Law school still a good investment


There are various blogs for law students, most of which now seem to be in schadenfreude mode. The most famous of these is Above the Law, but even that site recently carried an article called “In Defense of Going to Law School”, in which it kind of offered an apology for their usual hyperbolic language condemning law schools.
The main argument against law school is the level of debt for graduating students; which nowadays has reached almost $150,000 if the student does not have financial aid or parents’ money to pay for law school. But outside of engineering and accounting, all the other fields require a graduate degree of some kind to get into a well paid position. And compared to most others excluding medicine, no field pays as well as law.
The other point raised is the long hours new lawyers have to put in. These anti-law blogs talk about this as if the lawyers were some kind of indentured labor who are exploited, when the fact is that as young professionals they are among the highest paid of all professions. The other two high paying occupations: doctors and computer engineers, also have to put in a lot of hours at the beginning of their careers and even later on. It’s a well known fact that in Silicon Valley, computer engineers work almost 80 hours a week in startups. Doctors in residency programs hardly get any proper sleep. 
Both medicine and engineering require individuals being good at math and science. So for students with a humanities background, there seems to be only one field where most people can end up earning in six figures within a relatively short time as long as they are hardworking and ready to put in at least a decade of hardwork.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Posted on: 07/15/2010 07:04 AM | Number of feedback 0