cold air. severe weather potential throughout the day today and tomorrow across the southeast. del? >> dave thank you very much. thank you for watching al jazeera america. i'm del walters in new york. "the stream" is next. hi, i'm lisa fletcher, and you are in the "stream." avoiding law school in droves. enrollment is at its lowest point in decades, and for those in school, tuition is really high. and the jobs that will pay those loans are square. what is it going to mean when you need a lawyer? ♪

our digital producer wajahat ali is here as always. waj i feel like people are sort of gleeful and smirking as they are writing things like we don't need more lawyers. >> yeah, everyone think us fellow lawyers are the follow [ inaudible ] of the world next to executioners and bankers. like we were mentions before in 2007 and 2008, i could have been a guest on today's show, talking about how difficult it was for some of our good lawyers to try to get a job in this industry. and we have gail who shares that sentiment . . .

but as we're fining out, lee so, it ain't that easy. >> yeah, you have a little distance on your situation now. do you regret going to law school and not staying in the profession. >> i don't regret the education or my license, it got me hear wearing makeup, sitting next to you. i do regret the debt. >> yeah. going to law school used to be a good way to achieve upward mobility, but the school is expensive. but thanks are changing, in the last 25 years, tuition has risen twice as fast as inflation

students are avoiding the career that has left many graduates saddled with huge debt, dwindling salaries and poor job prospects. about 80% of law schools are loosing money. and some universities are trying to attract more students by selectively slashing prices. we'll talk about that. and how will this effect you and the legal profession. we're joined by senior fellow at a think tank, and professor of law and economics, and professor at the university of colorado law school. he is also the author of "don't go to law school unless." welcome to all of you. paul, in just four years we have gone from record high numbers of aspiring lawyers entering law

school to some of the lowest numbers in nearly four decades. and this is dropping off a cliff. what is going on? >> i think what is going on is that for the first time perspective law students are able to access some reasonably accurate information about job prospects, salaries, and costs 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 is 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. >> water when we had these all time highs in 2010, i believe

52,000-some students entering law school, there was a glut of new lawyers. this is a consequence of the market saying we have enough? >> the bottom dropped out of the hiring, and that had everything to do with the 2008 crash with the decline in demand for lawyers starting new businesses all sorts of things that people need lawyers for, so the hiring was cut off, and there was a plunge from relatively good job prospects 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 80er 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

word spread fast that this is a disaster. >> have you seen a decline of students? >> yeah, our students are generally in pretty good shape, but obviously there is a significant change. yeah, there's more anxiety and worry about this. i think i probably d dig -- disagree with the diagnosis. i don't think this is a 2008 crash. i think it is what is happening in big law more generally and has been happening -- >> you are suggesting that big law schools are perpetuating this problem -- or big law firms? >> all of us operate -- both the law schools and the legal profession operate in a pretty protected environment. we haven't had to respond to much in the way of competitive

pressures, and frankly what has happened over the last several years is that 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 problem we're facing is the law school and the profession is not seeing that problem. >> our community is deeply cynical . . . and on the flip side from

berkeley admissions . . . >> with regards to whether law school is worth it, i would say at least at berkeley law our applicant pool is about where it was last year, so relative to the rest of the country, i think people are still applying to berkeley law. our job prospects, i think have been fairly good, been good for me, and i would just say the government loan repayment program really gives public interest law a real boost. >> paul, look, i'm an attorney, we are the galliums of america. my digital producer today said i hate attorneys. most people are hearing this and saying isn't it a good thing for america to have less lawyers what is your take on that? >> it would be better to have a closer alignment between the number of lawyers produced and the number of lawyers that the economy can support. i have to disagree with water a

little bit in terms of things being pretty good prior to the 2008 crash. at a large number of law schools many graduates have been struggling for a long time. since 1989, the percentage of the american economy dedicated to legal services has declined by a third. basically what we have had over the course of the last generation is a gradually contracting legal market with a very spectacular crash at the very top of the profession in big law six or seven years ago, but an overall contraction, while at the same time we have had an enormous increase in tuition. >> you know, what is interesting about that, though, is the elite school, walter, they are pretty much unscathed, but what was

interesting to me in reading the research, is the schools that leave students with the highest amount of debt for the most part are second and third-tier schools, so what is going on that students go there and think if i say $175,000 for my education i'm going to get something out of it? >> the schools saw a good thing and went with it. because it's a strange, strange market where you can be a third or fourth-tier lawsuit and milk people for as much money as if you were a top-tier law school. but word got around of how poor some of the placements were. that was a type of misleading consumer advertising that was over -- >> americans conflate a high price with quality. >> yeah, and the law school business is so prestige driven

everyone looks to the elite schools and tries to imitate them, even if the students who are going to a lower-rated school don't want the same career as the higher tiers, and are wound up being saddled with the same amount of debt. >> up next we're going to hear from a law school grad who has $215,000 in debt, and can't get a job as a lawyer. his story when we return. also did you know you can interact with this show, there is an app for it. check it out. >> tv is no longer one way with "the stream" second screen app. interact with other app users in real time. you can be our third co-host,

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♪ i'm a professor of gorge to up, and lawyer in private practice, and i'm on "the stream." >> law schools are seeing a huge decline in enrollment. joining us now is andrew post, a usc law school grad. you were definitely on the fast track. you took college classes at age 13, you were in law school at 18. when did you realize you weren't getting a job as a slam dunk.

>> my first year in law school, i realized that some of the higher classes had a pretty good oncampus interviews, and for my first summer, i was very excited about researching what those firms would be. come my second summer, only seven firms came to interview. >> it went from 100 firms to 7 firms in one year? >> 7 firms and a handful of government agencies. i didn't even win a lottery for a single interview slot. >> did you think about bailing at that point? >> at that point i was already $60,000 in debt for my tuition, i didn't assume that losing $60,000 could be the best thing that i could do. >> and now that price tag went up to $215,000, what are you doing to handle that kind of

debt? >> for the first two and a half years i was a sallow practitioner. i took any work i could find in contracts or landlord-tenant disputes. i hung out my shingle and was making about 40 to $50,000 a year. that was barely enough to keep up with the interest on my debt. >> do you feel like you an an exception or more the rule these days? >> i would say what paul commented earlier is about right, about 50/50. i have some classmates who have been very lucky to work for big law firms. i have others who have gone into government work, and we're lucky enough to be one of three or four applicants who won out of thousands who applied. there are about half of my

colleagues who have been unable to sustain themselves in this profession. >> about 85% of law school grads graduate with $100,000 in debt. what are some of the other consequences to this decline. >> some of the consequences are that people are unable to buy houses, start families, have the -- the -- the attributes of even a middle class lifestyle let alone a more glamorous life just because they -- they are essentially carrying an extra house payment as andrew is, and it's high-interest debt that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. and here i want to emphasize something a that is really important to understand. andrew has gone to one of the top 15 or so law schools in the country. one of the best law schools in

the country. one of the schools where there is a realistic shot of getting a job with a high-paying law firm, about 35 to 40% of the students there do so. but at the vast majority of laws, no more than 5 or 10% of the students get the kind of jobs that leave any reasonable possibility of services the debt load which is includingly common. >> we have lawyers climbing in with that same sentiment . . .

jillian i'm going to go to you with this -- >> good. >> you teach at usc, andrew was a usc grad. thinking about the consequence, this might lead to a shrinking lawyer pool, what are the consequences that will have on society, big firms? let's map this out here. >> yeah, one of your tweets actually started down the right path. you have got to think about the mismatch in demand and where are people needed. i think the major problem we're facing -- because we're facing this amazing paradox. there is tremendous demand for legal help. there is tremendous demand in the corporate sector, in a more global complex fast-moving world, there is lots of need for

legal work, and then at the other end of the scale, the ordinary person, the small business, 90% of people showing up in in a court for family or eviction or collection foreclosure and so on, they are unrepresented. so there is this 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 -- it's terrible, the situation that so many of our students across the country are finding themselves in with this mismatch and getting caught right at the bite 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 to get a jd to provide legal help, and people

like andrew should be able to apply for a job at an online company providing legal services and provide services in that way. our current regulations don't let him do that, and don't let the really sophisticated tech companies that we already have ready to do that right now. >> walter is there an upside to this in 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 of the table. so does this reduce the pool of in-coming lawyers to people who are really passionate about this, and are in it because they love it? >> for so many years law was the miscellaneous thing if you were very smart and afraid of blood, so you don't want to be a doctor, your parents pushed you to be a lawyer. and that was all wrong.

there is a high burnout rate because so many people go into law who's personalities are not suited to the board room or the combat or the other things that law brings. so the legal profession would be much better off if the people who are drawn to it for its own sake are the ones who become lawyers. coming up some innovative things that a few law schools are trying, and why at least one of our guests say that will just make the problem worse. and before we hit the break check out a couple of hashtags we're following.

>> welcome back. ♪ welcome back. we have been discussing what is behind the big decline in law school enrollment. the dean of the university of baltimore school of law says this >> there are lots of ways our students gain experiences. first of all many students participate in our clinics. we have eight active clinics, so students participate, for example, immigration law clinics, criminal practice clinics, family laws. community developments. there are lots of different ways in which students can represent

clients under the supervision of expert faculty. secondly, we working to get our students out into law offices in externships, and we place our students in all kinds of legal settings. >> so walter there are a number of schools that are trying to innovate, thinking about changing the business model, is this the way forward? >> well, it could be. one of the problems that law schools face is when they do something innovative, very often they don't get good results either from applicants or the law firms who is hiring their graduates determines how popular they will be as a law school. and good schools have experimented with a third year that is more oriented towards experience, and a couple of years later they aren't getting better interview ers the way

they hoped, and they go back to doing it the old way. there are things we can do, one is to blow up accreditation. because they tie their hands. a tenured faculty, an expensive library, clinical study, whether your students want it or not, and on down through the whole list. that's what makes you a $50,000, instead of a $20,000 law school. >> how do you break out of that? >> i think we have to blow up the model more significantly than that. i think people see the legal world as the world it has been in the last century, and that is changing. we should not be thinking about law schools as a jd-production machine only. the requirement that you have to have a jd to provide any legal help in this country. that is not necessary.

and we should make a jd defending itself because of the quality it produces. we should have all kinds of training programs like the legal equivalent of a nurse practitioner, and allowing online companies like they have in the u.s., grocery stores, banks, small business associations, let them hire some of these graduates, take all of that risk off of them. take off the job of finding clients and collecting from them, and we can lower the cost of the model. there's lots to demand out there. we need to be a lot more creative at the law schools. >> let me get some community in here . . . andrew, give us some hopes for these people who are watching?

>> yeah, the advice i give them -- >> andrew go for it. >> not a job jillian. the advice i would give is there is not a glut of lawyers on the market. does america have enough lawyers? you should ask does america have enough justice? we need to find a way to graduate lawyers who are able to afford to take those jobs. >> paul what does the future for attorneys and law school look like to you? >> we're producing twice as many law graduates as there are jobs for lawyers. and we're charging way way too much. i agree with jillian. when she and i went to law school, private law schools cost a third of what they cost now. >> sounds like the priority is getting the tuition down. i'm sorry i have to cut the

conversation off here, because we are out of time. but thanks to all of our guests for a great discussion. until next time, waj and i will see you online. hello, welcome to the al jazeera news hour. the top stories. >> many more dead and injured as police use live ammunition against protestors they say are al armed. and violence spreads outside of the capitol with attacks on security forces. in the rest of the country. detaped journalists report in cairo and deny all