Law school students trade three years of their lives, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, for the prospect of a lucrative job after graduation. The top programs advertise post-graduation employment rates of 95 percent or higher, and "all but explicitly promise that, within a few months of graduation, practically all their graduates will obtain jobs as lawyers," says law professor Paul Campos at The New Republic. But "the truth is that less than half will." That's because no one's counting the many graduates who have given up looking for work, settled for lousy part-time jobs, or found work outside of the legal profession. Such a vast disparity between perception and reality "suggests the extent to which prospective law students need more and better information" about whether to enroll in the first place. Here, an excerpt:
Some schools have adopted the practice of placing their graduates in temporary positions, which, whatever the rationale, has the benefit of helping to inflate their employment numbers. ... Last year, Georgetown’s law school paid three unemployed graduates $20 an hour to spend six weeks working in, of all places, its admissions office.
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