After years of positive punishment, hapless college graduates shooting out of the maze of adolescence are finally resisting the electrified cheese and the fantastical promises of Adult Stability and a Passat With Leather Seats that law schools have long promised. The Times reports that applications to law school are at a 30-year low, and have declined 38% since 2010. “Thirty years ago if you were looking to get on the escalator to upward mobility, you went to business or law school," law professor William Henderson says. "Today, the law school escalator is broken."
For years law school tuition ($40,500/year for private schools, up from $23K in 2001; $23,600/year for public, up from $8,500 in 2001) has gone to pad the salaries of deans and law professors.
Recently it was revealed that the dean of the New England School of Law makes an annual salary of $867,000—or what a current law school graduate will owe in interest in 2030. The New England School of Law isn't even ranked in the top 25 law schools in the country, meaning you likely won't find a job to pay back your loans after graduating. But you'll at least have the legal know-how to start your own for-profit college—hell, maybe someday you'll run the Washington Post!
Law schools are bracing for massive layoffs in the fall, and in New York, there's an idea being floated to get rid of the third year of law school (referred to by law school deans as the "Beach House Mortgage year") and allow students to practice sooner, giving them the practical skills legal employers actually need ability to represent themselves in bankruptcy court.
“In the ’80s and ’90s, a liberal arts graduate who didn’t know what to do went to law school,” professor Henderson says, presumably as a bloody horse head stuffed with Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England is laid onto his pillow. “Now you get $120,000 in debt and a default plan of last resort whose value is just too speculative. Students are voting with their feet." It's about time.
