Free to Choose...What They Think Is Best

There has been a steady drumbeat in the media since about the turn of the millennium about professional, well educated women who were supposed to represent the triumph of feminism leaving their careers. The one I first remember reading was "The Opt-Out Revolution" by Lisa Belkin back in 2003. They've cropped up every so often since then, and just last month we saw one dedicated to disappearing female MBAs. Now Linda Hirshman asks in the September 4, 2006 National Law Journal where all those female lawyers are ending up:

They have been expensively educated, many at state law schools at taxpayers' expense. Most of them will pass the bar exam. But in 10 years, half of them, mostly the married ones with children, will have strayed from the profession, working either part-time or no time at all. Behemoth New York law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom has assigned a woman partner to head up a program to try to help the runaway Portias stay connected to the firm and one day perhaps even return. Famed Judge and University of Chicago Law School Senior Lecturer Richard Posner said on his blog last year that everyone connected with elite law schools knows that, of those training there, a lot more women than men will leave the profession.

Young women who are considering expensive graduate professional degrees -- the kind they'll borrow six figures for -- deserve to know what choices those women are making who are just a decade or so ahead of them on the life curve, and these articles are providing a service in getting that information out there. Hirshman goes a step further and also offers a fiscal policy proposal:

Maybe a liberal undergraduate education makes you a better child raiser, but it's hard to see how an extended understanding of torts would be useful....The question is: Why are the rest of us paying for their legal education? Not only do taxpayers pay for state law schools, the donors to private law schools get to deduct their donations from their federal income taxes, raising the taxes on the rest of us (or the deficit we pass on to our children). So the taxpayers pay a big chunk of the cost of educating lawyers at private schools, too. Then many women quit to stay home with their babies. Is it worth it?

She's not asking rhetorically, either. She thinks that people who aren't using their law degrees in some substantial way ten years after they graduate should pay back whatever it cost to educate them above and beyond whatever tuition they paid. The refunds would then fund scholarships for people who couldn't otherwise afford to attend.

(Flashback: just last year the director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, Marlyn McGrath, pondered whether concerns about highly educated women abandoning high-powered careers should factor into admissions decisions: "It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" Good thing her name isn't Larry Summers.)

I agree with part of Hirshman's premise. If people were absorbing all the cost and risk of educating themselves -- which is not currently the case -- then we'd all be 100% responsible for the returns on those investments, and it wouldn't be anyone's business what we do or don't do with our expensive degrees. (And we would perhaps find future stay-at-home moms less willing to take up precious spots at Harvard that should apparently be going to people who will be putting together Goldman Sachs pitch books in the middle of the night.)

I'm also troubled by the whiff of indignation, both in Hirshman's September 4 article and also in a previous one she's written, about women choosing to be full-time mothers. When she asks how to "change the situation" and mourns what she calls the "failure of choice feminism," just as Lisa Belkin mourned the "stalled revolution," and the dean of Yale college mourned the failure of young women to "imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles," what they're really mourning is the fact that many young women make what they are deeming the wrong choice.

I also don't agree with Hirshman's proposal as a practical matter. I wonder how we would decide which jobs are sufficiently related to one's degree or are sufficiently beneficial to society to implement her proposal. I have a law degree, but I'm not practicing law, and my work life takes me further and further away from what I was trained to do. (I'm also dutifully paying off my taxpayer-subsidized loans.) And if we're going to pick on women who decide to raise their children full-time after however many years in the workforce, how about we also pick on all the other people with degrees they don't use, say, people who graduate unemployable with useless humanities PhDs, or people who majored in chemistry but then decided they didn't like the solitary nature of the lab, or the folks who majored in "communications" but couldn't craft a grammatically correct sentence if you paid them to? What about the study of wheel-thrown ceramics, or post-modernism, or Tupac and Lil' Kim, or the sociology of urinals? Admittedly, these are line-drawing problems that don't invalidate her argument or her proposal. But if we're going to ask whether taxpayers should be subsidizing educations that don't get used, or that most taxpayers would consider a lousy return on their investment, then that question needs to be asked of a much wider group of graduates than just stay-at-home moms. If they're fair game, let's also go after every useless degree. That would make for a lot of checks to the U.S. Treasury.

Circling back to former lawyers in particular, I'll wrap up by pointing out that most law school applicants have no clue -- none at all -- why they're applying to law school or what they want to do with their law degrees, other than some vague notion of "helping society" or "doing something international." I hear them paint rosy pictures of the family life they plan to have, even though it's just not doable with a six-figure law firm job (and they'll need those six-figure jobs to pay back their loans). That goes for men and women alike. I ask them to think about what they want to do with that enormous investment of time and money, because it's an investment that simply doesn't make sense for a lot of them, at least not at that stage in their lives. There's a reason legions of people leave the law, wish they could leave the law, or write books and satires about the horrors of practicing law. Even if they're spending their own money and not someone else's to pursue a law degree, it's still a boneheaded move for many of them, whether or not they end up staying home with their kids.