Restoring Dignity to the Law: Ready for an Even Bigger Laugh?! Law Degrees Still Worth the Debt, Says Kiplingers

Monday, September 5, 2011

Ready for an Even Bigger Laugh?! Law Degrees Still Worth the Debt, Says Kiplingers

From Kiplingers' "5 Advanced Degrees Still Worth the Debt:"

Avg. annual tuition and fees, public in-state: $18,461

Avg. annual tuition and fees, private: $35,622

Avg. debt: $82,601

Avg. income (lawyer): $129,020

Monthly loan payment: $960 (10 years); $544 (30 years)

Hiring is down compared with prerecession levels, and competition for jobs will be fierce as law schools churn out more lawyers than the market can bear.

The biggest paydays now are at big private firms, where new lawyers earn a median annual salary of $160,000. Public-interest attorneys bring up the rear, with median starting salaries of $42,000.

There is so much wrong with this general entry, I wouldn't know where to start, save saying that the "competition is fierce" stuff is the only accurate portrayal.

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About RDTTL

I am a current law student who dreads the end of the conveyor belt and wishes to see positive change in the legal community.

To me, a dignified profession is one that is respected, one whose members serve as ambassadors for its social value, one that lets its practitioners lead healthy, productive, and active civic lives, and one where the members of the profession take active steps to protect the profession's honor.

It is self-evident that the legal profession has problems on that front (or all of those fronts, if you want to break it down). Lawyers are twice as likely to kill themselves as the average person. They are significantly more likely to become depressed or alcoholic. Along with other factors, an oversupply of labor has led to smaller salaries for most - putting the ability to have families or manage debt at risk - while making attorney work an impossibility for others. Last year roughly 1/3 of recent juris doctor recipients did not have jobs. Legal process outsourcing makes it far less likely that they'll ever get them.

These issues existed before the recession and extend beyond its effects. This blog explores these issues and seeks to provide helpful information and commentary, especially with regards to legal education, the reform of which I believe would aid many the other issues that prevent the law from being a fully-dignified profession.

I have chosen to use pseudonymous speech for roughly the same reasons outlined by zerohedge, even though I don't think the risk of retaliation is that high in my case (of all the professors I've had, I can only think of one who would "retaliate").

If you wish to contact me, please leave a comment. In the interest of simplifying my life, I am cutting my email addresses down, including the one that used to appear here, which has become unmanageable due to spam.