Step 1: Get Into Law School, Step 2: Graduate from Law School, Step 3: Pass the Bar Exam, Step 3: Sell Your Diploma Because You're NEVER Going to Practice

Doing things differently?  Hmmm.  That's one way to "see it."

Interesting week in the law world.  I know these several things have been covered, but because I think they are all related, I'm going to cover the stories again.
Law Schools have no regard for whether  you'll be able to practice the law when you graduate.  NONE.  My alma mater admitted people with petty crimes on their records and mental illness.  These were issues that were left for the "Character and Fitness" portion of the bar to deal with.

Case in point, Michael Behzadi.  This freak graduated from the esteemed Florida Coastal School of Law.  Haven't heard of it?  Well, that's because it sucks.  And with every psychopath they shove onto the street, their reputation will grow.  Michael pled guilty to making threats.  He had a To-Do list, much like any organized student of the law.  Except his list had some disturbing to-dos:

The first item on the list is to "buy eggs," but the list also includes running guns to Nigeria and killing Behzadi's professor at Florida Coastal School of Law.

According to court documents, Behzadi's girlfriend reported in March that he was planning to kill his ex-girlfriend, her new boyfriend and her parents.

According to the documents, Behzadi sent his girlfriend an online message that read, "I don't want to kill her with the S&W revolver. Kill her. Shoot her dead. Drive up to Wisconsin first. Kill her family then tell her before I kill her. Dead. It feels good to hurt people."

Oopsie.  Well, how was FC to know that he was unstable?  Well, according to this article, he had a long history of mental problems.  Maybe they thought that law school would stabilize him?  Ha.  Anyone whose been to law school knows that law school, especially 1L year will unhinge you.  So, epic fail.

How about this one?  A blind chick from California was admitted to UCLA school of law.  How nice!  A token disabled person.  Nevermind the fact that she had to SUE to take the bar exam:

Enyart sued the NCBE, ACT and the State Bar of California in California federal court for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and state civil rights laws.

     She asked the court to order the NCBE to allow her to use a computer equipped with ZoomText and JAWS, presenting a sworn statement from her ophthalmologist to back up her software preferences.

     Finding that the accommodations provided by the NCBE were not sufficient to make the test accessible to Enyart, and that she would be kept from pursuing her chosen profession if her requests were not met, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer granted a preliminary injunction and ordered NCBE to provide the software. He required Enyart to put up a $5,000 bond to cover the costs in case the NCBE eventually proved that the injunction was illegal.

Hmm.  That's a hidden cost of becoming a lawyer if I ever heard one.  During one the injunctions, the poor girl actually took the bar exam and FAILED:

The NCBE appealed, and while the case was pending Enyart took and failed the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE) and the bar exam. She requested a second preliminary injunction to take the tests again, which the court granted. Enyart has since received a high enough score on the August 2010 MPRE to qualify for admission to the California Bar but she failed to pass the July 2010 California Bar Exam, according to the ruling. 

I'm sure she'll keep chugging along until she passes, but she has yet to conquer the greatest hurdle of all: getting a job.  I'm not even talking about the job market sucking ass.  Anyone who has worked in law firms knows that they are the least likely to have the accommodations needed to employ a blind person.  Even if she managed to get a job at a firm that was willing to deal with her blindness by getting word processing software for the Blind--how is she to do on-line research?  Looking up something like "factors in determining child custody" on Westlaw will result in 200 cases and you can't skim the cases for relevance if you're blind.  Or, if you can, it will take you 800% longer because the software will read every last word aloud.  And what if you're a blind litigator?  How will you present evidence to the Court if you can't see it?  I bumble and fumble through my folder when I'm in front of a judge and I'm sure that's not unique to seeing people.  So, good luck getting a job.  UCLA should be ashamed of selling you a dream that will never be realized or only realized with great difficulty. I'm not saying it's right--it's just the facts.

Lastly, once you have gotten through law school and invested over $100K in getting the degree--sometimes the smartest thing to do with it is sell it on ebay for $200K.

So, what's the moral of this story?  If law schools want to maintain a place of dignity and respect in this Country, they should invest some time and energy into admitting students who can do legal work and give back to their alma maters happily.  Somewhere along the way, alumni contributions have been phased out as a source of income and tuition has increased to fund law school operations.  This model is bound to implode as fewer and fewer alumni look back upon their law school experience as worthy and lemmings grow brains and use a cost/benefit analysis in deciding whether law school is a worthy investment.

Today, I spoke to an older attorney who must be living under a rock.  She expressed dissatisfaction at her alma mater for costing her a whopping $20K.  We're all in the same market.  If she thinks her degree wasn't worth $20K, why do you think yours is worth $200K?  It defies logic.

Xtranormal Takes the Higher Education Scam Mainstream

Here are several more xtranormal videos. I'd like to see more of these videos follow in the footsteps of the "So You Want to Go to Law School" video that has gone viral and received 660,000 hits in the last week. I'm glad to see unemployed graduates putting some of their free time to good use by creating these creative and humorous videos that will hopefully save someone from a similar fate. Enjoy and pass them along to a real life lemming contemplating law or graduate school. You could save a life.

More Tidbits from the book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money And Failing Our Kids - And What We Can Do About It

A BIDER reader sent us an interesting statistic posted by author Sheril Kirshenbaum on twitter via the upcoming book "Higher Education?" which will be released tomorrow:

From 2005-07: 101,000 PhDs awarded & only 16,000 professorships created (via book Higher Education?) Recession undoubtedly increased spread 12:48 PM Jul 31st via web

So where are the 85,000 PhDs without an assistant professorship? They are likely writing blogs about their lives on public assistance, working as adjuncts, serving you fries at your local fast food joint, or sending out resumes as overqualified candidates for entry-level positions meant for GED and college graduates. I'm glad that this book seems to at least briefly touch upon the victims of the graduate school scam along with the college tuition scam. Maybe someone will someday write a serious book about the law school scam. I'm not holding my breath.

Several days ago, I briefly mentioned the book Higher Education? in a post about the college scam. With more information being revealed each day, I honestly cannot wait to get my hands on this book. I looked up the statistic and came across an interview with one of the Higher Education? authors, Claudia Dreifus, at More Magazine. This is a fascinating interview worth reading in its entirety, but I couldn't resist pasting some of the highlights below.

Why do you think a Harvard education may not be worth it?
First, it’s overpriced. Harvard has just raised its fee to over $50,000 a year, and that will trigger a cycle of increases throughout the system because Harvard sets the trend. Harvard says it’s raising the number of scholarships, and that’s well and good, but the overall effect of the tuition hikes on the rest of the system is thoroughly immoral—most schools are not nearly as well endowed and can’t award as much financial aid. I believe that the elite universities we call the Golden Dozen—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, Duke, Amherst, Williams—are, for the most part, overpriced prestige items.

But they have great faculty.
Over 70 percent of college teachers—even at top schools like Yale, Harvard and Stanford—are graduate students or adjuncts or gypsy visiting professors. That’s up from 43 percent in 1975. There are 181,000 teaching assistants at work in 280 research universities around the country. And it’s not just the elite colleges. Florida Keys Community College, for instance, has 24 full-time faculty and about 90 adjuncts per term. Using a contingent workforce costs the schools much less money. At Yale, for example, teaching assistants earn roughly $20,000 a year.

So the students are not taught by the stars?
Rarely. And this bothers me, because you’re cheating the young people.

Where are the adjuncts coming from?
Universities are overproducing PhDs way beyond levels anyone can use in this country. From 2005 to 2007, they awarded 101,000 doctoral degrees—but there were only 16,000 new assistant professorships created.

You criticize what you call “vocational training” at many colleges: Resort management. Equine science and management. Apparel and accessories marketing. Why does this bother you? Doesn’t it help kids get jobs?
I think 18-year-olds are too young to know what they’re going to do with their lives. We’re a rich enough society that we can give people four years to find themselves—to expose them for one brief moment to ideas and thinking, to take a hiatus from the world of commerce. We can afford an educated populace.

Even in these tough economic times?
Yes. It’s not a luxury to be educated.

What should colleges be concentrating on?
They should be exposing young people to the great ideas of the past and present, and they should be giving them a chance to stretch their minds. A return to the liberal arts: history, philosophy, English, physics. Science as a whole needs to be valued more on the undergraduate level. Too often science classes are taught by people who speak English too poorly to communicate clearly—all to save money.

What’s the solution?
De-emphasize professors’ need to publish and promote those who are good teachers. Abolish tenure. Pay adjuncts something like parity per course. Force professors, no matter what their ranking, to teach undergrads. Cap presidential salaries. And end sabbaticals: They’re a total waste of money—a raid on parents’ and students’ resources. If a professor wants to advance her career by writing a book, she should do it on her own time.

What can parents do?
The first value should be not starting your youngster off with five-figure debt. Consider alternatives to the most expensive schools. It’s not so important to be able to say, “My child is at Princeton.” What’s more important is to say, “My child has a good future,” which partly means a future without crippling debt.

Can any college deliver “a good future”?
A large number of CEOs of major corporations didn’t come from the Ivies but from second-tier schools. There are good things to be found anywhere; the system is big enough so there is something for anyone. The trick is to find the right match.

Are Higher Education Scam Blogs Racist and Sexist?

Lambert at Corrente linked to BIDER several weeks ago (thank you, Lambert and BDBlue!) along with a Yahoo/BusinessWeek article questioning whether college is still worth the student debt investment. The first two comments pretty much reiterated everything that Angel and I have been posting this year. Higher education, once a source of opportunity for some to move into the middle class, has now become an elitist and corrupt business that is perfectly fine with financially raping students into a lifetime of servitude to Sallie Mae, Access Group, and Direct Loans.

The third comment, however, came from a professor named “Historiann” who believes that higher education is worth the (insanely high) tuition cost because it enriches their inner lives. Teehee:

The article shows that college grads still on average make $400,000 more over 30 years than high school grads. Would you like an extra $13,000/year this year? I sure would. That's still real money to most people.

In any case: is a college education really only about the acquisition of money? (Pretend we're not living in the United States of Amnesia for a few minutes.) All things considered, universities have made the U.S. a better place, on balance. Not all students who enter leave it a better place, and there surely is a lot of wastage that the system encourages. But we shouldn't see the value of education as purely vocational.

I like to think that teaching at a university and introducing them to interesting, new ideas and writers helps young people develop rich and complex inner lives in adulthood. Even if we leave aside the value of those inner lives for artistic and creative thought and work, think of the savings in mental health services!

Um…that’s all well and good, but does inner enrichment pay off six-figure student loan debt and the feelings of absolute failure when you have to move back in with your parents, or you’re stuck in a dead-end job that can barely pay off those student loan bills and put food on the table for your family? One can argue that the massive amount of loans students have to take out to go to college and graduate school cause more long term unhappiness and mental anguish than whatever enrichment they get in the classroom.

As a starting point for any new readers joining us, I recommend reading Jobless Juris Doctor’s post about a day in the life of an unemployed graduate working a $10/hour part-time job with loans to pay back. Many of the comments are just a small window into the large numbers of young people who are depressed and on the verge of suicide because of student debt, especially in this new jobless era that could last for decades.

Please also read Cryn at Education Matters and put her under your blogroll even if your blog has nothing to do with education issues. Cryn is one of the few education advocates trying to change the system and fight for student loan victims. She regularly posts absolutely heart wrenching stories of educated American families being destroyed by student debt compounded by unemployment and our country not having a national health care system. Cryn herself attended an Ivy League and is now working in South Korea to pay off her student loan debt. Yes, many of us are being forced to flee the country to find anything resembling a respectable and decent paying job to pay off our student loans. This is the reality of higher education in America today and it doesn’t look like the situation will improve considering that many white-collar jobs along with manufacturing jobs are being outsourced, never to come back to the States. Below are links to reader stories Cryn has recently featured on her blog.

http://alleducationmatters.blogspot.com/2010/07/destroying-educated-american-family-one.html

http://alleducationmatters.blogspot.com/2010/06/cryns-story-as-student-loan-refugee-and.html

http://alleducationmatters.blogspot.com/2010/06/in-your-words-grandsons-anguish.html

http://alleducationmatters.blogspot.com/2010/05/son-who-wants-to-help-struggling-family.html

We should also be wary of the college versus high school statistics and some statistics that say the unemployment rate among college graduates is only 4 percent. Many of these studies offer an expansive range of numbers from $400,000 over 30 years to as much as a million dollars more than a high school graduate over the course of a lifetime. Personally, these numbers sound as fraudulent as law school employment statistics.

Some tenured professors and university administrators will want to believe that they are getting paid as much as $388,000 to make the world a better place while turning a blind eye to the adjunct professors who are suffering, the unemployed PhD graduates who are suffering, and the thousands of their very own students who are suffering. Other professors have fessed up to random luck to getting a good job in academia. A few have admitted to being okay with scamming students out of hundreds of thousands of dollars as long as they get their six-figure salary and funds to go off to some exotic place for vacation under the guise of an academic conference.

I decided to head over to Historiann’s blog and found that she had linked to Lambert in a post of her own accusing people who write articles questioning the value of a college education as possibly harboring racist or sexist beliefs:

Is anyone else skeptical of this current rash (h/t Corrente) of “is college really worth it?” (h/t RealClearPolitics) articles, now that women are the majority of college students, and black, brown, and first-generation college students are gaining more of a purchase in post-secondary education? It sure seems like an interesting coincidence to me.

These always appear in a recession, and it’s true that unemployed people with college degrees are just as unemployed as people who never made it to college, or even out of high school. But, seriously? My bet is that the authors and publishers of these articles all have college educations. Do they really think that more education was a big mistake for them, or do they just want to argue that it’s a mistake for their social inferiors?

Huh? If this was an attempt to discredit anyone who challenges the higher education industrial complex, it was a pretty weak one. Many of our friends and truth-tellers under our blogroll do in fact think that more education was a big mistake for them because it has caused them unimaginable pain, suffering, and financial ruin. These people should be lauded rather than accused of being racists or sexists. Angel and I are women and have posted many stories on the plight of women, minorities, and the poor during this recession and as victims of the higher education scam. Nando at Third Tier Reality is Hispanic. Cryn and Jobless Juris Doctor are women. A Law School Victim at Life’s Mockery is African-American. Educated people of all backgrounds are beginning to see the inequality and unfairness of the U.S. higher education system and it has nothing to do with seeing women and minorities as social inferiors or dissuading them from trying to have a better life. It is naïve to believe that a college education somehow magically breaks down all the barriers of privilege, rank, and connections – all those things that are most important to finding a good job in our new economy.

I have never questioned education as a valuable way of becoming a better-rounded, enriched, well-informed, and enlightened individual. However, it is possible to become educated and worldly through self-education and travel without having to pay a business (and that is exactly what universities and for-profit colleges have become – a billion dollar making business) up to $200,000 for a degree as some sort of proof that you are superior to those who don’t have a $100,000 - $200,000 piece of paper. Anyone paying $50,000+ per semester should feel entitled to a good paying job – and they should get an education that not only makes them more creative or analytical, but also provides them with job training skills to do something practical once they leave the protective bubble of the ivory tower.

There are other countries that put their money where their mouth is and make education accessible to more people by offering free or low-cost tuition. If their graduates can’t find a good job in a depression, at least they won’t have up to half of their wages garnished to pay off banks and loan companies breathing down their necks with threats and obscene phone calls to friends and family. Wanna bet that most university administrators, if asked whether they would rather work under the current system that keeps out many poor and minority students from getting a top tier education or take a salary cut so that more students can afford college/grad school, would be perfectly fine keeping out the poor and forcing their students into lifetime debt as long as their coffers are filled? Who’s the racist now?

I do not regret going to college because I attended a top tier institution that covered most of my tuition with financial aid and scholarships. I was one of the lucky ones. I do, however, regret being fooled into spending thousands of dollars for a degree that hinders me from getting any job outside of the legal industry due to the fraudulent employment statistics released by the ABA and law schools.

We are not against education. We are against a system that devalues the importance of education by turning it into a money making scheme. To swindle millions of dollars from hard-working Americans using fraudulent data and myths in order to convince parents and their children that taking out hundreds of thousands in private loans is worth it to become more self-enlightened is despicable and should be stopped. Tax attorney said in a comment last week:

Tax Attorney said...

I think you people are missing the point. The relevant point is, "do we want an America with undereducated people who reject advanced degrees due to financial rape, or do we want an America that wants its citizens to proceed with education as far as they can go?"

Go to any guidance counselor's office in a high school--they will sell you a bill of goods that education is always profitable. Maybe that was true 30 years ago, but now it is just a business used to exploit the intelligent and ambitious. And as a country, unless we curtail free trade and the offshoring of jobs, we need educated people. But when the cost of the education exceeds its value, then how do we get there?

The European model with free education and vigorous testing to qualify, seems the most rational to me.

July 9, 2010 12:27 AM

Low-income, minority, and single parent (usually women) students bear the brunt of the higher education scam. Too many of them end up in for-profit schools or low ranked, third tier schools that offer a crappy education and few job opportunities at the same tuition rates as the Ivy League. Many must gamble with the possibility of absolute financial ruin for life by taking out huge loans to attend college. So when someone asks whether or not college (or graduate school) is worth it, they are asking a very serious question that no one in higher education is willing to answer directly. Is taking out $50k, $100k, $150k, $200k – even $300k (I know an Ivy League and T14 graduate who owes more than $300k) in loans worth the risk? Is anything that doesn’t offer a money back guarantee or an absolute guarantee of a good paying job worth taking such a huge financial risk?

Anyone who can justify not questioning these exorbitant costs is either rich, clueless, or profits in some way shape or form from the system currently in place.

Dismal Job Prospects for PhDs.

I think I have already extended a warm welcome to PhDs to join in our pity party, but one tipster alerted me to this mainstream media article about their job prospects that I thought I should share.

PhDs are usually in it for one thing, to attain the ideal position as a professor in higher education.  As many of our readers at BIDER know, the PhD program is the biggest Ponzi Scheme out there.  Many lemmings feel that higher education will pay off, by allowing them to join the ranks of the very people that educate them. Much like Madoff's investors, these professors to be are shit out of luck:

The number of jobs university math departments were trying to fill in 2009 declined 40% from 2008, according to the American Mathematical Society. There were about 1,000 positions advertised from  October 2009 to February 2010 in the Modern Language Assn.'s Job Information List, a 27.5% decline from the year before. (The association's conference this year will hold the foreboding title The Academy in Hard Times.)

I could have told them that this was going to happen.  Not to toot lawyer's horns, but at least we go to law school under the false impression that we will be learning a skill.  The last people that any university wants to hire are those who have invested time and money in their education.  Instead, they hire graduate students (for free or little pay) or adjunct professors for as little at $20K a year (who are probably working professionals as well).   See my previous post on The Lost Generation of Scholars Who Did Everything Right.
What are we going to do to knock it into students' heads??? Education does not always pay off and often it prohibits you from obtaining work that does.
When I think of PhDs, I have this vision of Aristotle and his students speaking about philosophy for the sake of discussion. I think they were all men of leisure who liked to think and hypothesize.  He abhorred paid work, by the way. I found this quote, where Aristotle said: All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. Clearly, he did not think of education as a means to become wealthy.  Education was a luxury to be enjoyed by the wealthy for the sake of enjoyment alone.  This dreamer had this to say about his shitty investment:

At least one academic isn't worried. Patrick Horn is paying $25,000 a year to get a doctorate in mythological studies in the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria. His working class family balked at the tuition and time commitment, but the 30-year L.A. resident says he's not concerned.

"It's a great investment, and I'm not worried about the debt," he said. "I love being a thinker, I love being a writer, and I feel privileged for the opportunity." 

Patrick, privileged is the last thing you're ever going to feel after taking mythological studies so damn seriously for so long.  Wait until Sallie Mae comes knocking on your door, you will have more in common with the tranny hookers on my street corner than you will with Zeus.  Just saying.
Hardknocks and I differ in our philosophies about education.  I'll let her tell you what she thinks of it, but I think it's unnecessary. In my ideal world, we would all learn practical skills and take a year trip around the world to gain enlightenment and knowledge.  But the real world has robbed our parents of the means to subsidize this sort of worldly education, and has left us vulnerable to the vultures at local universities and colleges to teach us that... how to live, how to think, how to be understanding.

Ms. Jobless Juris Doctor wrote a post on the potential explosion of the education bubble, much like the sub-prime mortgage bubble. Steve Eisman, a economist who predicted the mortgage implosion, is addressing student loan defaults in his latest prediction:

If present trends continue, over the next 10 years almost $500 billion of Title IV loans will have been funneled to this industry. We estimate total defaults of $275 billion, and because of fees associated with defaults, for-profit students will owe $330 billion on defaulted loans over the next 10 years.

This will affect our children and our children's children.  I don't think I will have a kid that will come home with a Doctorate degree.  But he comes home a cop with a badge, or a plumber with a snake--I will be happy as a clam.

Tips on Being Overqualified

I just came across Ask a Manager and thought the blog was very helpful in answering some of the questions I had about references, cover letters, thank you letters after an interview, etc. One of her articles on what to do if you're overqualified was posted at USNWR back in 2008 but I think the tips she mentions are useful to anyone who hasn't read it yet.

So your job

is to reassure the hiring manager that none of these things are true, and in order to be convincing, you need to explain why. For instance:

• "At this stage in my career, having a job I enjoy is more important to me than salary. I have no problem with earning less than I have in the past."

• "I want to move into this field, and I know that I need to start at a lower level in order to do that."

• "I'm deliberately looking for something with fewer responsibilities than I've had in the past so that I can spend more time with my family." (Or because you're going to school at night or have simply realized you prefer lower-pressure jobs.)

• "I wouldn't take a job I'm not excited about, and I'm excited about this one because ______."

Ideally, the time to address all of this is in your cover letter. Otherwise, you may never get the chance to say it at all, because the manager may simply assume that you don't understand the nature of the position and screen you from the start. And once you get to the interview stage, be prepared to discuss it again, likely in more detail.

If you can successfully put these doubts to rest, many hiring managers will be thrilled to hire your overqualified self. After all, you're a bargain.

Of course, I'm pretty sure she's not addressing people who are overqualified in terms of having a JD or another graduate degree, but overqualified in that they have actual work experience. Maybe we should send Allison a few law related questions. She might have a few helpful tips for law grads looking for entry level careers in other fields.

On another note, I am visiting my friend who is getting her PhD at a top tier school (and has admitted that she'll probably never find a job). Boy did she have plenty of sad stories to tell me. It amazes me how so many smart people remain clueless when it comes to applying to graduate school, taking on mounds of debt, and not realizing that there aren't any jobs to help them pay back that debt. It just shows you that anyone can be fooled and there will be millions more who will join us in the indentured educated class in the coming years.

One of her friends was laid off because her job is being outsourced. What's even sadder is that the company is now paying her to train people in Southeast Asia who will take over her job in a few months. Anyway, instead of learning her lesson she's planning to take out a huge ass loan to go to a third tier business school. Another story she told me was about a mutual acquaintance from college who is attending a tier 1 law school but can't find a job (not surprising). She goes to interview after interview and all of them tell her that as much as they like her, they aren't hiring many new graduates. My question is why then did they offer her an interview to get her hopes up when they knew that she never had a chance of getting the job? Wtf?

But At Least The Worst Is Behind Us, Right? Right?

by guest blogger The Angry Future Expat

This will be my last post over here, so let me express my gratitude to Hardknocks and Angel for giving me a wider platform to post my scribbles. Also, thanks to you all for not flaming me in the comments - though I suppose it could still happen. In any event, everyone is welcome to stop by my place any time - it's basically the same material I posted here, but with more swearing and insults.


With that said, the BLS report on payroll employment for March is either coming out tomorrow or was just released (depending on when this gets posted). The consensus estimate is an increase of 200,000 payroll jobs. Of course, the vast majority of any increase is due to hiring short-term workers for the Census - the consensus for private employment is a much more subdued 40,000.


But whether the numbers show a big gain, a small gain, or even a loss of jobs, keep in mind that the monthly results are mostly noise. Much more important is the long-term trend. For that, the Minneapolis Fed maintains its Recession in Perspective site. It's fun to play around with some of the features, and the chart below compares job loss and recovery across some recent recessions.




Barry Ritholtz notes that "If the 2007-09 Recession end up being anything like the 2001 recession, we are still 4 or 5 years away from a full jobs recovery back to employment levels prior to the crash." Scary as that is, those overeducated, overindebted, and underemployed readers of this blog, may "prefer" to think of it another way.


For every month of those 4-5 years of elevated unemployment, thousands of 20 and 30 somethings are going to sit for the LSAT, GMAT, MCAT, or GRE, and sign up for a lifetime of crippling debt that they never would have considered in a normal job market. Sitting in class praying for a recovery before they receive their degree, so that they might at least have a shot - however slim - at the middle-class life so many could take for granted a few decades ago. And when it all goes south, they'll sit at their computers - while reading this blog and dodging calls from Sallie Mae - and wonder how they could have been so wrong. Think the MBA, JD, MD, and PhD markets are saturated now? Just give it a few years.


I leave you with that thought to mull over as I bid you farewell.


Best,

AFEP

MBAs are Screwed Too! Welcome to the Party!

I was surfing the web when I ran into this article about MBAs (and lawyers) and their difficulties finding jobs.  I had to eat crow because my motto after law school was "I wish I got my MBA instead."  So, apparently, they are feeling the effects of the recession and squirming under the pressure as well.  So, MBAs, lawyers, doctors... anybody else want to join our pity party?  Why anyone goes to professional school anymore, I have no idea.  Read on:

Job offers dwindle for MBA and law school grads

By Darrell Smith 


Nelson Chiu shook hands with the PepsiCo representative, exchanged a few brief words and received a parting "good luck."
He was dressed in a crisp, dark blue pinstripe suit on a recent Wednesday, and his voice was starting to fade; he'd been at a career fair inside the University of California, Davis, field house since 11 a.m., talked to more than a dozen companies, and it was closing in on 2 p.m. on the afternoon of his daughter's first birthday.
For Chiu, who earned his MBA in 2009 from UC Davis' highly regarded Graduate School of Management, a solid lead would have been a great gift.
For years, someone like Chiu with a newly minted degree from a top-flight business or law school had the closest thing to a golden ticket for a high-paying job. But the ongoing recession has brought graduates – many staggering under mountains of student loan debt – face to face with a new economic reality.
For most of the past decade, markets for both groups of grads were humming: 10 percent to 20 percent growth per year for MBA graduates, according to the nonprofit Graduate Management Admission Council; a 10-year stretch of near-90 percent job placement for law grads, the National Association for Law Placement reported.
But those days seem like ancient history now.