The only solution for the surplus of workers with law degrees is
a massive, permanent reduction in the issuance of new law graduates.
America is in the opening stages of a massive
surplus of over-credentialed workers. The default setting for
50 years has been: if you want a secure upper-middle class salary, get a law
degree, MBA, PhD or other graduate-level professional degree.
The massive surplus is now apparent in J.D.s
(law degrees) and PhDs. The writing is already on the wall:
there aren't enough jobs for law school graduates, and this scarcity of
high-paying legal jobs will only increase going forward. These two articles
provide the context:
An Expensive Law Degree, and No
Place to Use It (via Joel M.)
The only solution for the surplus of workers
with law degrees is a massive, permanent reduction in the issuance of new law
graduates. The only way to achieve this result is for a significant
percentage of law schools to close their doors.
What's the percentage that must close to
restore some balance? An unfettered market would discover the price of attending
law school and the number of schools needed to fulfill diminishing demand for
workers with law diplomas.
But we don't have an unfettered market--we
have a government-sanctioned system of debt-serfdom. Law
students can borrow up to $200,000 for a three-year law program, and so
surprise, surprise, the cost of that three-year program is--yup, $200,000.
This gargantuan state-supported debt-serf machine enabled prices
to soar without regard to the value of the education, its utility in the
marketplace or its market cost.
The glut in over-credentialed workers is not
limited to law: The PhD Bubble Has Burst:
Graduating 'Doctors' Are Having Trouble Finding Work (Zero
Hedge).
As I have often noted, graduating 50,000 PhDs in chemistry
annually does not automatically create 50,000 jobs for the graduates.
Our system of government-sanctioned
debt-serfdom has created perverse incentives for colleges to raise prices and
for students to become over-credentialed, a process that has enriched
universities and their administrative legions while impoverishing students who
are dumped into a job market saturated with over-credentialed but underskilled
workers.
This reality is visible in the declining pay for all classes of
workers, including the most highly educated:
It doesn't have to be this way. Radically
improving our higher education system while reducing the cost of that education
by 90% is the topic of my books Get a Job, Build a Real Career and
Defy a Bewildering Economy and The Nearly Free University and the
Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.
So how many law schools need to shut down to
restore the balance of supply and demand? It depends on
how fast technology reduces the demand for legal expertise. A 20% reduction in
the number of law schools and law school graduates would be a good start, but
if technology and outsourcing start eating jobs, the eventual number of law
school closures might have to exceed 50%.
One quick way to discover price and demand
would be to eliminate all student loans. Once students could not
borrow money, the cost of higher education would collapse to a cash-value
level. The number of colleges and universities would plummet, and supply and
demand would soon find a new equilibrium, minus the debt-serfdom.
