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Career Lies My Graduate School Told Me
RCM ^ | 03/14/2012 | Steven Malanga

Posted on 03/14/2012 6:06:41 AM PDT by SeekAndFind

Lately the efforts of a trio of advocates to sue law schools on behalf of unemployed graduates have gained much media attention. Eager, but out-of-work graduates make compelling figures on the evening news, especially when they are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and have passed the bar but are working in bars because they can't even get a job interview with a law firm.

The lawsuits, alleging that the schools have been misleading students about their postgraduate employment prospects, have helped stoke a certain amount of indignation because job prospects for lawyers have been declining for years, yet law schools have continued expanding enrollments. Some schools have apparently lured students by advertising job placement rates for graduates of 90 percent or better, even though there is currently only one job for every two law school graduates in the country. If consumer advocates and government watchdogs can go after so-called for-profit and technical schools for misleading students about their job prospects, why not traditional law schools, too?

Although the lawsuits seem somewhat quixotic right now, if they succeed in pressuring schools to provide more detailed information about how their graduates perform in the job market (and maybe even prompt some schools to issue tuition rebates as part of broader settlements), the legal action could reverberate well beyond law. The next target could well be university graduate programs that for years have been producing Master's and PhD grads for whom there is little or no gainful employment.

Programs in fields like the humanities, where some professors claim schools have been misleading students for 40 years about job prospects, or grad schools in disappearing fields like journalism, might suddenly find themselves ripe for similar suits.

William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English Literature, has been a harsh critic of schools which continue to churn out PhD graduates who have no prospect of gainful employment in the one area in which they are qualified, namely teaching in a college. In a series of commentaries in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Pannapacker paints a distressing picture of humanities graduate schools operated for the pleasure of the professoriate, in which students pursuing careers for which there are no job prospects are "an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river."

Over a 20 year period from 1987 through 2007, he notes, humanities programs sharply increased the annual number of doctoral students they graduated, from 2,991 to 4,366. Those increases came even as colleges and universities cut their tenure track positions and substituted adjunct and part-time positions, producing "ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility." Those who tried to find work outside the academy discovered they were unemployable, avoided by suspicious corporate recruiters who wonder about all those years spent on campus.

These students, you're thinking, have only themselves to blame. Surely with a little bit of research they could have figured out just how bad things are.

CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE REST...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Education; Society
KEYWORDS: career; college; graduateschool
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1 posted on 03/14/2012 6:06:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Many years ago, my retired-AF-MSgt dad, who only had a GED, worked at an employment agency for a while in California. He told me even then: anyone with “-ology” in their degree simply was not hire-able.


2 posted on 03/14/2012 6:18:27 AM PDT by RightOnline (I am Andrew Breitbart!)
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To: SeekAndFind
This is an absolute crock! Someone with a humanities degree can always find work...

US Army, Eleven-Bravo!

3 posted on 03/14/2012 6:23:25 AM PDT by Redleg Duke ("Madison, Wisconsin is 30 square miles surrounded by reality.", L. S. Dryfus)
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To: RightOnline

I dunno - geology majors are pretty hot right now.


4 posted on 03/14/2012 6:25:49 AM PDT by patton (DateDiff)
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To: RightOnline

RE: He told me even then: anyone with “-ology” in their degree simply was not hire-able.

Not even Molecular Biology?


5 posted on 03/14/2012 6:27:02 AM PDT by SeekAndFind (question)
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To: patton; RightOnline

With the promulgation of degrees, it would be more appropriate to say that anyone with “studies” in their degree simply is not hire-able.


6 posted on 03/14/2012 6:30:06 AM PDT by kosciusko51 (Enough of "Who is John Galt?" Who is Patrick Henry?)
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To: RightOnline

When I was looking at grad schools, the best advice I got was: if they aren’t paying, you shouldn’t be going. I think that doesn’t hold for MBAs/law school or med school, of course, but for Ph.D programs, it’s a good rule of thumb.

Idiots going into debt for a Ph.D in Wymyn’s Studies have only themselves to blame.


7 posted on 03/14/2012 6:30:29 AM PDT by JenB
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To: SeekAndFind

Normally I don’t encourage ambulance-chasing, but in the case of our illustrious institutions of Marxist education, I’ll make an exception.


8 posted on 03/14/2012 6:31:19 AM PDT by St_Thomas_Aquinas (Viva Christo Rey!)
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To: SeekAndFind

Where to begin?

It’s not surprising. It’s a conspiracy by both lawyers, educators, and gov’t bureaucrats to shaft taxpayers and lawyers.

For all the fraud and abuse of the charter of the Legal Services Corporation, it’s a mechanism to provide employment to Dem activist lawyers that should have been shut down long ago.

State political hacks and education bureaucracies have been adding more law schools for no other reason than to provide sinecures for themselves and other deadbeats. Both CA & MA have done so in recent years, in spite of the over-supply of lawyers.

I haven’t heard about other states.


9 posted on 03/14/2012 6:31:19 AM PDT by Calvin Locke
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To: patton
Lots of these young "lawyers" are not exactly the "best and the brightest." They in many cases made it through Law School by the skin of their teeth and got the the bar exams by dint of fast and furious bar review courses, which IMHO could get a reasonable housebroken Irish Setter through the exam in 2 or three tries.

Then again, many of the "Law Schools" out there are scam outfits, too. You wouldn't want their grads working for you! (Or mixing your drinks, or washing your car.)

Law student = a guy who wasn't smart enough or motivated enough to take math and science. See "Congress."

10 posted on 03/14/2012 6:32:42 AM PDT by Kenny Bunk ((So, you're telling me Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts can't figure out this eligibility stuff?))
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To: RightOnline

You can probably say the same thing about degree names containing the word “studies”.


11 posted on 03/14/2012 6:34:14 AM PDT by Fresh Wind ('People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.' Richard M. Nixon)
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To: kosciusko51

Sorry, “promulgation” was the wrong word. I was trying to convey the increase in the number of degrees.


12 posted on 03/14/2012 6:34:49 AM PDT by kosciusko51 (Enough of "Who is John Galt?" Who is Patrick Henry?)
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To: Kenny Bunk

LOL!


13 posted on 03/14/2012 6:35:00 AM PDT by patton (DateDiff)
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To: RightOnline

Informations Technology
Geology
Biology
Kinesiology
Physiology
Pathology

I think what your Dad meant was people with “sociology” degrees are not hire-able.


14 posted on 03/14/2012 6:37:17 AM PDT by Anitius Severinus Boethius
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To: SeekAndFind

I just graduated with a masters in mining engineering and I’m 61 years old. I get at least 3 good job offers a week and have people coming up to me at professional meetings and offering jobs. Pay ranges from $80K to $180K if I’m willing to relocate to the Congo.

Kids with bachelors degrees in engineering are starting at $60K/year. Science degrees are a bit lower, but getting lots of offers.

The folks with art, history, education, psy degrees - they can’t even get jobs at fast-food places unless they speak Spanish.


15 posted on 03/14/2012 6:40:03 AM PDT by xtargeter
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To: SeekAndFind

For you Mississippians out there:

“I don’t talk to Mississippi State Graduates very often, but when I do, I alway order large fries”. yuck yuck yuck

You can substitute the school of your choice.


16 posted on 03/14/2012 6:43:50 AM PDT by A. Patriot (Have we lost our Republic? Do the majority of Americans care?)
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To: xtargeter

Well, my friend’s daughter just graduated with a Bachelor’s degree International Business Finance at Grove City College last December. She found a job in one month ( starting salary -— $45,000 with benefits ).


17 posted on 03/14/2012 6:44:44 AM PDT by SeekAndFind (question)
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To: SeekAndFind
Career Lies My Graduate School Told Me

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but whatever they told you is just the first of MANY, MANY lies you will be told, especially if you listen to the federal government. The most important thing you can learn in grad school is who and what to believe.

18 posted on 03/14/2012 6:47:56 AM PDT by The Sons of Liberty (Psalm 109:8 Let his days be few and let another take his office. - Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin)
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To: SeekAndFind
disappearing fields like journalism The best ray of sunshine and schadenfreude chuckle in this article.

Employers are on to the fact that, outside of the hard science and engineering colleges and degrees, someone with a baccalaureate today leaves college with an education roughly equivalent to or significantly less than what a public high school diploma in the 1960's demonstrated. Possessing a PhD is now the equivalent of hanging a sign around one's neck reading "Useless but Arrogant Twit". The university system is just one more bubble in this society that is long overdue for bursting.

And specifically as it applies to a graduate degree in Law, did the writer and his cohorts not themselves notice or did no one inform them that there are already far too many "f***ing lawyers" in this country and that they are hated by the vast majority of their fellow citizens? Suckers!

19 posted on 03/14/2012 6:58:26 AM PDT by katana (Just my opinions)
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To: JenB

Many yutes take the easy courses in hopes of getting the best grades. This begins in high school. What happens is they work themselves into an academic corner. Ultimately, achieving a 4.0 in social studies, communications, history, english, etc., does not bode well for a job after college, so they then double down by getting into Law School with these stellar grades only to be dumped out the other end, finally, with little to no chance of finding work. Then come crying when reality sets in. A little forethought and more difficult classes would have gotten them farther down the road to success.


20 posted on 03/14/2012 7:05:26 AM PDT by SgtHooper (The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on the list.)
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