Posted on 01/15/2009 10:10:48 AM PST by rabscuttle385
I got the same degree in the 80’s for the exact same reason. No math!
The one thing it qualifies you for is a job with the government doling out working people’s money to the non-working. Institutional thievery.
I am now an independant retail store owner married to a tradesman with his own trade shop. The only class I ever took that has ever been any use to me was the business law I took as elective because I was so sick and tired of sociology, anthropology and psychology.
That might work for a solo practitioner, but when you start getting up into the higher tier of law firms, your resume gets thrown into the trash if you don’t have a good law school listed at the top.
No question that when one is dealing with the a**h*** brigade that school matters more than ability or ethics. But who wants to work with them, instead the small pracices are the way to lots of monies when niched appropriately. And less (vulgar explitive)s.
Way back in the 70s, that $3,000 seemed HUGE to me. And I was a music ed major - not a hot field at that time.
We can’t keep bailing out everything forever. No, prices have to go down to what their actual value is. There is not going to be a bailout. The days of colleges holding onto their billions of dollars in trust funds and not using them while raising tuitions and continuing to hound alumni for donations, while at the same time offering worthless sh1t degrees needs to come to an end.
“That might work for a solo practitioner, but when you start getting up into the higher tier of law firms, your resume gets thrown into the trash if you don’t have a good law school listed at the top.”
....that was my daughter’s experiance....she was an honors grad at UNC-Chapel Hill Law...she got on at a 2nd tier firm in Washington DC...the top tier firms there were all looking for Yale, Harvard, Chicago ect...even so, she started at $125K which was more money than anybody in our family ever made....and BTW, because we sent her to a state school she was debt free upon graduation.
Exactly. I do not feel sorry for these idiots at all.
Most of the shysters you see chasing ambulances went to crappy law schools, so I wouldn't be too quick to conclude that going to a less prestigious law school leads to a more ethical lawyer. As for ability, firms tend to play the odds- the Harvard lawyer is usually a safer bet to be a good attorney than someone who went to a fourth-tier law school.
But who wants to work with them, instead the small pracices are the way to lots of monies when niched appropriately
I got lucky when I lateraled a few years back to my current firm. I'm working at a large DC law firm with nearly a zero asshole quotient.
Dave Ramsey fan cash is king ping!
Debt is much uglier than many people realize. This article is precisely why I kicked Sallie Mae out of her bedroom at my house.
If you would like to be added to the “Live like no one else, so that you can LIVE like no one else” list, feel free to Freepmail me.
Probably from idiots who can't be bothered to read the entire column.
By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job.Sounds like it worked out very well actually. Would you accept a $70,000+ annual pay raise in a secure job if you had pay off ~$100,000 once?
With interest accruing at up to 12% a year ...Sounds a bit high to me, but that works out to $23,000 of interest per year. With *two* 6-figure jobs, plus moonlighting, that should not be too bad.
... come up with $145,000 in loan payments ...OK. So they paid the $23,000 in interest, and over $100,000 of principle. In other words, in just one year, they were able to pay off over 1/2 of a debt accumulated over 7 years.
that whittled away only $21,000 in principalAnd here's where I call B.S.
They probably own $120,000 of brand new car, go out to eat at lunch and supper every day, pay a huge rent on some place that builds no equity and gives no mortgage deductions. Among other things.
Thanks. I wasn’t sure, but certainly thought that to be the case.
I got lucky when I lateraled a few years back to my current firm.
Lucky or desensitized.
Lucky. 9:30-6:30 are pretty much standard working hours for me. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've had to work weekends. I've never billed more than 1975 hours. Pay is just a little bit below market.
It's not the same degree, though. If a person has an opportunity to get into a "name" school--particularly for post-graduate work--and chooses not to go because of money, that person is being foolish. There are a lot of opportunities available to people that graduate from those types of schools that simply aren't there to the person that graduated from the commuter school.
Community College for 2 years. State college for 2 more. Low debt and a degree. You want a master’s? Get a job and save some money.
Small practices have lots of middle class lawyers. Nothing wrong with that, but certainly not "lots of money." These firms do things like insurance defense work and pay their lawyers $50k for lots of work on repetitive and mundane cases. A decent living, but nothing special.
If you mean plaintiff's firms, then it would have to be a very unique situation, since you're never going to make equity partner in a plaintiff's firm unless you're bringing in lots of clients, and if that were the case, why are you partners with someone else in the first place?
A relative of mine who has five children, all worked their way through Rutgers Univ. in NJ. All very successful today with no loans.
Cousins who worked their way through Ohio St. Univ. and others.
A friend’s dau who works full time here at a major defense contractor during the day and student at Univ. of San Diego School of Law at night.
The key word is Work, why many who make it a profession attending school so they don’t have to work and face the real world.
Yeah, ditto most liturature and philosophy depts. I realized this years ago after reading Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. That book was published during my last semester of college and confirmed to me that I'd been swindled. I remember thinking, "People will stop attending these tony schools and paying outrageous fees when they find out what's being done to them." Over the years I've been amazed at the staying power and effectiveness of the corrupt humanities depts. Their ability to reproduce "Leftism" (or Deconstructionism/Frankfurt School/neo-Marxism, whatever you want to call it) helped give us the voters who elected Obama.
It would be a great thing if the charlatans running the humanities dept scams had to face economic realities and scale down or close, just like any other losing enterprise.
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