Big Debt Small Law strikes again

Another awesome post from “Big Debt, Small Law.”

My favorite excerpt:

Biglaw never really wanted to “dip into” these shitty Non-Top 14 schools in the first place, and when they did they held their nose and cringed, like a husband fishing his wife’s wedding band out of a septic tank. They looked for the few “diamonds” to pluck from what was otherwise a festering puddle of excrement. This “tier-two trolling” was necessitated by the insane credit bubble and alphabet soup of shitpaper that had to be pushed during Bush’s ”boom” times: CDO’s and CDS’s and other worthless securities and phony “investments” engineered by Biglaw’s criminal pals on Wall St.

Now those days are forever gone. The large firms have a veritable Tiffany’s of jewel-encrusted job seekers from which to pick, and are unlikely to ever again stick their toes in the Tier 2 mud puddles for “talent.” Why pan for gold when stacks of bullion surround you?

I also laud the blogger for demonstrating HBD-awareness:

Shit, every time New York tries to raise the passing score by a tenth of a point the gutter schools start screaming “racism” and lobbying for “extra time” for their special needs grads to sharpen their Crayolas and wipe the drool from their chins. Pathetic.

Comments

[Bruno from Paris]

it seems there is :

big 1 : Yale
Big 3 : Big 1 + Harvard and Stanford
Big 7 : big 3 + Columbia, Stern , chicago and Berkeley
big 13 : Big 7 + penn, ann arbor, duke, north western, virginia, Cornell

Yale is really different if you look at % of students clerking for supreme court.

As for "big14", if you include Georgetown, looking carefully at US News data, you should include 4 other Law school (like UCLA). I would speak about big 7 or big 13.

[Peter]

"The children’s bone cancer ward at Sloan-Kettering will be a mardi gras compared to the scene that’s soon coming to a second-tier school near you!"

The ring-in-the-cesspool analogy was funny. This one is not.

[king obama]

Yeah, "Bruno from Paris," you are right, there are different levels of prestige with in the T14.

Yale is very focused on public service and a lot of its students go on to clerk for the SCOTUS or other federal bench spots, do a short stint in a Biglaw firm after their clerkship, and then become law professors. Students at Georgetown, on the other hand, aren't much better off than students at the T15-T19 schools.

The point isn't necessarily that the T14 (or schools close in ranking) are the only law schools you should go to, but that they are the only ones worth paying sticker price for.

I like the saying: Go prestigious (T14), go public (cheap tuition), or don't go at all.

[sabril]

Fundamentally, the problem is student loan policies in the United States. If student loans were done the same way as other loans (i.e. no government guarantees and dischargeable in bankruptcy), then nobody would lend significant money for people to attend low tier schools.

And low tiered schools would be forced to drop their tuitions to a reasonable level. Even prestigious schools would have to drop their tuition.

What's going on now is a scam which is structured to make it look like it's serving students but actually works against those students' interests. The real beneficiaries are the law schools and student lenders who are raking in tons of cash.

This is a classic case of regulatory capture, in my opinion.

[sestamibi]

What is "OCI"?

[HS: On-campus interviewing.]

[TurkishThought]

As I site here in my office, I can see over 8 people makign 90-160k a year. I work for a Fortune 50 company in Central Illinois. Most of them are like me, Bachelors in a technical field and an MBA.

I was successful in talking my niece out of Law School. She had the grades and test score to get into Northwestern in Illinois but at 47k a year, she would have graduated with 150k debt. Instead, I told her to get a Business degree with an accounting minor. She is never going to make big dollars but like me her family can live very comfortably.

[The Engineer]

I work for a Fortune 50 company in Central Illinois.

How's Cat doing these days?

[bjk]

I have trouble believing things are as bad as BDSL makes out . . . $28/hour is still close to $60,000 year. If you went to a cheap school, in a few years you'll be debt free with a JD. Of course nobody should pay private school rates for third rate prestige . . . but that's not the law profession's fault.

[SFG]

"Fundamentally, the problem is student loan policies in the United States. If student loans were done the same way as other loans (i.e. no government guarantees and dischargeable in bankruptcy), then nobody would lend significant money for people to attend low tier schools."

College loans as regulatory capture. Never thought of that, sabril, but you're quite right indeed.

[Lee]

I have a Business degree with a focus in Marketing from a first tier public university. Will I also be able to live comfortably?

[Underachiever]

Same here, i am getting a degree in bioengineering from ASU.

[Peter]

"I have a Business degree with a focus in Marketing from a first tier public university. Will I also be able to live comfortably?"

Things might be a bit difficult right now because of the state of the economy, but when economic conditions improve you should be able to do well. Certainly much better than most non-Top 14 law school graduates.

"Same here, i am getting a degree in bioengineering from ASU."

You are very, very fortunate to have the intelligence to study such a difficult field. You should do quite well for yourself.

[Darwin's Sh*tlist]

The thing I would tell someone considering a lower tier school (I graduated from one in the late 90s and have been fine) is don't do it if you hate the idea of having a general practice in a small town, because that's what you're likely to end up doing(though I didn't). You're not going to be in the middle of Fortune 500 mergers or setting up offshore tax havens. But, you'll also have a lot more of your weekends free.

And, be sure to come out of law school with some concrete, marketable skills. Legal education is one of the biggest frauds in the country. Before you're allowed to hold yourself out to the public as a physician, engineer, CPA, or architect, you're able to do the work on a day-to-day basis. This is because they all have apprenticeship-like requirements. Law school, however, requires passing three years' worth of little exams, and one big one at the end. But you can separate yourself from the pack by not just knowing the law, but knowing how to complete some basic transactions soup-to-nuts. Real estate closings, incorporations, wills, family law stuff.

This dawned on me when in my graduating class, all the non-law review people who got the first job offers had worked as paralegals prior to matriculation. They could walk into a firm on Day 1 and contribute whereas the rest of us couldn't.

[Underachiever]

Thanks Peter,

I'm still considering graduate school in bioengineering, biochemistry, or molecular biology from a more elite school.

[jj]

Go for it. Grad school can only take you further in life. Also, labor market is weak enough that doing more school probably will be a good move.