Law in Nebraska Crowded; Creighton Downsizing Law Class

Remember when Prof. Sara Stadler pompously suggested that Emory law students pack the wagon and head for Nebraska?

Well, as it turns out, ain't no jobs there! From the Omaha-World Herald:

Current students say the competition is fierce even for summer clerkships, internships and other steppingstones to post-graduation employment.
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[S]ome students who graduated at the top of the [U. of Nebraska] class of 2011 are still hunting.
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Area lawyers said Omaha's legal job market hasn't been as hard hit as in other areas. Although they still make most of their hires from area law schools, law firms are getting more applications from across the country as new lawyers scramble to find jobs.
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Omaha lawyer Hal Daub...said he would not discourage students from seeking law degrees, which he described as a versatile education that prepares students for a variety of careers.

Nonetheless, Creighton's strategy has merit, Daub said.

“For a small state, we are graduating way too many attorneys. There just haven't been the opportunities that students thought they would have four or five years ago.”

Emphasis mine. Obviously, Daub is a mouthpiece/idiot for suggesting that someone go to law school for the "versatility" of the degree, but I take him at his word that there is overproduction with a whopping two law schools in the state.

The article's main point is that amidst this atmosphere, Creigton is lowering their class size by 13-15%. As I gave hesitant applause to the New York schools who did the same thing, I salute Creigton for acting somewhat responsibly and forgoing almost $600k in revenue even as they could fill every seat.

The article goes on to state that the Universities of Iowa and Nebraska have responded to the lack of jobs by beefing up their career services staffs. I have no idea what the bleep that's going to accomplish in actually creating jobs, but I suppose it's something. Maybe they can improve contacts with non-legal employers, but frankly I'd rather see them slice down their class sizes as well.

Nebraska is a fairly insular place, as far as U.S. states go. People live by UN-L football in the fall, and I imagine the the state school's network mops the floor with anything else. Omaha has a respectable business climate, but it's big enough for the top national schools to have a serious influence.

The fact that there are top graduates from Nebraska who can't find full-time work is scary. Of all the "guaranteed" resumes, I would think finishing near the top of a state flagship where there are no other big-name options would be just below doing well at a T-14. If I were from the state, I'd rather be at the top of the class at Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc. than be at the top of similarly-ranked private schools.

I'm also curious how this will affect Creighton's USNWR rank. In theory, it shouldn't. I mean, if you went to Creigton and ranked 60th/155 or 60th/135, what the hell is the difference to employers, or your employment prospects? You'll sit through the same class, same teachers, etc. But the LSAT and GPA medians may rise a tick or two, and the student-teacher ratio may drop. And the after-graduate employment percentages may rise. They're currently ranked 127th. Let's see what happens when a flawed ranking system encounters shaving from the bottom.

Law Grads: You Can Be Just Like Justice Thomas, Too! Just Follow Your Glimmers

It's graduation season, meaning another wave of 40,000 are told they can fit into a shrinking job market that has little use for half of them.

Up first we have Justice Clarence Thomas, who spoke at Nebraska Law School's graduation ceremony last Saturday. Even though Thomas went to Yale Law School almost forty years ago, he attempted to find relevance for today's graduates:

His attempts to get a job at a law firm resulted in numerous rejection letters, stirring anxiety in the future justice who had a young child at the time and staggering student loans. His lone job offer came from the state Missouri attorney general for meager pay and a long distance from his hometown of Savannah, Ga.

"Getting on the bottom rung would have been enough for me, but I couldn't even do that," Thomas said. "But I got to sit where you are today with that solitary job offer as my tenuous lifeline to that glimmer of hope. Little did I know what was in store for me."
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"As will be the case for each of you, the people who really mattered were supportive," he said. "But many others were not the least bit encouraging, and some even chose to pour salt in the wounds of disappointment and despair. Whether it was those who looked at me with pity, or those who assured me that my one job offer was a waste of a Yale Law School education, many were just plain unhelpful, unsupportive and mean."

What the article (and presumably the justice) left out is that he got his job at the Missouri ADs office because he networked with the sitting attorney general of the state, John Danforth, who wound up being an influential Republican Senator and who was a Yale law alum himself. And on his oyez biolgraphy, it states that he had ample offers and chose to go to Missouri because the AG would left him work on tax and antitrust stuff. And according to a New York Times column, Thomas has previously mischaracterized his past for his own motives.

But all that murky stuff aside, the point is the message, right? That these graduates may be spat on, rejected, or be greeted with people who tell them their education was a waste, but they can really make it if they just follow that "glimmer of hope?"

Yes, kids, if you just happen to be the right color, make the right ally at Yale, finagle your way into the Reagan administration and land a judicial appointment just in time for Thurgood Marshall to retire, you can have great things in store for you, too! Even if you have Anita Hill speaking against you! And when your opinions are mocked by TTT law professors who point out your numerous errors, you get the last laugh!

I'm not going to deny that Clarence Thomas had a rough childhood that he persevered through it all towards success (and I don't question that southern law firms refused to hire blacks at all), but for most of those kids graduating today, their "glimmer of hope" is that a weird disease immobilizes 1/3 of the attorneys in Omaha, or that they win the lottery, or that their student loans are forgiven via an accounting error. Something tells me their networking at Nebraska did not land them in the company of many future Senators.

Frankly, hearing Thomas talk of "staggering student loans" and dim job prospects to this generation is insulting, almost like a celebrity complaining because their double-platinum card's APR rose from 0.7 to 1.2% or because they can't get their custom Mercedes for another month. Thomas' starting salary in Missouri in the early 70s was the equivalent of about 45k today. If you offered that job - which, remember, Thomas got because he was a Yale graduate with connections - 85% of the students in the audience would take it in a heartbeat. And Thomas' student loans from Yale couldn't have been that bad compared to what today's average graduates face. Yale tuition in 1976 was 4150 a year. Assuming it was slightly lower when Thomas was there, his total debt-to-salary ratio would have been manageable, especially since Yale offered him generous financial aid on account of his race. And his student loans were dischargable in bankruptcy. Today, it's become routine for students to try to pay back debt with a 3-1 debt-to-salary ratio, if not higher.

The overall appearance here is one of a condescending, out-of-touch buffoon who thinks his overstated struggles and extremely good fortune can somehow furnish sound advice to people cruelly disabled by a system rigged against them. What these students really need to hear is exactly what Thomas told them to ignore. They need to have a realistic viewpoint and not rely on "glimmer[s] of hope." They need to confront the fact that law is an oversaturated field and that other areas may provide them with better success. For many of them, they need to embrace the fact that their education might have been a waste. If you don't take that view, you wind up with a bunch of people continuing to try and find nonexistent jobs for years.

What really matters to these kids is exactly what mattered to Justice Thomas: finding remunerative work and a healthy role in society. Your family can be supportive, but if you can't find a decent job, all the "you can do it, Billy, we love you, don't despair" in the world isn't going to help you put bread on the table and pay debts. It's a one-way ticket to depression and deep feelings of personal failure where there was very little chance to succeed.

What really galls me is that people like Justice Thomas are in a position (well, at least in theory) to really change things, get people to think differently about education and young adulthood and debt and finding work. And yet they all talk about working hard and fighting through rejection and turbulence and valuing your support system and blah blah blah. I'm not arguing that life should be rejection- and hardship-free (on the contrary, both are necessities), but central to having success in the world are knowing when to fold your cards and knowing when you're being screwed over. If something is more or less impossible, there's no point wasting further energy trying it. We're quickly approaching an age where restaurants, the notorious "look before you leap" business, will have more of an economic life than JDs.

I would love for just one speaker to get up this graduation season and say something like this:

"I'm mad as hell and you should be, too, because 1/2 to 2/3 of you are never going to really work as attorneys. Many of you would be better off finding a restaurant gig and writing your Congressmen daily. Sorry, kiddos, we abandoned professionalism a while back and the law schools decided to exploit the lack of youth jobs, the popular image of the Perry Mason attorney, and the myth that they're all rich. Have fun paying your non-dischargable debt working at the Gap."

Graduation ceremonies are supposed to be a welcome to the next world, right? And in many cases, isn't honesty the best possible virtue you can give to these graduates? It sickens me that the majority of law school students and recent graduates still seem to sit on their hands, waste two years of their life, and have a Pollyanna view of the world that they'll land a high-quality job if they're just tough enough.

Ultimately, that's the sort of passive egocentric optimism that needs to stop. It has nothing to do with you, whether you land a job or not. It's the system. It needs to change, and shame on Justice Thomas for apparently looking away and preaching the same old garbage. You'd think with his background he would be sensitive to social systems that screw people regardless of their merit, hard work, or character.