Angry Law Grads Beef, Blog and Move On; Tuition Makes $15K Total in 80s Seem Paltry
Unemployed law grads are venting their anger on blogs and in newspaper interviews, but some are moving on to permanent jobs or opening their own law firms.
One of the angry bloggers, known as Law is 4 Losers, complained online that law school is a “scam,” administrators are greedy “charlatans” and students are “hapless lemmings,” the New Jersey Star-Ledger reports. Now he has revealed his identity in an interview with the newspaper and announced that he’s forming a new law firm.
The blogger is Scott Bullock, a 2005 Seton Hall University School of Law graduate with more than $100,000 in debt, the story says. He is opening a firm with a classmate he met while working a temp job at a large Newark firm. So far they have about two dozen clients, but they still worry about survival, they told the Star-Ledger.
Another law grad, Carl Archer, told the newspaper he graduated in 2008 from Rutgers at Camden with $60,000 in student debt. He just found a permanent job last month. Archer told the newspaper he survived the challenging times. “You deal with it,” he said.
Meanwhile Brian Tamanaha, a professor at Washington University Law School in St. Louis, recalled that his tuition for law school at Boston University in the 1980s was only $15,000. The story notes that law school tuition has risen twice as fast as inflation over the last two decades, to $35,740 for private schools in 2008, up from $9,650 in 1998.
“I’m not sure I would go to law school today,” Tamanaha told the newspaper. “People have to think very hard about whether they want to take on this debt for uncertain returns.”
Related coverage:
New Jersey Star-Ledger: “Rising college loans exceed credit card debts”
