Last Sunday’s Times featured an extensive article questioning whether law school is still a worthwhile investment. It primarily focuses on the debt woes of graduates from lower-tier schools who can’t find jobs or are forced to do soul-crushing legal temp work. It’s not the kind of thing that gets mention in the glossy brochures from law school admissions offices.
If someone asked me whether they should go to law school, I would try to probe their motivations. Only a select elite will land the six-figure associate positions that so many covet. And those jobs aren’t necessarily going to result in rich lives of contentment. A good legal education will teach you to think and write with articulate precision; skills that are in high demand by all kinds of employers. But most of those jobs won’t make you rich. In the final analysis, they must decide whether this particular sort of skill acquisition is worth the price of a mortgage.
