Friday, July 1, 2011

Q: What do you call 9,000 lawyers who graduated from New York?

Credit: Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc.
A: Moving truck renters.

Via Ezra Klein comes this interesting study by Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc. For each state, they compare the number of available positions, the number of bar exam passers and the number of law school graduates. They found that there weren't any states that had more job openings than bar exam passers (not a real surprise.)

I'm terribly curious as to what a similar study of Ph.D. chemists would show; I suspect that we'd see a similar trend, although I suspect that there are certain states (in the Mountain West, perhaps?) where there is a balance of openings versus graduates (1 opening a year, 2-3 graduates?) 

5 comments:

  1. Academia is supposedly the number one proponent of social justice, affordable education and egalitarian outcomes.

    But it seem like they are even more psychopathic than any corporation today. Almost 5x the number of grads than openings in NY? We haven't even gotten to the cost of all that education yet.

    Where's the justice, affordability and equal outcome here? Even the science profession over the past decades has been destroyed by the unrelenting production of PhDs, who train in ever more narrow disciplines and attain crappier positions after graduation.

    Just stop funding this madness. Vote no on any politician who wants to give more money to "education". It's just another scam.

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  2. This does not take in account people practicing in industry as Patent Agents while going for their law degree to further advance their careers.

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  3. Is the cat out of the bag then, A701-12:43? That's what I wonder. At least one lawyer is suing her Alma mater over falsified statistics. Articles show up in papers on occasion decrying the overproduction of PhDs. The responses from the onlookers are so often the same: "you knew what you were getting into", "you bet on yourself and you lost", "you aren't going to be guaranteed a job". Well, as it turns out, no, I don't think most of us did know what we were getting into. I never thought I was gambling with my future. And while I wasn't literally guaranteed a job it was made pretty clear to me that the opportunities I was going to have would be a lot better than they are. So what are the poor college kids seeing and reading I wonder. The politicians and the higher ups don't care, I think. They'll keep funding the madness. If there is a way to stop them I'd be glad. But I hope people are at least seeing the way things are. That would be worth something.

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  4. When I entered graduate school I was told everyone from my PI's group easily made 6 figures upon graduation. While this may used to be true it is no longer today.

    People are lucky to land postdocs after 6-7 years in a PhD program.

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  5. And then you can get another postdoc!

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20