Usually I write about legal education in Japan, whose decision to ape the U.S. legal education model has failed brilliantly, but today I have good news! Other countries do it badly too.
In the United Kingdom of all places, The Times furnishes us with, “What law school doesn’t tell you: 17,500 graduates; only 5,000 jobs.” Alas, subscription is required for the specifics, but the headline sure made me do a double-take. Being ignorant of such things, I have no idea what The Times‘ slant is, but superficially I’m pretty impressed that the U.K. has managed to out-do the U.S. in law graduate overproduction. Come on, Britons! Mimic our nondischargeable Grad PLUS loans—I dare you.
The other disaster du jour is … Korea! Korea JoongAng Daily informs us that adopting an American-style law school system has led to immiserating tuition hikes. It’s much more expensive to go to the new law schools than just taking the country’s damned bar exam old-school style.
The kicker is that Korea is phasing out the bar exam process in 2017, meaning it’s expensive legal education for all!
1,014.20 Korean won equal $1.00, so yes, law school costs, like, twice as much in Korea as it does here (even with living expenses). (I’ve heard hearsay that Korea is a higher education disaster where everyone goes to college but people in menial jobs still earn more than the typical college job.) Here’s the math:
[A] research team led by business administration professors Cheon Do-jeong, from Chonbuk National University, and Hwang In-tae, from Chung-Ang University, presented their dissertation analyzing the lawyers produced under each system.
According to Cheon and Hwang’s data, it costs an average of 22.17 million won annually over 4.77 years [$21,859], from entering law school until becoming a lawyer. The law school system costs a total of 105.79 million won [$104,309].
By contrast, the old system of taking the national bar exam cost an average of 9.32 million won annually over the course of 6.79 years [$9,190], including completing training at the Judicial Institute. The whole process amounts to 63.33 million won in total [$62,443].
My favorite quote from the article: “Furthermore, tuition increased by 9.8 percent this year.” Don’t worry, though, without government loans, the universities are going to shut down the law schools, according to a former dean. Imagine a dean saying something like that in the U.S.A.!
That’s all for now. Hope you enjoyed your Labor Day.
The Last Gen X American 
In every single case, when a country moves to the ‘American system’, the result is sky-high tuition for students, and worse outcomes.
To be fair I don’t think the UK quite has the American system because law is still an undergraduate degree there, as it is in Australia.
Here in Australia where the population is about 24M last time I looked (we have one of the highest population growth rates in the world, but that’s another issue) about 12,000 people enrolled in law this year. Which is just absurd. The main problem worldwide seems to be the false prestige attached to being a lawyer and the huge number of lemmings this attracts.
Although university degrees here are much cheaper than America the cost of degrees to students (paid back through PAYE) seems to be going up and up each year. The argument from politicians seems to be that of course university graduates always make a lot of money so this is only fair. Looking at America you can see this will only end in tears.