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I wont disagree that perhaps the US system could use reform/overhaul, but it's a bit more complicated than you describe. When you compare how medical schools and medical school admissions are handled in the US versus how law schools are organized, it's no surprise why law school has a glut of graduates who can't find jobs. I know this because I have enough friend who went on either of those tracks (as well as others). The med school kids all have jobs that pay well-enough, and the law school kids all became disilusioned and moved to other fields (except for the one that went to NYU). The number of Medical school admissions and future residency positions is pretty well controlled, so this kind of problem doesn't really arise (well, it's complicated but more or less). On the other hand, any school can spin up a law program and start charging admission, no matter how qualified it is to actually do that. But it's only worthwhile going to law school if you can get into the first tier (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU) or second tier schools. Third and fourth tier are basically a joke. You're throwing your money away. Of course, many people ignore that thinking they'll be different or lucky. And we end up with the kind of issues we see here today. It's still more complicated, though, because a lot of what people from third and fourth tier schools used to do (sit in giant rooms and review case law for big cases), they are no longer needed for thanks to technology. So the 2000's onward was an awful time to want to be shove yourself through law school hail-mary hoping that just because you're a "lawyer" you'll be OK. Law schools students got squeezed on both sides, and the pain is real. A profession that used to be much like medicine, where you would do "OK" in life at the very worst is now a commodity product thanks to forces from all sides. |
I went to graduate school at a college that had a primarily liberal-arts oriented undergraduate curriculum and I knew a lot of people who graduated with their liberal arts degree and ended up going to law school after finding that their degree wasn't really setting them on the path to a successful career. Not universally of course and a number of my friends did quite well for themselves with just their undergrad degrees but those who did didn't really follow particularly conventional career paths.
So for a reasonable number of people I knew, law school functioned as this sort of default career path for liberal arts undergrads--though a fair number of them didn't stay in the profession long-term.