what could be a significant breakthrough. >> to watch the devices go out and learn no one else has done it is exciting. >> the excitement more undergraduates are getting a chance to experience. 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 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. jo

joshua 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 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. 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 reenls reasons for this, bmw 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 people with 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.

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consider this. the news of the day plus so much more. answers to the questions no one else will ask. >> it seems like they can't agree to anything in washington no matter what.

i did not even win a lottery for a single slot. >> did you think about bailing. >> i was $60,000 in debt for my tuition. i don't think that i would be ready to walk away and assume that losing $60,000 was the best i could do. >> now i know that that price tag went all the way up to $215,000. what are you doing to handle

that kind of debt? >> for the first 2.5 years after the bar exam, i was a solo practitioner. i hung out my shingle and trying to make what the average makes $40,000 to $50,000, and it was barely enough to keep up with the interest op my debt >> do you feel like you are an exception or more the rule? >> i would say what paul commented earlier is about right, 50/50. i have classmates who have been lucky to work for big law firms, and they are making almost what they would have been making. i have others that have gone into government work and were lucky enough to be one of three or more applicants that won.

there are half of my colleagues not me not able to sustain themselves. >> they are serious consequences for andrew. statistics showed that law school grads graduated with $100,000. what are some of the other consequences. >> some of the consequences are that people are unable to buy houses, start families, and have the attributes of a middle class lifestyle, let alone a more glamorous lifestyle. just because they have - they are carrying an extra house patient, as andrew is, with his $215,000, high interest debt, not dischargeable in bankruptcy. i want to emphasise something that is important to understand. andrew was going to a top 15 law school.

he was near or was when he was a student. one of the best law schools in the country, a school where there was a realistic shot of getting a job with a high paying law firm. 35 to 40% of students do so. the vast majority, no more than 5 or 10% of the students get the jobs that leave a reasonable possibility of servicing in 150 or 200,000 or 250,000 debt load, increasingly comment. >> in our kunty we have lawyers with the same sentiments. >> i would advise anyone to avoid loans:

>> jillian, i'll go to you. you teach at u.s.c., andrew was a u.s.c. grab. 2013, historic lows when it comes to law school applications. thinking about the consequence, that may lead to a shrinking lawyer pool. what are the consequences that will have on society, big firm, public defenders. ngo. let's map it out here. >> one of your tweets actually started down the might path. you have to think about the mismatch in demand, and where are people needed. i think the major problem - we are facing an amazing paradox. there's tremendous demand for legal help, in the corporate sector. in a global complex fast-moving

world. there's a need for legal work. multiple jurisdictions. then at the other end of the scale, the ordinary person, the small business. it's 90% on people showing up in a court or family or the addiction or collection for disclosure or so on. they are unrepresented. you have tremendous demand, but what the law schools are producing is not feeding that demand. that's where we need to focus. it's terrible the situation that so many of our students across the country are finding themselves in. getting caught as the vice is closing. we need to thing about how you can figure out how to get those people connected with the demand and the problem there is not everybody needs to go to law

school to get a jd to provide help, and people like andrew should be able to apply for a job, an online company providing legal services and provide services in that way. the current regulations don't let you do that or let the sophisticated tech companies, don't let them do that. >> it doesn't apply to andrew. >> is there an upside for this. now it's off the table. if this produces the pool, to people that are passionate. believe it's noble and are in it because they love it.

>> well, i think the big law firms are part of the problems, as we discussed. how can they be part of the solution. coming up innovative things that a few law schools are trying and why one of our guests say that will make the problem worse. before the break, check out a couple of hash tags:

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>> 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 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, justice? there is a huge demand for the service services law schools want to 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 i will see you online. >> protesters charge police barricades in kiev's central square. [ ♪ music ] >> it's the world news from al jazeera live from doha. >> libya elects a constitutional assembly. the democratic process under threat from militia. >> the trial of journalists in egypt is set to start soon. >> the government strikes a