Despite their graduates having fewer employment opportunities and lower pay, law schools are ramping up the brick and mortar. David Segal reports for The New York Times,
As other industries close offices and downsize plants, the manufacturing base behind the doctor of jurisprudence keeps growing. Fordham Law School in New York recently broke ground on a $250 million, 22-story building. The University of Baltimore School of Law and the University of Michigan Law School are both working on buildings that cost more that $100 million. Marquette University Law School in Wisconsin has just finished its own $85 million project. A bunch of other schools have built multimillion dollar additions.
Segal explains that law school tuition has increased at 4 times that of undergraduate education, which itself has increased 4 times the CPI. ”From 1989 to 2009, when college tuition rose by 71 percent, law school tuition shot up 317 percent.”
It is one of the academy’s open secrets: law schools toss off so much cash they are sometimes required to hand over as much as 30 percent of their revenue to universities, to subsidize less profitable fields.
Law schools are enrolling more students than ever before at annual tuition rates of $40,000+ per year. And while Yale Harvard and other law schools advertise that recent graduate average $160,000 per year in earnings, New York Law School dean Richard A. Matasar, admits, “In these materials and in our conversations with students and applicants, we explicitly tell them that most graduates find work in small to medium firms at salaries between $35,000 and $75,000.”
Katherine Greenier, of N.Y.L.S.’s class of 2010 is unhappy. “There were people wondering, why did the school take on this many people in a job market this terrible?” she asked. “How many of these folks are going to find jobs? And what does it say about the school?”
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Aw-shucks, the schools gotta make their money somehow. We can never have enough lawyers.
Do law schools have a credentialist “accreditation” system like undergrad schools do? If so, you can see why they’ve gotten so out of touch with the free market.
The accredtiation system is as much a scam in the law school arena as in the undergraduate arena. As for expanding law schools, unlike the AMA, at least the ABA encourages more law schools. A guild is a guild, pure and simple; and, little ol’ me will happily take the guild that seeks to increase its numbers over the one that seeks to reduce them. Take heart in knowing you may not be able to find a good doctor in ten years but the streets will be flooded with competent attorneys ready to help at a reasonable price.
Heh, reminds me of a scene from the old HBO show “Rome” where the main characters head to the forum to resolve a dispute and the outside stairs are littered with lawyers yelling to prospective clients about how good they are and what their prices are.
Yes, they do, the American Bar Association. However, here’s a counter arguement:
Engineering schools are accredited by ABET, The Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology; is there an over supply of engineers graduating from university in the United States these days?
Admission to engineering school requires math. Anyone with a degree in basketweaving or communications can take the LSAT. I do think it is the student’s problem for not doing the research, not the schools’ for offering a product that is in demand. But of course the schools wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for easy federal loans so like most everything else, it’s the government’s fault.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T31uqg7hziQ
A cheaper and more efficient way of producing bottom feeders?
What about the fact that the study of law is being redirected in a completely different direction by the forces of equilibrium! It is unlikely that brick and mortar will be necessary, and almost all of the dinosaurs of the obsolete doctrines will either go extinct or go off to graze in some forlorn pasture.
I found lawyers to be dogmatic and fanatical about the law.
The are so used to see everything by the law and by the book that they cannot think critically about the law.
If a law is stupid, doesn’t make sense, criminalizes victimless behavior they still follow the law without questioning it. A lawyer with the law is like a christian with the bible, incapable of independent thinking.
The law is like gospel to them, I was shocked.
Fits. It’s easier to get to money via the “court of law” but working for “real”. And the system was established that the stealing for the Deledefs get’s eased, and so if you want to keep something left of your own you need lawyers still able to navigate the laws for doing justice…..
Katherine, why did you spend $40k/year for a degree without first checking the market for it? Don’t blame the law school, blame yourself.
I was about to post the exact same thing. Yet another example of people eager to give up personal responsibility and put their faith in the responsibility of others.
Typical NYT (and most all mainstream media). Write about and quote the so called “little guy” who’ll illustrate that it’s always “The Man’s” fault.
I hope you’re all not as down on Austrian School knowledgeable anarcho-capitalists in law school. I agree that my classmates are very dogmatic, linear thinkers, but I’ve been delighted to find that Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe, and Kinsella give me an edge in analyzing spurious arguments. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at how many George Mason professors know of the Austrians; even if they disagree, they can raise interesting counter-arguments.
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