Law school safety net

It used to be a lighthouse for academic careers that strayed off course, but it’s quickly becoming the case that even the law can’t save you. Not even when you’re the one who’s practicing it.

This year, roughly 20 percent more people took the LSAT during the September/October test than a year previously.

It’s not hard to imagine why – getting a job with a sociology major is hard enough during boom times, but during a recession, it’s practically impossible.

Graduate school has always seemed like a nunnery in which to commit penance for unprofitable undergraduate choices, and law school is by far the most popular.

It’s not a pyramid scheme like academia, where the only way to make money is to teach what you’ve learned, and you don’t have to bother with calculus, like in MBA programs.

The only problem is that the legal field can’t expand nearly enough to take all these new students.

In fact, according to a recent article by the New York Times, many law firms are not only laying off lawyers but cutting into that time-honored time-waster, “billable hours,” which threatens not only to reduce the profitability of the legal profession but to replace expensive lawyers with paralegals and others who can do the work and are willing to for less.

You’d think that in a case like this, law school attendance rates would respond – but law school is getting more popular and more expensive by the year.

IU’s Maurer School of Law proposed this year to raise its tuition by 24.5 percent for in-state students, which the law school dean justified as a response to lessened financial support by the state.

Of course, IU’s recent jump to be the 23rd-ranked law school in the country might have raised the Maurer school’s sense of what it is entitled to. Then again, that seems to be a unifying trait among just about everyone in law school – a misperception of entitlement.

It’s entirely possible that this obsession of soon-to-be and recent graduates with the legal profession is their delayed processing of a societal signal; one that’s now outdated. It’s the idea that being a lawyer is synonymous with “success.”

Many current law students either grew up so far removed from the legal field that they couldn’t hear it buckling under economic and personnel pressures or decided too early to bank on law school as the validation to impractical courses of study, and even if they began to see clearly what law held in store for them, had no other options.

Others just couldn’t find a job after graduation and after months of living at home, picked up an LSAT prep guide and decided that the world would surely look better after three years with their heads buried in the sand.

More of my friends are in law school than are doing anything else, and I’m quite sure they’ll be excellent lawyers, but that’s like saying they’d be great at piloting the Challenger Space Shuttle. Sometimes, you just have to move on.