Read, Spot the Similarities Between Law and Higher Education

Although I maintain that there are some entirely unique aspects of the legal field (the limited transferability of the law degree, the seismic shifts in BigLaw creating a domino effect), it's hard not to see some similarities with how education has been handled in other fields.

See, for example, the run-of-the-mill PhD, as explained by this excellent article from The Nation by William Deresiewicz. Reading through it, it's hard not to see the similarities with the legal field:

1. "[T]he feeling is universal. Most professors I know are willing to talk with students about pursuing a PhD, but their advice comes down to three words: don’t do it."
2. "In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one."
3. "[T]hings kept getting worse. Instead of replacing retirees with new tenure-eligible hires, departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers. . . "
4. "Less visible but equally important has been the advent and rapid expansion of full-time positions that are not tenure-eligible. No one talks about this transformation—the creation of yet another academic underclass...."
5. "Graduate programs occupy a highly unusual, and advantageous, market position: they are both the producers and the consumers of academic labor, but as producers, they have no financial stake in whether their product “sells”—that is, whether their graduates get jobs. Yes, a program’s prestige is related, in part, to its placement rate, but only in relative terms. In a normal industry, if no firm sells more than half of what it produces, then either everyone goes out of business or the industry consolidates. But in academia, if no one does better than 50 percent, then 50 percent is great. Programs have every incentive to keep prices low by maintaining the oversupply."
   

In other words:

1. Practitioners regularly advise people not to go.
   
2. A dismal hiring market.
3. Systemic changes that have decreased opportunities for recent graduates by replacing them with off-shored and non-barred employees.
4. A downward shift in wages and job titles that creates a whole new underclass.
5. The education system has perverse economic incentives to flood the market and little to no incentive to actually place all of its graduates, only so long as it has relative success (i.e., US News and World Report).

Yup. Of course I'm simplifying for the sake of comparison. The article runs four pages and is full of nuanced differences in academia vs. other professions, but overall, it's hard to ignore that education systems seem to be run exactly like for-profit businesses, albeit at a slower pace. Those running graduate schools have seemingly cast aside the structural protections of professionalism just as quickly as those running law schools have.

And in both cases, you can ultimately blame federally-backed loans and this stupid folk religion that getting a chiseled-column degree - any degree - is better than working as a tradesman or garbageman or any other blue collar job that the American suburban bourgeoisie has turned its nose at for decades, along with a obedient capitalist media that has made higher education into a necessity of respect and a way to thin the labor pool instead of what is should be: a product evaluated for its usefulness and return on investment.

And that brings me to my next point, on the claimed need for happiness and personal satisfaction in a degree. This article is not only absurd puffery of the job market with lots of go-getter fluff (and it repeated the constant business lie that they want "analytical ability" and "writing" and therefore are peachy with liberal arts grads; earth to Ms. Pynchon: they've been saying that for decades, and it's just not true), but the comments betray a really irrational attitude on behalf of the author:

I went back to school and majored in Literature as had always been my plan – my passion. I figured I could always find A JOB but I had only one chance to study the thing I loved. Would my choice have been the same had my U.C. San Diego education cost tens of thousands of dollars rather than simply a couple of grand? I don’t know. But I’ve never for a moment regretted majoring in Literature – a subject that continues to feed my spirit 35 years after graduation.

Tragically, it's common to completely confuse education and knowledge in this way. People feel that if they want to know, say, "literature," they have to get a fancy certificate from Western Tech State. And the converse: if they don't have the certificate, they don't know it.

Well, neither proposition is true. I know dozens of English majors who wouldn't know a Shakespeare reference if it slapped them in the ass. I know a history graduate student who doesn't know what I consider to be basic nuts-and-bolts talking points of world history. And don't get me started on certain political science, psychology, or sociology disciplines who spend 50% of their time restating the obvious.

Conversely, I know many people - mostly older - who have become mini-experts in a particular area solely out of interest. Military buffs are common. Do you think a Civil War lover who visits battlefields and devours books about Sherman and Lee feels unfulfilled by not having done the procedural requirements to get a master's? In our age, almost anyone can get an advanced degree. Only a few actually love learning and seek knowledge to genuinely pursue it. And if you need some kind of structured setting to learn, get in contact with people in the field or set a schedule of visiting conferences or something.

There's simply no reason to confuse education - a certification process - with the love of knowledge, or its effects. That's precisely what the marketers at the universities want you to believe. Same with law schools: "won't you love learning about the law? You'll be enriched by your law degree, even if you don't practice!" Well, bullshit.

Truth is, if you want to be enriched by literature, you always have the chance to pick up a good book. There is no "one chance" with genuine knowledge, nor is the process ever complete become some trash bin gave you a gloried dead tree. Since anyone can pick up a Norton Anthology or explore the annotated classics at their local library, I see no reason to not apply full investment principles to a degree.

Law works in much the same way. No, you won't be able to get a law license, but if your interest is in "learning the law," there's nothing stopping you from reading good books about constitutional law or a history of English property law. Your odds to practice will only be slightly lower than some of those who spend three years, and your personal fulfillment will be identical, if not greater, since yours wouldn't end with some tenured jackass making you regurgitate every nicety in the rules in a three-hour span and then finding a way to slice 50+ practically-identical exams into grading categories.