25 years old and deep in debt

[Savonarola]

Here's one for you, Ide.  Maybe that Law Degree wasn't such a bad idea after all:

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth

Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians

You must have seen the warning a thousand times: Too few young people study scientific or technical subjects, businesses can't find enough workers in those fields, and the country's competitive edge is threatened.

It pretty much doesn't matter what country you're talking about—the United States is facing this crisis, as is Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, India...the list goes on. In many of these countries, the predicted shortfall of STEM (short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers is supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. A 2012 report by President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, for instance, stated that over the next decade, 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed. In the U.K., the Royal Academy of Engineering reported last year that the nation will have to graduate 100 000 STEM majors every year until 2020 just to stay even with demand. Germany, meanwhile, is said to have a shortage of about 210 000 workers in what's known there as the MINT disciplines—mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology.

The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas—temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade.

And yet, alongside such dire projections, you'll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.

A Matter of Supply vs. Demand: Every year U.S. schools grant more STEM degrees than there are available jobs. When you factor in H-1B visa holders, existing STEM degree holders, and the like, it's hard to make a case that there's a STEM labor shortage.
To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, we'll need to delve into the data behind the debate, how it got going more than a half century ago, and the societal, economic, and nationalistic biases that have perpetuated it. And what that dissection reveals is that there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone's been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today's students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering.

In preparing this article, I went through hundreds of reports, articles, and white papers from the past six decades. There were plenty of data, but there was also an extraordinary amount of inconsistency. Who exactly is a STEM worker: somebody with a bachelor's degree or higher in a STEM discipline? Somebody whose job requires use of a STEM subject? What about someone who manages STEM workers? And which disciplines and industries fall under the STEM umbrella?

Such definitions obviously affect the counts. For example, in the United States, both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Commerce track the number of STEM jobs, but using different metrics. According to Commerce, 7.6 million individuals worked in STEM jobs in 2010, or about 5.5 percent of the U.S. workforce. That number includes professional and technical support occupations in the fields of computer science and mathematics, engineering, and life and physical sciences as well as management. The NSF, by contrast, counts 12.4 million science and engineering jobs in the United States, including a number of areas that the Commerce Department excludes, such as health-care workers (4.3 million) and psychologists and social scientists (518 000).

Such inconsistencies don't just create confusion for numbers junkies like me; they also make rational policy discussions difficult. Depending on your point of view, you can easily cherry-pick data to bolster your argument.

Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor's degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them—11.4 million—work outside of STEM.

The departure of STEM graduates to other fields starts early. In 2008, the NSF surveyed STEM graduates who'd earned bachelor's and master's degrees in 2006 and 2007. It found that 2 out of 10 were already working in non-STEM fields. And 10 years after receiving a STEM degree, 58 percent of STEM graduates had left the field, according to a 2011 study from Georgetown University.

The takeaway? At least in the United States, you don't need a STEM degree to get a STEM job, and if you do get a degree, you won't necessarily work in that field after you graduate. If there is in fact a STEM worker shortage, wouldn't you expect more people with STEM degrees to be filling those jobs? And if many STEM jobs can be filled by people who don't have STEM degrees, then why the big push to get more students to pursue STEM?

Now consider the projections that suggest a STEM worker shortfall. One of the most cited in recent U.S. debates comes from the 2011 Georgetown University report mentioned above, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton of the Center on Education and the Workforce. It estimated there will be slightly more than 2.4 million STEM job openings in the United States between 2008 and 2018, with 1.1 million newly created jobs and the rest to replace workers who retire or move to non-STEM fields; they conclude that there will be roughly 277 000 STEM vacancies per year.

But the Georgetown study did not fully account for the Great Recession. It projected a downturn in 2009 but then a steady increase in jobs beginning in 2010 and a return to normal by the year 2018. In fact, though, more than 370 000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I don't mean to single out this study for criticism; it just illustrates the difficulty of accurately predicting STEM demand and supply even a year or two out, let alone over a prolonged period. Highly competitive science- and technology-driven industries are volatile, where radical restructurings and boom-and-bust cycles have been the norm for decades. Many STEM jobs today are also targets for outsourcing or replacement by automation.

The nature of STEM work has also changed dramatically in the past several decades. In engineering, for instance, your job is no longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts. To be sure, engineers in the 1950s were sometimes laid off during recessions, but they expected to be hired back when the economy picked up. That rarely happens today. And unlike in decades past, employers seldom offer generous education and training benefits to engineers to keep them current, so out-of-work engineers find they quickly become technologically obsolete.

Any of these factors can affect both short-term and longer-term demand for STEM workers, as well as for the particular skills those workers will need. The agencies that track science and engineering employment know this to be true. Buried in Chapter 3 of a 2012 NSF workforce study, for instance, you'll find this caveat: "Projections of employment growth are plagued by uncertain assumptions and are notoriously difficult to make."

So is there a shortfall of STEM workers or isn't there?

The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor's degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department's definition of STEM to the NSF's annual count of science and engineering bachelor's degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor's holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field.

Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master's and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there's the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades.

Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren't working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.

Spot shortages for certain STEM specialists do crop up. For instance, the recent explosion in data analytics has sparked demand for data scientists in health care and retail. But the H-1B visa and similar immigrant hiring programs are meant to address such shortages. The problem is that students who are contemplating what field to specialize in can't assume such shortages will still exist by the time they emerge from the educational pipeline.

What's perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage is that many studies have directly contradicted it, including reports from Duke University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Rand Corp. A 2004 Rand study, for example, stated that there was no evidence "that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon."

That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce. In computing and IT, wages have generally been stagnant for the past decade, according to the EPI and other analyses. And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers' and engineering technicians' wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers' wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: "At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive."

Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM labor shortage. "If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you'd be seeing very different behaviors from companies," notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. "You wouldn't see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you'd see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers."

"None of those things are observable," Hira says. "In fact, they're operating in the opposite way."

So why the persistent anxiety that a STEM crisis exists? Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and a senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls "alarm, boom, and bust." He says the cycle usually starts when "someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians" and as a result the country "is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically." In the 1950s, he notes, Americans worried that the Soviet Union was producing 95 000 scientists and engineers a year while the United States was producing only about 57 000. In the 1980s, it was the perceived Japanese economic juggernaut that was the threat, and now it is China and India.

You'll hear similar arguments made elsewhere. In India, the director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Vijay Kumar Saraswat, recently noted that in his country, "a meagre four persons out of every 1000 are choosing S&T or research, as compared to 110 in Japan, 76 in Germany and Israel, 55 in USA, 46 in Korea and 8 in China." Leaders in South Africa and Brazil cite similar statistics to show how they are likewise falling behind in the STEM race.

"The government responds either with money [for research] or, more recently, with visas to increase the number of STEM workers," Teitelbaum says. "This continues for a number of years until the claims of a shortage turn out not to be true and a bust ensues." Students who graduate during the bust, he says, are shocked to discover that "they can't find jobs, or they find jobs but not stable ones."

At the moment, we're in the alarm-heading-toward-boom part of the cycle. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government spends more than US $3 billion each year on 209 STEM-related initiatives overseen by 13 federal agencies. That's about $100 for every U.S. student beyond primary school. In addition, major corporations are collectively spending millions to support STEM educational programs. And every U.S. state, along with a host of public and private universities, high schools, middle schools, and even primary schools, has its own STEM initiatives. The result is that many people's fortunes are now tied to the STEM crisis, real or manufactured.

Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the "best and the brightest," and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to "suppress" the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.


For more, view the complete results from the latest IEEE Spectrum Forecasters Survey.

Governments also push the STEM myth because an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense. And the perception of a STEM crisis benefits higher education, says Ron Hira, because as "taxpayers subsidize more STEM education, that works in the interest of the universities" by allowing them to expand their enrollments.

An oversupply of STEM workers may also have a beneficial effect on the economy, says Georgetown's Nicole Smith, one of the coauthors of the 2011 STEM study. If STEM graduates can't find traditional STEM jobs, she says, "they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive."

The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn't exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their "bust" phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.

Emphasizing STEM at the expense of other disciplines carries other risks. Without a good grounding in the arts, literature, and history, STEM students narrow their worldview—and their career options. In a 2011 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, argued that point. "In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80 000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers," he wrote. "But the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly."

A broader view, I and many others would argue, is that everyone needs a solid grounding in science, engineering, and math. In that sense, there is indeed a shortage—a STEM knowledge shortage. To fill that shortage, you don't necessarily need a college or university degree in a STEM discipline, but you do need to learn those subjects, and learn them well, from childhood until you head off to college or get a job. Improving everyone's STEM skills would clearly be good for the workforce and for people's employment prospects, for public policy debates, and for everyday tasks like balancing checkbooks and calculating risks. And, of course, when science, math, and engineering are taught well, they engage students' intellectual curiosity about the world and how it works.

Many children born today are likely to live to be 100 and to have not just one distinct career but two or three by the time they retire at 80. Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.

at the last line.

I said, 'It's certain there is no fine thing   
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.

[Ideologue]

OK, but the difference between a STEM degree and a law degree is that you come out of school with a STEM degree and you have at least a few hard skills.  You might not even be able to sell those specific skills on the market, but people respect the bundle of skills that degree represents; whereas, to paraphrase someone (Paul Campos perhaps, but I could be wrong), a law degree represents to employers merely a bundle of expectations.

Also, are there any awesome movies about what lawyers make in their garages?  That's because we're rotten tertiary sector workers.  Without existing clients, we vanish.  The engineer controls their environment; the lawyer is dependent upon theirs.

Also also, I never said the economy didn't suck, and I certainly never said structural changes aren't afoot.  What I did say was that the only people left standing when the robots come will be the engineers who build and maintain those robots.

[Ideologue]

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/09/22/barrister-boom-and-bust/

Canada sucks as well.

Do we really need so many lawyers?

Barrister boom and bust: Legal fees are falling, pay is stagnant and jobs for law grads are harder to come by

by Charlie Gillis on Sunday, September 22, 2013 8:00pm - 0 Comments

Each year, just before Christmas, a cross-section of Toronto's legal establishment gathers for what might be the only truly indispensible event on its calendar. "Beef Night" is as old as the venerable Lawyers Club—est. 1922—and its name has hooves in the literal and figurative worlds. Fuelled by free beer, and by suppressed frustration, members rise during this banquet of prime rib to air "beefs" about the alternative dimension they inhabit. It might be the parsimony of the attorney general of the day. Or it might be the chafing effect of shabbily tailored robes.

The best "beefs" are rewarded with roasts donated by the Loblaws grocery chain, and the worst gets a turkey, but winning is never the point. A few years back, a barbershop quartet of articling students brought down the house with a ditty skewering their puffed-up bosses at a Bay Street firm—most of whom were seated in the room—illustrating the evening's traditional function as a leveller in a rank-obsessed profession. Any beef that runs too long gets gonged out with a cowbell that echoes through the rafters of Osgoode Hall Law School's regal Convocation Hall, whether it's delivered by a junior associate or a Supreme Court justice.

But in recent years, the evening has taken on a different hue, says John McLellan, a past president of the Lawyers Club, one reflecting a profession that feels increasingly under siege. "It's become a good pressure valve," says the commercial lawyer from Mississauga, Ont. "There's a fair bit of commiserating. A lot of these beefs are actually touching on raw nerves." Lighthearted collegiality still prevails, McLellan adds, but it increasingly feels like nostalgia for the days when lawyers felt lucky to do what they do, and an escape from modern reality. "I think there's a form of therapy in laughing at ourselves."

Commiserating? Therapy? What, an average Canadian might ask, could some of the best paid and educated professionals in our midst possibly have to worry about?

A lot, it turns out. Earlier this year, the annual fee and compensation surveys published by Canadian Lawyer magazine confirmed the growing fear that the profession has never truly recovered from the economic downturn of 2008. For the third straight year, median income of a first-year associate actually declined, hitting $66,000, or 13 per cent below the level in 2010. Signs were equally worrisome at the cigar-and-Courvoisier end of the field. Fewer than four in 10 partners surveyed were pulling down more than $250,000 per year, compared to nearly six in 10 in recession-ravaged 2009, while the super-well-off—those pulling down $450,000 or more—were also shrinking in number. They constituted just 12 per cent of partners in 2012, compared to 22.3 per cent in 2009.

These numbers are unlikely to elicit much public sympathy: On the pity hierarchy, lawyers fall somewhere below people who get sick after eating Cronut burgers. But the new indicators are the latest in a slew that have recently cast the legal community into a bout of existential dread. In June, the Canadian Bar Association published a report as part of its ongoing "Legal Futures Initiative" outlining a tempest of social, economic and technological forces shaking up the profession, from do-it-yourself clients to software that performs tasks previously done by lawyers poring over books. South of the border, where many a hotshot Canadian law graduate once found work, law schools are laying off faculty and slashing enrolment—in some cases, by more than half—as young American lawyers struggle to find jobs.

This is all occurring against a backdrop of what the bar association report describes as "potential excess capacity"—a polite term for the potential glut created over the last 13 years, when the professsion grew at five times the rate of the Canadian population. With more than 90,000 lawyers now licensed, it seems a matter of time before the laws of supply and demand take over. Increasingly, the report notes, "economic power has shifted to the consumer and client side, with buyers demanding more say on what lawyers do, how they do it and how much they charge for it." The authors herald an era of opportunity for firms and corporate legal departments to reinvent themselves, noting examples of individuals and firms "who have chosen to lead change, rather than just to react or ignore it." But they carefully skirt the question the metrics might raise to anyone outside the profession: Do we really need all these lawyers?

Maybe we shouldn't complain. The proliferation of lawyers is, after all, a byproduct of good economic fortune. Back in the late 1990s, when the tech bubble was considered mere froth and the housing market was just gathering steam, firms couldn't seem to get enough sharp grads to meet the demand for their services. On Bay Street, mergers and acquisitions drove growth, but the demand for workaday advocates—tax lawyers, real estate specialists—remained strong across the country and, by 2011, according to a Harvard Law School study, Canada had 2.8 licensed lawyers per 1,000 people. That's well below the 3.6 per 1,000 in the U.S., but it's above the ratio in the Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia (not all those lawyers, it should be noted, practise).

By nature, and by necessity, the legal industry has resisted the sort of cost pressures that limit the size of the workforce in other sectors. Martin Felsky, an expert of the use of technology in law who works for Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Toronto, recalls his astonishment when, as a law student in the 1980s, he saw how much of the sector's business was still done on paper. Part of that was born of legitimate concerns about clients' expectations of privacy and security. But a lot of it stemmed from habit. Lawyers tend to be word people, notes Felsky, and while they embraced practical tools such as cellphones and docketing software, they were slow to implement technology in their bread-and-butter work of research, discovery and document management. "Lawyers work on precedent," he explains. "Turning everything upside down by introducing technology is risky, and they're nothing if not risk-averse."

The result, adds Felsky, is a kind of pent-up demand for efficiency that is only starting to reshape the sector: "We're on the threshold of a very big change." Case in point: the growing use of so-called "e-discovery" services to identify relevant documents in civil and commercial cases. In the old days, at the onset of a major suit, big firms might have dispatched teams of lawyers armed with production orders to prowl the filing cabinets of companies and individuals involved. Today, many of the relevant documents would be held in databases, servers and email inboxes. To get them, firms can hire an outside contractor such as Commonwealth Legal, a Canada-wide company that uses software to crawl servers, hard drives and the web in search of material pertinent to the case.

Second case in point: the rising phenomenon of "offshoring" legal work to low-cost jurisdictions such as India, where well-educated, English-speaking lawyers will perform mundane work, such as drafting standard-form contracts, for about $25 per hour. That's about one-eighth the rate of an associate in this country, and with the ability to transmit documents instantly and securely, it's a wonder more firms and clients don't take advantage of it (it's much more common in the U.S.). The few overseas outsourcing companies working here deny they're taking jobs away from Canadian lawyers. But there's no denying the basic economics: "The cost of living in India is a fraction of what it is in other developed country jurisdictions," Gavin Birer, founder of Legalwise Outsourcing Inc., told National, the house magazine of the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) in 2011. With 35 lawyers operating in two offices in Bangalore, Birer's company has landed a number of blue-chip clients, including the consumer-credit reporting agency Equifax, while a growing list of law firms also avail themselves of his service. "If you're not [outsourcing]," he asks, "are you truly giving value to your clients?"

The sanguine spin on this would be to describe it as the natural evolution of a sector that will always be relevant in a thriving democracy. For all their bad press, and for all the lame jokes, lawyers are, in some sense, avatars of civilization and the healthy enterprise that takes place within it. But it's hard not to look upon recent developments as something broader—an end, perhaps, of public deference toward the industry's business model. Not only are corporate clients demanding that firms justify their fees, and asking pointed questions about exactly how they do their work, regular folk are doing all they can to get justice without them. With laws, judgments and rules of procedure now available online, recent studies suggest as many as six out of 10 people in Ontario and B.C. are going it alone in family court, while almost as many are doing so in civil court.

The underlying economics are well-known: Everyone from provincial cabinet ministers to Beverley McLachlin, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, have lamented that average Canadians have been priced out of the market for legal services. (Surveys suggest lawyers with about 10 years of experience charge, on average, just over $300 per hour.) Less understood is the attitudinal shift behind it, including the perception that the justice system is a closed community, set up not to deliver justice but to serve the needs of lawyers. Last winter, that sentiment boiled over in Sarnia, Ont., when a group calling itself Canadians for Family Law Reform protested outside the city's provincial courthouse, claiming lawyers were deliberately stoking animosity between parties in divorces in order to make more money. "I think most people think, at the start of a legal matter, 'Oh I gotta get a lawyer,' " says Jim Canie, one of the protestors. "But if you can keep lawyers out of it, you're better off. It's a close-knit community and no one wants to do anything to change it."

The question now is what the convergence of these changes means to the sector as a whole—whether, in short, lawyers are the next victims of the brave new digital world (behind travel agents and print journalists). So are lawyers doing things they don't need to be doing? If so, could we do with fewer of them?

Fred Headon pauses a long time at the question. The newly elected president of the CBA has just finished painting an image of the law firm of the future, working from an unexpected model. "When I visit the dentist," he says, "I've dealt, before I leave, with two or three people other than the dentist, each of whom is trained when to bring in the professional when need be." Paralegals, mediators and e-discovery specialists could work together in the same way, says Headon, thus lowering client costs and speeding up the process. But that doesn't mean the profession is about to take a haircut, he stresses. "People's lives continue to get more complex. There will always be new and unforeseen ways that questions of fairness will arise. For that reason, there will always be a good demand for lawyers."

Maybe, but pressure on the profession is steadily rising. A survey of 179 firms by Canadian Lawyer pegged the average price this year of a two-day civil action (not including trial) at $18,420, down from $24,318 in 2011, while clients appear to be getting fussy about the quality of service they receive. Lawyers with one year of experience are able to charge only 75 per cent of what a lawyer with five years of experience charges, compared to 81 per cent last year. And, once again, law graduates are having trouble finding work: Some 15 per cent in Ontario were unable to land articling positions coming out of university this year, while, anecdotally, a growing number of those who've been called to the bar say they're settling for non-permanent positions.

These harbingers are commonly chalked up to the sluggish economy, with the assumption that new ways of doing business will right the ship. A report produced through the CBA Futures Initiative cites 14 innovative approaches, including a Montreal-based firm that farms out lawyers to serve as in-house counsel on a temporary basis, as well as a U.K.-based outfit that has dispensed with billable hours, providing legal services instead for flat fees (starting price of a divorce: $1,600).

Some commentators, however, warn against the focus on the bottom line, saying the response will further erode public faith in lawyers and the justice system. Philip Slayton is a retired lawyer and academic whose 2007 book Lawyers Gone Bad turned the profession on its ear by exposing cronyism and unethical practices widespread in the early 2000s (it was famously—or infamously—excerpted in Maclean's under the cover line "Lawyers are rats"). The profession today is "changing itself in a way that is not to its advantage," Slayton says, adding, "There used to be a sense among lawyers that there was more to the job than making money. You were part of the justice system in a democratic society. You had obligations to that society as a whole. Now, it's increasingly come to be regarded by those in it as a business, like any other business. The emphasis is on profits and the bottom line."

Whether that's a bad thing is debatable. These days, clients seem more interested in lawyers they can afford than ones with a sense of noblesse oblige. And let's face it: Some traditions are best consigned to history. Consider the standard-issue black satchels in which lawyers and judges carry their court robes. Legend has it they started in the 19th century as cash bags that barristers would thrust toward their clients to avoid the unseemly spectacle of taking money from the great unwashed. Hard to imagine today's lawyers having any such qualms. But if they did, they'd best get over them quick. Some enterprising soul—inside or outside the profession—might sweep in to steal their business. That's one lament no one wants to hear about on Beef Night.

LOL, "avatar of civilization."

Anyway, the most salient thing seems to be the nearly sixth part of Canadian LL.B.s who don't have articling positions, and the increasing penetration of just-in-time lawyering into the American Tundra.

Also, if you're paying $25 an hour for offshore lawyers, you're paying too much.  You could get Americans with actual legal educations to do that for $20--or less.

[Savonarola]

Also, are there any awesome movies about what lawyers make in their garages?  That's because we're rotten tertiary sector workers.  Without existing clients, we vanish.  The engineer controls their environment; the lawyer is dependent upon theirs.

In lawyer movies lawyers get to right society's ills.   

[Admiral Yi]

In lawyer movies lawyers get to right society's ills.   

Lawyers care about, or at least work in, the tail ends of outcome distributions.  They save individuals, not entire societies.

[Savonarola]

OK, but the difference between a STEM degree and a law degree is that you come out of school with a STEM degree and you have at least a few hard skills.  You might not even be able to sell those specific skills on the market, but people respect the bundle of skills that degree represents; whereas, to paraphrase someone (Paul Campos perhaps, but I could be wrong), a law degree represents to employers merely a bundle of expectations.

An undergraduate degree in engineering will give one an understanding of the fundamentals of the math and science behind technology.  There are some ancillary skills needed, computer programming and introduction to some software packages used in industry.

How is a law degree different?  As I understand it you study the fundamentals of jurisprudence and gain some ancillary skills (knowledge of legalese and the ability to write in it.)  Even if you didn't become a practicing lawyer, wouldn't this skill set help you in your career?

[Ideologue]

Possibly.  Sometimes I do wonder if the degree to which I denigrate liberal arts diplomas and JDs is my internalization of the degree to which the economy seems to denigrate them.

[Jacob]

Possibly.  Sometimes I do wonder if the degree to which I denigrate liberal arts diplomas and JDs is my internalization of the degree to which the economy seems to denigrate them.

It's probably about 60% of the reason, with the remaining 40% being you internalizing the way other people denigrate them. You're a sensitive young man

[Ideologue]

No, I think there is an objective component.  Clearly being able to do calculus and being able to read are two very different skills, and one is rarer and more valuable than the other.

[Jacob]

No, I think there is an objective component.  Clearly being able to do calculus and being able to read are two very different skills, and one is rarer and more valuable than the other.

The point of a liberal arts education is not "to read"; it is to construct and clearly articulate an argument, to do so on a solid foundation of research and inquiry, and to cogently evaluate the arguments of others.

[Ideologue]

OK, "read and write."  But, ironically, that doesn't address the crux of my argument, which is that STEM degrees represent, on average, a more valuable potential employee due to the involved skills being rarer and more difficult to develop.

Especially since dumber students gravitate to the humanities due to their ease, but that is, I concede, a somewhat unrelated issue.

[Jacob]

OK, "read and write."  But, ironically, that doesn't address the crux of my argument, which is that STEM degrees represent, on average, a more valuable potential employee due to the involved skills being rarer and more difficult to develop.

I think you are making broad sweeping generalizations to support your argument, which doesn't reflect well on the quality of your liberal arts education.

Especially since dumber students gravitate to the humanities due to their ease, but that is, I concede, a somewhat unrelated issue.

If the liberal arts are taught badly and the qualifications are too easy to get, that reflects on how they are taught and how the qualifications are obtained, not on the value of liberal arts themselves. The same holds true for the STEM fields, by the way.

[CountDeMoney]

I think you are making broad sweeping generalizations to support your argument, which doesn't reflect well on the quality of your liberal arts education.

[Malthus]

Possibly.  Sometimes I do wonder if the degree to which I denigrate liberal arts diplomas and JDs is my internalization of the degree to which the economy seems to denigrate them.

That depends on where you are standing.

In my family of three brothers, one (me) went into law as you know, one into engineering (specifically, materials science engineering) and one into physics; and of the three, the economy has rewarded me the most if measured purely financially, even though I personally would concede that my brother the physicist is the guy with the most education and most difficult to master field, and my brother the engineer is doing stuff that is the most obviously useful to humanity (that is, studying how to make stronger metals).

[Ideologue]

Indeed.  And people like you--i.e., successful lawyers--is why there's a glut in the field.  It involves comparatively less rigorous education, but--until recently--it was believed to provide rewards out of proportion to that education.

Now the reality has come to light that ever since the 1990s JDs have become increasingly devalued (at the same time they became more expensive, thanks to Grad PLUS loans), and that the top flight rewards you represent have perhaps always been an anomaly, and are certainly not the norm today.

But anyway, at least both of us help pharmaceutical companies defend themselves from the slings and arrows of predatory plaintiff's attorneys.

Although for my part I more just take their money because courts force them to, than I "help" them, I guess.