>> hi, i'm lisa fletcher and you're in t "th "the stream." for those in school, tuition is really high, and the jobs that will pay those loans are scarce. what is the decline of the legal industry and what does it mean when you need a lawyer? our digital producer wajahat ali is here. people are sort of gleeful and

smirking as they're writing things like we don't need more lawyers. thithis isn't such a bad thing. >> gleeful, because people feel our fellow lawyers are the gollums of the world. like we were mentioning before, in 2007 and 2008, as a recent log rat i could have been a guest on the show, talking about how difficult it is for some of us good lawyers to get a job. gail shares this sentiment. we lack integrity. lawyers rank up there with used car salesman. thank you gail. jojoshua tweets in. it's time to refocus on rights community and people. and caroline gives us suggestions with all those who

cannot find jobs, anyone in government, adjournment, teaching some politics could benefit from a jd. it is not that easy for a bunch of recent law grads. >> do you regret spending that money and getting the education? >> i don't regret the license, it got me here sitting in makeup, but i do regret the debt. >> it is a way to achieve upward mobility, but ifort it's expens. in the last 20 years tuition has risen twice as fast as inflation. first year tuition has plunged. making the future of the profession a bit uncertain. students are avoiding the career, facing huge debt

dwindling salaries and job prospects. about 80% of law schools are losing money and some universities are attempting to attract some students by selectively slashing tuition rates. we're going to talk about that. what's behind the sharp decline, how is it going to affect you and the legal profession? to help us get a hand on this, jillian hatfield is a professional of law and economics at the university of southern california school of law and paul campos is a professional at the university of colorado law school. he is the author of don't go to law school, unless. welcome to all of you. so paul. in just four years, we've gone from record high numbers of aspiring lawyers entering law school to some of the lowest enrollment numbers in decades. we're not talking about a little decline. this is dropping off a cliff.

what's going on? >> i think what's going on is for the first time prospective law students are able to access some reasonably accurate information about job prospects, salaries and cost of attendance in regard to the investment that they would be making in a law degree and this has had a very strong effect on enrollments. because what many people are coming to the conclusion of is that it's just not worth it to pay $150,000 in tuition, to get, in many cases, less than a 50-50 shot of getting a job as a lawyer with many of those jobs paying $50,000 a year or less. >> so walter when we had these all-time highs in 2010, i believe it was 52,000 and some students entering law school. there was a glut of new lawyers coming on the scene. is this just a new consequence of the market, saying we've got

enough, we're saturated? >> the bottom dropped out of legal hiring and that had to do with everything in the 2008 crash for the decline and demand of lawyers making new deals, starting new businesses. so the hiring was suddenly cut off and there was a plunge from relatively good job prospects for the people who graduated a couple of years earlier to absolutely terrible, worst in any possible memory. and so the amount of debt that might have made sense, it was a stretch. but if you could get a good job and 80 or 90% of your classmates were getting good jobs, that was one thing. when you could only get a job for every third person in the class all of a sudden everyone looked around at each other. word spread fast. this is a disaster. >> jillian, you are a professor at usc school of law. is there a fear of not getting jobs not being able to pay back

this debt? >> yes, i mean are you asking students are generally in pretty good shape but there's been obviously a really significant change in there. yes, there's more anxiety, there's more worry about this. i think i probably disagree with the diagnosis of what the problem is, i don't think it's just the 2008 crash. i think this has been something that is structural and a big problem related to what's happening in big law more generally and has pen happening for well over a decade. -- has been happening for well over a decade. >> are you suggesting that law schools are perpetuating this problem? >> both the law schools and the legal profession operate in a pretty protected environment and we haven't had to respond to much in the way of competitive pressures and francsly what's happened over -- frankly what's happened over the last several years is a lot of the people who buy the expensive legal services have found out ways to reduce

how many expensive lawyers they need to hire. and that's kind of wrecked our business model and the problems that we're facing is the law schools and the legal profession isn't seeing that -- >> jillian, our profession is deeply cynical. two reenl reasons for this,w and a steak, i don't have either. it helps many students realize that stem, science, technology, engineering and math is the best way to go. and programs outside the top 10 are not worth it. less mediocre lawyers are entering the field. and here is tristan. give him a listen. >> with regard to whether law school is worth it, at least at

berkeley law, our applicant pool is about where it was last year, relevant to the rest of the country, i think people are still applying to berkeley law. job prospects have been good to me. and the government loan repayment program really gives public interest law a real boost. >> well, paul look. i'm an attorney. we are the golums of america. my digital producer earlier today said, i hate attorneys. most people are saying, you know what, isn't it better for america to have less lawyers? what is your take on that? >> my take on that is it would be better for america to have a more closer alignment between the number of lawyers that are produced and the number that the economy can support. i have to disagree with walter, in the picture he participanted, things being pretty good prior to the 2007, 2008 crash. that was true at elite law

schools but at a number of law schools many graduates have been strugglings fostruggling for a . the amount of legal services have been declining over a third. basically what we've had over the last generation is a gradually contracting legal profession, a crash at the top of the profession in big law six or seven years ago, while at the increase in tuition that is absolutely remarkable. people are shocked when i tell them you could go to harvard law school for $12,000 a year in the early 1970s, in terms of 2013 dollars. >> what's interesting about that the elite schools, walter, the harvardharvards are pretty much unscathed. the schools that leave the students with the most debt are

second and third tier schools. if i pay $175,000 for my education i'm going to get something out of it, isn't there a responsibility on the part of the schools? >> well, schools saw a good thing and they went with it. because it's a strange, strange market where you can be a third or fourth tier law school and milk people for as much money as if you were a first tier law school. it took a lot of effort through paul campos and others, how poor the placements were at the expensive or low rated schools. that was a type of misleading consumer advertising that was overly corrected. >> inflating high price with -- conflating high prices with quality. >> the law business is so, trying to imitate the high price law schools. even the students going to a lower rated law school don't

want the same type of career as the yale students, they still make it an expensive education and wind up sad lin saddling peh debt. a main street lawyer shouldn't be graduating with $150,000 of debt. >> we'll hear from a law school grad with $215,000 of debt and we'll hear from him in a moment. there is an app for this, check this out. >> tv is no longer one way with the second screen app. disagree with one of our guests, great, tell us. get exclusive app content receive quizzes and guest information. interact with real guests in real time. tweet, record video comments and we'll use it onair. use the app and drive the guests

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>> i'm professor at george town i'm a lawyer in private practice and i'm on "the stream." >> lawyers are in a predicament. seeing a huge decline of element enrollment and lack of jobs at graduation. andrew, you took college classes at 13, law school at 18, smart, driven, a high powered job at a high powered firm should have been a slam dunk for you. when did you realize that wasn't happening? >> well my first year in law school i was aware that the higher classes at usc had had

fairly good on campus interview process, more than 100 private firms had come to interview usc grads. and for my first summer, i was very excited about researching what those firms would be. come my second summer, when we are first allowed to interview, only seven firms came to interview. >> it went from 100 to 7 firms in one year? >> 7 firms and a handful of government agencies. i didn't even win a lottery for one slot. >> did you think about bailing at that point? >> i was already in debt $60,000 for my tuition. i don't think i would be ready to walk away and assuming losing $60,000 would be the best i could do with my legal education. >> now that that price tag went all the way up to $215,000, what are you doing to handle that kind of debt? >> well, for the first two and a

half years after the bar exam, i was a solo practitioner. i took any work i could find in contract, landlord-tenant disputes, i hung out my shingle and i was making about what the average student who tries to do that makes, $40,000, $50,000 a year. that was barely enough to keep up with the interest on my debt and have me living at federal poverty standards. >> do you think you're the exception or the rule these days? >> i think what paul commented was about right, about 50-50. i have fellow classmates who were lucky to work for big law firms and making almost what they were making five years ago. and going into government work, luckily one of the three or four applicants who won after thousands who applied. i say there's about half of my colleagues like me who have not been able to sustain themselves

in the legal profession. >> paul, these are serious consequences for andrew. 60% offing law school graduates, graduate with over $150,000 in debt. what are the consequences of this situation? >> consequences is people are not able to buy houses, start families, have the attributes of even a middle class lifestyle, let alone a more glamorous lifestyle. just because they've -- they're essentially carrying an extra house payment, as andrew is, with his $215,000 in debt which is high-interest debt which is not dischargeable in bankruptcy almost like any other kind of debt in this country. here i want to emphasize what is important to understand. andrew was going to one of the top 15 law schools in the country. he is very near or when he was a

student where jillian hatfield teaches, one of the realistic shots at getting a job at a high paying law firm, 35 to 40% of the students there do so. at the vast majority of law schools, not more than 5 or 10% of the students get jobs that lead any reasonability possibility of servicing a $250, 000 debt load which is increasingly common moong amongw school graduates. >> paul, we have similar sentiments. my loan payments are almost as much as my rent and when i lived in sacramento more than my mortgage payments. i work 52 weeks a year to scrap by. she is an attorney. criminal defense ngo work with government subsidizing that work. kimberly says, there needs to be

a realignment within the law field. right now big law makes all the money, while other law struggles. kimberly was a real estate grad. thinking about the consequence, that may lead to a shrinking pool. let's map this out. how will the average joe in america feel this? >> one of your tweets actually started down the right path on this. you got to think about the mismatch in demand and where people need it. i think the major problem we're facing because we're actually facing this amazing paradox. there is tremendous demand for legal help. there's tremendous demand from -- in the corporate sector, in a more global complex fast moving world there's a lot of need for legal work.

there's multiple jurisdictions when you've got global supply chain. and at the other end of the scale, the ordinary person, small business, tremendous demand, 90% of people showing up in court for family or eviction or collection or foreclosure and so on, they're unrepresented. there's a big mismatch. you have tremendous demand but what the law schools are producing is not feeding that demand. and i think that's where we really need to focus. i think it's -- you know it's terrible, the situation that so many of our students across the country are finding themselves in with this mismatching, getting caught right as the vice is closing. but we need to be thinking about how you can figure out how to get those people connected with that demand. and the problem there is not everybody needs to go to law school for three years to get a jd to provide some legal help.

and people like andrew should be able to apply for a job, at an online company that's providing legal services and provide services in that way. our current regulations don't let him do that, don't let the really sophisticated tech companies that we already have ready to do that don't let them do that. i think that's the big draw. >> this doesn't apply to andrew but is there an upside to this, that there were a lot of people that saw the idea of being an attorney a ticket to riches, right? and now that's kind of off the table. so does this reduce the pool of incoming lawrg lawyers who belie this is a passion and they love it? >> for so many years law was the miscellaneous thing. your parents pushed you to be a lawyer. law has very specific job skills

and rewards specific kinds of personalities. there's a high burnout rate because so many people go into law whose personalities are not suited to the board room or the combat that law brings. yes the legal profession could be much better off if people who are much drawn to it for their own sake are ones who become lawyers. >> i think big law firms are the part of the problem. how can they also be part of the solution? coming up, innovative things, some are trying, and student who says, that will just make it worse. before the break, check out the comments we're getting.

>> welcome back. we've been discussing what's behind the big decline in law school enrollment. can law schools be part of the solution, the dean of law school says yes. >> hands on legal experiences, first of all many students participate in our clinics. we have eight active clinics. and so students participate for example in immigration law clinics, criminal practice clinic, family law, community development. there are lots of different ways in which students, as law

stoonlts -- students can represent clients under the aid of expert faculty. throughout baltimore, maryland? externships, we place law students in all kinds of legal settings. >> changing the business model, is this the way forward? >> well, it could be. one of of the problems law schools face is when they do something innovative, very often they don't get good results either from applicants or from the law firms whose hiring of their graduates determines how popular it will be. you can quote chapter and verse. they aren't getting better law firms to do better than they had

hoped and they go back to doing it the old way. there are things we can do to encourage innovation. one of them is to blow offer accreditation. the current accreditation -- blow off accreditation. the current are accreditation, you have to have a tenured faculty. you have to have an expensive library, you have to have a program whether your students want it or not, that's what makes you a $50,000 instead of a $20,000 law school. >> jillian how do you feel about that? >> i think we have to blow up the model, people that are talking about are fairly marginal. they see the world the way it is in the last century and that is fundamentally changing. we shouldn't think about law schools as a jd-only producing machine. the requirement that you have to have a jd to provide any legal help in this country, that's not necessary.

and we should make a jd defend itself because of the quality it produces. we should have all kinds of training programs for people who want to be -- helping out people in special areas, like the legal equivalent of a nurse-practitioner and we should be allowing online companies like they have in the u.s., grocery stores, banks, small business associations, let them hire some of the these graduates, take all that risk off of them, take off the problem of finding clients and protecting them, we can lower the cost of the model, there's lots of demand out there. we need to be a lot more creative at the law schools and we need to take down some barriers. >> jillian, let's get to the community here. alex says i'm a second year i'm worried about job placement. what should i do to secure my future? andrew, i've been in your situation man.

what advice do you give them? >> so the advice i give them is-- sorry. >> andrew go for it. >> not a problem jillian. the advice i would give is that there is not a glut of lawyers on the market to answer the question, does america have enough lawyers, you should ask, does america have enough justice? there is a huge demand for the serviceservices law schools wano provide. we should graduate enough lawyers to provide those jobs. >> what do attorney's and law schools look to you? >> let's cut to the chase. we're producing twice as many law graduates for the jobs for lawyers. i agree with jillian, they need to stop being jd factories. when we went to law school, law schools cost a third of what they cost now in real adjusted terms and public law schools cost a 10th of what they do

now. >> i'm sorry i got to cut the conversation off here we're out of time, thanks to the guests for a great conversation. until next time woj an waj and l see you online. >> good evening everyone. welcome to al jazeera america. i'm john siegenthaler in new york. ready to negotiate. both sides in ukraine say they are prepared to talk but the fires are still burning in kiev as world leaders express their concerns. >> there will be consequences if people step over the line. >> obama's message to the ukraine government about dealing with peaceful protestors. lone survivor. a girl found days after massacre