Top Law Schools

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A. Nony Mouse wrote:Much as I love TLS, I agree that the NYT, hmm, shall we say it has more gravitas than TLS? I agree there's plenty of info out there for those who search, but it would still be nice to see one of the NYT articles that doesn't focus on a bottom feeder school.

This article from last year isn't quite as dire, but focuses on someone who went to CLS.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/busin ... arket.html

You're right, I'd forgotten that one.

Does anyone have a link to an article (I think it was in the NYT, but maybe i'm misremembering) where they profiled a lawyer who made 300k but was declaring bankruptcy or something?

As far as I can remember he was at a big firm that was going down and he jumped shipped because one of the rainmakers at the firm vouched for him.

I can't quite remember all the details, but if anyone knows the article I'm talking about it would be helpful.

Barack O'Drama wrote: ...I think the circumstances would be different if the internet didn't exist or the employment rankings weren't published...

this right here. NYT has more gravitas, but gravitas doesnt preclude an editorial slant, and NYT should be read as critically (perhaps in a different way, filtering for different things) as TLS, and same goes for any other media outlet...particularly as they put more of their content and layout online...dont know why so many students won't do this.
NYT's angle--from what I recall--seems to be that everyone should have the chance to go to law school, however shit the school is, and theyre sympathetic, but they can't reconcile that with their other stance that the economy is recovering and all is good

kaysta wrote:

Barack O'Drama wrote: ...I think the circumstances would be different if the internet didn't exist or the employment rankings weren't published...

this right here. NYT has more gravitas, but gravitas doesnt preclude an editorial slant, and NYT should be read as critically (perhaps in a different way, filtering for different things) as TLS, and same goes for any other media outlet...particularly as they put more of their content and layout online...dont know why so many students won't do this.
NYT's angle--from what I recall--seems to be that everyone should have the chance to go to law school, however shit the school is, and theyre sympathetic, but they can't reconcile that with their other stance that the economy is recovering and all is good

I agree with everything you say about reading critically, but I'm a bit confused. Its seems like you say they slant towards thinking everyone should go to law school no matter what the outcome, but they write one of these articles a couple times a year profiling people who have terrible outcomes from bad schools. It seems like these articles should be read more as a warning, than an endorsement of the idea that "everyone should have the chance to go to law school, however shit the school."

Or am I misunderstanding your point?

NYT certainly does carry more cache with the literate public but I still found that article to be "blog post" quality at best. You could tell it was written a few months back and put on the back burner to be used as filler in a slow news day. The research was thin/flimsy, and the writing was rife was cliches.

If the writers at NYT know - or at least have a notion - that the layman perception of law school is disjoint from reality, I would expect a better article. I mean, if you give a megaposter a month to come up with a long-form expose, I'm sure we could come up with a much better article. (Brut, but heavily redlined).

I think these articles don't do themselves any favors by going the fluff piece route and concentrating on a single school, with a couple poorly googled stats thrown in (citing LST but not the ABA reports is lazy).

I mean, if the NYT reporter had any balls she would have gone after USNWR from the onset. If you're going to lament over the cop-turned prosecutor, publish real debt repayment numbers. Key in on the bimodal salary distribution. Explain that law grads outnumber job openings 2:1. But maybe I'm overestimating the newsconsuming public.

I don't know how much of an impact a poorly written article vs a well written article about the legal market will have an effect on anyone.

Meh, even if that guy is wrong that there isn't a $400k present value to a law education, PAYE and PLSF basically mean if you get a salary that is 10% higher than what you were doing before, it's a positive outcome still. The people in that article had dog shit for career opportunities. Now they at least have a dice where 20% isn't dog shit and the other 80% is still the same dog shit they had before.

It's also free money from the government that lets you increase your leverage, so as long as the investment has a positive return (anything greater than .01%) it's not a dumb idea to go.

JohannDeMann wrote:Meh, even if that guy is wrong that there isn't a $400k present value to a law education, PAYE and PLSF basically mean if you get a salary that is 10% higher than what you were doing before, it's a positive outcome still. The people in that article had dog shit for career opportunities. Now they at least have a dice where 20% isn't dog shit and the other 80% is still the same dog shit they had before.

It's also free money from the government that lets you increase your leverage, so as long as the investment has a positive return (anything greater than .01%) it's not a dumb idea to go.

Even on PAYE, a $200k bill after 20 years of minimum payments plus the tax bomb is still gonna add up to $200k in the end. It would have to be much greater salary premium that actually occurs for the math to add up.

"Law School a Solid Investment, Despite Pay Discrepancies"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/busin ... f=dealbook

AndroidLawyer wrote:"Law School a Solid Investment, Despite Pay Discrepancies"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/busin ... f=dealbook

Wait, you mean to tell me that this guy thinks you should pay $53k in tuition to the school that gives him $141k a year to work maybe 30 hours a week, set his own schedule, take summers off and have the job for life?

^You've gotta love Simkovic et al. with their "only peer-reviewed study on the topic" sales pitch on "The Economic Value of a Law Degree."

Anonymous User wrote:

yay wrote:hard to have sympathy for people who go to bad schools who aren't rich or have some non-idiotic loan-repayment plan. that article just makes the rest of us look bad. nobody cares about that guy's 200K+ loan and shitlaw job in small town. like he literally did it to himself fully aware. Like he saw shit and stepped on it, and he's now crying it smells.

This.

I do feel bad because some people don't know to even get educated about this. Or worse, they see schools like Valpo as their only choice to fulfill a dream.

October25 wrote: I agree with everything you say about reading critically, but I'm a bit confused. Its seems like you say they slant towards thinking everyone should go to law school no matter what the outcome, but they write one of these articles a couple times a year profiling people who have terrible outcomes from bad schools. It seems like these articles should be read more as a warning, than an endorsement of the idea that "everyone should have the chance to go to law school, however shit the school."

Or am I misunderstanding your point?

ah, lets see here, whatd I say-- its not well formulated, wrote that while half asleep.

my point was just that if you take the whole collection of NYT articles on this topic, the subtext and editorial point is that people from all walks of life, regardless of LSAT score etc, should get a shot at law school if they want it--they generally aren't placing [much] blame on the graduates. my read anyway and like I said partly subtext. but theyre simultaneously reporting bad outcomes/futures and the implication is that the economy, some abstract force of nature, is to blame--theyre not really analyzing role of current administration in lack of economic recovery, or USNWR, or law school admins or school debt financing options--it's just a sad sad tale without a lot of content, maybe with a happy ending tacked on to keep people reading.

pancakes3 said it better than I did. but that was sort of my point, and that online NYT is getting to be a lot like a blog--I used to read the print version and I swear it was more substantive. content does seem more rushed, and I hate how they present it, with clickbait titles that are recommended for you, you cant flip through the paper as a whole--its not as easy to get a good cross section, like you can in print.

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zot1 wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:

yay wrote:hard to have sympathy for people who go to bad schools who aren't rich or have some non-idiotic loan-repayment plan. that article just makes the rest of us look bad. nobody cares about that guy's 200K+ loan and shitlaw job in small town. like he literally did it to himself fully aware. Like he saw shit and stepped on it, and he's now crying it smells.

This.

I do feel bad because some people don't know to even get educated about this. Or worse, they see schools like Valpo as their only choice to fulfill a dream.

This is not a reason to knowingly crushing your life. How does this make someone more sympathetic?

October25 wrote:Does anyone have a link to

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/busin ... krupt.html
"Anyone who wonders why law school applications are plunging and there’s widespread malaise in many big law firms might consider the case of Gregory M. Owens..."
nah, he just sounds like an asshole

Talk about burying the lede. This guy made nearly $400k a year and was just trying to get out of his divorce settlement.

yay wrote:

zot1 wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:

yay wrote:hard to have sympathy for people who go to bad schools who aren't rich or have some non-idiotic loan-repayment plan. that article just makes the rest of us look bad. nobody cares about that guy's 200K+ loan and shitlaw job in small town. like he literally did it to himself fully aware. Like he saw shit and stepped on it, and he's now crying it smells.

This.

I do feel bad because some people don't know to even get educated about this. Or worse, they see schools like Valpo as their only choice to fulfill a dream.

This is not a reason to knowingly crushing your life. How does this make someone more sympathetic?

Because they don't know they are crushing their lives. They think I've done manual labor since I was little and so has everyone else in my family. If I can become an attorney, I can improve myself and my whole family. You have to grow up in a certain social class to get this. I'm happy that you and most people here don't.

i don't buy the patronizing slant of the working class applicant being duped and dazzled by the bright lights of biglaw. being a bumpkin is no excuse for forgoing your due dilligence into the field of your choice. at the very least you've got to recognize the enormity of the debt and figure out if you can service that debt - even with a 160k salary.

pancakes3 wrote:i don't buy the patronizing slant of the working class applicant being duped and dazzled by the bright lights of biglaw. being a bumpkin is no excuse for forgoing your due dilligence into the field of your choice. at the very least you've got to recognize the enormity of the debt and figure out if you can service that debt - even with a 160k salary.

On a personal level I think the individuals are responsible, but as a matter of policy we really should shut down some of these schools.

Capitol_Idea wrote:

pancakes3 wrote:i don't buy the patronizing slant of the working class applicant being duped and dazzled by the bright lights of biglaw. being a bumpkin is no excuse for forgoing your due dilligence into the field of your choice. at the very least you've got to recognize the enormity of the debt and figure out if you can service that debt - even with a 160k salary.

On a personal level I think the individuals are responsible, but as a matter of policy we really should shut down some of these schools.

I think it'd be a more easily implemented poicy to control who gets loans than to decide which schools live and which schools die.

pancakes3 wrote:i don't buy the patronizing slant of the working class applicant being duped and dazzled by the bright lights of biglaw. being a bumpkin is no excuse for forgoing your due dilligence into the field of your choice. at the very least you've got to recognize the enormity of the debt and figure out if you can service that debt - even with a 160k salary.

There are people who don't even know they can apply to scholarships for undergrad. Say what you will and we can agree to disagree. But in order to do your due diligence, you need to have some knowledge of what that would even mean.

zot1 wrote:

pancakes3 wrote:i don't buy the patronizing slant of the working class applicant being duped and dazzled by the bright lights of biglaw. being a bumpkin is no excuse for forgoing your due dilligence into the field of your choice. at the very least you've got to recognize the enormity of the debt and figure out if you can service that debt - even with a 160k salary.

There are people who don't even know they can apply to scholarships for undergrad. Say what you will and we can agree to disagree. But in order to do your due diligence, you need to have some knowledge of what that would even mean.

Agree to disagree then, but 2 points:

1) UG admissions is a completely different beast than LS admissions. The applicants are older (and presumably wiser), and the job market demands for an UG degree are much higher than for a JD.

2) There's something endemically irrational to the LS applicant pool that can't be excused by a lack of institutional knowledge/privileged background/etc. There are nowhere near the same number of applicants (and schools) in niche PhD's, MD's, or even MBA's who run headfirst into their respective programs without thought to debt/employment outcome. There isn't a bumpkin out there who's banking on applying to a TTTT French Literature PhD program hoping to kill it their first year and then transfer to a HYS's French Lit program.

pancakes3 wrote:

zot1 wrote:

pancakes3 wrote:i don't buy the patronizing slant of the working class applicant being duped and dazzled by the bright lights of biglaw. being a bumpkin is no excuse for forgoing your due dilligence into the field of your choice. at the very least you've got to recognize the enormity of the debt and figure out if you can service that debt - even with a 160k salary.

There are people who don't even know they can apply to scholarships for undergrad. Say what you will and we can agree to disagree. But in order to do your due diligence, you need to have some knowledge of what that would even mean.

Agree to disagree then, but 2 points:

1) UG admissions is a completely different beast than LS admissions. The applicants are older (and presumably wiser), and the job market demands for an UG degree are much higher than for a JD.

2) There's something endemically irrational to the LS applicant pool that can't be excused by a lack of institutional knowledge/privileged background/etc. There are nowhere near the same number of applicants (and schools) in niche PhD's, MD's, or even MBA's who run headfirst into their respective programs without thought to debt/employment outcome. There isn't a bumpkin out there who's banking on applying to a TTTT French Literature PhD program hoping to kill it their first year and then transfer to a HYS's French Lit program.

I disagree on MBAs. Plenty of people go to shitty business schools wrongly thinking it will do something for them. If there was a university willing to accept anyone with a pulse for PhDs or MDs, like there are with law schools, then you'd have plenty of people doing that too. Luckily you actually have to know something and demonstrate your ability to succeed to some reasonable level before you can get into one of those programs.

At the end of the day, saying these students should know better is just victim blaming.