The importance of meeting the admission requirements for a top-tier law school cannot be overstated. Put another way, if your credentials aren’t good enough to meet the admission requirements for one of the top 100, or maybe even the top 50, law schools in America, you should seriously consider another line of work. Going to a bad law school may still allow you to become a lawyer, but it can also buy you some forms of debt-driven misery that you can’t imagine or understand.
The truth is that most law students finance their education with debt. Lots of debt. Much of the debt comes in the form of student loans. Unlike most other loans, student loans generally have to be repaid. Student loans are extremely difficult to discharge in bankruptcy.
Therefore, these loans exist. These loans are quite large. As an example, the sum of out-of-state tuition and fees at the city school where I practice is $44,000.00 per year. That’s tuition and fees. This does not include the cost of simple things like food and a place to live.
Now, if Dad has $150,000.00-$200,000.00 lying around and he wants to send you to get legal education, it doesn’t really matter if you qualify to get into a good law school or go to a bad law school. If you’re going to law school on someone else’s pennies, that’s fine. You become a lawyer. It will cost you nothing but your time. That’s great. Go for it.
But most of us don’t have a dad who has $150,000-$200,000 lying around. Most of us take out these loans. Many of them. And when the loans come due, they have to be repaid. The problem is that most lawyers don’t make a lot of money, especially when they’re fresh out of school, and paying off loans is incredibly difficult if you don’t make a lot of money.
I will give you an example. I went to one of the top 100 law schools. A friend of mine graduated with a job that pays $30,000.00 per year. He had $100,000.00 in loans to pay off when he graduated and broke his back for a long time. He was paying almost half of his salary in loan payments every month during the first few years of practice. He stayed skinny by living on ramen noodles. It wasn’t much fun.
Now you might be thinking, “Well, most lawyers make more than that…it won’t happen to me.”
Yes, and that’s where you’re wrong. When I graduated from college, the average student graduating in my major was earning $50,000.00 per year. The average attorney, at all levels of experience in my state, made $45,000.00. I remember these numbers very clearly, even though ten years have passed, because they scared me. Those numbers mean there are a lot of lawyers out there who aren’t making any money. The average lawyer is not living the high life. The average lawyer has little income and lots of loans fresh out of school. Now, schools do a good job of hiding those averages so they can sell admission to unsuspecting victims.
You see, it turns out that the figures that the legal institutions quote about what their former students earn in the labor market are false. The way they pump the numbers is to “forget” to get information from people who are unemployed or don’t make a lot of money. If you do what I did and start with six figures, the guys at the career services office make sure you fill out the form so they can include you in the numbers. If you’re my friend and you make a third of that, the professional services office somehow forgets to provide the form.
So the numbers are cooked. Lawyers earn less than you think, and this is particularly serious in the current recession.
Now, there is a way to win the game… Maybe.
The dirty little secret of the law is that the highest salaries for beginning lawyers are concentrated in a handful of the best schools. If you meet the admission requirements to one of the major legal institutions, your chances of landing a job that allows you to eat something other than Ramen noodles improve dramatically. You still have to do well in that law school, particularly in the really tough economy we’re seeing right now, but there is hope.
The secret is a dirty secret because most bad schools that teach law will not tell you that they are bad law schools and that their graduates are unemployed and hungry. You don’t find out until you go out into the job market and learn it the hard way.