Cash for Clunkers

As the summer ends, most of the nation's largest law firms (including some coders' favorite, Morgan Lewis) are deciding whether to make offers to their current summer associates and/or deciding whether they should have a summer program next year. It's turning out to be a bloodbath out there.

Summer associates are being no-offered or cold-offered left and right. The mighty (?) Morgan Lewis has scrapped it's summer associate program for next year. (this is old news from mid-July). Ballard Spahr followed the next week. Monkey see monkey do? McCarter & English followed suit recently.

Perhaps coders care. Perhaps they don't. Maybe some are even secretly happy that associates are sharing the pain. Perhaps openly happy.

Classes before '09 - layoffs
Class of '09 - deferrals, possible rescission of offers
Class of '10 - no-offers
Class of '11 - no summer recruiting

Even if coders care little about aspiring associates on a personal level, they might care that the attorney supply is even more crowded than before.

With all this in mind, should there be a federal govt program stepping in here? Let's do a "Cash for law degree clunkers." Trade in your law degree for a brand-spankin' new degree in something else. What would you get yours in? How would the program work?

First, let's define "clunker." For cars, it was a vehicle doing less than 18 miles an hour. So let's say a "clunker" law degree is one that failed to obtain a job for the holder. A job making 80k or more. After three years (the length of law school itself), if a person can't find a job as an attorney, he or she can trade in their degree. The govt will then offer to pay 15k in tuition towards a degree in the sciences or 25k towards a degree in engineering. (number arbitrarily made up by me). Or even into training as an airplane mechanic. (I have no clue how much this costs). Any profession where there is an undersupply of talent. The drawback is you'd be going back to school. You would also get a 2k living stipend a month for a max of two years.

Of course, it's easier to say we should all just get refunds, or loans wiped out. But that only solves a single problem. Cash for clunkers might've benefitted people who bought new cars, but it also benefitted the car companies themselves, and in theory benefits the nationwide populations because the new cars had better mileage, thus lowering demand for gas and possibly lowering gas prices, and also lowering emissions which would theoretically help the environment and public health. In a similar way, cash for law degree clunkers gives the unemployed attorney a new degree, but also helps other attorneys by decreasing the attorney pool, and helps society in filling out in-demand jobs.

The costs would probably be astronomical though. I'm not even going to try to do the math on this.