Hey, Ide...Law students sue law schools: "You sed I'd be able to get a job!"

[ulmont]

Also, I don't know about cost, but my impression is that time and effort needed to get a law degree is significantly lower than getting a medical or engineer degree. 

Untrue regarding engineering.  A law degree in the US is another 3 years of school after a 4-year bachelor's degree.  An engineer can begin a career with just the bachelor's degree, and even if they get a master's degree that's just another 1 year worth of classes and/or thesis.

The medical degree, of course, takes forever and you have to touch icky things with your hands.

[dps]

I could see getting a AAS in History at a community college. At ~100/credit hr, you could do that on pell grants alone.

Going to even a state school for 4 years+ for History? Pshaw. Silly.

I was actually a Physics student I just took lots of HIstory for...um...stupidity?  But it turned out to be how I was able to leave school with both a degree and my sanity.  Of course the fact I was stupidly taking extra courses was the reason I was losing it in the first place.  I took a history course every semester just for a break from the math and science you see.

But in my defense people were always feeding me all this crap about getting a well rounded education or some BS when it should have been: get skills and get a job.

There's something to be said about getting a well-rounded education, especially when roughly 1/3 of the people who graduate college ultimately wind up working in different fields than the field in which they hold their undergraduate degree.  OTOH, if there was more focus on acquiring job skills, maybe fewer people would end up working in different fields.  And at any rate, if you really want a well-rounded education, you can get an engineering degree and read history, philosophy, etc. as a hobby.

[PDH]

Going to even a state school for 4 years+ for History? Pshaw. Silly.

Hey now!  I actually kinda do work that requires my history degrees.

[dps]

Going to even a state school for 4 years+ for History? Pshaw. Silly.

Hey now!  I actually kinda do work that requires my history degrees.

All Hail PDH The Unique!

[Ideologue]

Going to even a state school for 4 years+ for History? Pshaw. Silly.

Hey now!  I actually kinda do work that requires my history degrees.

By teaching history courses that 90% of those enrolled will not use, and the remaining 10% will use to teach history courses that 90% of those enrolled will not use?

[Iormlund]

Also, I don't know about cost, but my impression is that time and effort needed to get a law degree is significantly lower than getting a medical or engineer degree. 

Untrue regarding engineering.  A law degree in the US is another 3 years of school after a 4-year bachelor's degree.  An engineer can begin a career with just the bachelor's degree, and even if they get a master's degree that's just another 1 year worth of classes and/or thesis.

The medical degree, of course, takes forever and you have to touch icky things with your hands.

Here engineering is much, much harder than law.

[OttoVonBismarck]

"Hard" isn't necessarily a measure of time. Engineering school here is four years but is undergraduate (starting right after High School.) Becoming a PE is harder and requires extra study after undergraduate.  A lot of engineers pick up a master's degree but it isn't "necessary" to be successful in the field, and engineering graduate school is only 2 years.

In total becoming a lawyer here takes around 7 years (I'm going on the assumption you graduate undergraduate in 4 years, though I think the numbers suggest most people take 5 years now), with 4 years undergraduate and 3 years of law school. But the 4 years of undergraduate can literally be complete fluff, you can major in political science, physical education, sports marketing etc and still get into the best law schools, so I wouldn't say that here in the United States law school is "harder" than getting a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, because Mech. Eng takes 4 years of extremely hard classes while law school takes a total of 7 years, three of which are considered very difficult and four of which can be complete fluff.

[The Brain]

Law is just make-believe stuff. My unbleached anus can do that shit in its sleep.

[Iormlund]

As an aside, I'm loving Stanford's Machine Learning course. If my classes were like that back in the day I might have stayed long enough to complete my degree.

[PDH]

By teaching history courses that 90% of those enrolled will not use, and the remaining 10% will use to teach history courses that 90% of those enrolled will not use?

10% is a wee bit generous...

[OttoVonBismarck]

Law is just make-believe stuff. My unbleached anus can do that shit in its sleep.

The practice of law is one in which you become an expert in extremely arcane rules and regulations, that through the government essentially all persons in a society to some degree have to contend with (creating a guaranteed base of customers who need such experts services.) Further, the arcane rules and regulations are by and large created by practitioners of law, thus insuring they become ever more arcane and thus creating sub-specialties in which persons can command higher fees for being expert in highly arcane rules specialized to certain subsets of the overall rules.

[Martinus]

"Hard" isn't necessarily a measure of time. Engineering school here is four years but is undergraduate (starting right after High School.) Becoming a PE is harder and requires extra study after undergraduate.  A lot of engineers pick up a master's degree but it isn't "necessary" to be successful in the field, and engineering graduate school is only 2 years.

In total becoming a lawyer here takes around 7 years (I'm going on the assumption you graduate undergraduate in 4 years, though I think the numbers suggest most people take 5 years now), with 4 years undergraduate and 3 years of law school. But the 4 years of undergraduate can literally be complete fluff, you can major in political science, physical education, sports marketing etc and still get into the best law schools, so I wouldn't say that here in the United States law school is "harder" than getting a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, because Mech. Eng takes 4 years of extremely hard classes while law school takes a total of 7 years, three of which are considered very difficult and four of which can be complete fluff.

I am not sure if you are right that the 3 years of law is really hard. There is a lot of stuff to memorize, sure, but that's not rocket science - most of it is rote memorization. Even a monkey can do it. Compare that to stuff like advanced mathematics where if you don't get it, you don't get it, no matter how much time you spend reading and memorizing the books.

[OttoVonBismarck]

It really depends I suppose. As with most of the service academies, at West Point the engineering program is one of the largest (perhaps largest) on campus, so I went to school with a lot of engineering students. I definitely think a great many lawyers would not have been able to pass their classes. But I also know a lot of the engineers I went to school with had very questionable ability to do things like study past court cases and really understand the arguments and how they could apply to other situations. Which, my understanding is that at least in the U.S. reading past court cases is a huge part of law school. Engineers aren't all reading comprehension deficient, but as with most things stereotypes exist for a reason. A huge portion of the guys I knew who were engineering majors struggled mightily with any class where they had to do extensive writing or research.

[Barrister]

I did a science degree in undergrad (geology), and then a law degree.

It's only my own personal experience, but I found that my B.Sc. was much much harder than my LL.B.  Like orders of magnitude harder.

[The Brain]

I took a law course once (we had to take some non-science courses, I took law and economics). It was a pretty good course btw, I liked it. Completely different subject from the math, quantum physics etc stuff that I did normally.