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.
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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.
US Army, Eleven-Bravo!
I dunno - geology majors are pretty hot right now.
RE: He told me even then: anyone with -ology in their degree simply was not hire-able.
Not even Molecular Biology?
With the promulgation of degrees, it would be more appropriate to say that anyone with studies in their degree simply is not hire-able.
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.
Normally I don’t encourage ambulance-chasing, but in the case of our illustrious institutions of Marxist education, I’ll make an exception.
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.
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."
You can probably say the same thing about degree names containing the word “studies”.
Sorry, “promulgation” was the wrong word. I was trying to convey the increase in the number of degrees.
LOL!
Informations Technology
Geology
Biology
Kinesiology
Physiology
Pathology
I think what your Dad meant was people with “sociology” degrees are not hire-able.
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.
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.
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 ).
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.
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!
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.
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