Why do you want to go to Law School?

I do not have to write letters of recommendation, but I’ve talked to a number of young people about it.

My observation of the many, many people I’ve known who go to law school is that (almost) the only ones I know who are *happy* with their work are the ones working in the public interest. The exceptions are: the one who did small-scale trusts, estates, and small-time business law — he was happy because he got to meet a lot of people who weren’t actually in the middle of horrible life crises. Then there’s the one who’s in copyright law, strictly in the book-publishing industry — he gets to meet a lot of writers, which he really enjoys, and the hours are not crushing.

Aside from those two, the only happy lawyers are ill-paid public interest lawyers, or not-terribly-well-paid law profs. All the other lawyers I know are either unhappy or sociopaths. And paralegals are even *less* happy than lawyers, because they have to work with the sociopathic lawyers.

>But I do ask them, straight out, “why do you want to go to Law School?”.

Every faculty should have this as an essay question in their entrance exam.

And, every one of them should require one practical work term – very early in the four years – in order to graduate.

I’ve known several happy lawyers though most of them are public interest lawyers (mostly working in immigration and related issues) who, if perhaps not properly called ill-paid at this point, are not very highly paid, either. But, I should say, I don’t know many non-public interest lawyers or government lawyers who have been lawyers for very long, so this should be taken with at least some skepticism.

I had the very odd experience of being asked to write law school letters of recommendation _while I was in law school_, because I was, at the same time, teaching undergrads in philosophy at Penn. As with Harry, it was usually too late to seriously advise people by then, but with my other students I did try to dissuade them from the idea that a law degree is an “all purpose” degree with which they could “do anything”. Mostly with a law degree you can be a lawyer. The best way to see if one wants to be a lawyer is to work with them, at least for a summer. Because very few law schools think it’s a positive thing (and a few think it’s a negative thing) for students to come immediately from their undergrad studies, taking a bit longer to work w/ lawyers after graduating might be an even better idea. This will almost never hurt an application and sometimes will help it.

Many students seem to go to law school because their parents (and their social set) want them to do so something professional, but organic chem was too hard so with med school out of the picture, law school seems like the next best option. This is a very bad reason to go to law school.

Additionally, all students thinking of going to law school should know about and consider very carefully the strongly bi-modal nature of starting salaries for lawyers. See, for example, here:

http://www.adamsmithesq.com/archives/2008/07/the-bimodal-starting-sala.html

and here:

http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2008/07/how-the-cravath.html

This might change, as the world of law jobs is now in serious upheaval. But, it’s not going to change so that there are even more of the very high-paying jobs.

I should say that I’m very glad to have gone to law school and mostly enjoyed my time as a law student. I didn’t think it was significantly more stressful than my other graduate school experiences, and I’m glad for the other options its opened to me (including the chances I’ve had to make a more direct impact in people’s lives than I would have just studying philosophy.) I’m not nearly as opposed to people going to law school as, say, Paul Gowder, who sometimes comments here. But students certainly should have their eyes more open to the realities than they do, and not go as a sort of default when they don’t know what else to do and need something to keep the folks happy.

Since most of us professors only have limited work experience (I’ve worked many types of jobs, from being a nanny to working on a machine hulling almonds to trying (unsuccessfully) to sell used cars, but most of my students don’t want to go into any of those kinds of work, and most don’t want to be professors, either), what should we do so we can give good advice/guidance to our students and advisees?

go as a sort of default when they don’t know what else to do

The degree of disassociation between what one does in college, and what one plans to do for a stable career, is distressing and is not limited to law school applicants.

But then, where does one go to get reasonable information about career options related to one’s interests? (Assume one does not have well-connected parents and is largely unaware of available jobs as well as unaware of how/where to search for them.)

Undergraduate career fairs are largely a joke, and I anticipate many R1 universities don’t invest many resources in educating their students about options they can pursue with an X major. Trying to receive career-oriented advise from a college major adviser is probably extremely hit-or-miss. I remember my adviser for one of my majors at University of Wisconsin was flabbergasted and offended when I dared to ask.

(The eventual response from said adviser was “It’s not my job to go find you a job,” which suggested a misunderstanding that never did get resolved. Apparently the adviser’s job was specifically to ensure I was selecting courses that would satisfy the major requirements in 4 years’ time. I never had a reason to visit again.)

I remember there existed a Career Services, a kind of interdepartmental facility, had all kinds of resources related to interview skills: how to write a resume, how to behave in an interview, etc. I recall they were apologetically unable to be directly helpful with “career exploration” related to my major, but they at least did provide some insightful suggestions: the best one was to flip through a phone book’s business section and jot conjectural notes on what kind of employee would work at each place, what qualifications and prior experience would be required or preferred, what salary would be reasonably expected, et cetera — which when done thoroughly gives a very interesting conjectural picture of the makeup of one’s community, which can be selectively verified by calling the businesses.

Expanding the Career Services facility, and directing students to it (perhaps making a second-year visit mandatory or perhaps encouraging one’s students or advisees to visit), would go a long way toward educating students about available careers and discouraging the “well I could do this” mentality that I suspect is common among undergraduates.

“the way we go about thinking about preparing students for a career is extremely laissez faire”

I have a reputation as a hot-head on the topic of higher education so I will do my best to moderate my tone here. I’m sure I will be over-heated for some readers, but believe me, I’m trying.

The quoted statement above is an understatement. Faculty members never “go about thinking about preparing students for a career.” They know nothing about the careers open to the vast majority of their students. The only career thinking that faculty members perform is for the small minority of students who have the aptitude and interest in an academic vocation. As for the rest, they give their lectures, grade a few papers and exams, and wave good-bye. If the students can’t get jobs, so what? They’re adults, aren’t they? It’s not the professor’s problem, or the university’s, if a B.A. in philosophy or film studies is a ticket to unemployment. After all, the student has received a liberal arts education, and that’s more important to a well-lived life than any mere career training, isn’t it? So what if the only job the student can get is the glorified file clerk position known as ‘paralegal’?

The reason so many bright students go on to law school after getting a humanities degree is that law school is an undergraduate program masquerading as graduate school. It provides a three-year undergraduate education that requires no particular base of knowledge. (This used to be clear in the degree that law schools awarded – the LL.B. – but nowadays the law schools give a J.D., which is false advertising.) So, once your students find that their B.A’s are useless in terms of earning a living, they enter the only undergrad career-training program open to them that does not require them to admit that they’ve just wasted several years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Once in law school, they have to unlearn most of what they’ve learned in philosophy, or history, or lit crit, because the fundamentals of legal reasoning are rooted in 19th century modes of argument and understanding. You can’t use modern humanities critical techniques and expect to succeed in law school or in a courtroom. In later years, they will look back on “theory” with the nostalgia they have for children’s stories.

The time for students to wonder about what to do with their lives is not senior year, when they ask you to write a recommendation. It’s when they choose their major. If a sophomore comes to your department and says, I want to major in philosophy, that’s the time for you to say, that’s nice, what do want to do three years from now? And if the student can’t answer, that’s the time for some career counseling. Not two years later, when the time to choose a future has come and gone.

But that would mean turning away students, and you can’t do that and expect your department to thrive. And anyway, even if you can see that the student has no possible future as a professional philosopher, you don’t want to discourage them. It’s their choice, right?

Bloix, success: your post is not offensive at all, to me at least. Let me try to engage some points you’ve raised:

Admittedly, I’m quite glad that I don’t have to worry about walking my students through their career options, even though it distresses me greatly that there might be nobody at the university performing that job.

As an instructor, my job’s pretty clearly to teach: to make topical familiarity and mastery accessible, to share insights, to reinforce/encourage insightful thinking, and to guide students into a community of professional scholars: to indoctrinate values and perspectives that are compatible with scholarly research and investigation.

All the same, I spend a nontrivial amount of time familiarizing myself with the career advising services available at this university (which have changed dramatically every semester) and directing students to the appropriate resources (luckily about 99% of them want engineering-related resources, which around here are abundant and reliably good).

Some of these services, frankly, could do a much better job announcing their existence and detailing their services to instructors/professors in the relevant departments. Others do a very good job, e.g. by maintaining an up-to-date website and sending annual explanatory emails.

I’ll address some other points in a second comment.

One advantage that law school has (I say as a moderately discontented lawyer, but one who still doesn’t have a better idea for what she should have done) is that for a student without a strongly directed personal ambition, it offers a much more certain? obvious? route into an upper-middle class career and income than other possible vocational routes. I graduated from college with a degree in Medieval Studies from the University of Chicago, without a vestige of a clue as to what I was going to do to pay the bills for the rest of my life. After a certain amount of undirected flailing (Peace Corps, receptionist, selling reprints of articles for a business magazine) I ended up in law school because I simply didn’t have any better ideas of getting onto a career ladder that would put me someplace economically comfortable.

This shows a certain lack of enterprise, admittedly, but I think it’s a reasonably common type of lack of enterprise even among reasonably bright and competent people.

Huh. While I was writing that, I see that it was pretty much pre-empted by the preceding ten or so comments. Yeah, another vote for more assistance with career planning for undergrads — college didn’t seem to be obviously leading to anything but a career as an academic, and I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do.

Almost half of the young lawyers leave their firm within three years.

I think that statistic is incomplete without an estimate of how many leave the profession altogether. It would be interesting to disaggregate both groups by gender, too.

The happiest lawyer I know has been a solo practitioner of family law in Oakland CA for 30 years. When she was a candidate for Editor in Chief of her school’s Law Review, someone on the interview committee–made up of the current editorial board–asked why she had decided to go to law school. “Because I couldn’t go on the stage,” she told them, which (as intended) brought that impertinent line of questioning to a close. P.S. She got the job.

In my own case, when I was an undergraduate (before I had a settled major) I took the Strong Interest Inventory test (originally used to give people who were leaving the military advice about careers) as well as the Myers-Briggs test. I have no idea how good those tests really are (I think the Strong test ended up recommending that I become a forest ranger or a speech pathologist – probably both would’ve been good carreers for me) , but I also (apparently) had a very high score in something called the “academic comfort scale” (which probably meant I liked reading jargon and citing obscure sources!) and in the end I went to graduate school and it worked out well. But I do recall distinctly the two philosophy profs that I talked to a couple of years later (once I’d decided on philosophy as a major) both encouraging me to go to law school – since the job prospects in philosophy were so crappy, and what else could one do with a degree in philosophy? I almost went, but what I really wanted to do was teach, and the issues in foundations of law that interested me at the time could be perused from philosophy as well, and there were a lot of other areas of philosophy that I was interested in besides.

Now that I’m in the position of occasionally getting asked for such advice, I also try to find out from students why they want to go to law school, and recommend that students seek out others who are in the careers they’re considering. If nothing else, I think the interest inventory tests opened up possibilities for careers that I simply hadn’t considered.

And speaking of spending time finding out what someone does in their day to day job, a couple of years ago I was asked by a local high school if a student could hang out with me for a day to find out what it was like to be a philosophy professor. He visited on a teaching day ( rather than simply watching me sitting around thinking, reading and writing all day… or, heaven forbid, coming to a department meeting.) I have no idea what he is doing now.

Just to add a small voice of optimism, it still remains true that most college graduates make significantly more money than most people who don’t go to college. So, while I wish more people had fulfilling jobs, a) I’m not sure there are enough fulfilling jobs to go around, given our current economic system, though we can help work to change that, and b) college graduates muddle into jobs or even careers somehow, despite how badly most of us professors do at helping them.

I talk to my advisees about their long term goals, but unless I have a friend in the field, or it is a job I did myself, I don’t have a lot of specific advice to give them. At least I can talk to them about generic stuff like going to job interviews and writing letters of interest.

Interesting timing — today marked the first day of the bar exam. Here are some thoughts from a hopefully-soon-to-be lawyer.

My undergraduate degree was in history and Slavic studies. I chose to go to law school for a dozen reasons, most of them vague. But I’ll agree with Bloix — when I was an undergrad, I found that the faculty (whom I adored) were unable to give me any suggestions beyond their own doors. Whether it’s institutional pressure, or an egoistic drive to pull interested students into the field, or simple ignorance of the other options out there (because, often, to get their positions, most of the faculty have done little except academia themselves), faculty members can’t really give much direction. No blame, just a dry statement.

Kids in college, or law school, have a hard time with career advisors because they look at them and think, “You haven’t done anything, either — why are you giving me advice?” — and a hard time with faculty, as they think, “You’ve done one thing — can’t you give me advice on any other career?”

The real eye-opening opportunities are out there with alumni networks, and internships, and school-year jobs in the city, and courses that take you out of the classroom and down to the courtroom or the newspaper office or what have you. But those are trickier to break into than law school, which is always happy to have you, and harder for career advisors to convince kids to try.

I’ve spent three years in law school generally ignoring the dry, academic part of the law and reveling in the public interest world — public defense, community organizing, alternative dispute resolution — and it’s been a fun ride, with an exciting public job at the end. But I’ve been both obsessively pointed in what I wanted out of law school and pretty lucky about my opportunities. And gifted in having an incredible set of public interest law advisors, the first time in seven years of higher education I’d had someone who I felt knew what they were talking about giving me advice.

I vaguely wonder if undergrad schools should require an internship at a different job every year. Law school effectively does that in the summers, and it helps a lot in figuring out what to do with the next few years of one’s life. Which is why, love it or hate it, most people actually do seem to get some direction out of law school.

I generally discourage people from going to law school straight through, like I did. It worked out great for me, but not for many.

No one should be allowed to take the LSAT without reading Tom the Temp’s blog.

Law students are a very different breed from medical students on the whole. Selection for medical school starts with the undergraduate curriculum. Organic chemistry, comparative vertebrate anatomy and similar weed out a lot of students who like the image of being a physician but who haven’t given the actual process of becoming one much thought.

Bloix@11 is dead on in recognizing a legal education as a glorified undergraduate program with no underlying knowledge base. I went to a very good state school, University of Washington, for law school and was stunned at how little some students knew about anything.(I had just completed a PhD in biology and taught an upper-division ecology class during law school.) Law school was often the default choice for lack of a better idea.

Even 20 years ago the financial rewards of law school (I’m excepting the top graduates of elite schools here) were starting to erode. Firm associates had less expectation for making partner and, if let go, often had experience which was transferable only to another large firm. It’s pretty hard to go out on your own when you’ve never even seen the inside of a courtroom and can’t even do paralegal tasks because you had a paralegal doing those tasks. At present the technological revolution has greatly reduced the numbers of lawyers needed to support partners.

What was clear to me was that many law students were in love with the image of being a lawyer. No matter how much you hated the profession or how little you made, you would still be a professional. Law school is a way to cling to an elite status even if you are making less than the average plumber.

Education in the US is sort of like its health care system. We spend a great deal of money to get mediocre and uneven returns.

SamTH @ 6: I agree; at my institution we get about 14,000 applications to grad school/year. I can’t help but think there are plenty of students who pursue professional/graduate degrees largely for the reasons you describe, a problem of the unknown working world vs. continuing school of some form, which still allows the pursuit of one’s own interests. The working world isn’t so flexible, at least from the viewpoint of a senior, and so grad school, with some funding attached, seems to look a lot more appealing for most. So I think the sentiments here are correct that more undergrad advising would be beneficial, but more networking and connections between departments and businesses/outside institutions would be helpful too, to give students tangible options of life after school.

I am not a lawyer, but I was a disaffected Liberal Arts major for a few years after graduation, and was told countless times by countless adults throughout many years of schooling that I was the “lawyer type” (a scenario which I think is played out many times for many students), even though I continually told people, from a relatively early age, that I didn’t want to be a lawyer.
I guess looking back I am struck by how unimaginative we (educators, parents, adult figures) are when we encounter a relatively smart, rational, logical and articulate student who enjoys thinking critically and taking positions. My skills, nascent as they were, almost always got deflated to: you like to argue, you should be a lawyer. So much so that by high school I drifted as far into Math and Science as I could, began my undergrad as a Chemical Engineering major, only to find out, with the help of Calc II and Analytical Chem for Freshman, that that kind of ‘work’ wasn’t for me.
I think it is somewhat disheartening that smart, non-business/science oriented but motivated liberal arts majors think the only profitable path after undergrad is law school. And this sentiment seems to be continually reinforced by those whom students look to: adult ‘authority figures’ (it was in my case).
Thankfully, there are Professors/other adults of ‘authority’ (Harry was one for me) who are willing to sit down and actually engage and discuss possible careers with a student that they have an idea of and are willing to offer suggestions about.
One thing to remember is that it can take years; it did for me.

The Law School appeal isn’t all that hard to figure out. If your a bright kid with a general humanities or (some) social science degree, don’t want to be an academic, and would like to make a decent amount of money then law school is certainly the default choice. You might then prefer to work for the ACLU or Public Citizen or whatever, but after you amass a huge amount of debt then working for a corporation seems reasonable.

So anyways, the “why not, lets go to law school” thing seems rational. If its true generally that public sector/non-profit/in-reality-valuable jobs are scarce why is it a problem that a fair number of people just decide to be lawyers?

PGD 07.28.09 at 9:56 pm

” I know a fair number of happy lawyers, but most are doing government or legislative work of some kind. In-house corporate lawyers also seem to be reasonably satisfied. The real misery-inducer seems to be law firm work, which of course is the bulk of the legal job market. One wonders why they can’t evolve more ways of organizing the legal job market that don’t make people miserable.”

The obvious reason is that the misery is part of the system – get people to spend up to $200K to go to an elite law school, and they have to work certain jobs to pay that off. The firms divvy up the graduates, and then work them like dogs for 6 years, after which the large majority are shown the door.

Zamfir asks:

Perhaps some of the former liberal arts students here who didn’t become an academic or a lawyer can tell how they ended up? I have always been amazed by the period of “wandering” many liberal arts friends of mine seem to have go through to find a place where their skills fit.

I knew, as a teen, that I didn’t know what major or career I wanted yet. That’s one reason I chose to go to a large state school with many strong departments — to keep my options open. I’d been doing summer internships every summer for a few years by the time I entered college — a public radio station, a state senator’s office, tech writing at a tech startup. So I knew a little tiny bit about the world of work. I also had a mentor who’d switched from teaching philosophy to carpentry mid-career, so I knew — at least intellectually — that I wouldn’t be stuck forever in a career I hated.

My parents wanted me to go into software engineering, medicine, law, or some comfortable and secure government job. I took a single programming class and did terribly (it’s not really my native mindset), didn’t think I could deal with being responsible for others’ lives as a doctor, and was unsure about law, especially after I read Scott Turow’s 1-L. Also, I think I’d known by then that most law students go into law school wanting to do public service work and come out doing corporate firm work, and I probably assumed that would happen to me, too. As for working for the government, the application processes frustrated and bored me.

I majored in political science in college, because I found it interesting, basically because of a single graduate student who taught my discussion section the second semester of my freshman year. I kept doing tech writing internships in the summers, and did random part-time admin/editing/tutoring/webmaster/research work during school. I took the LSAT and the GRE just before graduation, because my mom & sister suggested I should take them while my book-learning was still fresh and hold the scores for eventual grad school applications. I did fairly well. But I argued strenuously with my mom about grad school. She said I should go, get another degree, become more employable and keep my options open. Why not law?

I said that I didn’t want to go to grad school without a reason. It seemed like the people who entered grad school with a specific purpose, a burning desire to study or become a specific thing, did well, and the others were at high risk of burnout. What’s more, in high school & college, I’d seen that the most interesting teachers were the ones who’d had jobs in The Real World and not just academe. So I wanted some real life experience before any grad school I did.

The next time I thought of grad school, it was as I was reading tax histories for fun, and I consulted the prof who’d introduced me to it, Robin Einhorn. She gave me a tax history reading list, I started it and then stopped, and realized that I wasn’t passionate enough about it to go to school again.

After college I still didn’t know what to do, and to varying degrees pursued substitute teaching, copyediting, and personal computer consultancy, while working fulltime in (mostly) customer service jobs. One of those jobs expanded so that I did a little software testing, marketing, and writing. As I was looking for perhaps a sales job in tech, I heard about a tech management training program that was a paid fulltime job, and I applied and got in (perhaps partly thanks to those GRE/LSAT scores). I got a specialized nights-and-weekends degree (MS in technology management), partially paid for by my employers. Now I’m a happy project manager of software developers. I describe this sort of job as suitable for nitpicking dilettantes. I have to know a little about a lot of things. Random academic-y love of trivia helps, but so does experience in a variety of fields and environments.

I’m very glad that I had so many different work experiences before making irrevocable choices, and that I delayed grad school till I had a specific purpose.

I did hear a piece of advice I sort of wish I’d followed: major in something that makes you an expert in a field, like biology or history, that gives you a strong base of knowledge.

especially after I read Scott Turow’s 1-L
I’m pretty sure that this book, if it were ever a very accurate description of law school, is no longer very accurate for the majority of law schools.

I’m not at all sure that majoring in history makes one an expert in any sense that makes you employable, except perhaps as a school teacher.

Other than the US education system, the system I know the most about is the Russian one. There, students finish highschool at 17 (usually). They can enter college right after that but many spend a year preparing for entrance exams, as the exams are subject-specific(*) and the normal high-school education usually doesn’t prepare students well enough to pass them.(**) The normal course of college study is 5 years, with the large majority of time focused on one subject and closely related areas. There is significantly less “general eduction” or general requirements than in the US. You must pick your field of study when you are 17 years old and it’s very hard to change once one has started- you’d basically have to start the whole process again. Students graduate as “specialists” in a field, but my experience is that the percentage of them who go on to work in these fields, at least for any time, is not significantly higher than what you find in the US. Students still don’t know what they want to do and are not trained clearly for jobs outside of their specialty. The point of all of this discussion is to suggest that this problem might not be a particular problem with education in the US or with academics who fail to properly advise students, but rather a normal part of life, and that figuring out what you want to do with yourself is hard, full of false steps, and something that others can help you with only to a limited degree.
(*) the system of entrance exams for Russian higher education are changing now and it’s not clear how they’ll end up. It seems that a general test of some sort will be at least part of it.
(**) Paying bribes to examiners has often been a sufficient, and sometimes a necessary, step for passing university entrance exams, unfortunately.

I’m not at all sure that majoring in history makes one an expert in any sense that makes you employable, except perhaps as a school teacher.

I didn’t interpret it in that sense, but rather in the sense that the intellectual chops gained by working to attain some real degree of mastery over a field of inquiry are more transferable to a variety of subsequent jobs than the experience of dabbling in a number of things without really focusing on anything. And as we know, even some quite prestigious colleges have a sufficiently lax system of academic requirements to make it quite possible to graduate after having only done the latter.

Having earned a law degree, taught in a well-ranked law school, and practiced law, all before returning to philosophy, I have long felt myself morally obligated to have a very frank conversation with every student who seeks a recommendation letter for law school admission. In addition to pressing hard on the why do you want to attend law school question, I press hard on the what do you intend to do with your degree, how much have you researched the kind of work you’re interested in (and who in particular have you talked to), why are you applying to these schools, how are you going to pay for it, do you have a plan to recover your investment, have you considered other options, have you looked at any of the quality of life evidence gathered in recent years regarding various careers in law, how else might you use your talents in ways rewarding both to you and to society, and so on. I also openly share my own experiences and evaluationos — both the positive and negative. I tell students that I drifted into law school for various reasons (including the collapse of a plan A in my senior year and a wildly improbable couldn’t get any better LSAT score), that (and why) I found law school both frustrating and rewarding, what I thought about practicing law (I was fortunate that my area of practice permitted a high degree of craft satisfaction; unfortunately, I had to work with lawyers and had little control over what I worked on), what my friends thought about it, what they’re doing today and how they feel about it, the kind of person I felt myself becoming while in law, what my wife’s experiences in law have been, why I eventually left law, what it feels like to just now be approaching the income I had some 19 years ago, and so on. I do my best to establish credibility with the students and share my sense of what law school friends at work in private practice, the judiciary, public service/government work, not for profit work, and so on, report. I feel good about the fact that all or nearly all seem to be prompted into serious reconsideration of their situation and decision and many report back later feeling much better about the path taken — some give up on going to law school, others go with clearer vision, some just change the schools they’re applying to, or apply to joint degree programs, and so on. I’m always amazed at the fact that the majority of the students I talk to seem not to have had any previous conversation with parents, relatives, counselors, etc., even remotely like the one I have with them — they’re just drifting down stream and reporting to parents, et al., that they’ve got a plan, so no need to worry.

As a few posts above emphasize, three things students need to hear as they move from the undergraduate work to the next step: a) there are lots of ways to earn a living doing meaningful work that you’ll enjoy, grow in, and so on; b) remember, the average student today will have not three jobs over his or her life, but three careers — so be open, flexible, and on the look out for opportunities of interest; c) you’ll need enough money to acheive a certain baseline standard of living (the baseline varies from person to person to some degree), but after you’ve hit that baseline, additionoal money is over-rated relative to other features of your work (meaningfulness to you and society, autonomy/control, collegiality, stresses (some of the good, little of the bad), and so on).

As with Harry, it was usually too late to seriously advise people by then, but with my other students I did try to dissuade them from the idea that a law degree is an “all purpose” degree with which they could “do anything”. Mostly with a law degree you can be a lawyer.

How interesting. About three years after I graduated from engineering school I went to a friend from there’s wedding, there were about ten of us there, all working professionally, and only one person was actually working as an engineer (who, incidentally, was female). I am surprised that law would be more limiting.

“As a few posts above emphasize, three things students need to hear as they move from the undergraduate work to the next step: a) there are lots of ways to earn a living doing meaningful work that you’ll enjoy, grow in, and so on”

Yes, but I think also folks need to be realistic about the transistion from college to the world of work. In college, the focus is education – in the sense of “bringing out” the talents of an individual, culturing them, adding to their human capital. In the work world, the focus is on how you can make money or save time or money, what you contribute, rather than how can develop you as a person. It’s a hard transition, whether you’ve taken a generalist track or a specialist track like engineering or pharmacy, etc.

Plus, as the most junior person, you’re probably going to get the least interesting work, as a rite of passage, because no-one else wants to do it, or because you have the least expertise and so can’t do the work that needs the most domain knowledge.

I’ve found in my career that working for or with government is a much better work environment than the purely private sector – as the incentives of the carrot of pay/promotions and the stick of “avoid getting fired” are weaker than in the private sector, it’s harder to force a colleague/subordinate to do something, so basically, you have to treat your colleagues and subordinates nicer, relying more on persuasion and strokes. Macho, aggressive “Big swinging dicks” with poor interpersonal skills have a hard time getting anything done without the fear of being fired over the poor souls who have to work with them.

I was precisely one of those would-be law students who could have used some skeptical advice from my instructors in the philosophy department while I was an undergraduate. After studying law for one year, I decided that law was not for me. It was a strong desire to protect children that led me to apply to law school, and it is that same desire that has brought me through a lateral entry teaching licensure program. My student-teaching semester practicum begins this Fall. Hopefully, I made the right choice both for mine and my students’ sake(s).

Mmmm … sake.

Scott Turow’s 1-L
I’m pretty sure that this book, if it were ever a very accurate description of law school, is no longer very accurate for the majority of law schools.

I’m 30 years out of law school, so I can’t vouch for how things are now, but Turow’s account struck me as pretty accurate.

academics have a lot of bad habits, but one of the better ones that some acquire is an unwillingness to claim expertise outside of their area.

i’m not an engineer; engineering is difficult and complex: so i don’t give people advice about how to build bridges or water-treatment plants.

i’m not a doctor; medicine is difficult and complex: so i don’t give people advice about fighting cancer.

now we come to the matter of career counseling. i feel strong sympathy with harry’s original post. i certainly think too many people go to law school, and for the wrong reason.

but, as has been said several times upthread, it doesn’t help a lot to tell your students “don’t do this”, unless you can give them some advice about what they *should* do. it’s the lack of clear positive options, after all, that leads a lot of the kids to go to law school by default. so without a clear option, most of them will go by default, despite your intervention.

so what should the conscientious faculty member do? well, what we should do is give positive, detailed, personalized career advice.

except: that’s not what i’m an expert in. i have no more expertise in career counseling than i do in engineering or oncology. given what i know, and given what i have made it my business to know, i really have no business giving your kid advice about future careers.

it’s not that i begrudge your kid some advice that i could easily give them. it’s not that i’m trying to reproduce more clones of myself, or increase my enrollments.

it’s just that i have a clear sense of my own limits. and i don’t like to claim expertise outside my area.

now, maybe you’ll say, “okay, so the faculty shouldn’t do it, but the university should, through a career counseling staff that does possess the relevant expertise!”. that’s fine with me.

or maybe you’ll say, “you may not be an expert, but there are no experts in this area! career counselors are losers who don’t have any specialized knowledge! most career counselors are doing it because they couldn’t get a real job!”

i don’t know. i don’t know enough about career counseling even to know whether there is a well-defined and reputable body of expertise there or not.

but i am quite confident that i don’t have it. and that none of the faculty at any of the departments at any of the universities and colleges that i have taught at (quite a few by now) ever had it. it’s just no part of our expertise.

and i don’t really see why it should be. it’s hard enough for me to be an expert at what i’m an expert at.

and given those facts, i do not think the failure of universities to help students choose a career is to be blamed on the faculty. any more than your hospital’s failure to give its patients good career advice should be blamed on their oncologists. just not what we do.

Lots of whining about law not being “fulfilling” and lawyers being unhappy here, isn’t there? I don’t get it. I’ve been a lawyer at various top firms for 8+ years and am now at a smaller firm. Yes, the work is sometimes tedious, often exhausting, sometimes stressful and there are some unpleasant personalities to work with. But overall, it has been interesting, challenging, sometimes even exciting and I have made more money than I ever thought I would. Law is a service business, your goal is to help your clients not to stroke your ego or focus on your own “fulfilment.”

Part of the problem is that the more lucrative but soulless professions (law, consulting, etc) are much more engaged recruiters, offer a much clearer professional development path, and are more willing to offer paid internships than the wholesome, homespun alternatives.

TeachFirst, the UK adaptation of Teach for America, explicitly set out to remedy this: it was an aggressive recruiter, made it clear that it was looking only for the most talented people, and set expectations for career progression (a clear path to being a head of department, good exit prospects for those who chose not to remain teachers).

But in most cases, the less mercenary professions can’t afford the financial and management costs required to take recruitment and professional development seriously. The irony is that this means that some of the most politically progressive workplaces end up having the most inegalitarian hiring practices (unpaid 6-month internships, anyone?) and under-reward and under-promote their junior staff.

figuring out what you want to do with yourself is hard, full of false steps, and something that others can help you with only to a limited degree

1. Yes; 2. yes but sometimes avoidably; and 3. not that limited. Given how large work looms in the lives of most people, much better career guidance could and should be given throughout life than actually is (in the UK and, I think I can safely guess, the US too).

The absence of a body of expert professionals dedicated to helping people choose careers affects almost everyone – many to a much worse extent than those with inappropriate law degrees – and the resulting job dissatisfaction must be one of the biggest (fairly) easily avoidable causes of unhappiness in society. There’s plenty of concern in govt about providing skills (currently) needed in industry, but bugger-all interest in trying to guide people into (and equip them for) jobs where they might actually be happy or fulfilled.

It’s not the people here. Over here all the academics seem reasonable and caring. It’s over at Lawyers Guns & Money – a site that I truly love, by the way, for the substance of most of the posts – that I get into trouble, because there I run into faculty members whose attitude is, my job is to teach them [narrowly defined field], full stop. If they don’t learn it it’s their loss. They’re adults and they’re mostly assholes anyway. Now of course what I may be doing over there is the equivalent of evesdropping on faculty lounge belly-aching, but still, there often seems to be no recognition of the purpose of higher education for the great majority of students, and even less that their parents – who are making very substantial financial sacrifices – have any right to an opinion.

“what the job of a professor is. I think it is more”

i invite you to say more about the more.

and also about how to train the professors so that they can do it.

I said that I didn’t want to go to grad school without a reason. It seemed like the people who entered grad school with a specific purpose, a burning desire to study or become a specific thing, did well, and the others were at high risk of burnout. What’s more, in high school & college, I’d seen that the most interesting teachers were the ones who’d had jobs in The Real World and not just academe. So I wanted some real life experience before any grad school I did.

I wanted to highlight this comment from Sumana Harihareswara because it rings so true to me.

Like others in this thread, I was told many times that I should be a lawyer, which I took mostly politely, because I know it was well-intentioned and kindly meant. My experience with formal education in college was sufficent to assure me that graduate school was extremely unlikely to ever be in my future.

By the time I graduated (with my non-specialist liberal-arts degree), I had nine years of experience in the paid workforce, the last several full-time. The Career Services representative at my university looked at me in polite disbelief when I told her I wanted to work in the nonprofit sector. She was at a complete loss for where to refer me, and apparently had even less inclination to do any research or exploration to find ideas. So I left the office and ended up finding a job through a want ad.

Since I had (have) no particular ambition beyond making myself useful to the world and finding work that keeps me engaged and reasonably well-paid, I tend to feel as if I’ve hit the jackpot. Certainly I know few other people who have had as painless a “career path” in the decade-plus since college that I’ve been lucky enough to go through.

These days, I write a lot of letters of recommendation (although few for grad school), and try to dissuade a lot of bright-eyed young people from law school. (Not usually the same people.) The dissuading conversations go something like “You have told me you like X, Y and Z. What makes you think you will be able to do that as a lawyer? Have you talked to any lawyers? Do you know what they actually do all day? Would you like to do that? How do you plan to pay down your law school debt? Are you aware that most debt-forgiveness programs require you to work full-time, so that if you want to have a child you may be disqualified?” etc.

So far my success rate is zero.

What I have taken from this is that the facts and logic that would be persuasive to me are not persuasive to some other people, and that by the time somebody is coming to me mentioning law school, it’s too late.

I do try to talk very bluntly and clearly about money and possibilities when people come to me for informational interviews about nonprofit work. I don’t think it does anyone any favors to hide what kind of salary they can expect to earn, and the various costs and benefits of going into the sector.

Thinking a bit more, I agree pretty much completely w/ Kid B that it’s unreasonably to expect professors to be career advisers, and I tend to think it’s unreasonable for professors to have their student’s financial future or even their happiness foremost in mind. But, something departments can do that could be very helpful is keep lists of alumni and what they are doing. This would provide a ready resource for students wanting to know what they can do w/ a degree, people with knowledge of various fields, and contacts who might help w/ internships or entry-level positions, or even advice on what else a student should do to get such a job. These days especially, w/ email and data-bases and the like, such things are not hard to do and could meet a real need.

kid bitzer 07.29.09 at 6:24 pm
“but, as has been said several times upthread, it doesn’t help a lot to tell your students “don’t do this”, unless you can give them some advice about what they should do. it’s the lack of clear positive options, after all, that leads a lot of the kids to go to law school by default. so without a clear option, most of them will go by default, despite your intervention.”

Yes, it’s hard for an individual academic to make up for the faults of the system. However, one can dissuade a few from making a choice for no good reason.

“But, something departments can do that could be very helpful is keep lists of alumni and what they are doing.”

That is an awesome idea. I imagine there would be some selection bias in who returns the surveys each year et cetera, but something > nothing in this regard.

Sorry, better formatting:
There are liberal arts grads out there (I have a BA in computer science from a liberal arts college, but that’s probably not what you mean), but some of them are too busy or disparage the Internet or are too optimistic to take part in this discussion, and that’s part of why you won’t find them here.

I have no idea about career counseling. My own industry is changing by the minute. I’d like to see the following, though:

* Consideration of what careers can’t be entered except by recruiting from universities and grad schools (law gets a check on this)

* Reconsideration of the knee-jerk public policy advice that “retraining,” which somehow will occur in universities, is a panacea (law probably gets another check)

* Recognition that the ideal of the delicate genius (or whatever) whose wife keeps the kiddles quiet and whose disciples handle correspondence isn’t a reasonable goal for most people, and that criticism based on failure to achieve that goal, or social rules based on the idea that those with merit will achieve that ideal, aren’t helpful (law is probably one of the closest careers to meet this ideal, though, only punditry being reliably better)

* Examination of questions like career path–as an engineer, after 5/10/15 years, you may be a very senior engineer–but you may find yourself expected to go into management, or else doing work that is no more challenging than what you were doing at 21, and if you went into engineering because you wanted to do engineering, that can be disappointing. (law gets another check here)

* Recognition that the self-help literature (which I assume reflects the therapeutic training literature–and which influences what gets into the press) may reflect the ideology of the people writing it more than the reality people find on the job, and that’s a problem.

While some of what Bloix says echoes my own conscience-searching back in my academic days, I think it’s a bit harsh. In particular I think puts a little too much stock in direct job-related training (which admittedly is not what universities and the more prestigious liberal arts colleges are good at.) The problem with an approach that focuses on training is that few of today’s graduates can expect to have just one career in their lives. This is not to endorse the usual complacent balderdash about how laid-off autoworkers can just retrain as massage therapists or whatever. But it’s a bit too easy to devalue the mental habits that a good liberal arts education is meant to develop (though I’m not claiming that the reality always matches the advertising) in a world of ever-accelerating change. If done right it should give one a degree of flexibility and adaptability on which most people are going to need to draw during their lives and which vocational training does not provide.

Of course, high schools have long been failing in their duty to produce some of the same effect at a less advanced level, and consequently kids who don’t go to college are really getting screwed. Many jobs “require” a college degree only because high school graduates can’t be counted on for what ought to be high-school-graduate skills. But that’s a whole other can of worms.

I may have had a vague notion of becoming an English professor, but I went to college, and then grad school, because I was deeply interested in the subject matter for its own sake.

This is basically how I feel about my own life-science doctoral and postdoctoral education, though it also does have some genuine relevance and significant market value in my current career.

Salient, you think data entry is a prospect?

What you say about college degrees is true because it is against the law for an employer to specify a high school diploma as a credential for a job unless the employer can show that the diploma is necessary for performance of the job. Why? because in a early civil rights act case, the Supreme Court found that high school diploma requirements had the effect of discriminating against black applicants. But no such rule has ever been imposed on a college degree requirement. Therefore, many employees require college degrees in order to make sure they are getting employees who can read, add, and show up on time with a clean shirt and a pleasant manner. That’s why jobs that clearly don’t require a technical or liberal arts education – secretary, insurance sales – nonetheless require a degree.

But students whose sights are set on those kinds of jobs would be far better off in tech or business school. No, you don’t need much education to sell insurance. But if you have any ambition at all, you’ll want to move into underwriting, where accounting and actuarial science would be a big help, or management, where a business degree would give you a leg up. And if you can run a copy machine you can be a paralegal. But if you want to advance into law firm management or legal support, then you’d want some human relations courses or computer database skills or finance.

Too many students in the liberal arts are simply marking time in order to get the credential that will allow them to apply for entry level trainee jobs.

Salient, you think data entry is a prospect?

Eh, for example, medical coding’s not bad.

…it is against the law for an employer to specify a high school diploma as a credential for a job unless the employer can show that the diploma is necessary for performance of the job.

I did not know this. Hm.

…I don’t think I understand what the law says. How could one show that a “diploma” per se is necessary for the performance of the job? I’m confused. It seems monster.com lets me filter search results by “high school degree” and I get results saying, a HS diploma or GED equivalent is required… maybe those employers can prove the need for a diploma somehow. I don’t see how they could.

Too many students in the liberal arts are simply marking time in order to get the credential that will allow them to apply for entry level trainee jobs.

I still dispute this idea that these students are just “marking time” — i.e. not enjoying themselves at all in the process. If that is indeed their experience, I absolutely agree they should find either (a) another major they would indeed enjoy or (b) a less expensive and faster option, perhaps such as an associate’s degree. But I think most students find the majority of their courses in their in-major coursework to be a blast, or at least “fun except for the exams” :-)

(long comment bolded to help readers skim it)

We know that you think college should primarily be job-training or technical training. I think that’s wrong.

I do agree with Bloix (and I’m conjecturing that you do too, Matt) that we need to more openly acknowledge how many of our students rank job-training and employment-enabling among their own priorities when pursuing a degree.

One obligation of the University is, clearly, to advise students as to what career options are open to individuals who pursue each major. And within reason, it’s the responsibility of professors (especially those with tenure?) to advocate for their university to fulfill this obligation to its students, and to inform students about this resource when appropriate situations for that information arise.

I think this priority is commonplace in students largely because college education is extremely expensive — it’s essentially impossible to just take a class in your spare time, out of personal interest, which is a shame. No, not just a shame, let me be emphatic — it’s a core problem, perhaps the core higher-education problem from a social justice perspective.

Let’s see if folks agree with this one: College education ought to be cheap enough, and geographically well-distributed enough, to enable most working individuals in a society to take a course in their leisure time if they so desire. Bloix, I hypothesize that you would be well-satisfied by this, as your principal concern seems to be the monetary cost incurred by students moreso than the years of life spent at college. I hypothesize we can find some basis for agreement here.

I emphatically fault (since I’m being emphatic) most state governments in the U.S. for not subsidizing a strong and reasonably inexpensive public university system that satisfies the above condition. The current distribution of resources is unjust, and accessible college coursework is one dimension of resources. Redistribution of resources, including subsidization of a strong and accessible public education system, is necessary in order to achieve a just society.

I’m very lucky to have grown up in Wisconsin, which has a pretty top-notch public education system and at the time provided sufficient subsidization to maintain reasonable control over the cost of attending college (I don’t know if this is still true). But access to education ought to be available regardless of which state or country one is born into.

I claim, if we find a way to ensure the “leisure course” condition is met, that will reduce the cost of full tuition such that pursuing a degree no longer imposes the stark financial burden we see as commonplace today. This, in turn, settles the problem of “wasting” one’s time and money on a degree never used later: even in a worst-case scenario, the degree can be reconciled as a leisure pursuit, enabling the person to lead a fuller life.

But we can’t talk about “enabling the person to lead a fuller life” in any serious way until cost controls are in place. Then, but only then, it is fair and reasonable to tell a person their expense in obtaining a degree may not be recompensed with access to employment.

I like Harry’s approach to recommendation letters, and I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more discussion of recommendation letters for applicants to PhD programs in the liberal arts. Having gone through a PhD program (in a branch of medieval history) and law school myself, I’d guess that a higher proportion of people end up regretting the choice of the PhD. Assuming that almost all the people who drop out without finishing, most of the ones who don’t get tenure-track jobs, and a few of the ones who become tenured faculty end up wishing they’d done something else, that’s probably what, three-quarters? And a lot of those people have very bitter regrets. I enjoyed both grad school and law school myself, for different reasons, but I felt like a distinct minority in grad school. Not that many people like being lawyers – I don’t like it particularly myself, but then I didn’t like being a professor either – but I’d guess that many fewer of my law school classmates had the same level of bitterness as so many of my grad school ones.

+1 bianca steele, that’s great

Of course, I think Bloix meant business administration courses on the topic of human resources administration, or some such thing — or maybe Bloix meant sociology courses — ? — but I am now imagining a New Yorker type cartoon of a frat boy leaving the classroom and complaining, “I thought this was a course in human relations, but all we’re learning about is how people talk to each other!”

I dunno, I would guess that if anything, business administration courses regarding human resources administration would be useful for managers. So I think that’s what Bloix meant — in fact, it wasn’t until you pointed out the wording that I noticed it said “relations” and not “resources”

{But I’m worried Bloix might take offense at an extended discussion of this, so I’ll withdraw from further conversation about it — Bloix, no offense intended, and I do feel you have been making a solid and reasonable point, though we disagree around the margins.}

Resources, yes. The folks who teach you how to fire people. But seriously, am I missing the joke? Is someone really concerned that I’m going to take offense? Me? Good God, The Editors told me Good Day to You, Sir. Bitch PhD ripped me to shreds. Robert Farley called me an idiot. I’ve been banned from Edge of the American West. Nothing that anyone at this decorous site could say would offend me in the slighest.

Bianca Steele – I’m not saying that you’d want in your wildest dreams to take a human resources course, either for you or anyone you care about. I’m saying that if a person’s ambition is to be an insurance salesman or a paralegal, they might be just the person for those courses.

On one college visit, my son and I were taken on the tour by a young biology major whose career goal was to become a pharmaceutical salesperson. Ohh-kayy. We crossed that school off the list. But the job she wants exists. Just because I think she’ll be doing evil and destroying her brain while she’s at it doesn’ t mean that there’s no proper educational path for her to achieve it.

^^Oops – shame on me for not proofing.

Second paragraph should read:

Because for the last 20 years or so (until Sept ‘08) Wall Street’s been hiring liberal arts grads and luring them with far more money than Big Law ever did. To the point where BigLaw partners were pretty pissed about the low quality of the students they were seeing from the top law schools.

(correction in italics)

Joey is literally correct but as a practical matter he misses the point. He’s correct that there is no “special rule” for diplomas, but the point is that the Supreme Court has ruled explicitly that if an employer requires a high school diploma it can be forced, by a private litigant, to show that the diploma is a BFOQ (a bona fide occupational requirement) – that is, that the skills represented by the diploma are necessary to performance of the job. No court has ever reached the same result for college degrees.

What this means is that HR consultants tell employers that, if they can afford to do so, they can lessen the risk of suit by requiring degrees, even if a diploma plus two years of work experience would attact equally qualified employees. And many employers follow this advice because discrimination law suits can be expensive and bad publicity.

So the college degree becomes the entry level requirement for many white collar jobs. We then get statistics that show that people with college degrees earn more money than those without, and interpret them to mean that the education confers greater productivity, when a more likely explanation is that the credential is an arbitrary threshold into the world of white-collar work.

We then get statistics that show that people with college degrees earn more money than those without, and interpret them to mean that the education confers greater productivity, when a more likely explanation is that the credential is an arbitrary threshold into the world of white-collar work.

That makes a lot of sense to me, especially if “college degree” is specified instead of “some college experience.”

On the other hand, I remember looking at the list of graduating seniors each year and observing such a stark gulf separating those who were accepted at a college and those who weren’t. Either “accepted to a college” is the new “competent enough to merit a diploma,” or “competent enough to merit a diploma” never meant very much.

And how does one indicate “we want applicants who have demonstrated a willingness to learn whatever authority figures intend to teach them and to participate in a system of interaction constructed by authorities,” if not by requiring some proof of performance?

@Aaron

Exactly. Success in other areas often relies on luck, talent and connections. When you’re 21 and making what seems to be the most important decision in your life, it’s way too easy to fall into a field where you’re being recruited: law schools want students with good grades, so do Wall Street and consulting firms.

As you note, they make it way too easy.