[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]Okay it’s been fourteen years, I’m still bitter, and I’m not the only one. Really, I am trying to get over it, but I still feel like I got stiffed by the whole law school/student loan gambit. Yes, I (or rather my husband) paid off my hundred thousand dollar plus student loan debt. I no longer live under the specter of banks or fear bill collectors. But I haven’t quite recovered from my own Japanese-style lost decade and a half.
Though I could be doing something far more productive, almost every day I cruise the blogs of those who share my fierce disappointment. “But I Did Everything Right” (except for going to law school and getting into debt), “Jobless Juris Doctor” (reality didn’t meet up with expectations), “Temporary Attorney: The Sweatshop Edition” (working as a contract attorney for low wages at the big law firm that wouldn’t hire you is no fun), “Lawyers Against the Law School Scam” (law schools lie about employment statistics, don’t believe the hype), “Esq. Never” (regrouping after finding no legal jobs), “Third Tier Reality” (don’t go to law school unless you get into a top one on a free ride), “First Tier Toilet” (even the top schools are no guarantee), “Tales of a Fourth Tier Nothing” (speaks for itself), “Subprime JD” (same). I could go on, but you get the gist.
Oh, How High the Odds
Despite coming at the same issue from dozens of different perspectives, they are all right. As I discovered almost fifteen years ago, law school is not an investment worth the opportunity cost. It is a gamble with the odds stacked against you. Back when I went, the whole shebang cost about one hundred twenty thousand dollars (not including the amortized interest for those borrowing, and not reflecting the lost years of earning while one studied) – and the job prospects were quite grim on the back end. I can’t remember which recession I graduated into, but it was during the Clinton era and only half our graduating class had jobs. I wasn’t naïve enough to think I could get a job at a white shoe firm. After all, there were more of us minorities than token spots to go around. But I believed the rest of the hype. Surely with all those critical thinking skills and a doctorate degree I could get a job doing something . . . anything.
Well, it turns out the gatekeepers in careers of something, anything . . . and everything else non-law related aren’t particularly interested in law school graduates. While I had been whiling away my time in blizzard-ridden upstate New York, my college friends were off building their careers, living relatively debt free. When I applied for hundreds of entry level jobs (my husband insists that I should delete that Excel spreadsheet of every job I ever applied for), I was turned down time and again. While networking, I learned that no one outside of the “traditiona” law career path wanted to hire people like me because obviously we were “slumming,” “would leave at the first opportunity for a ‘real’ legal job,” and, as one unkind Fox Entertainment executive put it, “You guys think you can do everything because you’re lawyers, so I won’t hire you.”
Not to say, “I told you so” (even to myself), but I sounded the alarm way back when. In the midst of law school, as I learned more about the scam in my face, I tried to convince everyone I came across that law school was apparently not the answer it is often presented to be. Even after I published a newspaper article, chock full of charts and statistics that would make Ross Perot blush, I was derided as a nattering nabob of negativism. It wasn’t until the economy tanked, again, and scores of attorneys (including those white and male with Ivy League degrees) were laid off or not even hired that the blogosphere began to light up.
I Fell for ‘Education Is the Answer’
Debt free and wiser, part of me enjoys the schadenfreude of all those who looked down on me suddenly finding themselves out of work as well. But the nicer side of my nature commiserates with those who drank the Kool-Aid ten years after I knew better, and are finally coming out of the shadows of shame to talk about it. Back when I fell for the “education is the answer” ruse, blogs didn’t proliferate as they do now. Nowadays, there wouldn’t be any good reason for another potential student to fall into the same black hole.
Stepping back from this and other essays, I can see the trend in my writing may seem to be anti-education. Admittedly, I don’t dislike the idea of education – and believe that it can help to cure ignorance, which is generally far worse – and also agree that our young adults and our society would likely benefit from something more than a high school diploma. But it’s hard to advocate for spending hundreds (or even tens) of thousands of dollars that folks don’t have – and must borrow – to obtain an education when the economics of the situation don’t support it. This path may instead drive the student into a form of indentured servitude for the rest of his or her adult life in a career other than the one “promised.”
The statistics (more honest than the ones supplied by law schools, we hope) are damning.
Even if an earnest and indebted graduate wanted to work in the field of law, the latest National Assn. of Law Placement statistics disclose that it’s nearly impossible for many – for the 44,000 recent law school graduates, there were only 29,000 jobs. Setting aside the fact that law is not the growth industry it once was, even these current statistics reveal a 66 percent employment rate – a 33 percent unemployment rate – with a professional degree. Moreover, the pay rates of many of those 29,000 jobs don’t reflect the gold at the end of the rainbow we often hear about from law school brochures and the media. In our often ignored thirty-year wage stagnation, salaries in most private and public sector legal work haven’t increased much since I graduated (about $35,000, if you must know). Sure, there are the big (smaller since the Great Recession) law firm salaries, but few actually get those jobs. (Even fewer keep them.) I remember sitting across from my poor pro bono clients realizing they earned far more than I, and with a lot less debt. From my old client base, the best bet used to be signing up to be a teacher (although current reports suggest even they’re having a tough time finding work).
When will I get over the years I lost in school, and after looking for work to pay for that school, with interest? Who knows? But thanks to the full disclosure now on the Internet, no one else need suffer a lost decade or a lifetime of debt or regret.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
