<p>I hope you’ll pardon the headers. I need to do SOMETHING to keep myself entertained while I study for the bar exam.</p>
<p>Posture: I think the strategic question has been pretty well-settled on this thread. If we were speaking to the person in question, I would probably scold him quite severely – but we aren’t. If it’s okay, I’d like to separate out the discussion point we all seem to be dancing around.</p>
<p>(Btw, aries, I haven’t really traced it all through, but I think the social responsibility question gets mooted by the fact that the law schools will give those scholarships out to somebody else. At first impression, I don’t think the result is that he’ll take money from the government that would otherwise have been taken, net, from a law school.)</p>
<p>Distinguishing Precedent:
</p>
<p>padad, your encouragement is obviously the appropriate tack, and congratulations to your daughter.</p>
<p>It seems to me, though, that your daughter’s situation is not quite like the OP’s. Your daughter is pursuing her dreams, yes, but she is doing so in very sensible, extremely competent ways. Of course you should encourage her to go to law school! She’s gotten admitted to HYS with some scholarships to T14! Discouraging her wouldn’t just be unempathetic – it would be incorrect.</p>
<p>But the situation on this thread is pretty different. In this case, the student is taking on debt that is horrendously – and, to boot, obviously – unnecessary due to some aversion to retaking the LSAT. I can’t exactly speak to why, and from the thread it sounds like the OP is a little bit baffled herself.</p>
<p>If your daughter had a very strong chance at reducing her debt by six figures or more in exchange for a few hours of studying and a few hours of test-taking – telling her to retake would not be “discourag[ing] her from pursuing her dream.” It would be believing in her enough to suggest that she could do better at pursuing her dreams.</p>
<p>Conflicts of Interests (and Dreams): See, here’s the thing about when folks discuss pursuing their dreams: they forget that people have lots of dreams. Buying a house. Getting married. Raising children. Traveling. Taking care of their parents. Having hobbies. Tucking your four-year-old in at night. Others that we can’t imagine, and certainly don’t appreciate fully when we’re 22 or 29 or 84.</p>
<p>And despite that, I see many folks my age pursuing ONE dream to the exclusion of all others. Make no mistake: six figures of debt will affect your entire life. It restricts the jobs you can take and the jobs you can leave, even if you discover six months in that you hate them. It changes the way you think about marriage, about whom and when you can marry. It affects the house you live in and the car you buy. It alters how many children you can have, how many assets you can accumulate, at what age you’ll retire, and what vacations you can go on.</p>
<p>That’s what this young man seems to be signing up for.</p>
<p>This is a more extreme scenario of course, but this woman’s family really should have encouraged her NOT to “pursue her dream.”
[Bar</a> exam was the test of time | bandy, exam, law - Life - The Orange County Register](<a href=“Bar exam was the test of time – Orange County Register”>Bar exam was the test of time – Orange County Register)</p>
<p>On Information and Belief: So yes, it is important to “believe in him” and “encourage” him. But telling him that he need not plan it out is a funny sort of belief, isn’t it? It’s a belief not that he will prove himself capable but rather than he will prove serendipitous.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing: I believe that this young man is more capable than he seems to believe. I believe that he is capable of studying, of retaking, of planning out his life so that one of his dreams does not crush the others. I believe, basically, that he has a very good shot at a much, much better life with a very, very small investment. He’s apparently not willing to do this, for reasons I can’t entirely fathom. Behavioral economics suggests that human beings are loss-averse and myopic; perhaps one of these explains his thinking.</p>
<p>I am getting doddering in my old age. He’s not here, and I had promised not to scold him. </p>
<p>In loco parentis: And that’s entirely the point. As a side character on one of my favorite television shows said: “We are what we are. And you can fight it if you want, but you’re just gonna fight with yourself.” We can strategize and scold and insult (and really I think we have been quite mild) as much as we like on this board, and it will make not a whit of difference because he’s not here.</p>
<p>I suspect that the metaphorical horse is out of the barn, and that continuing to fret and nag and scold will only cause him to dig his heels in more. Right now, he wants to go to law school. If we keep pressing him, he will sort of want to go to law school but mostly he will be invested in proving that his way was right all along. Inducing THAT kind of mood is rarely very wise.</p>
<p>So here is my recommendation: raise the idea of retaking the LSAT, withdrawing if his score improves, and reapplying – but raise it ONCE, and quietly, and then never breathe a word about it ever again.</p>
<p>This way, there’s a small chance that the idea will stay percolating in his mind, and that when it reemerges he will feel like it’s his idea and he might really think about it. And if he opts against it – well, that’s probably what he was going to do anyway, and at least this way he will not resent you for trying to discourage him. (Which of course is not what you were doing, but that’s how it would have FELT.)</p>
<p>And you know what? It might well BE okay. In the grand scheme of things, he’s still going to a great law school, he seems to be a smart kid, and God has a special providence for 168s and Californians.</p>