NOTE: This post also appears here at Time To Keep Score, a blog to which I'm grateful to have been invited to contribute. There's a good group of writers over there. It's a good read and I recommend it highly. Now to the post...
As I'm neck deep in finals and my eyes are growing dark and hollow in a Gollum-like manner as I've confined myself to the indoors to study, this topic is particularly near and dear to my heart. As I interact more and more with attorneys, it's become clearer and clearer that law school serves two essential purposes to the profession it supposedly prepares students for: 1) give law firms some sort of cheap and easy way of rating applicants by looking at alma mater and GPA therein, and 2) big, fat, yet-sometimes-porous barrier to entry (I saw porous because I don't think I've heard any breaking news lately about the dearth of attorneys).
Almost every attorney I speak with either can't remember much of what they learned, and certainly can't remember the last time they used something they learned, yet we all must go through it. I've heard similar complaints of the medical profession and others, though I get the impression that it's a bit different for you MBA students and the like who pursue advanced education while working.
Certainly, 3 years and countless thousands of dollars is something of a barrier, but I think the largest barrier to entry in any profession is our country's overall education system. Add to those three years the 4 (or 5 for those like me who took their time) years of undergraduate study and to those the years of secondary education that did very little to prepare or motivate me towards my career choice, and we have a system that, in the name of general education (read "liberal arts"), does little to help young people funnel their way into fulfilling and meaningful careers and mostly just prolongs that moment, that very real and frightening moment, when you have to decide what you're going to do with your life.
If you're lucky, you get to have that moment. For many young people, that moment passes them by as they end up working ten years at a job they took after high school, "just to make some money before they figured out what else to do," with a very low ceiling and very few options. Can't we figure out a way to move the process along some?
I'll be 30 when I enter, as I said, the lowest rung of my professional ladder. Couldn't I have been working in a law office during high school summers, reviewing documents, learning the basics of Internet research and the nitty gritty of filing court papers? Couldn't I have bypassed all of that liberal arts education during my undergraduate years that was really just there to hold me over until law school?
Just a thought. And really, it has nothing to do with how sick of my finals I am. I promise.
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I got a lot out of my undergraduate studies and really enjoyed them. also, the thing about the law is -- there's so much to it. I think law school does a good job of preparing us to think analytically and teaches us how to process large bodies of information. I guess we could study law in undergrad like they do in other countries but the only real hamper I think comes from excessive law school debt, which I have too. The large debts force people to make job choices based almost solely on money-- can I pay my debt and also afford a house and a family? it cuts out many of the more fulfulling jobs. I chose to be a lawyer somewhere around the end of my sophmore year of college, which meant I got to be a history major (awesome!) and really and truly enjoyed all 7 years of education. I'll be paying for it for a while, but I'll be done paying before my kids start college, so that's good enough for me. I was also lucky enough to get one of those rare fulfulling jobs that allows me to pay my bills, save a small amount for the future, and not want to kill myself, like some of my friends.
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