I can't tell you what job that is. But if you follow the prestigious path of least resistance, you risk never having a chance to figure it out for yourself. It's nice when your parents are proud of you, but it's not a good reason to get a law degree.
Your parents would probably like you to stop reading this article right now. They would strongly suggest that you stop taking the advice of this random overeducated woman on the internet and start listening to them instead. After all, they care about you! But remember what we just learned? Don't let someone else choose your career for you. Even if that someone else is a loving parent.
Because your parents' priorities for you are not necessarily the same as your priorities for you. For one thing, your parents probably care much more about your financial stability than your happiness. That's not to say they don't care at all. They love you, and of course they want you to be happy.
But they won't share in your satisfaction directly. Your financial stability, on the other hand, does affect them directly — it affects whether they will have to support you during adulthood, and whether you can support them if they need you to. As startup investor and mentor Paul Graham put it in a great essay a few years ago, "All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards.
If your eight-year-old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences. And more than that, all of your career worries worry your parents, too.
They have their own fears of your career abyss. Your parents care about prestige, and also want validation at cocktail parties. They want to see the impressed looks on their friends' faces when they tell them you are in law school and everyone expects big things from you.
They don't want to have to explain that you're using your expensive undergraduate education to be a waitress or a someone's assistant, but it's only temporary. These breezy assurances might not seem fair. After all, law school isn't just a way to create career order out of seeming career chaos — it's also a path to a lucrative job as a lawyer.
Only sort of. It is true that many lawyer jobs are very well-paid. But many aren't, and even those that are are prone to burnout and instability. I want to emphasize that there is nothing wrong with wanting to earn money. Money can be a way to ensure that you aren't a burden on your family, or to give your children important opportunities, or to help out the less fortunate.
Perhaps your parents are immigrants who sacrificed to give you opportunities with the expectation that your success would bring stability to the whole family in a new country. Or perhaps you are the first person in your family to go to college, and feel the burden of proving the value of the education they worked so hard to give you.
Money is a lot. But it isn't everything. And even if it's important to you, law school isn't necessarily the best way to get it. Let's start with the most basic point: graduating from law school doesn't necessarily mean you even get a job as a lawyer.
According to the American Bar Association , only 71 percent of law school graduates were able to obtain long-term, full-time employment as lawyers defined as jobs that either required them to pass the bar, or preferred to hire candidates with JDs.
That means that one in four law school graduates were either unemployed or were doing jobs they could have gotten without ever going to law school. And even if you're within that 71 percent, a lot of lawyer jobs aren't particularly well-paid.
There's nothing horrifying about those numbers, but they won't make anyone rich — especially if they come with a large law school debt burden. And they're nothing that can't be achieved in a host of other industries.
Private firms, at least the large ones, do tend to pay more. But those jobs are difficult to get, especially for students who don't attend top-tier law schools. And even for students lucky enough to obtain one, it can be a risky path. Most large firms have a pyramid structure, with large incoming classes of junior associates that get winnowed down over the years until just a few individuals remain.
The rest have to leave. Don't miss: The 10 colleges that produce the most billionaires. Skip Navigation. Jennifer Liu. Jack McCoy. Weigh all this against what your law degree could get you in terms of opportunity and salary. Additionally, it can give prospective students additional chances to take the LSATs. VIDEO Make It New Grads. If you're on the fence about going to law school, then you probably shouldn't. Read on to find out!
Should You Drop Out? This could be a dangerous path. Find out why! Will You Be a Happy Lawyer? A fantastic interview with Jennifer Alvey, lawyer turned career coach for "thwarted creative" lawyer types. Check it out! Should I Become a Lawyer?
If you want to go, make sure it's for the right reasons. Disillusioned investment banker to SEC prosecutor. Convict to public defender. Union rep to labor lawyer. Who can resist a transformation from barista to big-law associate to rainmaking partner?
Out of a recent publication of the Forbes , thirty-five are JDs. What if you simply want a stable job with a decent salary? Knowing the distribution of salaries is equally important. A birds-eye view of legal salaries is pretty clear. School rankings matter, because they matter to employers.
There are always exceptions to the rule, but generally, students at higher-ranked schools have better post-graduate outcomes. According to the ABA , for the Class of , only fourteen law schools had at least 80 percent of graduates pass a bar exam and gain employment in a full-time, long-term job. Virtually all of them are perennial leaders in school rankings. Better yet, if you can graduate from a leading school with little or no debt, you can make career moves unencumbered by financial need.
But a school will likely take you. Each year, thousands of newly minted attorneys enter the profession, vying for a relatively stable number of legal jobs. Along the way your own priorities will inevitably shift. Legal practice itself will change, too. Think about how those things will look by the time you will pay off your law school loans.
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