<story><title>Law school applications collapse: Get ready for schools to start closing</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/12/01/law_school_applications_collapse_get_ready_for_schools_to_start_closing.html?wpsrc=fol_fb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hackuser</author><text>&amp;gt; Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion&lt;p&gt;People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes. Also, they usually understand the world and critical thinking much better, have better communication skills, etc. These things are valuable in themselves and valuable for their roles as citizens, parents, community members, etc.&lt;p&gt;To read that claim from someone with a Ph.D., a degree from MIT, and will soon be on the faculty of &amp;quot;a very good school&amp;quot; is a bit rich. It reminds me of wealthy people who says money doesn&amp;#x27;t matter to them.&lt;p&gt;HN is a unique environment of generally highly-educated, high-achieving people. Most of the world cannot program computers; many cannot operate them. It would be interesting to hear from members of the large majority who lack college degrees.</text></item><item><author>untilHellbanned</author><text>&amp;gt; As best I can tell, they don&amp;#x27;t see alternative options.&lt;p&gt;Soon this will trickle down to college. In many cases, you pay $250K for that too. In many, many fields, you can learn everything you need to know on the internet, and get the job you want by just hustling (often by impressing only a single person with influence in the field you want).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m in biomedical sciences, have a Ph.D. and will be a professor at a very good school soon, but I don&amp;#x27;t give a crap about somebody&amp;#x27;s degrees. If this line of thinking is invading my world, then you better believe the rest of the economy is getting there too. (I also only got into MIT because I managed to impress one influential person).&lt;p&gt;Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion.</text></item><item><author>graeme</author><text>I run an LSAT prep business. You&amp;#x27;d be surprised how determined some undergrads are to go to law school, despite the objectively terrible math.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ll have a mediocre LSAT score, but say &amp;quot;School X will let me in!&amp;quot;. School X is terrible. They have lousy employment prospects, and charge $50,000 a year.&lt;p&gt;When you add miscellaneous fees and opportunity cost of not working, the law degree costs at least $250,000. And your school might close.&lt;p&gt;But (some) students still want to do it, despite the stark reality. As best I can tell, they don&amp;#x27;t see alternative options.&lt;p&gt;This group is shrinking however, which is why law school enrolments are in free fall. This chart from the LSAC shows a massive drop in LSATs administered.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.lsac.org&amp;#x2F;lsacresources&amp;#x2F;data&amp;#x2F;lsats-administered&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;2008-2009 was the high  water mark: 171,514 LSATs. 2014-15  likely will be less than 100,000.&lt;p&gt;Which is good. The industry&amp;#x27;s been in a bubble, and it needs to pop. But that means this is a VERY bad time to be going to law school unless you&amp;#x27;re extremely careful (and ideally have a guaranteed scholarship to a good school that won&amp;#x27;t close).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>karmacondon</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t have a fancy college degree, but even I can see that you might be mixing correlation and causation. College doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily cause people to earn more money, better understand the world or communicate well. It&amp;#x27;s that intelligent people who are likely to succeed in life tend to go to college, mostly because they are expected to by society. Those people would have probably been just as successful without college, but that&amp;#x27;s hard to prove empirically without a large control group. Your argument seems different when applied to basketball instead of education. Was Michael Jordan great because he played for a top college basketball program, or was he playing for a top program because he was already great?&lt;p&gt;I think part of OP&amp;#x27;s point was that college itself isn&amp;#x27;t what makes people successful. There are a lot of great reasons to go to college, but advances in communication technology have fundamentally changed the landscape. It used to be that college libraries and professors were the only way to gain access to certain kinds of knowledge. That period in time is obviously over. College degrees will become less and less important in a world where anyone can communicate with everyone. A diploma used to be the only way to certain open doors. Now a facebook account and an impressive resume can do just as much or more.</text></comment>
<story><title>Law school applications collapse: Get ready for schools to start closing</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/12/01/law_school_applications_collapse_get_ready_for_schools_to_start_closing.html?wpsrc=fol_fb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hackuser</author><text>&amp;gt; Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion&lt;p&gt;People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes. Also, they usually understand the world and critical thinking much better, have better communication skills, etc. These things are valuable in themselves and valuable for their roles as citizens, parents, community members, etc.&lt;p&gt;To read that claim from someone with a Ph.D., a degree from MIT, and will soon be on the faculty of &amp;quot;a very good school&amp;quot; is a bit rich. It reminds me of wealthy people who says money doesn&amp;#x27;t matter to them.&lt;p&gt;HN is a unique environment of generally highly-educated, high-achieving people. Most of the world cannot program computers; many cannot operate them. It would be interesting to hear from members of the large majority who lack college degrees.</text></item><item><author>untilHellbanned</author><text>&amp;gt; As best I can tell, they don&amp;#x27;t see alternative options.&lt;p&gt;Soon this will trickle down to college. In many cases, you pay $250K for that too. In many, many fields, you can learn everything you need to know on the internet, and get the job you want by just hustling (often by impressing only a single person with influence in the field you want).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m in biomedical sciences, have a Ph.D. and will be a professor at a very good school soon, but I don&amp;#x27;t give a crap about somebody&amp;#x27;s degrees. If this line of thinking is invading my world, then you better believe the rest of the economy is getting there too. (I also only got into MIT because I managed to impress one influential person).&lt;p&gt;Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion.</text></item><item><author>graeme</author><text>I run an LSAT prep business. You&amp;#x27;d be surprised how determined some undergrads are to go to law school, despite the objectively terrible math.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ll have a mediocre LSAT score, but say &amp;quot;School X will let me in!&amp;quot;. School X is terrible. They have lousy employment prospects, and charge $50,000 a year.&lt;p&gt;When you add miscellaneous fees and opportunity cost of not working, the law degree costs at least $250,000. And your school might close.&lt;p&gt;But (some) students still want to do it, despite the stark reality. As best I can tell, they don&amp;#x27;t see alternative options.&lt;p&gt;This group is shrinking however, which is why law school enrolments are in free fall. This chart from the LSAC shows a massive drop in LSATs administered.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.lsac.org&amp;#x2F;lsacresources&amp;#x2F;data&amp;#x2F;lsats-administered&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;2008-2009 was the high  water mark: 171,514 LSATs. 2014-15  likely will be less than 100,000.&lt;p&gt;Which is good. The industry&amp;#x27;s been in a bubble, and it needs to pop. But that means this is a VERY bad time to be going to law school unless you&amp;#x27;re extremely careful (and ideally have a guaranteed scholarship to a good school that won&amp;#x27;t close).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jqm</author><text>People with college degrees, in the past, earned significantly more over their lifetimes than those without. But this may or may not continue, particularly for certain degrees where the person may have been better off learning marketable skill and applying it early.&lt;p&gt;I have a college degree and have never really used it. The jobs I have landed, the things I have done, none of them in any way shape or form are attributable to that degree. And, I graduated college nearly 20 years ago. College was a good place to drink beer and get laid, but really, I think I would have been better off going straight to work. The sad part is, I knew it at the time but my parents were insistant that without a degree I&amp;#x27;d be mopping floors for a living. So I listened to them when I should have trusted my gut instincts. I&amp;#x27;d trade the degree back in a heartbeat for tuition and interest and book costs alone...to say nothing of the 4 years (ok.. almost 5, I was having a good time but who is counting?) of opportunity cost.&lt;p&gt;Have to agree with OP. I believe college to be generally overpriced and over rated. Particularly in certain disciplines. I&amp;#x27;m about as sad to see law schools going out of business as I would be to see mosquito breeding pools being drained. Maybe some of the potential attendees can do something socially useful with their lives now. (yes, I know...we need lawyers. we probably need mosquitos too. just not so many of them.)</text></comment>