Reveling in failure

To Keith Lee at Associate's Mind when faced with failure, millenial lawyers "revel in it." Instead of going out and finding a job, millenials are content to sit at home and whine about the law school scam on the Internet or take the audacious step of suing their alma maters. Finally, in a call to action, Mr. Lee, 32, asks "If new lawyers cannot solve the problem of their own millenial malaise, how do they ever expect clients to trust them with their problems?"

Mr. Lee is one of the lucky ones who got a law job in short order. But, his article is in rather poor taste. Most young lawyers are not as lucky as Mr. Lee. The BLS statistics show that the average law school graduate is more likely to wait tables than to practice law. So the lucky few like Mr. Lee should try to offer real solutions to graduates. How did you find your job, Mr. Lee? How might your experience help others? Reading through Associate's Mind brings to mind the self-aggrandizing attitudes found in most "blawgers" twice his age. Mr. Lee's attitude seems to be "I'm working so hard, while those without jobs are sitting at home watching Maury Povich." Why not stop rubbing salt in the wounds of those who were left behind in this historically bad job market?

The debt loads carried by today's graduates are rising with no end in sight. I looked at the historical tuition data for Texas Tech, as it is one of the few law schools that publishes comprehensive tuition data. Between 1990 and 2012, tuition and fees for out of state students for an entire school year rose from $5,947 to $31,847.10. Lawyers in earlier generations were able to pay their loans off within a few years, given a steady income. Today, most graduates are facing 30 year repayment plans or IBR payments for 25 years with an income tax time bomb attached at the end. Mr. Lee either doesn't care or doesn't want to understand that having a $1500 per month loan payment severely restricts the career options of most new grads. I graduated in 2004 and in my last semester, my university uncapped tuition rates and instituted a 20% increase in tuition that very semester. When all was said and done, I owed a little more than $54,000 upon graduation. Only 8 years later, students from the same school are carrying at least twice that amount of debt upon graduation. If a grad today does not have a steady income, life stops.

Articles like Mr. Lee's are built on false assumptions and a lack of touch with reality. How do you pull up your bootstraps if you can't even get a boot in the first place?