H/T to Corrente for finding an oldie but goodie by Ian Welsh called the Personal Politics of Hopelessness. I'm sure many of our readers can relate:As I write this I’m eating a sub I bought from across the street. While it was being prepared I chatted with the young woman making it, and she told me about moving from the Canadian Maritimes to Toronto, to, in essence, get a job that pays a little more than minimum wage. Because out in the Maritimes she had trouble getting even that.
I thought to myself that her experience is one that politicians need to have. Many politicians, of course, have never ever had a bad job. They went straight to a good university and from there to a good job or internship. They probably worked hard for it, and think they deserve what they have, never really seeing all the people whose feet were never on that road, who never had the same shot they did.
Then there are a fair number of pols, though less and less every year, who will tell you about the lousy jobs they had as teenagers, or maybe in their early twenties. But in most cases something is different between them and many working class and even middle class folks.
They knew they weren’t staying there.
When I was poor and working in lousy jobs I used to look in the mirror and see myself at 50, or 60. I expected to still be working at grindingly hard jobs, being treated badly by bosses (because there is no rule more iron than that the worse you are paid the worse your employer will treat you), and still being paid little more than minimum wage. That was the future I saw for myself.And when I was on welfare, after having failed to find a job for 6 months, and even being turned down by McDonalds (in the middle of the early nineties recession) I wondered if I’d even ever have a shitty job again. I ate cheap starchy food, turned pasty and put on weight. My clothes ran down. When my glasses broke beyond the point where tape would keep them together I literally had to beg the optometrist to make me his cheapest pair and I’d pay him later. (I eventually did.) My life was a daily grind of humiliation.
And that’s what I expected my life to be.
When politicians participate in one of those “live on Welfare for a week/month” programs I’m happy, but I’m also dubious. The difference is that they know they’re getting out in a week or a month. They know it’s going to end. Much as I applaud someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, who lived for months working at lousy jobs, again, she knew it was going to end. She knew that, if push come to shove and she became seriously sick, she could opt out. She knew that if she really couldn’t eat for days, that was her choice.
Living without that safety net, knowing that if something goes wrong, that’s just too bad, changes you. Living without any real hope of the future, knowing that the shitty job you’ve got now is probably about as good a job you’re ever going to have, changes you.
And it changes your sense of what hard work is, of what it means to be deserving. I remember working on a downtown construction site as temp labor, and I’d watch all the soft office workers with their uncalloused hands come out for lunch, and I’d wonder why they got paid two or three times what I did for work that was so much easier (and which, of course, I could do, even if I didn’t have a BA.) At the end of the day they might be stressed, but I’d go home physically exhausted from hard labor and so would my co-workers.
Of course, I got out of that. I’d say “I went back to university”, but even though that’s true, it’s not what got me out, since I never finished my BA. Instead what got me out is that I finally got a couple chances to prove what I could do—I got a temp job in an office, and was one of their most productive workers (they measured it.) Later I got invited to blog, and hey, I can write, even if I don’t have a BA. I got lucky. Like most people who get lucky in work, that luck involved a lot of hard work, but it also involved luck.
But a lot of folks never get lucky despite the fact that they work hard. Perhaps they aren’t really all that bright (half the population, after all, is below average intelligence.) Perhaps they’ve got some personality issues or weak social skills. Perhaps there’s something not quite right in their brain chemisty. Or perhaps they just never catch a break because they aren’t lucky and their parents weren’t well enough positioned to help them get those breaks.
But still, most of them work hard and earn their money, whether it’s barely more than minimum wage or they did get a bit of luck and got one of the few remaining good blue collar jobs.
But when they look in the mirror, they know that the guy or gal looking in the mirror ten or twenty years from now is probably going to be doing the same thing. And they know that they’re one bad break away from losing even the little they have—one illness, one plant closure, one argument with their boss.
They don’t have a lot of hope for the future, except that it won’t get worse. The life they live now is the best it’s probably gonna get.
Living like that changes you. It makes you see people differently. You understand that there are a lot of bad jobs out there, and that someone’s going to be stuck with them. You know that most of those jobs are either hard or humiliating, and often both. You know that for too many people, a shitty job where they’re abused by their boss is as good as it gets.
If this depression and the "jobless recovery" has taught the educated underclass anything it is that connections and luck usually matter more than intelligence, hard work, and doing everything right to get into law school or even a top law school only to find yourself back in the same position you would have been in if you had dropped out of high school. Only now you have student loans so huge that it will take you the rest of your life to pay back.
This is especially painful to many of us who didn't come from a rich family. Maybe your mother was like the woman in Ian's post who moved to Toronto to find something better than a mininmum waged job. Or your parents struggled to pay the bills and the mortgage while putting aside money each month for your college fund. My mother bought used textbooks from the library so she could tutor me at home in addition to schoolwork. She always emphasized getting an education so that my life would be better than hers. Some of you might have had strict parents who forced you to take additional classes and extracurricular activities so you'd have an edge when applying to college.
Your parents or guardians did all of this because they held out hope that all of that hard work and education would someday pay off and you wouldn't have to struggle for the rest of your life or work in a demeaning and low-wage job. Hope for a better life for themselves but especially their children is what keeps most people going through the worst of times. Well, the light at the end of the tunnel has officially gone out and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans who did everything right (emphasis mine):
Meeting 99ers is to tap into a deep well of anger at lives that have been knocked off course, shattering the enduring vision of the American dream that many had felt they had achieved. Just take Donna Faiella, a 53-year-old New Yorker who lives alone in Queens. She spent 28 years working in film post-production and video-editing. She was successful and had a career. Now she is desperate for a job, any job. But she cannot find one. "I will do anything. I will sweep floors. You think I look forward to collecting unemployment? It is fucking degrading," she said, almost quivering with anger.
Faiella is in dire trouble. Joblessness has eaten away at her sense of identity. "I feel like we are worthless. We are lost in the world. I don't know what to call myself. I don't have a title any more. What do we do? What do we do?" she implored. Faiella has one week of benefits to go. Then her 99 weeks will be up. She will have a title again. But not one she expected. She will be a 99er. "I am petrified. Do I become homeless?" she said, adding that she has begun making inquiries at local shelters.
Perhaps the most tragic is to see so many young Americans who have lost all hope and faith in a better future for themselves and for their children. It is tragic to see a generation who should be starting their lives having to move back home with nothing to give their parents - who may very well be struggling with unemployment or early retirement themselves - other than a worthless piece of paper that they and their parents had invested their entire lives to obtain.
I hope for our country's sake that someday we get a President who really had to struggle so they know what it is like to live on the edge with no money and no hope for the future. Someone who grew up on welfare and struggled to find a job during our generation's Great Depression will hopefully have at least a modicum of empathy to invest in job creation and finally end the total looting and destruction of this country by Wall Street and the student loan companies. I'm not holding my breath. Regardless, if or when we get out of mess, there will be inumerous casualties including many of our readers and scambloggers who are part of the Damned Generation.
Slave work in Mumbai: Cotton gin worker or Michigan Law graduate in the depths of an Indian doc review basement?Michigan Law School — the 9th best law school in America — is now posting job opportunities from India.
Has it really gotten bad enough that graduates from a top law school should consider international LPO opportunities? Yes, yes it has…
The job is for Pangea3, one of the largest legal outsourcing companies on the market. Look at how they try to spin the “opportunity” for a bunch of Michigan students:
Role: Legal Research – Associate.
Designation: Associate.
Department: Litigation.
Reports to: Sr. Manager – Litigation.Job Description: Pangea3 is looking for a recent law school graduate who’s looking for an alternative to the law firm route. The position will offer a U.S. attorney the opportunity to gain a global perspective on the legal services industry by joining a cutting-edge, dynamic, and fast-growing industry in an exciting, rapidly changing part of the world…
The Associate will be based in our state-of-the- art, ISO-certified facility in Mumbai, India. Candidate Profile: Recent Law graduates; Remuneration: Compensation includes competitive benefits and bonus.
There it is, folks. A Top 10 school shilling for a legal sweatshop in India. Maybe T14 grads will become the 21st century version of slave masters of the outsourced legal sweatshops. If this isn't the canary in the coal mine for OL lemmings, I don't know what else will convince them that law school is a bad investment.
Originally, announced in 2002, this subsidy known as a 'borrower benefit' was achieved by meeting certain payment conditions. Under the program, MHESLA's ability to offer the borrower benefits was contingent upon sufficient funding. MHESLA obtains the funds to make or acquire student loans by borrowing money through bond issuances. The borrower benefits programs began at a time when it was less costly for MHESLA to borrow and excess interest earnings were available. Recently though, the severe and ongoing credit crisis has forced MHESLA to pay more in interest costs for its funds. Changes in federal laws, including the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, have also resulted in a decrease in MHESLA's available funding for borrower benefits programs.
You can also add JD, MA, MS, PhD, and LLM along to the long list of degrees that will not lift you out of poverty. So much for the brainwashing from teachers and family my entire life that I could achieve anything with a college education. A study from the Institute of Higher Education Policy shows that an increasing number of low-income youth are pursuing higher education, but remain poor (Hi CLEO Pre-Law Institute for minorities *waves*).Increasing proportions of low-income young adults are pursuing higher education, but some remain poor even with a postsecondary degree, according to a new report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
In 2008, among Americans ages 18 to 26 whose total household income was near or below the federal poverty level, 47 percent were or had been enrolled in college, compared with 42 percent in 2000. Eleven percent of them had earned a degree, a proportion roughly equivalent to that eight years ago, according to the report, which is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.
The institute is a nonprofit group in Washington that conducts public-policy research to encourage access and success in higher education.
In introducing its report, the group called into question President Obama's declaration in his State of the Union address in January that "the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education." Poor students go to college academically unprepared, the report says, and, amid competing family and work obligations, they accumulate debt "that could have been avoided by pursuing a different type of degree or a credential."
None of the 11 percent of low-income graduates should remain in poverty, said Gregory S. Kienzl, director of research and evaluation at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. "If you have a degree, you should no longer be poor," he said.
Across all racial and ethnic groups, greater proportions of low-income young adults were or had been enrolled in college in 2008, compared with 2000. Hispanic students showed the largest percentage-point increase, to 37 percent from 29 percent. Low-income Asian and Pacific Islander and white students enrolled at the highest rates in 2008, 62 percent and 51 percent, respectively; the greatest proportions of low-income degree holders were also from those groups.
The report, "A Portrait of Low-Income Young Adults in Education," is the first in a series financed in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The next report will focus on attendance and enrollment patterns among low-income students, Mr. Kienzl said, including that black and Hispanic women more often attend for-profit institutions than public four-year colleges.
The article also leaves out the little inconvenience of having thousands in student loans to pay back, especially for children from poor and low-income families who have no way of helping them pay off those loans. As someone from a working class neighborhood, I can say from firsthand experience how heartbreaking it is for families who invest the time and money to make sure their children are the first in the family to attend college, only to see their children come home with no job and thousands in debt. The higher education system has become a Ponzi Scheme and the people who are responsible for perpetuating the higher education scam and charging hundreds of thousands for useless degrees should be forced to testify before Congress for their crimes.
We at BIDER and other scam bloggers have said this again and again. College and graduate school have ALWAYS benefited the rich who had the money and connections to get the best private school education and admittance into the Ivy League. If they were dumb rich kids, they still had a job guaranteed with the family business or through a business associate. At every level of education since high school, most of the people I know who turn out to be "successful" or at least employed at a well-paying or prestigious job have done so because of their family wealth and connections. The truth is that the degree alone has never helped the majority of people who didn't graduate from top schools at the top of their class. Even a degree from a high ranked school gets you nowhere without connections, unless you are extremely resourceful and lucky.
Read the entire article now!You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.
If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.
I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.
I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.
Consider this, you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once, your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.
This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.
...
If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices. You can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.
You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident – we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it – others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You’ll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.
In closing, I want to remind you of something – unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?
* I was hired four times by the Census Bureau: spring 2009 for address canvassing; fall 2009 for general quarters verification; late winter 2010 as a quality assurance clerk; and, spring 2010 [as an] enumerator non-response follow-up. I've just been laid off. In each case I spent more time training and going to meetings than actually working. Please don't use my name, I still may be called back.
* I was hired four times, counting last year and this. There's lots of waste and poor management. I've wondered about the handheld computer (used by door-to-door workers.) I've no idea how many of these were purchased. They were only used last year in one effort and my understanding is there were a lot of problems.
* I'm in south Orange County in Southern California and I'm going door-to-door to people the Census says have not turned in their form. At least 60 percent of the people I speak to swear they've turned it in. We are supposed to visit a residence three times. (If we can't contact anyone) we are supposed to try up to three proxies (neighbors or other people) to get information on a particular resident. So basically your neighbor can report how many people live in your home.
* Everything you reported is absolutely true. I was fired three times and rehired. I earned more going to training classes than (working). Several classmates didn't get any work after completing training.
* I was hired by the Census on March 16 and my last day was April 19 at the bilingual question answering center in Rome, Ga. We had two days of training, of which one was just to get hired officially as a federal employee. I had a total of two people come by my location and ask a question -- costing taxpayers $250 per question.
* I am a Census worker. I, too, can confirm that they are checking and checking. I checked homes that have already been checked by the "enumerators." The next phase is to go and re-check the checks that we already did twice..
* It's not much better in Florida. Our first day of training was a total joke. The supposed crew leader knew nothing. She didn't even open the manual to prep herself. We spent four hours signing six pieces of paper, one of which we signed on the day of the initial test ing. The nightmare didn't end when we got to the field. No work was available so we would sit in a meeting waiting for work for hours, which went on our timesheet.
* I have personally experienced the very same thing (in Missouri)) and have said from the beginning that this is strictly political and for jobs numbers. It is a waste of our tax monies. Our area appears to be very disorganized. However, I believe that it is intentional. Just another way to increase outlays and jobs.
I'm not wasting another year of my life waiting for the employment situation to improve. My pessimism about the future seems to have rubbed off several of my friends who are unemployed or hate their slave wage jobs and they are looking into the few good opportunities abroad that are left. If you're thinking about it, do it fast before more unemployed graduates with student debt jump on the bandwagon and those jobs become nonexistent as well.
The generation before me came to the conclusion I was worth the investment. Maybe my generation is a little too selfish.
- From the same Star Tribune article, law school shill Niels Schaumann, vice dean for faculty at third tier toilet William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota.The more urgent question is: What do you tell people who are thinking about going to law school? I don't recommend it to people looking to make a lot of money. ... If you're not interested in helping people in some way or providing service to your clients, it's not for you.
How about not recommending William Mitchell College of La- HardKnocks from But I Did Everything Right! in response to Niels Schaumman's dishonest and shameful comment in the Star Tribune.w to anyone who wants to find a full-time job after spending $52,000 yearly tuition? That way, shills like Schaumann would no longer make an average of $104,832 yearly blaming unemployed graduates for being too greedy.
Thanks for posting this article, Hardknocks. I am a WMCL grad - although I have pretty much severed all ties to that place after the Dean sent me a letter begging for MORE money AFTER I had already made a contribution and stated in his letter, "[Insert my name here], would you really be as far as you are today if not for your law degree?" As you can imagine, this irritated me to no end and I decided to never give one cent to that place again.
As for the gentleman featured in the story, I actually know him. Ironically, right after I graduated from WMCL with HONORS, I was working as a TEMP for $11/hour at the same place where he was working for the summer doing some humiliating clerical type of work. This was back in the early 2000's. He was going off to Korea to be with his girlfriend. Anyway, the reason I mention this is because there was a legal job shortage even back then, but nobody believed it. This is NOT new, people, so I don't understand why everybody acts like this all happened it the last 2 years. I have been out of school for almost 7 years, and a majority of my classmates are drowning in debt and working piddle a$$ jobs just to make ends meet and pay their student loans. It annoys me that suddenly now this is "news" - why wasn't it news seven years ago? Maybe some of these people wouldn't be in the shape they are in, if the media had listened or cared back then!
Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.I don't think most graduates in a similar position as Ms. Munna are idiots or irresponsible. They were misinformed like the rest of us. Students and their parents invest $100k for a degree from an elite institution because they believe it will land them a job that pays enough to pay off those loans in a reasonable amount of time. No one plans to default or flee the country when they sign up for a student loan. You get a degree from an Ivy League or top tier college and you expect to get a decent paying white collar job. I can't speak for third tier graduates, but back in the good ol' days, the majority of graduates from my college and law school found jobs that paid more than factory line workers. That is why people, and especially working class people with academically gifted children, believe higher education is a good investment - perhaps the only investment - that will allow their children to enter a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle.
Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
The financial aid office often has the best picture of what students like Ms. Munna are up against, because they see their families’ financial situation splayed out on the federal financial aid form. So why didn’t N.Y.U. tell Ms. Munna that she simply did not belong there once she’d passed, say, $60,000 in total debt?
“Had somebody called me and said, ‘Do you have a clue where this is all headed?’, it would have been a slap in the face, but a slap in the face that I needed,” said Cathryn Munna. “When financial aid told her that they could get her $2,000 more in loans, they should have been saying ‘You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.’ ”
That’s not a role that the university wants to take on, though. “I think that would be completely inappropriate,” said Randall Deike, the vice president of enrollment management for N.Y.U., who oversees admissions and financial aid. “Some families will do whatever it takes for their son or daughter to be not just at N.Y.U., but any first-choice college. I’m not sure that’s always the best decision, but it’s one that they really have to make themselves.”
The complications here go well beyond the propriety of suggesting that a student enroll elsewhere. Colleges don’t always know how much debt its students are taking on, which makes it hard to offer good counsel. (N.Y.U. does appear to have known about all of Ms. Munna’s loans, though.)
Then there’s a branding problem. Urging students to attend a cheaper college or leave altogether suggests a lack of confidence about the earning potential of alumni. Nobody wants to admit that. And once a university starts encouraging middle-class students to go elsewhere, it must fill its classes with more children of the wealthy and a much smaller number of low-income students to whom it can afford to offer enormous scholarships. That’s hardly an ideal outcome either.
Finally, universities exist to enroll students, not turn them away. “Aid administrators want to keep their jobs,” said Joan H. Crissman, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “If the administration finds out that you’re encouraging students to go to a cheaper school just because you don’t think they can handle the debt load, I don’t think that’s going to mesh very well.”
That doesn’t change the fact, however, that the financial aid office is still in the best position to see trouble coming and do something to stop it. University officials should take on this obligation, even if they aren’t willing to advise students to attend another college.
Is Munna to blame or should we start criticizing the universities and banks for lending young people money knowing that students usually start college with little idea of how to manage their finances or any sense of their income prospects in 4 years. What do you think?
Do you feel this way about your degree?"Going to college made my life worse," Enlow said Wednesday from near Jacksonville, Fla., where he lives. "That is something that I don't keep to myself. I tell everyone."I hope Enlow finds BIDER and the other school scam blogs just so he knows that he is no alone and that he is even better off than most law and graduate school graduates who owe much more than $36,000 in student loans. Several days ago, Angel posted a CNN story about a NYU graduate who owed $275,000 in loans. Of course, Enlow's alma mater is not amused and fired back with a lame response that didn't address the student loan and unemployment crisis facing most graduates today:His line of thinking isn't the kind that Purdue officials find amusing, nor are they too keen on the auction itself.
But Enlow, 29, said he considers himself stuck in indentured servitude to Sallie Mae, his lender, because he is unable to get a decent-paying job with his current degrees to start paying a $470 monthly student loan bill. In addition to the Purdue diploma, he obtained a philosophy degree from IU through IUPUI. That one is not for sale.
The eBay sale is part stunt and part hopeful act of desperation that an "eccentric millionaire" will pick up the tab. Either way, the Indianapolis native is serious about kick-starting conversations on the worth of a college education and how it can be paid off.
"The universities are handing out too many degrees that have zero real-world application," Enlow said. "It seems to me, almost any major in the humanities or liberal arts will not gain you employment with a bachelor's degree."Enlow admits to not having a clear post-college career path. During school he fell in love with learning -- reading classics and learning history -- and he assumed that after earning a diploma a job would come easily.
"I think that some of us still believe that when we walk across the stage and get that diploma that we are going to have some type of social status and businesses are going to look at us differently," he said. "But that is not true."
"A degree in the liberal arts is not an automatic ticket to a job, but then again, no degree is," said Irwin Weiser, interim dean of Purdue's College of Liberal Arts."However, studying any of the disciplines in the arts, humanities, or social sciences prepares students to be successful because they learn to think creatively, critically and ethically, and to communicate what they think effectively."Ebay later took down the sale today which violated its terms of use. Enlow even caught Sallie Mae's attention. The loan company contacted him yesterday to "discuss payment options". Hah. They contacted him to make sure he has enough money for next month's payment. Just another publicity stunt to act like they actually care.
"However, studying any of the disciplines in the arts, humanities, or social sciences prepares students to be successful because they learn to think creatively, critically and ethically, and to communicate what they think effectively."
Enlow said he would not contest eBay's decision.
"The dialogue has been started," he said. "What's done is done."
I'm a little late posting my thoughts since I only listened to the interview ten minutes ago. You can visit Fluster Cucked and Attorney to Temp to read what other scam bloggers thought about the NPR segment.
Reader "Minneapolis 3L" made the following comment about the interview in our open thread last night. I think his opinions sum up a lot of the sentiment I've been hearing around the web from scam bloggers and our readers. We all know that T14 and TTT grads can't find jobs. The question the mainstream media should be asking is why is the law school scam and outrageous tuition rates allowed to continue?
As the mainstream media slowly picks up on the story of law school being financial suicide for the vast majority of graduates, I noticed NPR did a story on Friday about underemployed law students. It was a strange format, a five-member panel of Georgetown law students. While the lead-in made it sound like NPR would tell everyone how much of a scam law school is, the piece turned out to be fluff, with all of the students saying something like "oh well, I won't make 160k right out of school, but I will have a decent life in government work." EVEN the 3Ls whose plan was to "move to California and shack up with my solo practitioner pal."
These 3Ls were a bunch of ninnies who were obviously hedging and not placing a toe out of line. They probably were lined up for the panel by GULC's career services office. Despite two or three of the panel members really having NOTHING solid and lined up, they made it sound like they were just happy to "settle" for a job that paid under 160k. No one came flat out and said "we are unemployed and grasping at straws, fuck you GULC for charging us 150k," even though that was clearly the situation for two, and maybe three, of them. Only two of them had real jobs, one with the federal mine safety agency, and one with some legal aid org on the West coast...sounded like volunteer work actually.
Anyway, I had high hopes for this story, but NPR dropped the ball and basically turned it into a fluff piece about how law school can still give you a great job in government or public interest, just not in biglaw anymore. LOL. I'm sure any 0L or their parents listening naively breathed a big sigh of relief and cut a check for their seat deposit in the class of 2013. "Well, I won't be making 160k at biglaw, but at least I will have a decent federal job and it's probably less stressful than biglaw anyway. Law school is a great choice."
I sympathize with these students because they aren't any better off than the rest of us and are in for a rocky year. Just give those 3Ls a few more years unemployed or underemployed in a job that doesn't pay enough to payoff their loans and they'll be a lot more frustrated with their situation than they are now. NPR can find plenty of T14 grads from several years ago who never found a job or were laid off and have been unemployed ever since. Graduates a few years in the real world are likelier to complain about their law school experience and troubles paying off their six-figure debt. But that is assuming the mainstream media wants to question the law school scam at all. As Frank at Fluster Cucked said:Mr. LEWIS: I think that a lot of the real problem that's happened at legal profession is that now we're suffering because the economics of the large law firm just doesn't work. You know, I think that's why you see not many of the firms have gone under, but one of the things that I hope that does come out of this is a restructuring of it.
And maybe law students are going to have to realize that coming out of law school after a three-year education and expecting $160,000 a year is just not a realistic business model.
Ms. BOGO: I do think that our generation be it our year or the year behind us and maybe the year in front of us or something like that, I think we did kind of get the rough end of a stick just because we didn't know that the economy was going to take a downturn when we signed up for X number of loans every year.
And if the economy does turn around, which I'm optimistic maybe because I have to be, but if the economy does turn around and law firms start hiring again, they're not going to hire us. They're going to hire the class that's behind us, who are coming straight out of law school, who they can train up in the way that they always have.
SIEGEL: Because this is a career in which you get on the escalator at a...
Ms. BOGO: Yeah.
SIEGEL: ...particular time, in a summer when you're at law school. They look you over and you look them over. And then you...
Ms. BOGO: Yes. Law firms generally don't hire you out of government or out of, you know, being a private practitioner. They generally hire you straight out of law school or from another comparable firm.
I don't know what NPR is like in other cities, but in my area NPR airs "support for NPR" ads from law schools, including one from Boston University (which airs nationally, I assume). Perhaps NPR doesn't want to risk angering its supporters. I suppose that that is a sensible policy, but it calls into question the network's journalistic independence.Much of the mainstream media is corporately owned or depend on the support of universities and large donors who are on the board of a university. I'm not holding my breath for the mainstream media to rock the boat if it means angering very rich and powerful people, whether they be in politics, business, or the education scam.
Posts
All Comments
Blog Template by YummyLolly.com - Header Image by Arpi
