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Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

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Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#71

Post by sthu11182 »

pkaye wrote: post #32
imcrs wrote: post #7

Law has changed since the 80s and 90s. The profession was much more of a bloodsport. Less cases settled, far less went to arbitration, and more money was spent when a case did go to trial. Nowadays the culture has shifted almost completely to keeping costs down and settling things outside of court -- either settling outright or through a mediated arbitration (much less expensive). It's no surprise to me that law scho…

Also I hear that computer automation is taking out the low hanging fruit in the legal profession like sifting through massive amounts of documents.

So is outsourcing.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#72

Post by ghaff »

guelo wrote: post #26
theVirginian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, engineering students statistically score highest on the LSAT out of any undergraduate degree

I think this is because an engineering undergrad degree is way harder than most other degrees except maybe pre-med types. That means there's a substantial weeding out effect plus all the extra studying helps shore up the general knowledge that the LSAT tests. In general, poli-sci or history majors have spent the previous four years idling. After I got my EE degree I took the GRE and GMAT and aced them, getting 95th+…

I wouldn't have called most of the classes in my MBA program easy or unrigorous. I didn't find just about any extremely challenging as I found some of my undergraduate engineering courses. It probably didn't hurt that I had worked for a few years and probably had significantly better work habits when I got my MBA.

It's also true that the non-quantitatively inclined do find some of a good MBA core curriculum pretty hard. I did some tutoring and in economics, among other things, and I had students who couldn't a simple equation. One once asked me to "explain how graphs work," i.e. basic x-y axis price elasticity, etc. Every few years there seems to be a book written by someone who really struggled with basic math in business school.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#73

Post by big_youth »

amyjess wrote: post #70
theVirginian wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting to read that. I have always thought of CS as a discipline that involves creating and testing competing explanatory models of the world similarly to the way that a lawyer might construct an argument to represent a series of events or a mathematician might construct an equation to represent a set/series of data.

You could also think of law as a form of code.

I think it's more like an api. You hack it to get what you want.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#74

Post by ptmcc »

voteapathy wrote: post #41

Well, I guess this is me? I had the ideal of going to law school several years ago, studied history and economics in college, with loads of public policy knowledge. Ultimately I determined that these fields actually don't interest me all that much. I mean, I had been reading texts on formal logic in my spare time because I found such subjects to be far more engaging. I enrolled for another Bachelor's degree a while a…

I did a BA+BS in History and Economics in undergrad intending to go to law school. Did undergraduate law review and everything. About junior year or so I realized I actually did not want to do that.

Now, 5-6 years out of undergrad I am a professional software developer without a formal CS education. I took a few CS classes and plenty of hard math as part of my Econ degree, but I don't hold a CS degree (or even a minor).

But I was always a computer geek from a young age. Through many years of interest, motivation, and self-teaching I worked in IT, then QA, and now development. I also work with many other non-CS-degree developers that are great.

You can definitely make a successful transition.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#76

Post by [deleted] »

geebee wrote: post #5

Interesting data, but I'm not sure the title is supported by the conclusion. The title reads "US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into engineering." This is backed up by data that shows law school enrollment declining and engineering graduate enrollment increasing. However, it's not exactly a secret that engineering graduate programs have higher international student enrollment than law schools. So we'd n…

[deleted]

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#78

Post by guyzero »

So... a lot of comments in this thread seem to equate "engineering grad school" with CS or EE.

There are some other branches of engineering too and the non-EE types outnumber the EE's. Pretty sure the programs in questions are mostly civil, mechanical, chemical, etc.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#79

Post by serve_yay »

woah wrote: post #8

We'd better improve our interview techniques before the flood of lawyer-like engineers who are only in it for the money arrives. My recommendation- avoid brain-teasers that can be crammed for. Assess based on open-source contributions, which show craftsmanship, architecture, and love of coding.

I've worked with some excellent former-lawyer devs. I think there is significant overlap between the ways a person must think as an attorney, and as a developer.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#80

Post by swampthing »

granfalloon wrote: post #37
geebee wrote: post #13

Another factor to consider here is a rise (if any) in engineering undergraduate degrees. I know that grad engineering degrees to law degrees seems like more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but there's a big difference. A history major who goes to law school goes from not lawyer to lawyer (assuming he or she passes the bar). Engineering graduate students, on the other hand, almost always have a background in their…

As a lawyer, I think I'd actually be in favor of the opposite approach -- law school (maybe just one year) with no bar exam. I guess the bar has some value as a "last line of defense" against totally incompetent people entering the profession [1], but it's really just a giant memorization frenzy with no real practical benefit. It's expected that you'll get a large chunk of the test wrong and forget everything in a co…

I don't know - I personally felt I learned a lot from studying for the bar. Sure, I don't remember most of the details - but I remember enough to have instincts and point myself in the right direction if I need to. And I definitely learned a lot more black letter law from studying for the bar than I did in law school. Frankly, I think I would have been well-served by having to study for the bar prior to law school.
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