>> for those in school tuition really high and the job paying the loans are scarce. what's behind the decline in the legal industry and what is it going to mean when you need a lawyer ? our producer is here as always, bringing in all of your live feedback, we have gotten a

lot of feedback on this today and i feel like people are sort of glee. and smirking as they are writing things like we don't need more lawyers, this isn't such a bad thing. >> glee. because everyone thinks us fellow lawyers are the gollums of the world. we are next to executioners and bankers. >> bankers might have more respect. >> they might. as a recent law rat i could have been a guest on today's show talking about how difficult it was for some of us good lawyers to get jobs in this industry if you will. and we have gail who shares that sentimentality. we lack integrity. lawyers are right up with used car salesmen. >> thank you, gail. given that 80% of congress are lawyers, well, i rest my case. joshua tweets in:

a law degree does not have to lead to traditional practice. anyone in government, journalist, teaching, politics could benefit for a j.d. but as we are finin finding out it aint ease. >> i do you regret going to law school? >> i don't regret the education or the license, subsidized my writing here got mere here wearing makeup. i do reget the debt. >> and it's huge for so many people. going to law school it used to be a great way to achieve upward mobility. but, you know, the school is extensive. hard work, promise i've high-paying job made it worth it. things are changing, though, in the last 25 years, tuition has risen twice as fast as inflation. and first year enrollment has plunged. making the future of the legal professional at least as we know it now, a bit uncertain. students are avoiding the career

that has left many graduates saddled with huge debt, dwindling salaries and far job prospects, now justs are feeling the crunch about 80% of law schools are losing money and some universities are attempting to attract more students by selectively slashing tuition rates, what he behind the sharp did he line and how will it affect you and the "profession to help us get a handle on this in 30 minutes we are joined by walter julien a professor of law and economics at the university of southern california school of law and paul campos is a professor at the university of colorado law school. he is also the author of don't go to los angeles school unless. welcome to all of you. paul in, four years we have gone from a record high number of aspiring lawyers entering law school to some of the lowest enrollment numbers in four

decades, we are not talking about a little decline, this is dropping off a cliff, what is going on? >> i think what's going is for the first time prospective 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 will be making of a law degree and this has had a very strong effect on enrollment because what many people are come to go 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. >> the all-time highs in 2010 it was 52,000 some students entering law school. there was a glut of new lawyers coming on the scene. i mean, is this just a natural consequence of the market

pushing back and saying, no, we have enough, we are search rated? >> the bottom dropped out of legal hiring and that had everything to do with the 2008 crash with the decline and demands for lawyers making deals, starting newbieses also took the new lawyers for. the hiring was cut off and plunge from relatively good job prospects for the people who graduate aid couple of year old 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 decent jobs that was one thing. when you could only get a job for every third person in the class, all of the sudden everyone looked around each other and word spread fast, this is a disaster. >> gillian you are a law professor at usc school of law. what is your sense in terms of contact with students.

have you seen a did h decline ia there a fear of not getting jobs and being able to payback the debt? >> you i can't, our usc students are generally in good shape and there has been a significant change. there is more anxiety. 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 it's structural and a big problem related to what's happening in big law and generally happening for well over a decade. >> you are suggesting that big law schools are perpetuating the problem? or big law firm rather? >> i think the whole system does. all of us operate both the law schools and the legal professional operated a pretty protected environment and we haven't had to respond to much in the way of competitive pressures. and frankly what's happened over the last several years senior that a lot of the people who buy

the expensive legal services have found outweighs to reduce how many of those expensive lawyers they need to hire and that's kind of wrecked our business model and the problem we are facing is the law school professions aren't seeing that structural problem. >> our community is deeply cynical like you mentioned at the top, lisa, two reasons for the decline, number one, students are duped in to thinking that law school say tick feed a b.m.w. and steak every night. i don't have a bmw or steak, lisa. second cost for schools is almost zero. decline is good, and she's a lawyer, it helped many realize that stem is the best way to go instead of pursuing j.d. that it's worth the money . here is tristan from berkeley admission, grif give limb a

him a listen. >> with regard to whether it's worth it. our pool is what it was last year. people are applying to berkeley law. our job prospects have been good. good for me. and i would say the government loan repayment program really gives public interest law a real boost. >> paul, look, i am an attorney, we are the gollums of america, my digital producer julio earlier today said i hate attorneys. most people in america are hearing this and saying isn't it bet for america to have less lawyers. what's your take on that in. >> my take is that is it's better for america to have a much closer alignment between the number of lawyers being produced and the number that the economy can support. i have to disagree a little about with walter in terms of things being good prior to the 2007-2008 crash.

that was true at elite law schools but 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. so basically what we have had over the course of the last generation, is a gradually contracting legal market. although not in a straight line of course. 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 an enormous increase in tuition that's remarkable. people are shocked when i tell them that you could go to harvard law school for $12,000 a year in the early 1970s and tuition in terms of $2,013. in terms of inning changes -- >> what's interesting about that is the elite schools the harvards, yales being stanford are unscathed pretty much. by what was interesting in reading the research is that 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 these students are going there thinking if i pay, you know, $175,000 for mean indication i will get something out of it. is there a responsibilities on the part of the schools? >> well, the schools saw a good thing and went with it. because it's a strange, strange market where you can be third or fourth tier law school and milk people for as much money as if you were a top tier law school and yet things have been set up that way, it took quite a while before through the efforts of paul and others word got around to just how poor the placement rates were at some of the expensive but low-rated schools. that was a type of miss leading consumer -- >> americans equate high price with quality. >> it's so press team driven. everyone looks to the elite schools, everyone tries tomorrow tate them. evening if the students who are going

to a lower rated school don't want that. they still make it an expensive education and winds up saddling people with debt. i love main street lawyers compared with others, they should not be graduating with $150,000 of debt up. >> next we'll hear from a law school grad who has $215,000 in debt. and he can't get a job as a lawyer, his story when we return. also did you know that you can interact with this show on your smart phone or tab he had. there is an app for that. check this out. tv is no longer one way with the stream second screen app, share your thoughts during the life show. disagree with one off you are guests? great, tell us. get exclusive app contest, receive graphs and guest information. interact with other app users in real time. you can be our third co-host. vote, tweet, record video comments and we'll feature them on air.

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♪ i'm a professor of gorge to up, and lawyer in private 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 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 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 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.

>> with al jazeera america.

♪ ♪ welcome back, to we have been discussing what's behind the big decline this law school enrollment of before the break we asked if schools could be part of the solution the dean of university of baltimore law says yes, lots of ways to gain experience, real world, hands on experience, many students participate in our clinics. we have eight active clinics and so students participate, for example, in law clinics, criminal practice clinic, family law, community development, there are lots of disk ways in which students can actually represent clients under the supervision of experts family. secondly looking to get our student out to law offices, baltimore, maryland and the

entire region, those are externships and and we place our students in all kind of legal settings. >> so walter, there are a number of schools innovating, changing business models is this the way forward? >> it could be one of the problems they face is when they are innovative they don't get good results of applicants or firms hiring. determineses how popular they will be as a law school. you can site chapter and verse, good schools have experimented with a school more oriented with experience, they rant getting better applicants or law firms to interview. and they go back to doing it the old way. now, there are lots of things that we can do to encourage innovation, one is to blow up a cred accreditation. the curb rules force their hand.

and force them in to the old mode. you have to have expensive library, clinical study, whether your students want it or not . >> they see the legal word as i word in the last century and that's fundamentally changing, we should not be thinking about law schooling as a j.d. production only machine. the more important thing to get rid of an accreditation is the requirement that you have to have a d.j. to provide any legal help in this country. that's not nessy. and we should make a j.d. defend itself because of the quality it produces, we should have programs for people who want to be helping out people in specialized areas like the legal

equivalent of a nurse practitioner and allowing online companies like they have in the u.s., grossly stores, banks, small business associations, let them hire some of these graduates, take all the risk off them, take off the job of finding clients and collecting from them. and we can lower the cost of the model, there is lots to demands out there. we need to be more creative at the law schools and -- >> let me get the community here:

>> does america have enough justice? there is a huge demands for the services lawyers want to provide we need to find a way to graduate lawyers you are able to afford the job. what does the future look like to you? >> let's cut to the chase, we are producing twice an as many graduates as jobs to lawyers, and charging way too much. i agree completely with gillian that law schools have to stop being j.d. factories and stop charging $55,000 a year, when we went to law school private schools cost a third and public a 10th. >> so sounds like the priority is getting the tuition down is number one folk, i am sorry we have to cut the conversation off because we are out of time. thanks for our guests for a great discussion, until next time we'll see you online. ♪ ♪

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