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Old 12-16-2010, 12:37 PM
 
750 posts, read 1,444,306 times
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That is the thing people do not get the long term outlook for most fields suck. I sure the ABA will ok accreditation for overseas law schools. They already send doc review legal work to India. This has put tons of young lawyers out of work. We already allow nursing grads to sit for their nursing boards here from overseas colleges. We import nurses from the Philippines under the H1C. Remove the caps and the Philippines alone could flood us out. They make 100k worth of nurses every year they do not need. They export them all over the world. Both low end and mid range engineering and IT jobs are sent to India or they bring in the H1B. Now the National board that oks who sits for their PT exams. They just approved 3 schools in the Phillipppines for their grads to sit for their US boards. College debt can last 10 to 30 years. Chances are your job in even in better fields will not last that long. The game has changed college is not worth the cost in most cases.
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Old 12-16-2010, 12:52 PM
 
78,013 posts, read 60,209,509 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bhaalspawn View Post
Cross law degrees (JDs) off that list.

Contrary to what most laypeople think, our nation actually has a gigantic oversupply of lawyers and a great many JDs are either unemployed or severely underemployed-and-involuntarily-out-of-field. Even if you an find a job as a lawyer, it is a miserable field with long, stressful hours and most legal jobs don't pay very well. (The people earning six figure salaries at large firms while working 65-70 hours/week are only a tiny percentage of the number of JDs out there.) Also, you could easily end up taking on $120,000-$185,000 worth of debt to pay for law school and your cost of living for three years. That debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

To learn more, visit:

Exposing The Law School Scam (http://lawschoolscam.blogspot.com - broken link)
Law School Scambusting resources
But I Did Everything Right!
JD Underground
Excellent point. My buddy is one of those "top few laywers" out there and he has such much the same thing. He works very long hours and mentions from time to time about lawyers he's worked with in the past that just scrape by doing "pick up" work at the courthouse.
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Old 12-16-2010, 06:34 PM
 
44 posts, read 143,215 times
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Are graduates from t14 law schools going through the same issues as well?
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Old 12-16-2010, 07:13 PM
 
Location: San Francisco, CA
15,088 posts, read 13,421,794 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Stranded and Lonely View Post
I am talking to many friends and relatives who have decided not to go to college because the tuition fees are too high. Others have older brothers and sisters who have graduated and are now working at Sears for Minimum Wage on loading dock.

I wonder what impact this is going to have on our economy in the short and long term. So many talented people are going to not go to college and will likely be forced to spend the rest of their lives in lower waged low skilled jobs. They would have so much potential in a country with reasonable tuition and a more optimistic view of employment after graduation.

Do you know anyone who had planned to go to college but decided against it because of they could no longer afford it or felt that it would not really help them get a good job in the end?
That's too bad that they are so short-sighted. There are no guarantees in life, but depending on the major and career ambitions, they could have set themselves up with much better odds of financial success down the road - and it doesn't have to cost $200K. Instead, they will spend their lives among the legions of the working poor.
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Old 12-16-2010, 11:22 PM
 
Location: Michissippi
3,120 posts, read 8,048,605 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dood444 View Post
Are graduates from t14 law schools going through the same issues as well?
It isn't as bad for them as for lawyers from the lower tier schools, but the job market has been tough for many years, even before the recession, especially for the 50% of the students at the Top 14 schools (other than say Yale, Harvard, and Stanford) who are not in the top 50% of their classes grade-wide. Some recent articles have reported that even Harvard grads have been having difficulty finding employment, at least at large and medium-sized firms (and that's a top 3 law school). Also, many graduates of the T14 schools have had their offers of employment deferred or rescinded in recent years and they can still suffer associate layoffs.

Even if you could gain admission to Stanford and were able to obtain a $160,000/year job at a large firm when you graduate, you still have to question whether or not it's worthwhile because your quality of life at a large law firm (especially today when large firms are suffering from financial pressures) is likely to be awful. There' s more to life than working 65+ intense hours per week under great stress and pressure in a Machiavellian environment to earn a large amount of money. What good is the money if you are always exhausted and miserable? What good is the money if your quality of life is poor? The actual doing of the work itself at a large firm isn't so awful; the problem is the volume of work that you need to do and the pressure that you will be under. If you had to do less work for less pay with less stress and pressure it wouldn't be so bad.

The problem is that having a huge oversupply of people in the field puts great pressure on just about everyone in the field, including people who have the "good" jobs (jobs that pay well and that offer substantive legal work for businesses). In essence--your wage--the amount of income you get per unit of human effort expended and discomfort suffered--is going to end up being low in the legal field as a result (of our nation having about one JD for every 215 people based on the number of JDs produced over the past 40 years) even if you do get a job at a large law firm. Even partners at large firms suffer pressure and stress and work long-hard hours. (Making partner has been described as a pie-eating contest where the reward for winning the contest is that you get to eat even more pie.)

When you consider all of that--when you consider wages in terms of income per unit of human effort and discomfort expended--it's questionable whether or not higher education other than undergraduate education in certain fields provides a sufficient return on investment at all anymore. Perhaps arbitrage has run its course and wages (as I've defined them) have evened out across all career fields. It may just turn out that it's better to have less higher education, more modest financial expectations, and, in actuality, a higher quality of life. (For example, being a tenured public school teacher seems like a pretty good gig and that only requires a mere bachelors degree. Becoming an Registered Nurse might be a good move. They suffer stress, but they earn good incomes and only need bachelors degrees.)

When you consider quality of life and overall happiness and personal satisfaction, I really don't know if I can recommend that anyone go to law school today, even a Top 3 law school, except in special circumstances. (For example, your last name just happens to be the same last name as that of the guy who owns the largest and most successful personal injury mill in town and who's cheesy ads are all over the TV, and he's your Dad and will train you and hand the reigns of the business over to you.) If you have the aptitude needed to gain admission to a top 3 or T14 law school then you could probably figure out a way to do something that would earn you a much higher quality of life in another field. (Got a science degree? Go to medical school, etc.)
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Old 12-22-2010, 11:32 AM
 
7,492 posts, read 11,801,520 times
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Another problem is when people don't make sure that what they're going to college for is what they really want to do. I just don't understand how the majority of people coming right out of high school know what they want to do already. I know I didn't. But you have parents or a parent that starts grilling you about college then what are you supposed to do??? I think most of the turbulence of my young adult years could've been avoided if I'd left home and kept working for awhile and ignored my mother. Now look at me? I'm starting all over and living with her again seven years later!
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Old 12-23-2010, 04:53 PM
 
5,652 posts, read 19,317,100 times
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"We import nurses", there are many people who would LIKE to be nurses. However, the nursing programs cannot handle all the applicants that there are (at least around here!). 800 applicants that have already gone for 2 years of college classes, to apply to a nursing program that only has room for 70. They do not get accepted - now what?

It is just like the story with the doctors who cannot get into the spaces for med schools.

This kind of thing has got to stop.
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Old 12-24-2010, 09:58 AM
 
6,041 posts, read 11,451,337 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Osito View Post
Another problem is when people don't make sure that what they're going to college for is what they really want to do. I just don't understand how the majority of people coming right out of high school know what they want to do already. I know I didn't. But you have parents or a parent that starts grilling you about college then what are you supposed to do??? I think most of the turbulence of my young adult years could've been avoided if I'd left home and kept working for awhile and ignored my mother. Now look at me? I'm starting all over and living with her again seven years later!
Keep in mind that in many cases, college=your parents supporting you for another 4 years. People want to become self-supporting ASAP so they go to college right after high school.
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