Pity the Law School Graduate? Bah, humbug.

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog asked a question of its readers yesterday using Julia Figurelli as an example concerning job hunting strategies for recent graduates now that intake through large law firms has shrunk to a trickle. These are interesting questions.

The Journal blog takes as its starting point the New York Times article covering the job market decline. My good friend Heather Milligan has covered this situation in previous Legal Water Cooler posts here and here. Heather has compassion and empathy among her many gifts. Me? Not so much in this situation.

Despite law schools attempting to seize upon the profligate materialism in the Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z, despite the frequent hiring excesses of law firms desperate to grow per-partner-profits, despite every sign that economies cycle from low growth to high growth, these graduates as well as the classes following them are publicly bemoaning their “unfair” fates and “desperate” straits as if they were completely surprised at this turn of events. Exactly what world were they living in?

I find these young men and women who I encounter in my work to be uniformly smart, driven and peculiarly detached from reality. There is no one spot to point the finger of blame for this. Is it the feeling of entitlement that causes them to expect to land these well-paying jobs? Is it the parents exhorting them to ever higher levels of achievement? Is it the law firm recruiters spreading widely the fables of success and remuneration in order to attract the best performing students to interviews? Is it the law school admissions offices (and the financial industry that lends the money) with visions of clear paths to employment and self-actualization?

I think these factors created a system that, similar to the housing industry, mortgaged escalating earnings against an unsustainable employment market. These days, it looks to me as if there are a lot of looming foreclosures and many graduates and to-be-graduates are going to have to walk away from their planned futures. How does it look to you?