Dropping Out

Every year around this time I receive phone calls from people -- some former clients, others total strangers -- who have just started law school and realize they have made a colossal mistake. Usually they're at fancy pants law schools, ones they feel lucky and privileged to be at. And they hate it. Everything about it. They hate the crazy amount of reading -- dry, boring reading. They hate the kinds of things they talk about in class, and the distinctive way that future lawyers are taught to analyze legal problems. Others tell me, just several weeks into their first year, that they'll do anything to hop over to the MBA side, because the jobs that those students are pursuing look more appealing.

Others wait until the summer after their first year to call me. They hated 1L, they confess, but they wanted to wait until their summer job -- at a real firm, with real lawyers, doing real legal work for real clients -- to see if they would like that better than law school. Sometimes, they hate what they see at the firms just as much: "I can't believe people do this all day long, year after year after year. I think I'll be an investment banker instead, as soon as I get out of law school." (At that point, I ask, gently but firmly, how he knows that industry and career any better than he thought he knew the law.) And these aren't people at Podunk Law School -- they're at Harvard, Columbia, etc.

If they were clients of mine when they originally applied to law school, I resist the urge to say "I told you so." And, invariably, I had told them so. I have the "why law?" conversation with a lot of people, but law school becomes this holy grail for many applicants, and once they've been accepted to a top school, they can't say no. I also see a lot of pre-law advisors -- many of whom have never practiced law -- contribute to the brainwashing.

What do I tell those unhappy 1L's? It depends. Some of them should drop out of law school, and out of the law. Most of them still don't have any idea what they'd rather be doing, though, and that's just one of the dangers of going to law school in the hopes that you'll figure out during those three years what the heck you really want to do. Some are in a real pickle if their resumes already look jumpy and scattered -- say, they started out pre-med, decided they hated that, then jumped over to law school, and realized they hated that too. If they drop out, they'll face some credibility problems when they announce, "Well, now I really want to do X!" The easier cases are the ones I tell to hang in there because there are aspects of their personality or their backgrounds that lead me to think that they'll actually enjoy certain kinds of legal practice even if they're hating law school; the two are very, very different beasts.

Some people stick it out through law school and then quit the law very soon after they start practicing. I have a friend who quit just weeks into her first job as a lawyer. Everyone told her she was crazy at the time, but over a decade later after calling it quits, she has had no regrets. Better that, she argues, than sticking around for however many years more, stuck in a miserable job as the courage to bail dwindles.

I do get happy calls too this time of year. I just heard from someone who told me she loves -- loves! -- Civ Pro as a 1L at Penn. That suggests to me that she's well suited for a litigation career (I hated Civ Pro and wrote off litigation on the spot. I went over to the transactional side). It's nice to hear when it's a good match.

On a side note: I've never -- not once -- received a call from a former MBA applicant telling me that business school was a huge mistake. An MBA may not always have been necessary to get where they wanted to go -- the top programs attract smart and ambitious people, the kind who are likely to be successful no matter what, so it still makes sense to think about whether the added value justifies the expense and opportunity cost in any given case. And of course there are limits to my sample size. Still, I find the contrast to my JD folks telling.

The New York Times has a confusing article today ("Debate Grows as Colleges Slip in Graduations") about the small percentage of "full-time freshmen" at community and commuter colleges around the country who graduate within six years. But the article goes on to point out that many of the students who attend these kinds of programs "are older, have children, and work full time," and that nearly half the students at the worst offender (Northeastern Illinois University, a Chicago commuter school) attend part-time. The statistics apparently don't count as graduates people who transferred out of a given community college into another community college or into a four-year program.

And in my experience, many people start out full-time and then drop down to part-time when they realize there aren't 96 hours in the day to juggle their various roles. If they're attending part-time -- as many peole at community colleges and commuter schools do -- then of course they're not going to graduate in four years, or even six. They're taking a class here, a class there, and fitting in what they can in between work and family obligations. I don't understand what the scandal is.

If anything, that's one of the things I admire about this country. Having grown up in Europe, I find it striking how much more open Americans are to starting a college degree even if they weren't on a college track when they got out of high school, and even if they have to plug away at it piecemeal while working full or part-time. In Germany, 30 percent of students drop out of university, even though tuition is "free" (i.e. taxpayers pick up the tab), working during school is practically unheard of, and the average student doesn't graduate until age 28. When my home state (Hesse) tried imposing a semester tuition fee equivalent to several hundreds of dollars, student protesters brought several large cities to a standstill. I'll take the scrappy American part-timer any day.

David Brooks offers an op-ed in the New York Times today about recent policy proposals that seek to increase the percentage of Americans who graduate from college. He sees two camps among the policy wonks: “ecologists” and “engineers.” Ecologists, he argues, think about problems – and solutions – in terms of a web of human relationships. Engineers, on the other hand, think about allocating resources. When politicians hope to fix a problem by throwing more money at it, he sees a bunch of policy “engineers” who don’t grasp the underlying human realities.

First he looks at the money side of the equation: Over the past three decades, he says, the government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid, while “the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged” and the “number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.” (Incidentally, economist Richard Vedder  has argued that the abundance of cheap student loans actually causes tuition to spiral upwards.) Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid.org has since disputed Brooks’s numbers, pointing to Census Bureau data showing that the “percentage of the population 25 or older obtaining at least a bachelor's degree increased from 9.4 percent in 1965 to 27.7 percent in 2004.”

On the people side of the equation, Brooks points to studies demonstrating that only a “relatively small slice drop out because they can’t afford college. Perhaps 8 percent are driven away purely for financial reasons.” Instead, he argues,

The reasons for dropping out are as numerous as the people who do it. Many students are academically unprepared for college work. Many suffer personal or family crises. Many are bored in the classroom and disengaged on campus. Many suffer from a strange cognitive dissonance. They have high aspirations. They know what they have to do to succeed. Yet when it comes time to, say, show up for the math test, they blow it off. And yet they still seem confident they will achieve their goals.

Brooks’s observation comports closely with what I see every day working with current and former college students who make up my admittedly non-scientific-sized sample. I do hear about financial troubles interfering with school, but they are rarely the reason that people ended up taking time off during college or dropping out. Rather, what I see over and over again is lack of motivation, of mentorship, of a realistic sense of how different their lives would be in the long run with a successful transcript than without one. I see a lot of people go off the rails when they get to college because they lack the maturity and self-discipline to succeed in the looser, unsupervised world of college; they go a bit ga-ga after escaping the confines of high school and the parental roof. Others lose sight entirely of why they’re even in college as they focus all their energy on their social lives. On the less fun side, I hear about parents getting divorced, eating disorders, substance abuse, and depression. It’s not clear to me either that more money for college tuition will fix those problems.

As a former graduate school admissions officer, I’ve heard a lot of excuses about how hard it was to adjust to college life, and would I please overlook this big chunk in someone’s transcript because of the following eight extenuating circumstances. Part of me sympathized, while the other part of me shook my head.

I would encourage high school students and their parents to adopt a practice that the Europeans, British, and Australians adopted a long time ago, with real success: the gap year. Let’s face it: most high school seniors are not ready for the freedom or rigor of college. Even the top colleges in the United States smile on a productive gap year (or more) between high school and college. Whether living on a shoe-string budget teaching English in Eastern Europe or China, or working retail to save money for college, gap year students arrive on campus with more motivation and more gratitude than the kids whose parents pushed them into college right out of high school. And when it comes time to compete for a good job after graduation or a slot at a prestigious graduate program, they’ll have to make far fewer excuses for themselves.

So Randal and Dante are back in Kevin Smith’s Clerks II , and they surprised me!

More than ten years after making directionless, lazy slackerdom appear charming and funny in the first Clerks, they now show us how tired that shtick can get when you’ve seen your thirtieth birthday come and go. Randal is still breaking the record as the world’s worst employee as he surfs X-rated websites on the job, mocks a burger-ordering internet millionaire for his sell-out ways, hurls racial epithets at one customer, makes another one vomit, and brings the kind of transgressive performance art into the workplace that would give any HR director a heart attack. Talk about a red flag: When even stoner Jay (of Jay and Silent Bob) concludes, “Sometimes I wish I’d done more with my life,” you have to wonder whether there’s any hope left for Randal.

But Dante? By some miracle, he managed to jump over that fence into adulthood and discovered expectations. He decides he’s sick of slinging EggaMoobyMuffins and figures out that perhaps he’s been hanging out with the wrong crowd. In one of the few redeeming scenes of the movie, when they’re sitting in lock-up and Randal calls Dante a sheep for wanting more out of life, Dante calls him on his BS: “What would you do if you were half the master of your destiny that you think yourself to be?” He reminds Randal how they ended up spending their entire twenties working at the Quickmart in the first place: they had started community college together, but dropped out soon after starting for lack of motivation. And here’s what really impressed me. Unlike some of the folks whom Anya Kamenetz profiles and defends in her now notorious book Generation Debt (including someone who dropped out of community college because she didn’t like the commute), Dante and Randal both figure out that what they need is a good kick in the pants. Wake up and smell the Mooby Coffee!

Surprise number two? When Dante decides that he wants to do something with his life and inspires Randal to jump the fence with him, I half-expected them to do what so many real-life people do when they’re looking for a quick and easy entré into professional respectability: apply to law school. Instead, they figured out what they were really passionate about and made it happen. God bless ’em.