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Brainstorming Warning Labels for Purchasers of a Legal Education, Part II
Earlier this week, I noted the Abnormal Use blog's post on potential warning labels for legal education. I offered up a couple warnings of my own (e.g., WARNING: Go to law school, and you may end up as a legal blogger) and asked if anyone had warnings to add to the growing list. A couple of people quickly added good warnings in the comments, including:
WARNING: Go to law school, and a disproportionate number of your friends may be baristas.
-and-
WARNING: Attending Law School Has Been Shown to be Hazardous to your Career, Marriageability, Financial Stability, and Mental Health.
The next day, Will Meyerhofer took the warning label concept to the next level in a post featured on Above the Law. Meyerhofer, a lawyer-turned-psychotherapist, wrote of the long line of lawyer patients he sees that come to him with a similar story:
The standard story is some variant of the following: You are either out of work or loathe your work. You have $180k in loans. You have either no income or an impermanent income paid to you in exchange for any joy life might offer. You see no hope. ...
Young lawyers look me in the eye and ask, how am I supposed to carry on with my life? What they mean is – how is one supposed to live a life worth living – a life that satisfies one as a human being – trapped in the hell of law and law school loans?
Meyerhofer proposes one course of action: the “It Gets Worse” Project. He says it can be like a reverse version of the "It Gets Better" Project, where people post videos to let LGBT kids know that life gets better after high school. Meyerhofer asks lawyers stuck in the no income-massive debt trap to post a video telling the truth about their predicament. His hope is that such videos will deter at least one bright-eyed law school wannabe from signing those law school loan documents, or even lead to "tuition strikes, mass drop-outs, maybe an 'Occupy Law School' movement."
It does not appear that anyone has shared a video yet following Meyerhofer's post, but one group of law students with the same idea did something very similar last month. Here is the GWU Law Revue on why "It Gets Worse."
Posted by Bruce Carton on March 29, 2012 at 04:22 PM | Permalink
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