WaPo: Law school totes worth the money, if you can get a job

This is a couple weeks old, but I've been meaning to comment on it because it is so full of shit. The author -- I hesitate to call him a blogger, because he is an employee of the Washington Post and simply publishes on what loosely qualifies as a blog -- manages to find a study that shows, apparently, that everybody should go to law school because it is so totally worth it. First, of course, they set up the bad news:

The numbers the skeptics cite are sobering: 12.8 percent of members of the class of 2012 were still unemployed in February 2013. Only 64.4 percent got jobs that actually required passing the bar. The median starting salary — $61,245 — was about 15 percent below the 2009 median. At law firms, starting salaries were down 30.8 percent.

Then they let you know that all that bad news doesn't matter:

That all sounds really bad. But they get away from the central question here: is the amount of money law graduates make greater than the amount they would have made if they hadn’t gone? And is that premium greater than the cost of law school? The answer to both questions, a new study finds, is yes. Seton Hall’s Michael Simkovic and Rutgers’s Frank McIntyre conclude, “For most law school graduates, the net present value of a law degree typically exceeds its cost by hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Value versus cost, right? Well, the study has already established that  more than 35 percent of 2012 law school grads fucked up -- they spent a lot of fucking money to get a degree that did nothing to help them get the job they got. Except, of course, for the 12.8 percent who really fucked up by spending all that money on law school and didn't get a job at all. But hey, no problem, right, because they acknowledge that law school has costs. The argument, apparently, is that those costs are outweighed by the benefits:

Of course, law school has costs too. But the average tuition for three years is about $90,000, far less than even the 25th percentile of law school grads earn. Even if you assume an annual tuition of $60,000 — above what even the most expensive law schools charge for tuition, fees, and books — that comes to $180,000, below the $350,000 premium that students at the 25th percentile get. The annual rate of return at the median, in real terms, is about 13 percent, well above, say, stock or bond returns. “These results suggest that even at the 25th percentile, the value of a law degree exceeds typical net-tuition costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars,” the authors write.

The problem with that logic is that "students at the 25th percentile" have to go to the most expensive schools to have any shot at the high-paying jobs, and those high-paying jobs are becoming more and more scarce.

No one seems to disagree that there are fewer law jobs at all levels. This study seems to say law school is worth it if you get a job, ignoring that a disturbing -- and growing -- percentage of law grads aren't getting the law jobs that make law school worth it. Just ask that barrista with a J.D. next time you go to Starbucks.