An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

A 25% increase in 10 years is not double digit inflation / year. It's around 2% / year.

What planet do you live on? $195k is WAY above the average salary for a programmer. Only in SV or other super-hot markets will a 26 year old command a salary that high, and even then, only if they're amazing at their job. Most places, you're looking at $70-$100k.

I feel like the NYTimes missed that their data point is a school that simply isn't that good. They call it well-established to give you a sense that it's a mid-tier school. It isn't. The median student has scored at the 40th percentile on the LSAT, the 25th percentile student at the school has scored at the 33rd percentile on the LSAT. In 1600-point SAT terms, that means the median student is around a 933 out of 1600 on the SAT.

The article notes that the person passed the bar on his first try. Indiana and Illinois (the two states grads from Valparaiso usually take the bar in) are 80.93% and 89.38% for first-time takers. So, noting that you passed the bart the first time doesn't seem to say much given the high pass rates in those states.

Honestly, is the story more that they picked a case from a school that just has mediocre students? What is the comparison between students who go here for law school and students that go to undergrad institutions with 900 SAT scores?

Are people who are well below median in tech really doing that well? For example, a friend of mine went to a top-50 school and has a BS in Computer Science. They can't find employment as a SWE because they're not that good (they got through the courses with a combination of a lot of TA help and sheer force of will). They're working for a tech company in a combination of a support and project management position. And that's someone who was smart enough to get into a top-50 ranked undergrad institution. Are people who are mediocre and attend an undergrad institution whose median SAT score is in the 900s getting jobs as SWEs with a BSCS? Are they taking adjacent positions where a BSCS might be seen as an "advantage", but not totally related to the work? Are they taking IT-related jobs?

It just seems like the story here is that people who are below median don't magically become 75th-90th percentile by a certificate or degree - and that mediocre law schools have been promising that dream to people. In the tech area, we have these bootcamp schools, but at least they're not charging students a couple hundred thousand. Like, if you spend $15k on a bootcamp and come out with a $60k salary, that might seem low compared to the dream of six-figures at Google, but you aren't saddled with a lot of debt. http://report.turing.io/ - Turing has reported that the average salary is $74k for their graduates which is respectable, but if they were taking $200k from students and 3 years of missed wages and 25% of students were earning under $60k, I think it would be the same situation - they'd be saddled with debt and even if they're earning more than they used to be, they're not earning a lot compared to the debt. But Turing isn't taking that amount of time or money and so if a student comes out with a somewhat mediocre salary by CS standards, they didn't waste a lot of time/money and might be earning a reasonable bit more than before.

And the thing is that places like Turing probably get people who might have done an undergrad at a good school, just not in CS. These are smart people who just lack a specific skill rather than below average people who also lack a specific skill. I mean, give me someone who studied at Boston College and I'm getting someone smart who just might not know any programming. Bootcamps might be getting a lot of those people - smart people who just don't know programming. Now, that doesn't mean that any smart person can make a great SWE, but it's a much better starting place than someone who is below average.

A better story would have been trying to figure out how much value add schools provide. Are elite institutions taking people who would otherwise be successful and marking them as such? Are mediocre institutions not improving outcomes for their students? To what extent do degrees actually improve student outcomes? People who go to schools and graduate schools have historically been privileged people - those who are smart enough to get in and those who are rich enough that they can afford it. Today, loans, a delay in marriage and child-having age, a proliferation of schools, etc. mean that way more people can go to post-secondary institutions. I don't know how much schools improve human capital, but that's definitely a story. Maybe elite schools do improve human capital a lot because really smart people can use education a lot. Maybe mediocre schools do well for some students and not others. These are important questions. These are questions unanswered by a NYTimes article pretending a mediocre law school with mediocre students means that no one is hiring lawyers.

While some US law schools offer what are termed masters (LLM) and doctoral (often 'SJD' or 'JSD' or the like) advanced degrees in law, few law professors (other than those with a first law degree from outside the US) have such degrees. (Edit: It's somewhat more common to see law professors with a JD and a PhD in some other field such as economics or history, but this is still not the typical profile of a law professor at any tier of US law school.)

At least at the relatively elite law schools, law professors do tend to be hired not too many years out of law school, often following a prestigious federal judicial clerkship and perhaps a couple of years of a stint at a top law firm. (That's probably mostly because those are the relevant biographical characteristics of those doing the hiring.) It is relatively uncommon to hire very experienced professionals (apart from adjunct positions). As you move to less elite tiers of law schools you see more ordinary faculty drawn from experienced professionals not necessarily having the cookie-cutter star credentials new hires at the elite schools have.

First year classes may be taught by either very experienced law professors or fairly junior ones.

In Germany the consensus is that there are so many underutilized lawyers that they resort to shady business tactics like cease and desist as a model of income, looking for opportunities to threaten website operators or trick users with traps and later c&d. And then we have pedagogically incapable and unqualified teachers who only are equipped with field knowledge (math, history, etc.) but are in no way able to teach humans anything, making one wonder if more of the smart enough population should consider education, though that would require reasonable wages. I can't help but think there are not many societies that favor education as importantly as it should, if we consider what teachers and public researchers can make.