Paul Gowder Tells Undergrads "Don't Go To Law School"
Over at Law and Letters, Paul Gowder has a post entitled "Why You Shouldn't Go To Law School." A taste:
My aim here is to come up with the definitive anti-practice-of-law essay, one to which I and others can point bright-eyed undergraduates to for some time to come. What follows is a loosely divided list of things that you might not know about the practice of law, and which should give you pause before you invest three years of your life and countless thousands of dollars in tuition and opportunity costs to go to law school. Law school really has little value other than to prepare you for a legal career of some sort. If you want to go into business or consulting, an MBA is quicker and provides more useful skills ("Thinking like a lawyer" is a bug, not a feature.), and, while lawyers do enter other careers (prominently writing for some reason) there's no reason to believe anything they got in law school put them there.
As I said, there are some people who are happy with the practice of law. But the data are not in your favor. Make this decision very carefully. Don't just drift into it because you're not sure what else to do with a humanities degree.
Why do you think you can defy the data? You probably can't.
My aim here is to come up with the definitive anti-practice-of-law essay, one to which I and others can point bright-eyed undergraduates to for some time to come. What follows is a loosely divided list of things that you might not know about the practice of law, and which should give you pause before you invest three years of your life and countless thousands of dollars in tuition and opportunity costs to go to law school. Law school really has little value other than to prepare you for a legal career of some sort. If you want to go into business or consulting, an MBA is quicker and provides more useful skills ("Thinking like a lawyer" is a bug, not a feature.), and, while lawyers do enter other careers (prominently writing for some reason) there's no reason to believe anything they got in law school put them there.
As I said, there are some people who are happy with the practice of law. But the data are not in your favor. Make this decision very carefully. Don't just drift into it because you're not sure what else to do with a humanities degree.
Why do you think you can defy the data? You probably can't.
posted by Belle Lettre at 1:02 AM
2 Comments:
The accreditation will look pretty on my wall next to my security and private investigator license.
Children, do not be astronauts since most don't go to space.
Do not strive to excel since that path has been well trodden.
Anonymous's comment for the win!
Post a Comment
<< Home