Regret Attending Law School?

ariesathena
Sun, 23 Dec 2012 23:00:52 +0000

JonLaw: why do you regret the chem-e degree? (Just wondering - I didn’t regret getting mine, although nothing could have made me do a Ph.D. in it.)

NYULawStudent: for heaven’s sake, I’m a thirty-something attorney with educational credentials to match your own and work experience that leaves you in the dust, not some high school kid heading to Podunk U who needs the world explained to her.

You can argue anecdotes all day long, or argue the exceptions to the rule (e.g. investment bankers), but overwhelming salary data shows that recent college graduates with no specific skill sets are lucky to land any job, let alone one that pays north of $45k a year. Recent. College. Graduates. Got those three words? Because that group is the original subject of this discussion and the subject of my salary data.

Beyond that, your counterpoints are proving my point - that you can earn a decent salary doing a host of things, provided you learn a skill set and/or spend time moving up the ladder. Your counter-examples - electricians, retail managers, etc. - are all people who are not B.A.s fresh out of school with a mini-van of their college possessions; they are working people. You’ve done nothing to disprove my statement that it’s hard to earn the median household income straight out of college, nor my belief that working for a few years will rectify that situation. You certainly have not explained why it’s a bad idea to, at worst, learn an industry before starting law school, so that knowledge of that industry can be leveraged into a post-law-school-graduation job.