 20 years ago would be highly marketable. The anti-intellectual part (as I see it) is the shift from higher education being an enriching experience that opens numerous doors to an expensive trade school designed to open only a few doors. This is where the bitter philosophy degree comes in: using that as an example of a now-”worthless” degree, one career path for a philosophy student would be to work in the editorial capacity or in the media. Those doors are now closed unless you have a degree in Journalism. Swap out the philosophy degree for any liberal arts degree, and the journalism job for any non-applied hardscience career and my point holds true: unless the title of the degree has a significant overlap with the title of the industry you want to work in, you’re not marketable. Most importantly, it ignores a crucial fact: the skills that have helped me the most in my job search have nothing to do with my degree – my time spent as General Manager of my radio station and starting my own failed business have been the most impressive. Not once has a class I’ve taken come up on an interview or even been a moment of curiosity.
In the broadest sense, there is some rampant anti-intellectualism on both sides of the political spectrum. Chris Mooney at Mother Jones recently published an article on this using the very same examples that I planned on including here as it sat in my drafts for the past month. The three brands are anti-vaxers (people who believe that vaccinations cause autism because Jenny McCarthy said so when she put her years of experience to work and Singled Out vaccinations), creationists (see: Scopes Monkey Trial), and Global Warming deniers. The common thread is that individual beliefs often override factual evidence presented to them because the science conflicts with their beliefs.
Now, while a law degree is not scientifically proven to be awesome, there is anecdotal evidence and plenty of conjecture that it is not a bad thing to educate oneself. However, with a stalled economy comes stalled job growth. The legal profession is not immune to this. Even if a law firm is not shedding jobs, they are sitting on their cash to weather the uncertain market and not hiring either. Compounding this is that when times are tough and many undergraduates cannot find a decent job, they try and seek shelter in law school in hopes that after 3 years things will be better and they’ll be making six-figures out of the gate while doing exactly what they see on TV. Easy money loans do not make this a hard decision. And perhaps that mentality is anti-intellectual as well.
What it all boils down to is that when a market does not value a college degree or even a professional degree, it is in a sense as anti-intellectual as saying all vaccines cause autism or Earth is six thousand years old. The mentality that “unless your degree says you took x amount of classes towards this job, you are not qualified for it” neglects the fact that many students never wanted to just have one career path. They wanted to open doors for themselves, and in turn for the companies they work at. It is that big-picture thinking that should be highly marketable and valuable to any company, but the business model of a low-risk approach does not value that concept (unless that risk is giving a $500k mortgage to barista with an English degree). The market is saying “your education is meaningless unless you were so narrowminded at 18 to know exactly what you wanted to do the rest of your life and you prepared for this single career path”. It is, in essence, creating a new caste system where we must choose at the age of 18 what echelon of a career we want to find ourselves for the rest of our lives. As a matter of personal experience, my list of majors went like this:
- Advertising
- Geology
- Anthropology
- Archaelology
- Political Science
- Political Philosophy
- Philosophy
Maybe I should have been more responsible at the age of 18 and had more foresight. Because that’s what teenagers are known for – looking far down the road and planning ahead.
The Professional Job Market
Turning to a law degree, the same facts apply. Here you have people who have taken courses to learning the philosophy of the law. Most law school courses are really of two breeds: practice and theory. Both are courses of general applicability because that’s what is expected of lawyers – even if you’re only goal is to do matrimonial law, you are often expected to answer the call to take a DUI or drug case pro bono if the bar association asks you to. Not doing so is – in theory – an ethical violation.
Even more broadly, lawyers are trained to solve problems, to evaluate a situation and make a critical decision based on facts, and cut through the densest of situations with seeming ease. Yet the mentality is that a Juris Doctor is a bad investment is the talk of MBA’s who went through this a few years ago and who are trained to see the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It’s the same mentality that brought down the music industry by only making hits and not artists because a hit raises quarterly profits while an artist is a long-term investment.
A market that cannot see the value in a JD in a legal or non-legal profession is a market that does not value intellectualism. A law degree shows an ability to make it through some extremely difficult topics, and passing the bar is no easy task. Even if you think the exams themselves are not difficult, the incredible pressure that every student faces combined with the sheer volume of seemingly trivial knowledge that one must possess in order to pass is a testament in and of itself to the ability of an individual. If a salary is fundamentally a valuation of the intellect of the person applied to their field of work, then it follows that there is a certain amount of anti-intellectualism to not hire anyone with a higher education. While that’s not say that anyone with a higher education is qualified for any job, it is to say that it is a sad state of the American workforce to see people with advanced degrees working at Starbucks and Olive Garden.
One approach is to say that a person with a Masters Degree in Celtic Woman Prose of the late 17th Century is an idiot for ever seeing value that degree. I offer the other side: you’re an idiot if you think the only thing that person knows or is able to know is the prose of 17th Century Celtic women. We are on the same track – while a JD might be in the technical sense a “higher” degree than a Masters degree in any subject, there seems to be very little market distinction between a BA, BS, MS, and JD. The market treats them all the same, which is to say it ignores them all completely.
Take a step back – is this the kind of society we want to create? We complain that the Chinese or Indians or Europeans or any nationality that is not American are kicking our asses in higher education, meanwhile we tell our educated citizens their degrees are worthless. Then, on the other end, we complain the Mexicans and Latin Americans are kicking our asses in manual labor. The hollowing out of the American workforce is not merely the middle class. Have we become such snobs that we only give jobs to those with Cum Laude and Columbia attached to the degree? The Cadillac degree is definitely a Cadillac for a reason, and those should be the six-figure entry level jobs without a doubt. But that should not say that everyone else is worthless.
The final obstacle facing today’s lawyer really is the American Dream, or what’s left of it. It is becoming increasingly difficult for any lawyer to hang a shingle, and the law firms aren’t hiring. In fact, the most insidious effect of market consolidation to me is the anti-competitive nature on the small business – it raises the barrier to entry as one entity expands further. Just ask any small brewer in New Jersey how easy it is to live in InBev’s shadow. Similarly, no one wants to hire a JD because they’re afraid they’ll jump ship the minute they can land an actual legal job. Paralegals have better job prospects than lawyers for the same reason. So where the Legal market is saturated, the general market is hostile to starting your own business. The broader implication is that as a society, we complain that our childrens aren’t learning, and when they do learn more, we tell them they learned the wrong material. We seem to demand a narrow-minded society of specific career paths and thought processes while holding hostage the idea that in America you can do whatever you want if you set your mind to it.
Either that, or I’m just bitter I can’t get legal or non-legal job.
