« Another Lucrative Practice Area: Britney Spears |
Main
| The Wolf Block Postmortem »
Aren't Students Doing Cost-Benefit Analyses of Law School?
Even before the economy took a turn for the worse, many law students had trouble finding employment after graduation. Recall, for example, Kirsten Wolf, the Boston University Law School grad who couldn't find a job and made it her one-woman mission to talk people out of law school. Wolf hoped to show that law school doesn't provide the level of job security that many students believe; indeed, large numbers of graduates aren't able to find employment -- and that was back in 2007.
Wolf's story gained exposure on high-profile sites like the WSJ Law Blog, spawning nearly 300 comments. So after all of that coverage, I was surprised to see that graduates still aren't engaging in the sort of cost-benefit analysis they should when considering law school. At Veritas Blog, Adam Hoff comments on this Wall Street Journal piece about how college grads are looking to law school (and business school) to ride out the current recession. Hoff emphasizes that law school is not a panacea and that in this economy, lawyers who want to work in highly coveted positions are going to have to hustle; perhaps spending summers or internships working for free. Hoff also advises students that they must put cost first and foremost atop the list of criteria that they evaluate in selecting a law school. Hoff's piece will hopefully remind students of the importance of doing a return-on-investment analysis of their time in law school and for that, it's valuable. But still, I can't believe that after all that's happened with the economy and layoffs that students still need to hear this.
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on March 24, 2009 at 02:48 PM | Permalink
| Comments (13)