Honestly if you look at the direction the US is going, federal politicians are getting wealthier and wealthier while the middle class erodes into a larger and larger dependent lower class.
Most of our congressman are lawyers.
You have about two paths to wealth in America. Start a tech company hope to get bought big tech, become a lawyer hope to become a high up well connected politician. Because those connections are proving to pay off.
Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
211–220 of 296 posts
Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money isn't everything, there's a status component related to those professions (especially if you are coming from poorer background) and a lot of people like the idea of being a doctor or a lawyer. TBH you have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy sitting in front of a screen 8H a day to work on stuff most people would find meaningless (eg. getting paid to optimize ad revenue, speed up PHP execution to save data…
and that perception of status is largely dictated by the mass media and movie businesses. Portraying a job as high-status makes it high-status in the eye of the audience, that's why it's generally accepted as higher status to be an actor than to be a backend developer. You 'll rarely see a show that ridicules actors but computer nerds are regularly ridiculed
I mean that's part of it, but the media/movie industry doesn't operate in a vacuum. People would rather watch a medical or legal drama than a drama about plumbers. Dealing directly with other people in high stakes situations lends itself to an entertaining show.
And even if most doctors/lawyers don't have a job as interesting as the stories depicted in Hollywood, they still don't have to get their hands dirty in the way that plumbers do. I'm also not sure that being a pediatrician or a dude who writes wills is considered high status, higher than a plumber sure, but not the same thing as being a specialty surgeon or a defense attorney.
Further, the circles that "high status" workers run in are more likely to include extremely successful/wealthy people due to friends made in college and grad school. The top 20 medical schools churn out over a thousand students per year, and some of those will surely go on to do high profile work.
Engineers are a bit of weird middle ground in this - computer nerds that run in elite circles (top schools, successful in SV, etc.) or that work in high stakes environments (mainly security) don't seem to be considered low status or ridiculed by the media. There may be a few nerd stereotypes mixed in, but if you watch enough medical or legal dramas you will find stereotypes for those professions too. Same goes for finance bros, cops, teachers, etc.
However, I agree a random computer nerd is considered somewhat low status. People that work in IT or are developers at random companies are looked at a bit more like tradespeople. It's not too surprising though that how hard a job is to get relates to its status.
Would the world be a better place if people stopped paying so much attention to status? Probably, I'm not saying that this perception of status is the right way to go about things, or even that the status "rankings" are rational. I'm just saying it is not caused by the media. Perhaps reinforced, but there are plenty of underlying reasons. Going to college was a high status thing even back when movies were still silent. Conversely, the US military has tried very hard to glorify itself in the media, but joining the military is still considered a low status thing to do.
Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it. Maybe for you. For me, when I was practicing, law was a very human-oriented thing. My job was about convincing people and companies to do things that they didn't want to do (mostly security). I felt like Charlie Sheen's therapist: If they don't make any changes the client will wind up in jail. But push t…
I will echo what sandworm says here. I went from a philosophy undergrad to law school to a law career to a coding bootcamp to a programming career. The job is certainly demanding and detail oriented. Analytical, I guess it depends on what you mean by analytical. What I became disillusioned with was how brutally incoherent legal arguments can be. And to be honest, the Python code I encounter is often in better English…
I am of the school that all laws are perfectly coherent. I read any vagueness as tacit permission for the court to figure it out for itself. So I don't see "loophole". Rather, I see the legislature granting permission to do something. That mindset means I never feel frustrated by poorly-written code. But when judges don't make sense, that is another story.
Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how high 5 figures is not high salary. 100k is literally double the average salary for the US, and 3 times the median wage. And a lot of people earning the median are also deep in student debt. If earning 3 times the median is not good money, maybe your view of what "good money" means something else. The lawyer median wage is 125k, and the 75 percentile is 186k. I consider 186k to be a high wage, it's 6 t…
> 100k is literally double the average salary for the US, and 3 times the median wage. I'm not sure what source you're using, but no, it isn't even double the median US salary ($56k): https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm It's good money, don't get me wrong, but it's not immediately worth it if you spend $200k paying for law school. Edit: I misread the data above, but I'm finding similar numbers from other sour…
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Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how high 5 figures is not high salary. 100k is literally double the average salary for the US, and 3 times the median wage. And a lot of people earning the median are also deep in student debt. If earning 3 times the median is not good money, maybe your view of what "good money" means something else. The lawyer median wage is 125k, and the 75 percentile is 186k. I consider 186k to be a high wage, it's 6 t…
> 100k is literally double the average salary for the US, and 3 times the median wage. I'm not sure what source you're using, but no, it isn't even double the median US salary ($56k): https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm It's good money, don't get me wrong, but it's not immediately worth it if you spend $200k paying for law school. Edit: I misread the data above, but I'm finding similar numbers from other sour…
That’s “Annual mean wage” not median wage.
Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
#216Here's some not so positive data - "recent University of Miami law school graduates borrowed a median of $163k, two years later were earning $59k or less."
Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fwiw I don't think that going to a non-top MBA is generally worth it either... It's very expensive and employer sponsorship isn't that common. But I'm not surprised to learn that most MBAs don't regret going since it's basically 2 years of partying with an internship in between (during which you mainly party). My partner's 2 years in bschool were 2 of the best years of my life.
Isn't that stressful for a regular person who has sub-100k in savings? Racking up debt while not earning any income for two years in your mid-20s or 30s would be pretty tough for me. I wouldn't feel like partying in that context.
From my experience with my partner's bschool, most of the classmates were either wealthy, or very talented and had sponsorship (or both)
Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knowing how to code prepares you to deal with lawyers that say something is complex but then you verbally break it down into an if-elseif-else in 5m and they get flummoxed. And when you find a possible bug / loop-hole / fuzziness, they tell you they will need weeks to research it on your dime when it has all the complexity of a stack overflow post.
It's not always (or even usually) cluelessness or malice. Law is somewhat like code, except it's like the worst Aspect-Oriented Programming codebase you can imagine - the source in front of you is never the full story. They may need the extra time just to go through possible interactions with codes, precedents, official interpretations, etc.
I once had the lovely task of turning law into code. 3 lawyers, 4 different judges, 3 officers/officials, and dozens of people the code applied to. The amount of 'law' was maybe 10 sentences. But there were books written on how to apply that small bit of law. That set was pretty solid and had 40 years of 'know how that works case law'. Then it got thrown out in court. Total rewrite. Same set of people again. But many had no idea how to even begin to apply that new law. It took nearly 2 years of wrangling with different law organizations to find out how is this going to be applied. It got so bad I was finding bugs in the law and loopholes just because I threw my hands up and exhaustively searched the whole space of actions. Even the guy who had the fun task of writing the law had reservations. I think they fixed the 'bugs' in a new rewrite a few years ago after it got thrown out again in court. Luckily I was out by that point.
Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
#219Other side of the coin: “Law school was once considered a surefire ticket to a comfortable life. Years of tuition increases have made it a fast way to get buried in debt. Recent graduates of the University of Miami School of Law who used federal loans borrowed a median of $163,000. Two years later, half were earning $59,000 or less. That’s the biggest gap between debt and earnings among the top 100 law schools as ran…
Is U of Miami a target school? Meaning do law firms come to campus in order to recruit? Because that is what matters for law school. If you're paying that kind of tuition, you owe it to yourself to do due diligence on how its graduates perform.
Back in the day you only had the school's published stats to go on. Those are gently manipulated to show the best possible outcome, e.g. "95% of students found employment within 6 months of graduation".
Today you have LinkedIn. Type in a search for U Miami and do a quick count of how many recent grads come up, and where they're working.
Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ask yourself this though: why aren't people going to trade schools more often? If it's such a high demand career, with such reasonable pay, then surely it should attract talent; especially when one considers the extreme affordability of trade school in comparison to university education. But we don't see this, why? I posit that it is because people who work trades are looked down on socially. People point at the mech…
People I know look at restaurant workers and retail store employees as the people you say "You go to college so you don't end up like them." I would never say that about mechanics, plumbers, and HVAC technicians. They have skills that I respect and value. I often ask them what was wrong and their analytic and problem solving skills often impress me. I got a new HVAC system with a 2 stage compressor. Everything was wo…
> People I know look at restaurant workers and retail store employees as the people you say "You go to college so you don't end up like them."
That certainly happens even more often, but within that statement is also an implication that one must go to college to avoid that kind of work. And why is that kind of work so bad? Mostly because they have to deal with people who treat them like garbage because they think so little of them.