Can't make a decision; at a dead end Forum

[dvlthndr]

From everything I've ever seen, aside from Legally Blonde, it seems like those top tier schools only take really smart, capable people. I think it would be more of a testament to the greatness of these institutions if they could take a dummy like me and turn them into someone (or something) that would be worthy of an interview at your prestigious firm.

Elle Woods had a 4.0 GPA, worked hard to improve her LSAT score from a 143 to a 179, and was involved in multiple extracurriculars. She earned that spot in Harvard Law. She's just as smart and capable as all the other overachievers that wind up in "top" law schools, and don't you dare suggest otherwise.

[beepboopbeep]

Op, the problem is that for better or worse, prospective employers care quite a bit where you went to school.

Do they? You really believe that a middle of the pack Harvard graduate fresh out of school has better job prospects, let's just say in whistleblower law, over an attorney who went to some unranked school but has won multiple cases, some with awards in excess of $150 million? And you're committing to that statement? *This is a real example by the way, which I can answer for you if you want.

The question then is what the plan for the debt with a small salary, and the contingency plan if you struggle to find employment. A lot of people in your will be gunning for those jobs, and they will be just as motivated as you.

You (and others) have to read posts in their entirety, my man. If I'm already struggling with a six-figure student loan debt, then how much of a difference is another $30k really going to make? What- I have to get Great Value brand ramen now instead of top-shelf name brand ramen? And if I'm not struggling with a six-figure student loan debt, somehow all of a sudden $30k is going to leave me poverty stricken?

I'm not sure you quite understand. I'm not trying to throw credentials around. I'm not trying to brag. My firm (and based on the other people who are posting here, I am not uniquely situated) has no attorneys who graduated from either of these schools. We don't interview 2Ls from either school. I'm sure it would be possible to lateral after having worked elsewhere, but that's rare.

Like it or not, legal employers care deeply about where you went to school and how you did there (in that order). A median student from UVA will get offers from firms that a student in the top 10% at Drake will struggle to land an interview at. This isn't bragging or some sort of "bro off." It's a sad fact about legal hiring.

Again, you go ahead and throw your money away on this. But please don't enter under the illusion that >40% of your classmates will fail to land jobs after graduation due to their own lack of hustle.

Well which is it? Is it their lack of hustle or that they went to a low-tier school? Or are you making a false equivalency that they are one in the same?

You are throwing credentials around. Your entire premise is based on the importance of a singular credential (two, if you're counting class rank now). Of what importance is it that "your firm" hasn't hired anyone that graduated from these schools? (Please- if you answer nothing else, make it that question.) Did you think I was interested or would want a position at your firm? ::Insert predictable remark about how you'd never hire me anyway::
I'm just curious, not being facetious or anything, can you explain the difference in the educated subject material from Yale vs. Drake without referencing alumni as part of your explanation? Does their law library have hidden books with secret proprietary information that can't be obtained anywhere else or something? Do they teach you how to become a sommelier of your own farts? What is it exactly? Dumb it down for me. Talk to me as if I'm completely clueless. You know, basically the same way you have been so far.

Here's a real brain teaser for you: Do you think Harvard/Columbia/Yale/Circle-jerk U produce so many successfully lawyers because they're such great institutions? Or do you think the people who gained admission are of such skill and intellect that they could have succeeded even if they went to Cal- Hastings?
From everything I've ever seen, aside from Legally Blonde, it seems like those top tier schools only take really smart, capable people. I think it would be more of a testament to the greatness of these institutions if they could take a dummy like me and turn them into someone (or something) that would be worthy of an interview at your prestigious firm.
Also- what do you in the event that you have two prospective job seekers- one graduated from Harvard, one graduated from Stanford- But at the time the Harvard graduate was admitted Harvard was ranked #3 while Stanford was ranked #2, but by the time each had graduated, Harvard was ranked #2 again pushing Stanford back to #3, *but also* now in current year, Stanford is back to #2 and Harvard is #3. What do you do? Do you like try to gauge their intellect individually or something? Look on their resume for something besides the school they went to? Do their resumes even have anything aside from the rank and school they went to?

Nobody is saying that more money will make you happy. You need to contend with the obverse: Having negative net worth with no means of escaping that debt will make you unhappy. Tens of thousands in law-school debt will hang on you like a millstone around your neck, constraining your options in life and making any other economic decision feel like swimming in quicksand. You will struggle to provide for your son and for your own retirement.

I dunno. I may have negative net worth right now with no way out and currently be pretty happy. I feel like if you go back and read what I wrote about my current student loan status you could more accurately gauge how I perceive the threat of additional tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

This thread is either top-notch trolling or an example of someone’s mind melting down in real time.

OP, if you’re not trolling, you need to take a deep breath and listen to the other posters. You say you don’t like people flashing credentials, but then you turn around and flash (undistinguished) life experience (which is honestly a pretty pathetic move and a symptom of the meltdown). You may have life experience, but you evidently have no experience with law school. That’s fine. That’s why you asked this forum. Now absorb what you’re being told — that’s a pretty basic lawyering skill TBH.

I’ll leave aside the harsh things I could say, but trust me that there are several other red flags in your posts that I and others see, and which inform my response here.

It's interesting that you find my comments about not giving a shit about where someone went to school as being symptomatic of a meltdown. As long as you're playing psychologist you should consider what that reveals about you. That, in conjunction with the fact that you felt it necessary to mention that others (not just yourself) see it too.
I don't know what the rest of your post is about or if it's some random incoherent thought or was meant for a different thread.

Kathleen Zellner graduated from NIU in 1981, when law school cost like $5 a semester and during a completely different employment universe than today. You can’t use her career as a model.

Sorry, did NIU use to be a T14 school or something? What does the cost of law school in 1981 have to do with its ranking amongst other schools? Same question but for "employment universe".

I used her as an example of a successful high-profile attorney coming from a low-ranked/unranked school. I don't know what you're doing.

As people have pointed out, you absolutely can get a criminal defense job out of Drake. But it isn’t about how much money you make, it’s how much it costs you to get there. Criminal defense isn’t a high paying field for servicing debt. If you work as a public defender you can work toward loan forgiveness, assuming it doesn’t go away. You’re the only person who can decide what kind of risks you want to take; people here are generally risk averse (comes with being a lawyer).

Yeah, you've definitely missed the point.
That's what "it" is for you- not me.

this is some of the best work i've ever seen on this forum from someone completely out of their gourd. enjoy drake, OP! please report back whether you kept the scholarship. do they section stack?

[cavalier1138]

Do they? You really believe that a middle of the pack Harvard graduate fresh out of school has better job prospects, let's just say in whistleblower law, over an attorney who went to some unranked school but has won multiple cases, some with awards in excess of $150 million? And you're committing to that statement? *This is a real example by the way, which I can answer for you if you want.

"People laughed at Galileo. Galileo was a genius. People laugh at me. Therefore, I am a genius."

(In case that wasn't on-the-nose enough for you, try "Bill Gates dropped out of college. Bill Gates is much richer than the vast majority of people who went to Ivy League schools. College dropouts earn more money than Ivy League graduates.")

Well which is it? Is it their lack of hustle or that they went to a low-tier school? Or are you making a false equivalency that they are one in the same?

It's the latter. It's only the latter.

Look at the job stats from University of Iowa and compare them to the employment stats at Drake. Why do you think they're so different? If where you go to school doesn't matter, then every school should have roughly similar employment opportunities for their grads. But they don't, which leads me to...

Of what importance is it that "your firm" hasn't hired anyone that graduated from these schools? (Please- if you answer nothing else, make it that question.)

Well, since you asked me to address this specific question: It's meant to illustrate the point that there are jobs you literally cannot get from Drake. Again, it's not a point specific to where I work; I made it pretty clear that most of the attorneys posting on this thread also work in positions that Drake graduates cannot get.

I think it would be more of a testament to the greatness of these institutions if they could take a dummy like me and turn them into someone (or something) that would be worthy of an interview at your prestigious firm.

Again, you're missing the point. There are brilliant students who graduate from schools like Drake every year. The fact that they will struggle to get an interview at competitive firms has nothing to do with their intelligence or drive. It has everything to do with the way that legal hiring works. If you pull your head out of your own ass for long enough to actually read the words on the page, you might start to get it.

Anyway, I truly hope you're trolling, because the alternative is much, much more depressing.

[LSATWiz.com]

Uncreative - Nobody said you were trolling or not cut out to be a lawyer. They said you are not going to get a job coming out of Drake that allows you to practice law and pays a decent salary. It’s not really the economy in 3.5 years as you want to have a job before you graduate. While I don’t have a crystal ball, I can say with 100 percent certainty the economy will not be back where it was pre-COVID in two-years. It takes time and a lot of the measures our government took were band-aid measures designed to alleviate the immediate economic impact but it’s likely that they will contribute to higher inflation and taxes that will ultimately impact legal hiring to some degree. It would be naive to expect these schools to post their best hiring numbers in 1 year when you’ll start applying for a job or even in 3.5 years when you graduate and their numbers now are pretty terrible.

If you have a great job guaranteed and we’re all just losers then just go wherever you will have the most fun. If you’re not concerned with employment statistics then that advice remains the same, but your level of cognitive dissonance is amazing. We are at the same time both losers because we post on a forum you asked for advice on and elitists who only have fancy jobs because we went to elite, preppy schools.

You do everything to attack us personally and bring up unrealistic additional considerations like having unrealistic pre-law school job offers for when you graduate presumably to justify why your plan is good. My advice is to not consider your current plans a part of yourself and self-worth, which you clearly do. It is an investment you are planning to make and you asked for advice because you are considering the investment. Outside of law, I do a lot of trading and do very well at it, and I can say that the first rule is to never be emotional about any company you hold and acknowledge that it’s okay to be wrong as long as you minimize the damage of being wrong. You haven’t even made a real investment yet and are already so emotional about it. Drake’s employment numbers are objectively bad and will be worse. That is the reality.

While I’m not Ms. Cleo, I have enough economic sense to call out a 99.9 percent reality when I see one and would put my money where my mouth was if there was a platform that allowed me to bet that Drake’s 2023 employment stats will be worse than its 2019 stats. I’ll say it again. They will be worse, much worse. I’d go so far as to say it is likelier that the Cleveland Browns will win the Superbowl and we will cure Cancer by 2023 than it is that Drake’s employment stats will be better in 2023 than in 2019, and even if they are better, they will still be bad.

This will anger you but it shouldn’t because the schools you got into aren’t a reflection of you. They are about the numbers you have and numbers can be changed. It’s okay to have a bad plan if you change it to a good plan. Just get into better schools - maybe a state flagship or a school with legitimate good employment in your home state. It does not need to be a top 14, though that is probably better. It is pretty easy to make six figures in law if you have a good plan. Your plan is not a good plan, and that’s not a reflection on you. Getting all angry and emotional about that reality is a reflection on you so don’t do that.

And to answer your question about which is better, you are comparing two different things. The lawyer with multiple 150 million dollar verdicts has been practicing for 25 years and is the one in a million trial lawyer. There are a small handful of lawyers like that. The Harvard lawyer getting the white shoe job out of law school is almost every Harvard lawyer. The draw of Harvard is you can just need to be adequate to have a net positive outcome. Comparing the average Harvard graduate with a one in a million attorney 25 years out of law school is so obviously a false dichotomy that I’d like to think it’s a dichotomy you made because you’re emotional and not because you think it’s a sensible argument. You shouldn’t bet your future on one in a million outcomes, especially if you have children.

[nixy]

So I’ll clarify a couple of things.

You’re weirdly fixated on Zellner. She graduated long ago when law was a much less saturated profession and it was much easier to get a job. It was also way cheaper to go to law school so it wasn’t nearly the financial risk to do so (and I don’t mean that today’s tuition was worth less in 1981 in the sense that everything was cheaper then; I mean tuition has increased ridiculously in real terms, as Prof. Paul Campos has shown). So the considerations of going to law school then were different. People considering law school today need to talk to recent grads, not (or at least not only) successful attorneys who graduated 30 years ago into a completely different profession.

The comparison between a fresh Harvard grad and your experienced whistleblower lawyer is silly because they’re not similarly situated. They’re never going to be competing for the same job. The comparison you need to worry about is a new Harvard grad and a new Drake grad.

Re: hustle - no ones claiming 40% of Drake grads don’t have the hustle to get legal jobs. That’s the point - that is that many students don’t end up with law jobs it’s not because they don’t work hard enough or didn’t want it enough, just that there aren’t enough opportunities for Drake grads in terms of who wants to hire from that school.

No one is saying that HYS grads are the only capable lawyers out there. There are tons of smart and/or successful lawyers from every school. We’re all simply pointing to the employment opportunities that a given school provides. Doesn’t matter how smart/capable you are if no one wants to hire from your school. Are the rankings/prestige whoring stupid? Probably. But no one here is endorsing them, just pointing out that they exist.

[nealric]

Op, the problem is that for better or worse, prospective employers care quite a bit where you went to school.

Do they? You really believe that a middle of the pack Harvard graduate fresh out of school has better job prospects, let's just say in whistleblower law, over an attorney who went to some unranked school but has won multiple cases, some with awards in excess of $150 million? And you're committing to that statement? *This is a real example by the way, which I can answer for you if you want.

The question then is what the plan for the debt with a small salary, and the contingency plan if you struggle to find employment. A lot of people in your will be gunning for those jobs, and they will be just as motivated as you.

You (and others) have to read posts in their entirety, my man. If I'm already struggling with a six-figure student loan debt, then how much of a difference is another $30k really going to make? What- I have to get Great Value brand ramen now instead of top-shelf name brand ramen? And if I'm not struggling with a six-figure student loan debt, somehow all of a sudden $30k is going to leave me poverty stricken?

As others have pointed out, the comparison between a wildly successful attorney with a lot of experience and a fresh graduate makes no sense. You are comparing a 1 in 10,000 scenario to a nearly certain one. To compare apples to apples, a fresh median Harvard graduate will have better prospects than the Drake valedictorian. It's not that the Harvard student is necessarily "better"- it's just the fact that the employers with time and money to spend on training a brand new lawyer tend to pick Harvard students. We may talk about society as a meritocracy, but the truth is that nobody can judge merit accurately from a fresh graduate. So employers use a lazy heuristic and target certain schools.

The fact that you already have a lot of debt doesn't mean that accruing more is irrelevant. Beware the sunk cost fallacy. I question your calculus that this will only result in an extra $30k. You'd be living on ramen died just to meet living expenses for law school on that budget (even with paid summer jobs). Plus, your non-subsidized existing loans will be accruing interest while you are in school. Then, there's the risk of scholarship loss. Finally, there's the 3 years of income you won't be earning while in school (likely $100k+).

The concern here is you may be thinking of law as a magic bullet to solve your debt problem. Getting out of debt by going to a low ranked school is like trying to get out of debt by going to a casino. You could luck out, but you are more likely to compound your problems.

If despite that, you still think the additional debt is irrelevant, then why not just go to Nebraska? No worries about scholarship loss then. It also gives you a better shot of finding a job that qualifies for PSLF loan forgiveness, which really could solve your debt problems.

[LSATWiz.com]

Just another note to OP: I get your current circumstances suck, and that you’re feeling that law school provides an option at a better life. You think it can’t possibly be worse so it’s worth a shot and the status quo is a worse option than dying (based on your joke).

I was also in a ramen noodle situation before law school and previously employed someone who was homeless at one point and now earns over $300,000/year practicing law. There’s no shame in being poor and law can provide a viable avenue to making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year but it won’t from these schools. You need to maximize the odds that happens. The fact you talk about death and stuff like that even in haste suggests you really hate your present circumstances. A lot of people would say you should see a psychologist, but I know many people who had that perspective and became successful because of it with no counseling. The issue is you are thinking about these things as though Drake and the 1:10,000 odds of being the next hotshot millionaire solo attorney is your only option. It isn’t. You just have to master a stupid test.

Not everyone here comes from wealth and while having a child definitely complicates it and being unemployed has clearly hurt your confidence, don’t base your self worth on what anyone says or how much money you are presently making. Form a plan and give max effort on each step of that plan. In time, the money will come and there will be a lot of money. You should seek out situations that provide better than 50:50 odds at a positive outcome so that eventually you’ll be successful. What you don’t do is go off of dreams and emotions and beliefs. There will be plenty of opportunity to half ass legal practice and do just fine. One of the times you can’t is when you are applying to law school. This is the best and most personal non-snarky advice I can give.

[Iowahawk]

OP, I expect by now you've already chosen Drake, but you should recognize that its job prospects are questionable even within Des Moines.

1. Only about 40% of its graduates in 2018 got jobs in Des Moines. Five students got jobs in Cedar Rapids or Davenport, which are fine cities. The rest are elsewhere in Iowa, probably mostly in small towns.

2. Only ten students got jobs in firms with more than 25 attorneys. Ten more got jobs with firms with more than ten attorneys. The rest of the class who got firm jobs, two thirds, went to very small firms of ten lawyers or fewer. Virtually every decent firm in significant Iowa cities has more than ten attorneys. Of the top four firms in Des Moines, one has a policy against hiring Drake students, one doesn't but almost never hires from Drake, and two will hire from Drake but only if you are at the top of your class.

Going to Drake isn't crazy if you have a great scholarship without a stip, you're right that it's one of the better TTTs for employment, but most Drake graduates do not get good Des Moines legal jobs and a large number do not become lawyers.

[239840]

Hate to say it, but retake. A 163-164 likely nets you a full-ride at Iowa, which is the best law school in Iowa by far.