Readers' Comments

1. August 25, 2012 02:04 AM

One need only look back to the dark ages of 1990 to see what private law schools could do with $20,000/year (in 2012 dollars). Given such meager revenues, legal education must have been quite intolerable at the time when most contemporary legal educators went to law school!

— Rayiner Hashem

2. August 02, 2012 08:05 PM

out trolling for more tuition dollars from gullible kids. Disgusting.

— joe

3. August 02, 2012 05:41 PM

"But as I see each year when I read the student evaluations at my school, overall the evaluations for the full-time faculty are substantially better than they are for the adjuncts. It is easy to understand why. Teaching is a skill, and most people get better the more they do it. Moreover, full-time faculty generally have more time to prepare than adjunct professors who usually have busy practices."

What does this have to do with anything? Student evaluations are filled out well before students realize that the professor hasn't taught them anything that will help them actually practice law. Professors may be better at teaching in general (although I've seen some horrid counter-examples), but that doesn't mean a student wouldn't be better off being taught by someone with a clue about the actual practice of law, especially if that has the added bonus of not putting them into crippling debt with iffy employment prospects. If the qualification for being a law school professor should be based on teaching ability, my band teacher from seventh grade needs to get hired by HLS today.

— Gerrytown

4. July 24, 2012 06:17 PM

"Just Say No" is incorrect. You can see government data on wages and unemployment here: http://www.askapeer.com/pages/labor-market-data The only occupations that pay better than Law are medicine (doctors) and CEOs. (Possibly Petroleum Engineers, but that is a very recent phenomenon). CEOs don't do much better than lawyers, and many of them have law degrees to boot, especially at the big companies that pay the best. The proportion of MBAs who will become CEOs is tiny. The proportion of JDs who will become lawyers is quite large, probably a substantial majority. Unless you can either: 1. Get into medical school or 2. Get a job as a trader at a hedge fund Law school is by far your best chance of making it into the upper middle class. And when you consider lawyers' skill set--basically just reading and writing--it is truly shocking how much money they make. You can compare lawyers to journalists, editors, authors, historians, etc. here: http://www.askapeer.com/pages/compare-jobs Across the distribution, lawyers make nearly twice as much as other workers with similar skill sets.

— Truth

5. July 24, 2012 06:17 PM

"Just Say No" is incorrect. You can see government data on wages and unemployment here: http://www.askapeer.com/pages/labor-market-data The only occupations that pay better than Law are medicine (doctors) and CEOs. (Possibly Petroleum Engineers, but that is a very recent phenomenon). CEOs don't do much better than lawyers, and many of them have law degrees to boot, especially at the big companies that pay the best. The proportion of MBAs who will become CEOs is tiny. The proportion of JDs who will become lawyers is quite large, probably a substantial majority. Unless you can either: 1. Get into medical school or 2. Get a job as a trader at a hedge fund Law school is by far your best chance of making it into the upper middle class. And when you consider lawyers' skill set--basically just reading and writing--it is truly shocking how much money they make. You can compare lawyers to journalists, editors, authors, historians, etc. here: http://www.askapeer.com/pages/compare-jobs Across the distribution, lawyers make nearly twice as much as other workers with similar skill sets.

— Truth