JamezPhoenix wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 3:17 am
Okay, time to inject my two cents.
Tomtown has a point, a lot of you posters with thousands of comments under your belt say things that basically equate to, "IF YOU DONT GET FULL RIDE AT HARVARD YOU WILL LIVE UNDER A BRIDGE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE EATING RATS YOU IDIOT!!! RETAKEEEEEEE". Hyperbolic of me, sure, but you have to admit, not far off the mark. I got a 21k a year scholarship from UCLA and the same people I see posting now were saying the same things to me then, don't go to law school, retake, you'll never get a job, give up!!! Which is fine, that's your opinion but it is incredibly elitist and out of touch. People go to law school for all different reasons and are comfortable and uncomfortable with different things so my advice is always to do your research, know the risks and ask yourself if you can live with worst case scenario. If you can, go for it, if not then choose something that you are comfortable with.
STCL has a median LSAT of 151, I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that a lot of people who scored average and below on the LSAT probably didn't do a lot of lsat/law school study, and likely realized while in Law school that practicing law wasn't something they really wanted to do. Maybe that doesn't account for the full 1/3 of people who don't get a law job, but i definitely could see how it could be self-selection. I would not recommend going to a non-accredited school. But if you want to go to law school, go for it, just understand the risks, understand the amount of debt and interest you will be paying off and understand that worst-case scenario, whatever that is for you, could easily become your scenario.
I’ve never told anyone that they have to get a full ride at Harvard. I’m a big advocate for going lots of different places. The reason people here so regularly promote the T14 is because people regularly show up **wanting to make fat stacks in biglaw or to do something incredibly competitive like international human rights law**, for which top-ranked schools offer the best chance of achieving those goals. When people show up with different goals (and they do, although less often), they get different advice.
The other issue is when people show up wanting to go to law school who don’t have any clear reason for going to law school and wildly unrealistic expectations of what law school actually gets you. It’s not 3 more years of finding yourself like in undergrad - it’s a focused program designed to achieve one thing, get you licensed for employment in a specific profession. But no one tells those posters to go to Harvard - they get told not to go at all, and I think that’s fair.
And yet a third issue is that people are usually way more comfortable with the worst-case scenario before it happens than after - in part because no one really thinks that the worst-case scenario will happen to them, and in part because taking on the debt just doesn’t feel really real at the beginning of the process the way that it goes at the end of the process.
My issues with tomtownsend’s law school plans were his refusal to understand the facts about what he was talking about. I never told him (or thought) that he should go to a T14; I just wanted him actually to understand the risks of what he was proposing so he could make the informed decision you’re recommending (though I’m not convinced he wasn’t a troll).
I absolutely disagree that somehow students at lower-ranked schools more disproportionately decide “gee, I don’t want to be a lawyer after all but I’ll graduate anyway and see what happens” than students at higher ranked schools. There are lots of reasons for lower LSAT scores that have nothing to do with interest in the law. The difference is in schools’ placement powers, not student interest.
What the stats we have don’t capture, of course, is students getting jobs after 9 months after graduation. Based on my own knowledge of my own law school (not a T14) I’d imagine that some unknowable (but reasonable) percentage of the STCL students do go on to get jobs of some kind after that date. And the vast majority of them will figure out something to do with their life and forge ahead and be fine. But “fine” doesn’t necessarily mean that they achieve what they set out to do when they went to law school, or that they enjoy the debt they took out to do so. So when someone is at the choosing/planning stage, why **not** try to advise them of all the implications of their choices and help them really maximize their chances for success? Why **not** try to go somewhere that makes it less likely you’ll be struggling longer to get a job? Because something else people don’t appreciate until they go through it is the emotional toll that prolonged job searching takes on a person (read the Vale of Tears thread).
There’s a little bit of - mission creep? inflation? - here in that people are often advised to strive upwards a little more (again, depending on their goals). That’s not because anyone thinks the T14 or HYS or whatever are magical and inherently better, but because law is a prestige-worshiping profession where pedigree counts (admittedly in some contexts more than others, but those contexts are often squarely where posters are trying to go - biglaw or fancy public interest).