Academic

LOOKING AT LAW SCHOOL?S RETURN ON INVESTMENT: As I?ve noted in some earlier posts about 21st ce?

By Glenn Reynolds

LOOKING AT LAW SCHOOL’S RETURN ON INVESTMENT:

As I?ve noted in some earlier posts about 21st century jobs, there?s also something quite dismaying in the fact that, for the first time I can remember in my adult life, we seem to be concluding that investment in human capital is not worth it. That might be true because the training is idiotic and not really ?human capital investment? at all, but more like summer camp.

But the much more worrying possibility is that structural problems in the US economy mean that there isn?t a need for professionally skilled labor, because the economy can?t deploy people to these higher skilled tasks. In the case of lawyers, or people who might have become lawyers, that might be because capital has been wasted in pointless things that didn?t pay off, and now there isn?t enough capital to invest in new things for which lawyers ? yes, even lawyers ? would be useful in making happen. It can, and certainly has, happened to engineers, too, over the past fifty years.

Read the whole thing.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on January 11, 2011 (boomark / email).