The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Several blogs have been discussing the enormous expense of law school and questioning whether students are making an intelligent financial choice by going to law school. The concern is whether students' resulting earning power will be enough to pay off their debt. It's a fair question, but on its own too simple to evaluate the overall wisdom of going to law school because it reduces the benefit of law school to the singular purpose of acquiring a high-paying job.

It's not to say that money isn't important. I myself would really like it if I had enough money to pay off my law school debt so that I could have more options with fewer encumbrances post-graduation. But I would still not want to make acquiring money my number one priority. Other things matter more.

There are students, I think, who do consider making money to be the most important thing and chose law school largely because of its perceived benefit to their earning power. These are the people who need to be most concerned about whether it truly is in their financial interests to choose this path, since if law school ends up being more of a financial liability than an asset, it will end up having been a giant waste of time and money for them with no other returned value.

But for the people who went to law school for something bigger, I think this bottom-line analysis is too limited. There is more to get out of the experience than a salary, and that something more may itself be worth the cost.

For me, I went to law school because I wanted the education. I wanted to learn as much as I could, in the best environment I could manage. And I did this because I wanted to make a difference in the world. Not to make a zillion dollars - I could have stayed in the tech sector if that was all I cared about - but to become equipped to do something important (at least something more important than I felt I was able to accomplish staying within the tech sector). It was going to cost what it was going to cost, and *not* going, to me, would have cost even more.

I've also always had the sense that if you do things you care about, the money will follow. My experience has born this out - it's how I ended up in the tech sector in the first place. In the course of pursuing my passions - namely, an interest in mass media - I ended up learning the skills necessary to have a career in Internet media. I didn't learn them because I was gunning for those nice Silicon Valley tech salaries; I just followed my passions and things fell into place along the way.

But I saw many other people who, once the boom got going, got into technology solely because of the promise of a good salary. These then were the people who were most negatively affected when those jobs dried up. It wasn't just that it was more difficult for them to switch skillsets and adapt to new opportunities; they had to get over their sense of betrayal. Hadn't they done what they needed to get a good job? So what happened?

Nobody likes losing their job. I didn't either. And it's not a bad thing to want to be financially comfortable. What IS a bad thing though is to get deluded into believing there's any guarantees. At least as far as money is concerned. You can't bank on the certainty of salaries, but you can bank on yourself. If you do the things you like to do, that interest you, that inspire you, your choices can pay off, and often in more ways than one.