Meet Mary Cheney, #3 in her Class, Retail Clerk

For those of you who automatically think people who go to lower-tiered schools and can't find work don't work hard (or if you think that the legal profession is, in any way, promoting an efficient use of human resources, I encourage you to read the testimonial of Mary Cheney on IPWatchdog:

First-year law students are told to study hard, earn that invitation onto law review, become involved in extracurricular activities, obtain real-world experience through legal externships and graduate at the top of their class. They are told that if they do these things, they will land that Associate Attorney position at a reputable law firm. I followed this advice. I earned those honors, and I am currently working, not as an attorney but in the retail industry for about minimum wage.

Mary has an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from UC-San Diego. She graduated #3 at Thomas Jefferson Law School (now with new campus!), where she also served as a Law Review editor. She also has multiple items of legal experience, including an intern stint at Pfizer.

If you read this, or her resume, and your first response to her working in minimum wage retail is "she should have gone somewhere like UCLA," you need to have your god-damned head examined.

Fallout from NYT Article: Are Economists Dumb?

There are a number of articles regurgitating what was said in the NYT yesterday, including the Baltimore Sun, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal (wouldn't it be nice if these guys spent their morning time working on their own stories instead of recycling someone else's?)

But one short reaction piece that especially struck me came from Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. To wit:

Most of the thousands of economists gathered this weekend at the annual convention of the American Economics Association in Denver would probably agree with MIT economist David Autor, that the big problem facing the U.S. labor market is that our workforce is not being adequately educated.

By contrast, the NYT devoted a lengthy article to tell readers about the dismal job market facing young lawyers. . . . It is worth noting that if Autor is right, then the NYT has seriously misrepresented the state of the legal market.

Wrong. Completely, stupendously, absolutely wrong.

First, Autor and the other economists are correct on some small level. We do need a more educated workforce, but it must be education that fits our economic needs. Piling on random years in school does not meet that need, and a society where everyone has a law degree is no more "educated" than a society of high school dropout dunces. We need people to study medicine, hard sciences research, international business, foreign languages, etc.; a law degree for a lower-tiered grad right now is no better than an art history degree in meeting our need to be "more educated."

Second, screaming "more education" from the mountaintops is no answer to American's economic problems; rather, it's calling for a band-aid after a grenade has torn two limbs and left shrapnel all over Uncle Sam's back. We have simply farmed out everything that can be farmed out without sharing the profits of the farming even though the costs are carried by everyone. That's essentially created a class of people who are forever screwed in this economy.

What happened with law school (and in undergraduate education and by some accounts in pharmacy school and in film school and in paralegal programs) can certainly happen in every other area of education where apparent demand (boosted by naive economists, advertising, and mass media) can far outpace actual demand, causing a glut of applicants, skyrocketing enrollments and tuition, a veritable economic bubble, and a lot of aspiring, otherwise-intelligent young people getting screwed with non-dischargable debt.

People have been "getting educated" for years. There are people in my law school who are trilingual and on advanced degree number three. Generation Y is the most paper-educated in history thus far and guess what? It's no defense when there's someone in India who can do the job for cheaper. The Indians and Chinese and Vietnamese and Malaysians can educate themselves just the same as we do. Why would a degree be any defense when the Board of Directors at Company XYZ decides to move some operation overseas or to Mexico to cut costs?

Such thinking is silly and short-sighted, a thoughtless solution to a weighty, perplexing problem.

The fact that something calling itself the Center for Economic and Policy Research can neither see right through this nor see that even if it were entirely accurate the New York Times may have been dead-on accurate is rather pathetic.