A Message to Yale Grads

So the Yale Daily News today published this piece about Yale grads applying to law school and/or putting it off in the wake of recent events.

In case any Yale grads (or grads of any other elite school) come around here, I want you to remember four simple words: you are not immune.

There is a tenancy at many "elite" undergraduate schools to think that you are "set for life," and I'm sure there are still many out there who believe if you go to school [x] that you should have no trouble finding a good job, even if a stagnant economy. Many of you are probably thinking that because you went to a school like Yale and did well, you would be able to thrive at any law school in the country, be it NYU or NYLS.

I'm going to tell you you are not immune to the conditions of the so-called "real world." Your Yale degree will mean jack squat at whatever law school you go to. You will be thrown in the same bin with Southeast Utah Tech grads. Finals are graded anonymously, and even though you may develop into an expert on Tort or Contract law, the odds are you will get a B after working significantly harder than you did at Yale to get A/A-'s. And if you choose to attend a non-elite law school, be it because of easy scholarship money (which you will have to work hard to keep) or because you couldn't score well on the LSAT, almost no one will care that you went to Yale.

There, in two paragraphs, I gave you better advice for your future than much of this article. For example, your newspaper chooses to devote the entire middle third of the story to allow Wendy Margolis of LSAC to advertise. To wit:

Margolis speculated that fewer students are interested in law school overall because of increased media attention regarding the impact of a poor economy on the legal job market.

“Last year, with the other sectors of the economy slowing down, people were taking the opportunity to enhance their education by going to law school,” she said. “People were still thinking that law school was a good investment. It is still a good investment, but people are just being more realistic about what the outcome is going to be.”

Um...yeah. The "increased media attention" is only minimally related to the economy, and the whole point of it is that law school is NOT a good investment for many people, including, I'm sure, some Yale grads.

But at least there are some good advisers at Yale.

“A lot of people say they’re considering it because there’s nothing else to do,” [student Kwaku Osei] said, “but the process is really complicated and the number of people who actually apply is much lower.”

He added that while most people have encouraged his own choice to apply to law school, his adviser in the Political Science Department told him not to apply. Osei said his adviser warned him of the high cost and the fact that law school only prepares students to become lawyers.

First of all, if you think the process to apply is "really complicated," you want no part of law school or being a lawyer itself. And second, your adviser is smart, unlike this fine representative of your lying-through-its-teeth career services department:

Elayne Mazzarella, deputy director at Yale Undergraduate Career Services, said Yalies turn to law school not just to prepare themselves to practice law, adding that students also use the degree to “to advance their careers, to make themselves more marketable in specific industries, to teach [or] for the love of learning.”

My god, seriously? If you love learning or want to make yourself marketable in any industry except law/government/compliance, law school is the LAST place you should go.

Apparently, Yale students aren't immune from having crap spewed at them, either. 50k for tuition and room and board and they can't even give you sane advice. At least some students learn about reality the hard way:

Shelagh Mahbubani ’11 said she had planned to apply to law school, but decided against it after an internship with The Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit legal services provider in New York City.

“I got to see lawyers working, and I realized that I wasn’t interested enough in the work to be able to put in the hours that are required to be a good lawyer,” she said. “They work ridiculously long hours to prepare for trials and I don’t want to spend that much time around paper, and doing one kind of work.”

While I'm wondering what the hell she thought lawyers did, and what jobs in this economy don't involve the dreaded "paper" or "one kind of work," it's good that she actually did the internship and that her experience was published to the whole community.

Because, kids, you're not immune. Unless you have choice connections, you're getting thrown in the same meat-grinder as everyone else. And if you think it's hard getting a job with a Yale liberal arts degree in this economy, it's even harder if you go into a field that has long-term shifts affecting it beyond the current recession's effect, and especially if you go to a non-elite law school.