The world at large has discovered that law school may not be the solution to every young person’s career problems after all. As a lawyer, there’s an unwritten rule that I’m supposed to tell every saucer-eyed college senior with an LSAT prep book under her arm to turn back, to step away from the edge. Or maybe encourage the little dear. But nobody ever asks me, and so I never get to give my wonderful advice. Until now. (None of this is particularly original to me, by the way, but it should be said over and over again.)
You can go to law school, somewhere. If you are smart enough to read this blog, you have the mental wattage to be admitted to one of the hundreds of law schools in this country. It will be glad to cash your checks! Law schools are profit centers for universities — no labs required, a few professors for very large lecture classes, etc. Most of your tuition is pure profit for the university it’s attached to. And the people who sell textbooks. And the bar review people.
Speaking of checks, law school can be expensive. It will take you three years, during which time you are not supposed to have much of any kind of other job. Tuition and other fees vary, but my alma mater, Boston University School of Law, projects a student budget of $58,500 for the 2010-2011 academic year. (That’s up quite a bit from when I graduated in 2001.) Say you go to BUSL for three years and borrow it all. (You’ll fit in just fine!) Cost: $175,500 plus three times whatever you might have made working at a crappy entry-level job right out of college. Let’s call it $35,000 per year. That’s $280,000 on the front end. If you made the big $180,000 salary that everyone fixates on (and few get), that’s a year and a half of your gross salary. How long does it take to pay off a year and a half worth of your salary? That depends on how much you like canned soup.
Question: If someone were to write you a check right now for $280,000 NOT to go to law school, would you still go?
It’s not whether you can go, but whether you should. Prospective law students can have some funny ideas. Law school isn’t about:
- Helping people
- Becoming a better person
- Learning how to argue
- Learning to write
- General training that will be useful in other fields (i.e., business)
- “Loving the law” (whatever that means)
You may want to do one or more of those things, but that’s not what deciding to go to law school is about. Here’s what it is about:
- Becoming a lawyer
Here’s the only right reason to go to law school: to become a lawyer, because you like what lawyers do and want to do it yourself.
Questions: Do you know what lawyers do? Do you know any practicing lawyers? Have you worked in a law firm? Have you looked over any legal documents? No? Then how do you know what you think you know? (If your answer is “talking to law students,” you are really not preparing yourself.)
So here’s the deal: you can go to law school somewhere. It may cost you a lot. And chances are, you don’t really know what you are getting when you sign on the dotted line. You may hate it — many people do. Even some people who like being lawyers kind of hate it.
Question: Is it worth it? Educate yourself, or you may find that you’ve mortgaged the rest of your life in pursuit of something that you wouldn’t have taken even if it were free. If you had only known . . .
[...] written before about how law school is not a very good deal for most people. It isn’t. (It’s worked out pretty well for me, but that’s another story.) [...]