By now most law students must have heard about Duke’s “Bridge to Practice” program and SMU’s “Test Drive” program. Duke’s program has gotten more media attention and in both the programs the schools are paying law firms to hire their non-employable unemployed students for a few months. So who really benefits with this arrangement?

The law firm gets a fresh law graduate without paying anything. Although if the law firm cannot afford to pay a proper wage to its new hire, doesn’t that tell us something about where the firm’s heading.

The law school gets to say that 100% of its graduates got handouts jobs, like in the case of Duke. But the fact that a law school that charges almost 150K for a J.D. is willing to give out so much money to secure its reputation shows that there is a glut of supply i.e. law schools in the market today. And right now it seems like a buyer’s i.e. student’s market.

Hopefully in the next few years, students will be able to drive a bargain with these colleges. It could be something like having this arrangement on paper before beginning law school or more scholarships and assistantships that are so common in engineering and science graduate departments.

The graduates who have taken up this offer must be pretty pleased that they at least got a job in their field in this economy. But after getting in over 150K in debt, do you really want to be stuck doing a 30K job paid for by your grad school.