How This All Began

About two months ago, I got a call from an old friend from undergrad. He was very excited that he was going to attend law school and follow his dream of becoming a lawyer. I of course, was excited for him (soon to be horrified). He was going to attend the Thomas Cooley School of Law in Michigan. I had never heard of this place before so I went searching on the Internet for information.

This is when I encountered the Law School Scam Bloggers. The first post I read was from Third Tier Reality. After months of reading those and other scambloggers like them, I saw what the legal market had become. It is not the shining star of a profession that I was lead to believe years ago when I dabbled in the prospects of attending law school. I luckily did not attend the third tiers that I was accepted into. I went to business school instead, for free on a graduate assistantship. This is important because my worthless double major in History and Politics as an undergrad is best used in this economy to wipe ones ass with.

Now, I thought before my eyes were opened, that law school was an ivory tower that guarded the entry into a noble and prestigious career. Wow was I wrong. From reading stories about outsourcing of basic legal work to India, to the gulags of document review, and the "international opportunities" for U of Michigan grads to work in those outsourced jobs, I saw yet another scam being run on our generation.

I will say this, if you do not like the angry ramblings of a bitter generation Y member, stop reading. I have the personality of Henry Rollins, Penn Jilette, and Tyler Durden put together in a button down, MBA having package. I work a dead end job at my university that will thankfully end soon, as my contract is about to expire. I'm actually looking forward to unemployment as bad as that sounds. Then at least I wouldn't have to speak on the phone with mouth breathing millennial bastards who sound like they just took a massive bong rip. Or their parents who need to cut the fucking cord. Ohhh... and the people that want me to release enough information to easily steal every bit of their identity, over a telephone, with no real way to identify them.

This post is going somewhere I promise. My friend, lets call him Mike, was in no way a stellar student. He eked out a bachelors degree in polisci like me, but was on some kind of probation, either academic or administrative, at least a half dozen times. He took out every loan possible to finance this four year party that was college to him. Many a time I have seen him pass out, fall down, wake up in the hospital with stitches or a stomach pump drunk. I have also loaned him ten or twenty dollars here or there, so he could buy food. Mike has spent the years between then and now working at a gas station in some armpit town.

Now, Mike is a good guy, and was fun to hang out with in college (to an extent), but he is in no way someone who I would want as my attorney. That is even if he can practice in the imploding legal market. What he will do is take out at least another $150,000 of debt to add onto the loans from undergrad. What he has done is mortgaged his future with no real chance to ever escape that debt (because they are non-dischargeable under bankruptcy) other than leaving the country or death.

What Mike is thinking is he is bettering himself through education. While this may be true for our parents generation during the baby-boom, the same is not true for people my age. Our bachelors degrees have been devalued because of the pipe-dream promise that education was meant for everyone. It is not. Some people should not waste the time and money on a useless college degree.

I will end with this quote from Fight Club:
"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. "

We now have that great depression and great war(s), maybe we will finally stop being the sheeple we have all become.