I wanted to offer a corollary to The Sherpa’s post about the “worth” of a law school education. To frame the debate, let my first offer a little background.
I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago immediately after I got out of college. Since I went to an undergraduate institution that did not have a stellar reputation in the Social Sciences and my academic record wasn’t off the charts, I paid my own freight for the degree. The program – a one year masters – was marketed as being a way to burnish your CV, and get into a doctoral program. Assuming you decided academia wasn’t for you, the claim was that you would be able to parlay the degree into a far more substantive job that would offset the cost. Incidentally, the total cost of this enterprise, counting tuition, fees, books, moving expenses, and credit card debt was probably on the order of $60,000.
