25 years old and deep in debt

[Ideologue]

Jesus, that'd be insane.  There's like 11 in FL already.

[alfred russel]

Jesus, that'd be insane.  There's like 11 in FL already.

My father is retired from that state, that is why he was telling me. He could be wrong though, or I could be misremembering.

A person in our department is going to John Marshall Law School at night. Not sure what will happen when she graduates. She has had internships. She already has a job where is makes decent money. Theoretically she could transfer to the legal department of our company, but I'm not sure how possible that is. Your thoughts?

[Ideologue]

She probably won't be fired, which is a plus.

I'd need to know more about your legal dept's hiring practices to really say for sure.  Isn't it a Big 4 accounting firm?  My guess is that they hire from top schools.

However, it doesn't strike me as inconceivable at all that she could transition into a legal (or, even more likely, compliance) role, since she she's a known quantity to the firm, has skills the firm values already, is theoretically adding new ones, and hasn't been letting the current skills grow stale, which is perhaps even more important.  She's as well-placed as a non-trad can be: guaranteed continued employment in the old job at least (as guaranteed as employment ever is, anyhow), and with a resume that could make her JD, even from a semi-lousy school, a genuine plus factor.  Plus accounting and law are so closely allied that the two degrees are potentially very mutually reinforcing, especially with that work experience.  Ultimately, I think she'll be fine even if it doesn't get her what she hopes for.

That said, this is an analysis from an "is she destroying her life?" perspective.  If the question is less narrowly posed as "do I think she's wasting her money?" I think it's just as likely that her ROI won't be terribly impressive, even if she succeeds in a qualified way (it'll be even worse when you consider the amount of labor input) and that it may turn out to be a complete waste.  But it doesn't sound like she's gambling her entire future, just the price of the degree itself, which isn't half as terrible.

The problem most JDs have is that they go from the liberal arts into law school without any connections or any skills, and they come out with no connections as well as no skills, other than those which the JD confers.  These skills are very hard to define and evaluate.  In my own opinion the most important skill one learns in law school is toleration of extreme boredom for years on end.  There are also research skills (which one should have already learned in college) and writing skills (you can not just tolerate boredom, you can create it!).  Finally, there's that nebulous "critical thinking," although there are probably cheaper ways to learn how to make yourself and others unhappy.

In any event, many employers seem to have no problem quantifying the value of these skills as actively negative (I've heard it best described as "the JD represents a bundle of expectations rather than a bundle of skills," which has been confirmed by the experience of the post-crash classes and even been stated outright by at least one disinterested HR officer in an interview).  The upshot of this is that they get legal employment, or they get nothing (or next to nothing).

Since this doesn't apply to her, my take is: she's not pants-on-head retarded, and her course is not unreasonable, although I doubt it is the most profitable or happiest road she could possibly take.  (For example, why not an MBA?)

[Savonarola]

It's the beginning of the end for Thomas Cooley, the worst law school in America.

It's the end of the Cooley trade.     Who will Michiganders get to harvest sugar cane now?   

[Admiral Yi]

Hang down your head Tom Cooley,
Hang down your head and cry.
Hang down your head Tom Cooley,
Poor boy your're going to die.

[garbon]

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League
The nation's top colleges are turning our kids into zombies

In the spring of 2008, I did a daylong stint on the Yale admissions committee. We—that is, three admissions staff, a member of the college dean's office, and me, the faculty representative—were going through submissions from eastern Pennsylvania. The applicants had been assigned a score from one to four, calculated from a string of figures and codes—SATs, GPA, class rank, numerical scores to which the letters of recommendation had been converted, special notations for legacies and diversity cases. The ones had already been admitted, and the threes and fours could get in only under special conditions—if they were a nationally ranked athlete, for instance, or a "DevA," (an applicant in the highest category of "development" cases, which means a child of very rich donors). Our task for the day was to adjudicate among the twos. Huge bowls of junk food were stationed at the side of the room to keep our energy up.

The junior officer in charge, a young man who looked to be about 30, presented each case, rat-a-tat-tat, in a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. "Good rig": the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. "Ed level 1": parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. "MUSD": a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the "brag"—were already in trouble, because that wasn't nearly enough. We listened, asked questions, dove into a letter or two, then voted up or down.

With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, "PQs"—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: "no spark," "not a team-builder," "this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us." One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be "too intense." On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I'd been told that successful applicants could either be "well-rounded" or "pointy"—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.

"Super People," the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: They have mastered them all, and with a serene self-assurance that leaves adults and peers alike in awe. A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize 30 lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Nearly every single kid got every single line correct. It was a thing of wonder, she said, like watching thoroughbreds circle a track.

These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality is very different, as I have witnessed in many of my own students and heard from the hundreds of young people whom I have spoken with on campuses or who have written to me over the last few years. Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they're doing but with no idea why they're doing it.

When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education.

I should say that this subject is very personal for me. Like so many kids today, I went off to college like a sleepwalker. You chose the most prestigious place that let you in; up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth—"success." What it meant to actually get an education and why you might want one—all this was off the table. It was only after 24 years in the Ivy League—college and a Ph.D. at Columbia, ten years on the faculty at Yale—that I started to think about what this system does to kids and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it.

Ayoung woman from another school wrote me this about her boyfriend at Yale:

Before he started college, he spent most of his time reading and writing short stories. Three years later, he's painfully insecure, worrying about things my public-educated friends don't give a second thought to, like the stigma of eating lunch alone and whether he's "networking" enough. No one but me knows he fakes being well-read by thumbing through the first and last chapters of any book he hears about and obsessively devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing. He does this not because he's incurious, but because there's a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them.

I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment's notice.

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study's 25-year history.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. Once, a student at Pomona told me that she'd love to have a chance to think about the things she's studying, only she doesn't have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.

There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school "stifling to the parts of yourself that you'd call a soul."

"Return on investment": that's the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. What no one seems to ask is what the "return" is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?

The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think. That doesn't simply mean developing the mental skills particular to individual disciplines. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.

Learning how to think is only the beginning, though. There's something in particular you need to think about: building a self. The notion may sound strange. "We've taught them," David Foster Wallace once said, "that a self is something you just have." But it is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. The job of college is to assist you to begin to do that. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways.

College is not the only chance to learn to think, but it is the best. One thing is certain: If you haven't started by the time you finish your B.A., there's little likelihood you'll do it later. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted.

Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.

... [more in link]

[Valmy]

"Return on investment": that's the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. What no one seems to ask is what the "return" is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?

It is not the only purpose, but it is by far the most important one.  The reason non-wealthy people spend 10,000 a year for an educational program is to get a job.  I mean there are lots of other great things one might achieve in college but come on now.  The fact that every single job seems to require one, and the lack of one severely limits advancement even in the corporate drone world, indicates this is precisely what society forces you to do to get a job.

[Darth Wagtaros]

"Return on investment": that's the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. What no one seems to ask is what the "return" is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?

It is not the only purpose, but it is by far the most important one.  The reason non-wealthy people spend 10,000 a year for an educational program is to get a job.  I mean there are lots of other great things one might achieve in college but come on now.  The fact that every single job seems to require one, and the lack of one severely limits advancement even in the corporate drone world, indicates this is precisely what society forces you to do to get a job.

I concur.

[Malthus]

"Return on investment": that's the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. What no one seems to ask is what the "return" is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?

It is not the only purpose, but it is by far the most important one.  The reason non-wealthy people spend 10,000 a year for an educational program is to get a job.  I mean there are lots of other great things one might achieve in college but come on now.  The fact that every single job seems to require one, and the lack of one severely limits advancement even in the corporate drone world, indicates this is precisely what society forces you to do to get a job.

The issue really is this: in our society, we place very little value on expanding our individual conciousness (or whatever other hippy-dippy phrase you want to describe this notion  ). In the larger sense, it is presumed to be the most important thing you can do - but you must do it while spending your time usefully obtaining a career, usefully producing and consuming products and services.

Kids at university age, and who have the "privilege" associated with going to university, are caught between these two motives. They have been conditioned to think that expanding conciousness is the goal, better than any other; but at the same time, they are made aware (some for the first time in their lives) that they have been supported all their lives by the hard work of others, and they must now struggle and strive to support themselves in the big bad world outside of university. That world values money, the making and spending of.

Academics simply don't really feel this, because of course being an academic is in some ways like never having to face the big bad world. For them, the answer is obvious - expanding the conciousness *is* the most important goal, money comes from grant applications. There is a tendancy to look down on the business of getting a job outside of academia as squalid and grubby, a second-best for those who fail to successfully pursue an academic career.

   

[garbon]

"Return on investment": that's the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. What no one seems to ask is what the "return" is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?

It is not the only purpose, but it is by far the most important one.  The reason non-wealthy people spend 10,000 a year for an educational program is to get a job.  I mean there are lots of other great things one might achieve in college but come on now.  The fact that every single job seems to require one, and the lack of one severely limits advancement even in the corporate drone world, indicates this is precisely what society forces you to do to get a job.

But do you think that extends on same basis to people paying out $40,000 a year? Recall the article is largely an attack on those going to elite schools (in some of the parts I didn't post he drifts into some cursing ).

[CountDeMoney]

I really don't want to hear a fucking thing about the "negatives" about Ivy schools.  You go to one of those schools, your ticket is punched for life if it wasn't already, and your "return on investment" is limited only by your own imagination and inherent douchebaggery.

Same bullshit as the "money can't buy happiness" crowd.  What a bunch of bullshit.

[garbon]

You go to one of those schools, your ticket is punched for life if it wasn't already, and your "return on investment" is limited only by your own imagination and inherent douchebaggery.

Of course, that isn't want the article is really about. In fact by the end portion, a big complaint is about the existence of said elite schools - not on a price factor but that the people that come out of them are out of touch with those of lower socioeconomic standing / those of lower standing are disadvantaged.

[Savonarola]

This struck me as amusing:

Experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function, via the college essay. From learning to commodify your experiences for the application, the next step has been to seek out experiences in order to have them to commodify. The New York Times reports that there is now a thriving sector devoted to producing essay-ready summers, but what strikes one is the superficiality of the activities involved: a month traveling around Italy studying the Renaissance, "a whole day" with a band of renegade artists. A whole day!

Send those artists back to the reservation.   

[mongers]

This struck me as amusing:

Experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function, via the college essay. From learning to commodify your experiences for the application, the next step has been to seek out experiences in order to have them to commodify. The New York Times reports that there is now a thriving sector devoted to producing essay-ready summers, but what strikes one is the superficiality of the activities involved: a month traveling around Italy studying the Renaissance, "a whole day" with a band of renegade artists. A whole day!

Send those artists back to the reservation.   

I think the tick-box approach has been around a long time, just as North American tourists find it hard to resist doing London (tower of london), Stonehenge and Bath, so earlier upper middle class English visting the continent couldn't help but give into a rather superficial itinerary. 

[Savonarola]

I think the tick-box approach has been around a long time, just as North American tourists find it hard to resist doing London (tower of london), Stonehenge and Bath, so earlier upper middle class English visting the continent couldn't help but give into a rather superficial itinerary.

It's not the package tours that I find amusing; it's not how I prefer to travel, but many people seem to enjoy them.  Nor is it that you have to go on these package tours in order to become the "Right" sort of person to go to an Ivy League school.  After all in the 18th and 19th century in order to become the right sort of person to fit into British society a young man had to go on a grand tour.  What I find amusing is that there's an industry that exists to create package experiences that will become part of your college entrance essay.  It's American capitalism at it's finest.   

Though it just occurs, unto me, good sirs ( ) that maybe I'm thinking of this the wrong way.  VM could fund his retirement by selling passes for a day or a week for this forum as an package experience for a prospective college students.  Concrete!  Renegade lawyers!  The Japanese My Little Pony Space Confederacy!  Byzantium!  Dreadnoughts!  Angry white men!  Blueberries!  Film reviews for the Lumpen Proletariat!  If one can't craft a story of triumph and courage after spending a week with us he probably doesn't belong at Harvard.