"How Can I Pay Back My Loans Without a Job?"

After starting my expensive law school education, I've realized the job market is over-saturated. There are too many graduates and not enough jobs.

With new employment numbers due Friday, March 4th, we at FrumForum decided that it was time to listen to the voices of the young as they face the challenges of this economic crisis. Over the next days, in an exclusive series, we will be featuring a number of their first-person stories in this space. If their experience is yours, we welcome you to join the conversation at Editor@FrumForum.com.

Click here for David Frum’s introduction to this series.

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From my vantage point as a second-year student at a top-ten law school, I see problems not just related to the financial crisis, but also at the heart of the legal career system. Right now, I don’t have an internship lined up for the summer, and if I cannot find a “good” position soon, it will have severe consequences on my future legal career.

One immediate problem is the enormous backlog of job applicants. Traditionally, law firms hire summer associates for their second summer of law school, then usually offer most of them a post-graduation position. The financial crisis meant that many firms did not hire many or all of their summer associates in 2008 and 2009, so now law firms are hiring fewer summer associates and forcing new graduates to compete against those qualified candidates previously overlooked. This surplus of qualified candidates makes all legal jobs more competitive, even those outside of the traditional law firm route.

To make matters worse, public interest and government jobs (where I want to work) are not on a standardized hiring schedule.  Some of my applications were due in October, but some due dates still haven’t passed. It is a struggle to juggle applying to some jobs earlier when your first-choice job applications will not even be considered until employers put out offers for the first round of applications. (Would you rather commit to a job you are not excited about, or wait for a chance to apply to a job you prefer but risk no job at all if rejected?)

It is also clear that the increasing number of law schools over-saturates the market with starry-eyed attorneys promised high-paying jobs, despite the already competitive nature of the legal job market combined with the state of the economy.  There are new law schools every year, but the job market (at least with regard to legal jobs that pay your loans) is not expanding as quickly, or at all.

Law school is notoriously expensive, and it is not clear how long students will be willing to gamble so much. Its costs are predicated on the assumption that you’ll graduate and get a job at $160,000 per year so that you can pay back your loans. But as these jobs become rarer, I see friends, out of law school for a couple years, in forbearance or at least in panic about their loans.

I don’t regret going to law school, but I do regret my timing.

Allison is a pseudonym.

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