Facing bleak job prospects, student loans, N.J. law school grads wonder if it was worth it
Published: Sunday, August 15, 2010, 7:00 AM
NEWARK — The angry rants first surfaced last summer on an anonymous New Jersey blog.Law school is a "scam," the blogger wrote. Administrators are greedy "charlatans" who could not care less about education, and students are but "hapless lemmings" who have been tricked into paying a fortune to enter "America’s most overrated, miserable and saturated industry.
"Within months, the blog was drawing up to 5,000 unique readers a day, many of whom praised the anonymous writer — known only as Law is 4 Losers — as a hero for exposing the lies they say they, too, were fed about secure jobs and generous incomes.
The blogger is Scott Bullock, a 2005 Seton Hall University School of Law graduate who agreed to reveal his identity to The Star-Ledger for this article. Yet Bullock, whose outrage stems from graduating with more than $100,000 of debt but meager job prospects, says he is merely tapping into a groundswell of resentment against the nation’s law schools.
As they enter the worst job market in decades, many young would-be lawyers are turning on their alma maters, blaming their quandary on high tuition, lax accreditation standards and misleading job placement figures. Unless students graduate from schools like Harvard or Yale, they "might as well be busing tables," Bullock said.
"It’s really just a big Ponzi scheme," said Bullock, 33, of Bridgewater. "They’re just cranking kids out for $45,000 a year."
School administrators, who admit to keeping tabs on these so-called "scam blogs," which now number in the dozens, bristle at the charge that they run diploma mills. Not every graduate can land a six-figure job at a big-name law firm — especially during the current downturn — but many still find fulfilling careers in and out of the legal field, said Claudette St. Romain, an associate dean at Seton Hall, one of three law schools in New Jersey.
"For a person with passion, a certain talent and a certain outlook, it’s a great education," St. Romain said, noting that Gov. Chris Christie and several state senators are among the school’s alumni. "But it’s not for everybody — don’t get me wrong."
TOUGH TIMES
What law school officials don’t deny is that these are challenging times for new graduates. Job openings are scarce. Firms are increasingly turning to outsourcing or contract work. And still, the number of law school enrollees has continued to climb as those unable to find work clamor for professional degrees.
The result: Unemployment among new law school grads nationwide has risen for two straight years, to a rate of 12 percent for the class of 2009, according to the National Association for Law Placement. Among the employed, one in four jobs were temporary, while one in 10 were part-time. One-fifth of those employed said they were searching for another job, twice as many as in the boom years a decade ago.
Recognizing the mounting crisis, the American Bar Association recently urged prospective students to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of a legal education. For a law degree to pay off, the association said in a memo, a grad should earn at least $65,000 a year. Nearly half of employed 2008 grads had starting salaries below that amount."Law students ought to look at the numbers and envision how their future might be before going to law school, not after," said ABA president Carolyn Lamm.
But the critics ask: How can prospective students make informed decisions when they aren’t given enough information in the first place?
In the glossy Seton Hall brochures he perused before applying, Bullock recalls reading about six-figure salaries and job placement rates of more than 90 percent. Nothing he read, he said, prepared him for the harsh reality after graduation, of having to take a low-level temp job at a large Newark firm and toiling in "sweatshop" conditions elbow-to-elbow with dozens of other grads.
Seton Hall classmate Justine Zeppone, who met Bullock while working at the same job, tells a similar story, saying it was then that she realized she had "made a very bad mistake." The two friends recently opened their own law firm in Lyndhurst but, while they have managed to drum up two dozen clients, they say they often worry about making enough to survive.
"It’s terrible. All the schoolwork, all the commitment, all the money — for not a lot," said Zeppone, 31, of Clifton, adding that she will be paying off her $65,000 student loan until she is 60.
Seton Hall administrators said they abide by NALP recommendations for reporting data and that sample sizes can vary because grads respond on a voluntary basis.On its website, the school currently reports an employment rate of 94 percent for the 2009 class, but does not break that down into full-time, part-time or temporary work. The school also claims a starting salary of $145,000 in private practice, though it does not specify how many grads reported salaries in this area.
A CALL FOR CLARITY
The push for more transparency is gaining traction even among some law professors, who say the wide disparity in how schools report such data makes it hard for prospective students to compare apples to apples.
"There are certain ways to paint statistics, and schools paint it in a way that’s most favorable to them," said Brian Tamanaha, a professor at Washington University Law School in St. Louis."This is not one school or two schools, this is a lot of schools doing this."
The lack of transparency is all the more troubling, he added, because of the large sums at stake. Average law school tuition has risen twice as fast as inflation over the last two decades, to $35,740 for private schools in 2008, up from just $9,650 in 1998, according to the ABA. Living and book expenses ballooned to $13,680 during the same period.seton-hall-law-grads.JPGMatt Rainey/The Star-LedgerScott Bullock and Justine Zeppone, who both carry heavy student debt after graduating a few years ago, regret paying more than $40K a year to go to SHU, only to come out with very few job prospects. They recently started their own law firm in Lyndhurst.
The rise in tuition, Tamanaha said, is partly the result of a trend among law schools to expand their faculties so that individual professors have more time to focus on academic research. However, while this practice might help schools boost their standing in magazine rankings, which place heavy emphasis on academics, it does little to benefit graduates after they get their diplomas, he said.
"I’m not sure I would go to law school today," said Tamanaha, who paid a total of $15,000 to attend Boston University School of Law in the 1980s. "People have to think very hard about whether they want to take on this debt for uncertain returns."
Ben Rothman, 32, said he enrolled in Loyola Law School Los Angeles after working a string of "dead-end jobs," with the impression that a law degree would be "a ticket to a high salary." He says this notion was strengthened by Loyola’s job placement figures, which showed nine in 10 graduates landed jobs.
However, Rothman, who graduated last May, says he soon questioned the value of his education when classes proved so easy that he could have slept through them and still achieved middling grades. He began wondering whether admissions officers would have "let a dead squirrel roll in."
Now, more than a year after graduating, Rothman is embarrassed to tell friends he is still jobless, living with his parents and $135,000 in debt. Even Loyola’s recent decision to retroactively raise grades in hopes of boosting employment prospects for alumni did nothing to help him, he said.
"I just have a piece of paper that says I’m a lawyer," said Rothman, who is considering a gig as a Revolutionary War-era re-enactor. (Though, after reviewing the job description, he concluded, "I’m actually unqualified.")"Schools should be regulated — other industries are. I don’t see why they’re the exception," he said. "Everyone assumes schools are altruistic, but they’re a business just like any other business."
A Loyola spokesperson said Rothman’s experience did not sound typical of the school’s graduates and that administrators work closely with students to ensure they "hit the ground running."
RETHINKING REPORTING
There are some signs that change is afoot.
The ABA, which is in the middle of a three-year review of its accreditation process, last week appointed a committee to study how schools can more accurately report their job placement and salary figures, said Donald Polden, who is heading the effort.
One of the models the committee plans to explore is a proposal by Kyle McEntee, a third-year student at Vanderbilt University, who suggests schools might get more candid information from graduates if they asked about employers and salaries separately. While Polden said he agrees with the aim of this proposal, he wonders if it may be too complicated.
The association says it is also looking into changing the way it accredits new schools, in response to criticism that a proliferation of institutions is adding to the oversupply of lawyers and diluting the quality of the legal education system. Since the start of the decade, 18 new schools have received accreditation, adding to the existing 182 and helping swell the ranks of enrollment by 20,000 students.
"The whole thing is being scrubbed, as they say, and being looked at," Polden said.Other law students, though, say the problem is not so much with the law schools as it is with applicants’ big-dollar dreams."
It just comes down to managing your expectations," said Carl Archer, 27, who graduated from Rutgers School of Law-Camden in 2008 and just last month found a permanent job.
Archer, who racked up $60,000 in student debt, says life after law school has not been easy. He survived by taking a one-year clerkship, collecting unemployment and even opening his own law firm for a few months.But through it all, he and his wife, who was also unemployed, were able to pay their rent and bills, and he said his optimism eventually paid off.
"Listen, I’m a happy person," he said. "If things are a challenge, it’s okay. You deal with it."
From:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/08/facing_bleak_job_prospects_stu.html
