US News and World Report, of all things, has a piece today that essentially brings the hammer down on people applying to law school.
In the article, the author, Katy Hopkins, implies that it’s a baffling situation that students, in the present law school and legal environment, choose higher ranked schools with limited or no scholarships over full tuition scholarships at lower ranked schools.
Take a second to understand this: the publication that releases the most pervasive law school rankings now finds it odd that students choose schools based off of ranking. The irony has quite literally beaten me into submission.
But the larger point of the piece is that the current legal bubble (more people taking the LSAT, more people moving onto law school) is unsustainable, which we’ve more or less agreed upon here as well. Something has to give, and it more or less already has: there are fewer employment opportunities for students upon exit from law school.
As far as grad school goes, though, law school is still one of the better bets as far as eventual employment goes, as Trent lays out in this article. While the current state of the profession is unsustainable, there is always going to be a significant, bordering on obscene, demand for lawyers.
But a good rule of thumb at this point would be: unless you’ve got some kind of precognition about your employment opportunities after law school, it’s probably a good idea to graduate with as little debt as possible. That way, the need for immediate, big law employment would be a little less pressing.
