How is Law School Like Wall St.?

From the Wall St. Journal's Law Blog:

"Thomas Jefferson School of Law, based in San Diego, was the first to face a lawsuit alleging that it misled students by advertising that a high percentage of its graduates landed jobs, without saying which of those jobs required a law degree or were full time.

 

Now, a former career-services employee at Thomas Jefferson says the school didn’t just mislead; it outright lied about how many of its graduates were employed."

 

Maybe it was the fact that this story was in the Journal, maybe it is just my propensity to see parallels between the worlds of finance and law at nearly any opportunity, but I started thinking about the similarities between Wall. St. and law school when I read this story.

 

Both offer the potential for riches as well as heartache. Both can lead to early retirement or early death. Neither is inherently bad, per se.

 

However on that last point, despite neither being inherently evil, both take on that quality in the minds of the masses when stories like this, or the Barclays story from earlier this week, rear their ugly heads. While there is a lot of good and usefulness in law school and Wall St. as institutions, cheaters like this bring the naysayers, perhaps with justification, out in full force.

 

Law school and Wall St. both provide benefits to most who participate on the balance and over time. However, false facts, like fake employment statistics or earnings numbers, tend to bring in those who are not well-equipped to deal with the rigors of each. The end result is that poor outcomes rise, giving each a bad name in the minds of the many. Pity, as both have done very well by me...