Thinking about law school?

In writing this column, I’ve learned how hard it is to find issues that are both relevant to my readers and which I have an opinion one way or the other.

One such issue hugely topical to everyone I have classes with is graduate schools and the mass migration of people slightly older than me, who are flocking to them to avoid the job market, which is obviously terrible right now.

Everyone in my generation, and I suspect others, has been socialized to think of an M.B.A., a J.D. or any number of different graduate degrees as being both prestigious and valuable.

Reality sometimes has a rude way of intruding on our notions that conflict with it.

The financial melt-down of 2008 changed a lot about the legal industry, along with a lot of other industries.

Pretty much, the law school class currently 2L’s or 3L’s got screwed.

A whole bunch of super-brilliant, young legal scholars, who expected to work in “Biglaw,” as it is often called on law blogs, can’t.

Quite a few 30-something associates of the same stripe, have also gone from doing very highly- paid work to doing no work in the last two years.

A cursory poke around on the Internet will go a long way if you know where to look to learn more about the legal industry.

The Wall Street Journal’s law blog is good, as is a site called www.abovethelaw.com or the American Bar Association’s Web site.

Obviously, attorneys and people who make it to the best graduate schools are hyper-literate and together they have filled the equivalent of volumes on the Internet, with stories and anecdotes about the recession, which hit them probably worse than it has hit many lower wage earners who weren’t directly dependent on investment banks for their paychecks.

I found the following quote made on March 1 by a Harvard 3L, who, like so many others at top law schools, has gotten no job offers:

“Those of us who had been hoping to become Biglaw associates have been dealt a real financial blow. Must we admit what we were told to leave out of admissions essays and job interviews —that we did come to law school with the hope of making money?”

That’s emblematic.

I’m obviously not saying the legal industry doesn’t exist. My own brother managed to wrangle a Biglaw summer job in Chicago.

There are jobs to be had, but not nearly as many as before.

There are also more people, rather than less, who are entering the elite graduate schools that feed into these jobs.

As I mentioned above, this has to do with needing to hide out from what is a bad job market.

The basic problem with that collective decision is the following: Law schools and M.B.A. programs produce functionaries for the most part.

Consultants, managers and attorneys all serve a function for some business that ultimately produces something.

Because of the financial meltdown and lots of other things that I don’t have the economics background to go into, too few of those businesses that produce something still exist.

It makes little sense to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an M.B.A. or J.D. if there are no transactions being done for attorneys to write and no businesses for M.B.A.’s to consult or manage.

One commenter on www.abovethelaw.com put it like this: “Watching all these people apply to law school is like watching rats run onto a sinking ship. It’s disturbing and it’s unnatural.”

I suspect the responsibility for this falls squarely at the feet of the people running law schools and other graduate programs.

At this point law school is a lot like a pyramid scheme.

Lots of folks are going to law school and paying lots of money to be there, while a few of the most impressive legal minds in the world are making a lot of money off of their decisions to do so.

So who is going to tell undergrads the truth?

ehelmuth@unews.com