Something Is Wrong Here
The other day I was looking for something or other in the Yellow Pages and ran into the Attorney pages. Much to my surprise the listings just went on and on and on. Out of curiosity I counted the pages for attorneys. Thirty two. I couldn’t tell the number of individuals because a lot of ads were for firms and didn’t give the number of attorneys involved, but thirty two pages! That must translate into a whole lot of attorneys for a medium sized college town. Thirty two pages! I knew the United States had plenty of attorneys, but thirty two pages of Yellow Page ads? Wow!
I got to thinking, there must be a whole lot of law schools to have so many attorneys. According to the latest data I could find online there are two hundred law schools in the United States. To put that into perspective I needed something to compare that number to. So I looked up the number of medical schools in the United States. One hundred and fifty nine. We have more law schools than we do medical schools.
But the number of schools doesn’t necessarily give a good feel for the actual numbers in each field, so I looked that up. One million, one hundred and forty three thousand and three hundred and fifty eight lawyers. That seems like a lot, but what about doctors? Seven hundred and one thousand, two hundred doctors. Roughly twice as many lawyers as doctors? Wow! No wonder so many attorneys are starving to death.
I ran these numbers by a business law professor down the hall from me, and he said that in our town, only about ten percent of the lawyers were really making it. The other ninety percent were just hanging on. I didn’t know it was that bad. I just happened to run across an article about recent graduates from the most prestigious law schools. It said that the top half of the graduates at the most prestigious law schools in the United States got decent offers this year, comparable to average years. But the bottom half of graduates of the most prestigious law schools were left out in the cold. Well, not actually, but most of them were lucky to get government jobs that graduates from less prestigious schools usually took. A real blow to the ego. And at only $45,000 a year, much less than the top half got. But what about the grads that usually took the government jobs? According to the article, they are still looking.
As a marketing professor, it was clear to me hat law schools are out producing demand. Law schools could reduce output, and therefore probably bring the supply of attorneys more in balance with demand, and therefore have fewer grads without jobs. But could law schools make ends meet with fewer students? Well, of course they could increase tuition to make up for the loss of students, but could the remaining students pay the higher tuition, or rather carry the debt load after graduation?
I thought things over for a bit, and then the obvious solution hit me. Close down all the law schools at state supported universities! States are always loosing money anyway, just look at California. That would ease the burden on taxpayers, always a shrewd move for the political class. The empty buildings could then be used for classes in art appreciation, Jazz in America, underwater archeology, subjects always in high demand. Am I sharp, or what?
