Finances

Lately, there seems to be quite a bit written about salaries and salary negotiation (we did an interview on that subject recently for an article in the Wall Street Journal). Salaries may at first seem like a bit of a non-topic, considering the state of the economy.  However, we do know if there is any group that it is really going to push the envelope, it's Gen Y, so we wanted to give you some guidelines to think about.

If you are in the process of securing a position:

1.  Be realistic, and don't be too picky.

Anything paid is a plus in this economy. What matters is that your career is moving forward. Remember that many young people are going the unpaid route just to keep their foot in the door. If taking a lower salary means getting a roommate or even moving home for a short stint, don't panic. Everyone is adapting to the challenges of the economy, and it may be your turn.

If you are lucky enough to be entertaining an offer, keep the following questions in mind. Answering these questions may help a lower salary seem more palatable.

• Will I learn new things from this role?
• Will I be learning things from established employees with a lot of experience?
• Does this role satisfy a skill or experience requirement that I will need in
  the future?
• Are there chances for advancement at the organization later on?
• Is this an organization known to help young people move forward with their careers?
• Is the organization known to be fair in terms of salary and bonuses overall?

Remember not everything is salary. Keep a clear head even if you are greatly disappointed with the salary you are initially offered. Try to extract your ego from the process and remember that working is good...being unemployed, not so good. Always remain gracious and polite when receiving any offers. Don't write off offers that you think are too low, especially if you have student loans or other debt to consider. There may be other things that the organization has to offer in the overall scheme of your career.

2. Do your homework.

Review websites to get current info about salaries. You could try www.salary.com or www.payscale.com. Others sites like is the bureau of labor statistics - (www.bls.gov.) are a bit more detailed, but offer info about your job in specific settings, and that can make a big difference in salaries. Keep in mind that even in the same field, the setting in which you work and area of the country can change a salary dramatically. For example, will you be in a school vs. a hospital setting vs. a business setting?

Also, remember that cost of living is quite different from place to place. Visit sites that help you compare how far a salary can actually go from one place to another. Try sites like www.bankrate.com that offer detailed information concerning cost of living indicators such as housing, food, and utilities.

Finally, know the credentials that affect salaries in your chosen field. If a master's degree means more dollars in your field and you have a bachelor's degree, know that there will be a difference in salary without exception. Be familiar with the credentials and certifications that affect eventual salaries in your field.

3. Get a realistic salary preview from insiders.

Use social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn to make contact with people in your field and explore what managers are actually offering younger employees. Don't rely on rumors or urban myths or outdated information, because today is much different than two years ago. Remember you may be competing with other individuals with years of experience. You can ask for information about raises and bonuses as well. If you are still in school, contact the college recruiting center - they are a great resource about salary and hiring trends.

If you already have a job and want to negotiate a salary increase:

1. Think long and hard about the timing of your request and the state of your organization.

If you have witnessed recent layoff and concessions among other employees, you definitely do not want to talk salary at this time. Be happy you are still employed and wait a while and reevaluate your options. Nothing will make you look worse than demanding a higher salary in the midst of a severe downturn. Don't move forward - sit tight even if you think your salary is on the low side.

If it appears that things are stable or improving at your workplace, read on.

2. Know how your experience and performance stack up against others in your role.

You need to look around your workplace and assess how you really stack up. Is your salary really low when you are compared with your co-workers? Do you have the credentials to move up the pay scale at your workplace? If you haven't completed your graduate degree or that certification program that has been recommended, now is the time to think about how that will affect a request for an increase. If you can swing it, find a way to beef up your resume and round out your credentials before you ask for an increase. 

3. Make yourself a more valuable employee before asking for more money.

Consider the following:

• Have I spent enough time in my current role to be a proven entity - in other words if you left, would you be missed?
• Has your performance stood out in a way that sets you apart from your peers?
• If you imagine your manager reviewing a list of employees and having to cut one loose, would it be you? Why not?

Remember that spending a year or two in a role doe not guarantee a promotion or a salary increase; those have to be earned and justified. In the meantime be sure that you are continuously increasing your value within the organization.

If after considering everything we have discussed, you still think it wise to negotiate, do so. But proceed with caution and be prepared to justify your request thoroughly. Let us know how things have worked out by posting a comment.

Marla Gottschalk is our workplace and career coach. She and Anna have conducted surveys about Gen Y in the workplace and will be publishing the results soon.

To add to the list of things that can keep you from practicing law: taking on so much debt that you can't pay it back and get dinged by the bar committee.

Today's NYT has an astonishing story about a 47-year-old who started at Hastings Law School back in 2000, decided to throw in a master's degree, and then found himself trying to carry student loans of $230,000. By now, that amount has spiraled to $400,000 because of interest and penalties, during a time when he wasn't able to practice law yet because he had some difficulty passing the bar exam (he had to take it three times).

He concedes that he hasn't made a single payment on his loans, and he now finds himself in trouble applying to the state bar:

In January, the committee of New York lawyers that reviews applications for admission to the bar interviewed Mr. Bowman, studied his history and the debt he had amassed, and called his persistence remarkable. It recommended his approval.

But a group of five state appellate judges decided this spring that his student loans were too big and his efforts to repay them too meager for him to be a lawyer.

“Applicant has not made any substantial payments on the loans,” the judges wrote in a terse decision and an unusual rejection of the committee’s recommendation. “Applicant has not presently established the character and general fitness requisite for an attorney and counselor-at-law.”

Mr. Bowman, 47, appears to have crossed some unspoken line with his $400,000 in student debt and penalties, accumulated over many years.

I don't mean to pile on. The article makes clear that the borrower had some extenuating circumstances, and that the lenders don't necessarily have clean hands in all of this. And of course these days even graduates of the top law school in the country are having a tough time finding (and keeping) work at very high salaries.

At the same time, though, one wonders about the borrower's judgment. This article serves as a good reminder that higher education is an investment -- a very expensive one -- and piling on more and more debt means you have to be ruthless in assessing what your income prospects are likely to be coming out of School X with a degree in Y to be leveraged in market Z. And to invest in law school and then have so much trouble passing the bar exam... that's a scary scenario, too.

Some closely related postings on the subject:

• "We Should Be Ashamed Of Ourselves"
• "What's a Master's Degree Worth?"
• "Feast or Famine for Law School Grads"
• "Interview with the LSAT Blog"
• "Upside-Down Math"
• "Dealing with Your Past"

Please share your thoughts! I imagine people will have strong feelings about this NYT article.

I'm enjoying a fascinating blog posting in the NYT about the value of a master's degree. Highly recommended.

A number of economists and education researchers say that the student debt problem, while real, has been overblown by the press and loan-forgiveness advocates, and that most students do not graduate with too much debt

But the debate presents difficult questions for young people, who face the most difficult economy since the Great Depression. Many have decided to go to graduate school, to wait out the storm. Several commenters on our forums even said they had no choice but to seek a master’s degree (and incur more debt), arguing that a B.A. today is the equivalent of having a high school diploma 20 years ago and more employers require a higher degree.

How do students know if a graduate education is worth it or not? What degrees are worth getting, and which are not? How does a student weigh the risks and benefits gain a higher education degree.

Read more here. (But see my advice about the article's purported "pay-off" of going to law school here and here.) And please share your thoughts!

These are not the happiest times to be coming out of law school or business school. An article and a blog posting in today's Wall Street Journal jumped out at me:

"Recession Batters Law Firms, Triggering Layoffs, Closings" is a sad post-mortem of the once-venerable San Francisco law firm Heller, Ehrman, which closed its doors last year. I summered there as a 2L, during much happier times (thank you, internet bubble). It sounds as if Heller, like many other firms, had been in the process of renegotiating its business model, and that's been a problem industry-wide. But check out this paragraph: 

When Heller lawyers gathered for a retreat in March 2007 in Santa Barbara, Calif., some had grown anxious about the firm's finances. Mr. Bomse staged a mock opera about the firm's struggles. It featured professional opera singers and members of the Santa Barbara orchestra, and cost the firm more than $200,000, according to a member of the firm's executive committee. During the performance, lawyer David Goodwin says his wife turned to him, aghast at what she imagined the cost to be, and said, "This is a poorly managed firm. You need to leave."

After reading the whole article, and this anecdote in particular, I find the article's title misleading. It's not clear to me at all that the recession is responsible for killing off Heller. The article points to the firm's overreliance on big cases that ended up settling, as well as clients in general who have been wising up and learning to avoid long, costly trials. And throwing money around on stupid things also says something about a firm's managerial priorities.

So lawyer-guy's wife got me thinking. When you're out intervieiwng, for any kind of job, you can take a look around at your prospective employer and, like that wife at the retreat, do a gut check. I know firms are spending a lot less on recruiting these days, but they still have to recruit. So if employers are being frugal in recruiting you, think about whether that's actually a good sign. Same goes for colleges and grad schools that try to lure you with stupid bling.

"Nowadays, an MBA Doesn't Equal Job Security" states the obvious to some degree -- did it ever equal job security? -- but take a look at the interesting comments to that blog posting, where we see a debate unfold about the commodification of MBA degrees vs. the school of thought that still puts a lot of stock in the "seal of approval" you're getting from the top schools. I'll add to that debate this observation: I'm hearing from a number of MBAs from the very top schools who are having trouble finding jobs right now. It's grim. Hang in there. An MBA, even from a top school, and even during economically healthy times, is not some sort of magic pixie dust you can sprinkle on your resume. You still have to do the work of figuring out what you want to do with your career, and figuring out how you're going to get from A to B. See here for more thoughts on that.

A huge thank-you to law professor Paul Caron for shining a public spotlight on a big problem.

Professor Caron has highlighted some astonishing bits of a recent podcast from a meeting of law school admnistrators:

AALS Committee on Research Program (Jan. 9, 2009), Citations, SSRN Downloads, U.S. News, Carnegie, Bar Passage, Careers: Competing Methods of Assessing Law Schools (podcast):

Bill Henderson (Indiana):

• 25:55: At 50 law schools, 20% of the students are either unemployed, flunked out, or are unknown, yet the ABA and LSAC disavow the use of data to rank law schools.

Richard Matasar (Dean, New York Law School):

• 1:16:50: "We are an input-focused business, and outputs are what the students are paying for."

• 1:21:20: "We should be ashamed of ourselves. We own our students' outcomes. We took them. We took their money. We live on their money to pay to come to San Diego [where the conference was held]. And if they don't have a good outcome in life, we're exploiting them. It's our responsibility to own the outcomes of our institutions. If they're not doing well ... it's gotta be fixed. Or we should shut the damn place down. And that's a moral responsibility that we bear in the academy. It's a leadership responsibility that each of us has. And damn the U.S. News if it affects our rankings. The kids are not gonna show up. Do you know that LSAT registrations are flat to down this year. That students' applications to law school are flat to down in a substantial number of law schools. That's never happened in a downturn in the economy before. They're catching on. Maybe this thing they are doing is not so valuable. Maybe the chance at being in the top 10% is not a good enough lottery shot in order to effectively spend $120,000 and see it blow up at the end of three years of law school.

Jason Solomon (Georgia):

• 1:29:20: "We're mad as heck and we can't take it anymore. ... To the panelists and others in the room: what are we going to do? Are people from AALS leadership here?"

Bryant G. Garth (Dean, Southwestern):

• 1:32:00: "This group has stonewalled completely and killed any kind of real consumer information for 20 or 30 years, and that's what made U.S. News own this particular enterprise. And it's something that maybe those that stonewalled for some long might have to take some initiative and responsibility in remedying the situation we find ourselves in." 

I'm also grateful to these law school professors and administrators for taking both moral and practical responsibility for this state of affairs. Dean Matazar in particular deserves a lot of credit.

Prof. Carson also called attention to this great article by Kathy Kristof in Forbes magazine called The Great College Hoax, a hoax that also applies to graduate school. In relevant part:

Accepted into the California Western School of Law, a private San Diego institution, [Joel] Kellum couldn't swing the $36,000 in annual tuition with financial aid and part-time work. So he did what friends and professors said was the smart move and took out $60,000 in student loans.

Kellum's law school sweetheart, Jennifer Coultas, did much the same. By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job. Yet even with Kellum moonlighting, they had to scrounge to come up with $145,000 in loan payments. With interest accruing at up to 12% a year, that whittled away only $21,000 in principal. Their remaining bill: $173,000 and counting.

Kellum and Coultas divorced last year. Each cites their struggle with law school debt as a major source of stress on their marriage. "Two people with this much debt just shouldn't be together," Kellum says.

The two disillusioned attorneys were victims of an unfolding education hoax on the middle class that's just as insidious, and nearly as sweeping, as the housing debacle. The ingredients are strikingly similar, too: Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging the masses to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it foists unaffordable debt on the most vulnerable marks. ...

Not only are college numbers spun. Some are patently spurious, says Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA. Law schools lure in minority students to improve diversity rankings without disclosing that less than half of African-Americans who enter these programs ever pass the bar. Schools goose employment statistics by temporarily hiring new grads and spotlighting kids who land top-paying jobs, while glossing over far-lower average incomes. The one certainty: The average law grad owes $100,000 in student debt. "There are a lot of aspects of selling education that are tinged with consumer fraud," Sander says. "There is a definite conspiracy to lead students down a primrose path." 

Here's what I've written on this subject before:

Readers of the Ivey Files and also my book (The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions) know that I've been discouraging people from attending all but the top law schools in the country, mainly because of simple math. As I wrote in The Ivey Guide:

You need to think of your legal education as an investment, and you should calculate your expected return on that investment. That's why it's so important to think about your career options coming out of various schools. If you have to pay $1,000 a month in after-tax dollars to cover your student loans, you'd better be sure you will be able to find work at a well-paying law firm after you graduate. If you graduate $100,000 in the hole, don't assume for as second you can run off and work for a public-interest legal clinic. And until you've paid off your debt, or unless you attend a law school with a generous loan-forgiveness program..., you won't have the freedom to go sit on a beach and stare at your belly button while you contemplate what you really want to do with your life. Think of it this way: Lots of people rush off to law school on the assumption that a law degree gives them freedom, but you don't really have freedom when you've mortgaged the next ten -- or thirty -- years of your life. (Law school graduates who join big firms don't have much trouble repaying their loans on the ten-year payment plan, but most law school graduates don't end up joining big firms, and many end up extending their loan-repayment schedules to thirty years.)

...

The further down the food chain [of law schools] you go..., the less of a safety net you have. Once you get to the second tier and below, you need to be at or near the top of your class to end up at a top firm in your region or with a top judge in your region (the national market is a much more difficult proposition), and people in the bottom half of the class often face grim hiring prospects.

Law school applicants fight me on this all the time, but I stick to my guns. Most ABA-approved law schools are not worth the investment. It's painful for people to hear, and most insist on learning this truth the hard way.

Read the rest of that post (and a discussion of the dodgy and arguably fraudulent recruiting and reporting practices of schools) here.

I'm also intrigued by Kathy Kristof's comparison, in her Forbes article above, of this college/law school hoax to the housing bubble and the real estate mess we find ourselves in. Economist Richard Vedder and his Center for College Affordability have done interesting work on this subject. Read their thoughts here and here.

Edited to add: A recent BU Law School grad's one-woman mission to talk people out of law school. "Don't Do What I Did."

Good news for prosecutors, legal aid attorneys, and public defenders here.

The headline says it all: "Strain on all sides as students put off college selections"

The front page of today's Boston Globe has a story about how July is just around the corner, but "a startling number of incoming freshmen are still torn over their college plans," and "some waitlisted students still hold out hope they will get into their top-choice school, while others who have already been accepted are not sure they can afford theirs." Multiple deposits are alive and well, no doubt.

As painful as it is, some of this soul-searching should have happened earlier in the process, and better late than never. It's healthy to be questioning whether $50,000 a year makes sense to attend some colleges.

More on the hell of waitlists here and here, and on bling-bling college tuitions here and here and here.

A short TV interview I had done on the subject aired today -- watch it here.

One of the really interesting things about Gen Y is how dramatically its preferences are driving changes in everything from workplace policies to luxury goods marketing to real estate development.

Last week, I headed over to the Boston Society of Architects to hear a talk by a woman named Persis Rickes about ways in which architects who design for universities need to be thinking about what Gen Y wants out of its academic and living spaces.

The talk was in many ways a primer on Gen Y for an audience that didn’t know much about this generation. Dr. Rickes did a great job pulling together some of the basic information about Gen Y (much of it culled, with attribution, from the seminal work Millennials Rising by Neil Howe and William Strauss). I was most interested in the following points from the talk (and for clarity, I'll break out the parts that are my own editorializing):

Many buildings will be around for 50 or 100 years -- how do you design a building that may already be outdated 10 years from now?

Just ten years ago, university architects were putting jacks in every wall on the assumption that everyone would want to be able to plug in anywhere for internet access. Of course, today everyone expects wifi, and all that wiring isn't getting used. Wired? That's so last millennium. Trying to predict what people will want out of their spaces for the next half century is perhaps a quixotic exercise, but architects are trying to be as forward-thinking as possible.

What about the ideal architecture for Gen Y? Part of that depends on their aspirations, which brings us to:

Gen Y is civic minded, socially conscious, dedicated to justice and the environment, and involved in a variety of causes.

Gen Yers expect to learn in real-life scenarios to prepare for their careers after college, and colleges need to be building the equivalent of “moot court” classrooms for students to get hands-on experience that approximates what they’ll face out in the real world. Students expect opportunities for real-world internships and service work. Schools need to offer “blended spaces” for teaching and learning a mix of academic and practical skills.

Anna says: This desire flies in the face of the mission of a liberal arts education, which values teaching you “how to think” over teaching specialized or pre-professional skills. But even at staunch liberal arts colleges, students are demanding hands-on experience through their extracurricular activities and internships, even if they don’t receive academic credit for them. Schools will need to think about what kinds of spaces they’re offering for hands-on training and learning, whether that happens as part of the curriculum or as an extracurricular activity.

I also wonder what it means for business schools that an entire generation is obsessed with social or environmental justice jobs (that's not the best short-hand and doesn't really cover the whole range, but I'll use it for these purposes). I personally think it would be impossible to do good without the private sector, but I suspect that business schools have a marketing problem on their hands with this cohort, and it explains the big uptick in social entrepreneurship and corporate citizenship offerings at business schools.

It also explains why so many college students are flocking to law school. I often talk to people who think they can litigate away the world's big problems -- poverty, hunger, international conflict, and war -- and they have every expectation that they’ll do so while making six figures or more in the process and living a somewhat glamorous life. (Brangelina and Bono have created some unreasonable expectations.) The social justice jobs are definitely out there, but many people I hear from struggle with the paychecks associated with those jobs. Sometimes people come out of school with unrealistic expectations about what kinds of salaries they can command in a certain job or with a certain diploma hanging on the wall, and those expectations (reasonable and unreasonable) are a big subject of this whole blog more generally.

Because realistic expectations are so important, it is absolutely necessary for college students to observe different jobs first-hand, whether it's through an internship or some other avenue.

Gen Y is obsessed with achievement and is really, really stressed out.

Gen Y is under a lot of pressure to achieve and excel. They like conformity and rules, because conformity and rules relieve some of that pressure. They have an overachiever culture. They know that they are being measured. They want constant feedback.

That means schools will need to offer a lot of tutoring and testing help, as well as spaces where those services can be accessed 24/7. Students also want a lot of very nice extracurricular spaces to blow off some of that steam, and there’s also increased demand for spirituality and meditation spaces. They also need spaces to be overachievers and show off their work, for example through state-of-the art performance halls.

Anna says: This has absolutely been my experience counseling Gen Yers for the last eight or so years. They are so worried about making the slightest mistake, because they feel that the stakes are so high, and I continue to grapple with the best ways to deal with their high anxiety levels.

This is a generation for whom mental health treatment and mental health prescription drugs are fairly routine, and I wonder how people who work with, manage, counsel, teach, and mentor Gen Y can best prepare themselves to work with these high anxiety levels. It's not specifically what most of us are trained to do, but maybe we need to be. From time to time we hear awful stories about college students going over the edge in one form or another, and I'm intrigued by Cornell's efforts to train the university community to deal with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.

More generally, these are the most risk-averse people I’ve ever encountered, and they fear doing things on their own (more on that below in the teamwork discussion). The kinds of questions people run by me every day reflect that fear. (“The application instructions say to put my name in a header. Could you please look at my header and sign off on it before I submit?”) Part of that phenomenon I also attribute to their parents (more on that below too). Part of our challenge as mentors for Gen Y is to help them develop their confidence to make decisions on their own when they are feeling that immense pressure to spread the risk. It's an interesting contrast to the strong confidence they feel in other ways (the next topic).

Gen Yers all think they’re special, don’t leave their parents behind, and want everything tailored to them and at their disposal 24/7.

Gen Y requires constant praise, much of it gratuitous, and feels entitled to it. Their parents have fed this sense of entitlement by making their kids feel as if they are the center of the universe, and the parents’ lives do indeed revolve around their kids. Gen Yers are sheltered and overprotected. They expect everyone else to jump at their say-so and are supremely confident -- some would say over-confident -- in their abilities.

For space planning, this means that Gen Y students expect 24/7 access to people and spaces and services, and schools will have to provide the technology to enable that kind of access. They expect private bathrooms and showers, single dorm rooms and apartments, and customized everything (such as cafeterias with 24/7 access to vegan food or whatever the case may be). They expect top-of-the-line health and wellness centers, academic support centers, and larger admissions offices (because they bring their whole families along).

Anna says: Yep - I’ve already said plenty on this subject (here and here -- note that the posting you're reading now will show up at the top of both links, so you'll have to scroll down for the older postings). The brouhaha over this recent voicemail is the perfect example. (Gen Y high school student finds it completely appropriate to call the COO of his county school system -- at home -- to complain that classes haven’t been canceled after three inches of snowfall; COO’s wife leaves an angry voicemail telling the kid to “get over it”; kid then posts the COO’s email and phone numbers on facebook.)

I'm also reminded of something an admissions officer once said to me: "With Gen Y's parents, their kid is always gifted or learning disabled. Those are the only two options." It's no accident that their children take that self-perception with them to college and into the workplace.

Gen Yers are always part of a group.

As much as they all want their own dorm rooms and bathrooms, they spend all their time together, travel in packs, work together, and study together. They therefore need lots of informal spaces that let them learn and study in groups.

Anna says: I've noticed that they also like to work on their applications in groups. Their college and grad school essays get passed around all over God's creation for feedback from parents, friends, neighbors, you name it. That's why so many essays read as if they were written by committee... because they were written by committee, and that rarely makes for a good essay, because the applicant's voice gets completely lost in the shuffle.

On an unrelated note: I've observed that Gen Yers also like to date in packs. In a way, it's not even a date at all, at least as someone Gen X or older would understand it.

 

Gen Yers multitask.

They need blended spaces for work and play because they’re never doing just one or the other.

Anna says: Definitely true. Whether they’re surfing the internet while in class, writing a paper at Starbucks, or instant messaging every five seconds while studying for an exam, this is an "ADD" generation that can’t focus on one thing for any length of time -- not necessarily because they literally have ADD (although some of them do, and that can compound the challenge), but because competing technology is always pulling them away from the task at hand. In that sense, young or old, we're all ADD'ers now, certainly in the workplace, but Gen Y takes multitasking to new extremes.

I wonder whether it’s a good idea for schools to accommodate this need to multitask. I know professors don’t like it when their students are buying shoes online during their lectures, and there has been some research showing that the human brain just doesn't do things all that well when it's multitasking (a lesson for us all, myself included). Just because Gen Y (or anyone, for that matter) wants something, does that mean it’s always good to give it to them?

 

Gen Yers are respectful of authority.

I’m not sure how respect for authority plays itself out in architecture and space planning, but the architects in the room found this characteristic very interesting.

Anna says: I disagree strongly with this characterization of Gen Y. I think the confusion on this point comes from a Boomer baseline of what it means to defy or disrespect authority. I suspect that in Boomer minds, if college students aren't lighting fires, smashing windows, and threatening to burn down Yale like in the Boomers' college days, then Gen Y must be pretty respectful of authority. And it's true that Gen Y, because of that risk-aversion I discussed above, doesn't like to rock the boat the way Boomers seemed to take a certain kind of pride in doing. But I would argue that Gen Y's admirable refusal to destroy things doesn't mean that they are respectful of authority.

Aside from that voicemail example I linked to above, I'll also point out the following:

I get an earful all day long from employers when they hear that I write about Gen Y. I hear about Gen Yers marching into the workplace thinking they can do the CEO’s job better than the CEO, and sometimes even saying so out loud. They expect management responsibility their first day out of college. I’ve even heard one employer tell me about a recent college grad who, on being given certain instructions, rolled her eyes, threw her pen on the table, and said, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.” That loud thud you hear is the sound of jaws dropping at workplaces across the country.

I routinely have applicants tell me, in effect, “Yes, I know you were an admissions officer, but here’s why I think you’re wrong.” I get some level of push-back just about every day. I do want people to disagree with me, because I know I'm not omniscient and often the input is helpful. Still, I'm curious that there is so much push-back when it's my expertise and experience they're seeking out in the first place, and I get that only from Gen Y, and the younger set of Gen Y in particular. It's interesting.

I hear this kind of feedback from professors as well, who are also surprised by the way in which their students communicate with them, and the ways in they make demands. For example, I have heard from several professors who are shocked to receive what they consider shamelessly casual emails demanding (not asking for -- demanding) special considerations, extensions, etc. These professors are also, in some cases, shocked to be referred to as "hey john" or whatever their first names happen to be.

Over the years, all this leads me to conclude that this is not a generation that as a group respects authority, experience, age, or a higher position on the org chart, although individual differences certainly occur (as with any of these generalizations).

On this subject, one of my Gen Y colleagues pointed out the following to me -- great food for thought:

While Gen Yers may not have respect for the trappings of authority (emailing profs with first names, office etiquette, etc.), I think they have tremendous respect for the value of authority. That is, they know what it means to be ranked X, or in position Y, or to be offered a job at a particular bank or office. They also know what it means to "know" someone in authority -- how to pull strings, ask for favors, and use connections to authority figures to advance their careers, percentages (of admission?), etc.

I recognize that this is a wholly different "respect for authority" than that term usually involves, but it it still a type of respect. It's a respect for the power of authority -- for the access, advancement, and "step skipping" that authority can grant you (i.e. if you "know" someone you can avoid some of the bottom rungs of the ladder).

So in that sense, I don't think Gen Y is entirely disrespectful of authority. I think the concept of "authority" has changed; instead of authority being representative of "the man," it's about "the connection," the "hookup," or the favor. Why apply through HR if your father's partner can put your resume on the desk of an executive? The recognition of the executive's power is a certain "respect" for his authority. Not the same type of respect we're talking about, but a respect nonetheless.

There were a lot of other interesting nuggets at this talk, but I’ll conclude by asking the following:

Anna Also Says: This stuff doesn’t come cheap. Who's paying for all of this?

I know applicants who decide where to go to college because one school has a cool rock climbing wall or that other school’s dormitories have seen better days or that school has the best cafeteria.

Somewhere in the application frenzy, the big picture seems sometimes to get lost. This country club approach to college doesn’t come cheap, and when Gen Y complains about its staggering student loans, I have to wonder who they think is financing those Olympic size swimming pools, state of the art performance halls, 24/7 access to freshly prepared vegan menus, spa-like wellness centers, and so on. That lifestyle is very expensive, and college students are paying for it with a staggering amount of borrowed money, plus interest.

It makes me wonder what some people's priorities are, what they're looking for in their college experience. Sounds to me as if some of them want a 4, 5, 6-year stay at Canyon Ranch rather than the best education they can find. I don't knock any of those wonderful features -- I know I would have loved them when I was in college too -- but I see some people focusing a lot on the immediate benefits and not on the long-term costs.

It also becomes very clear to me why many college students find it such a shock to join the real world after college, when they no longer have student loans to fund such a posh lifestyle. No wonder most of this age group moves back in with mom and dad for some period after school. This goes back to my theme of expectations and figuring out what's realistic and what isn't.

I heard one university representative at the talk say that her college had to offer this lavish lifestyle because that’s what they have to do to compete for applicants. Having been an admissions officer, I understand the pressures schools face to attract applicants. I do wonder, though, about the college administrators and trustees who are perhaps allowing their educational missions to be compromised too much, the parents who are letting their kids pick a college based on a rock climbing wall or a cafeteria menu, and the magazine rankings that reward schools for increasing their expenditures per student. Something is out of whack.

17-year-olds are 17-year olds, and I don't fault them if they are still figuring out what their priorities are, how compound interest works, and what kind of life they want to be living five or ten or twenty years down the road. And it’s our job, as the ones with a bit more life experience, to help them think about those things (even if they're not always inclined to listen to us).

Readers of the Ivey Files and also my book (The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions) know that I've been discouraging people from attending all but the top law schools in the country, mainly because of simple math. As I wrote in The Ivey Guide:

You need to think of your legal education as an investment, and you should calculate your expected return on that investment. That's why it's so important to think about your career options coming out of various schools. If you have to pay $1,000 a month in after-tax dollars to cover your student loans, you'd better be sure you will be able to find work at a well-paying law firm after you graduate. If you graduate $100,000 in the hole, don't assume for as second you can run off and work for a public-interest legal clinic. And until you've paid off your debt, or unless you attend a law school with a generous loan-forgiveness program..., you won't have the freedom to go sit on a beach and stare at your belly button while you contemplate what you really want to do with your life. Think of it this way: Lots of people rush off to law school on the assumption that a law degree gives them freedom, but you don't really have freedom when you've mortgaged the next ten -- or thirty -- years of your life. (Law school graduates who join big firms don't have much trouble repaying their loans on the ten-year payment plan, but most law school graduates don't end up joining big firms, and many end up extending their loan-repayment schedules to thirty years.)

...

The top fifteen [law schools] also offer a level of job security that other law schools can't. People at the top schools who find themselves in the middle of the pack or even below still do just fine on the job market, even at the highest levels of the job market. The further down the food chain you go, though, the less of a safety net you have. Once you get to the second tier and below, you need to be at or near the top of your class to end up at a top firm in your region or with a top judge in your region (the national market is a much more difficult proposition), and people in the bottom half of the class often face grim hiring prospects.

Law school applicants fight me on this all the time, but I stick to my guns. Most ABA-approved law schools are not worth the investment. It's painful for people to hear, and most insist on learning this truth the hard way.

Now comes an article in today's Wall Street Journal, front page and above-the-fold no less, making the same argument:

A law degree isn't necessarily a license to print money these days. For graduates of elite law schools, prospects have never been better. Big law firms this year boosted their starting salaries to as high as $160,000. But the majority of law-school graduates are suffering from a supply-and-demand imbalance that's suppressing pay and job growth. The result: Graduates who don't score at the top of their class are struggling to find well-paying jobs to make payments on law-school debts that can exceed $100,000. Some are taking temporary contract work, reviewing documents for as little as $20 an hour, without benefits. And many are blaming their law schools for failing to warn them about the dark side of the job market.

The article gives some harrowing examples (all bullets in this posting are verbatim):

• The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University -- where he says he ranked in the top third of his class -- is a "waste," he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt.
• A 2005 graduate of Brooklyn Law School, [Israel Meth] earns about $30 an hour as a contract attorney reviewing legal documents for big firms. He says he uses 60% of his paycheck to pay off student loans -- $100,000 for law school on top of $100,000 for the bachelor's degree he received from Columbia University.
• Sue Clark... this year received her degree from second-tier Chicago-Kent College of Law, one of six law schools in the Chicago area. Despite graduating near the top half of her class, she has been unable to find a job and is doing temp work "essentially as a paralegal," she says. "A lot of people, including myself, feel frustrated about the lack of jobs," she says.
• Mike Altmann, 29, a graduate of New York University who went to Brooklyn Law School, says he accumulated $130,000 in student-loan debt and graduated in 2002 with no meaningful employment opportunities -- one offer was a $33,000 job with no benefits. So Mr. Altmann became a contract attorney, reviewing electronic documents for big firms for around $20 to $30 an hour, and hasn't been able to find higher-paying work since.
• Matthew Fox Curl graduated in 2004 from second-tier University of Houston in the bottom quarter of his class. After months of job hunting, he took his first job working for a sole practitioner focused on personal injury in the Houston area and made $32,000 in his first year. He quickly found that tort-reform legislation has been "brutal" to Texas plaintiffs' lawyers and last year left the firm to open up his own criminal-defense private practice. He's making less money than at his last job and has thought about moving back to his parents' house. "I didn't think three years out I'd be uninsured, thinking it's a great day when a crackhead brings me $500.

Are there some law schools that are honest about their graduates' job prospects? Refreshingly, yes:

• Many students "simply cannot earn enough income after graduation to support the debt they incur," wrote Richard Matasar, dean of New York Law School, in 2005, concluding that, "We may be reaching the end of a golden era for law schools."
• The University of Richmond School of Law in the last couple of years started to be more open about its employment statistics; it now breaks out how many of its grads work as contract attorneys. Of 57 2006 graduates working in private practice, for example, seven were contract employees nine months after graduation. Schools "should be sharing more information than they are now," says Joshua Burstein, associate dean for career services who put the changes in place. "Most people graduating from law school," he says, "are not going to be earning big salaries."

More typical are the dodgy (and some would argue fraudulent) recruiting practices of many law schools. As the article points out, "students entering law school have little way of knowing how tight a job market they might face. The only employment data that many prospective students see comes from school-promoted surveys that provide a far-from-complete portrait of graduate experiences." Examples:

• Tulane University... reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of $135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year's graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of the class, a Tulane official concedes. On its Web site, the school currently reports an average starting salary of $96,356 for graduates in private practice but doesn't include what percentage of graduates reported salaries for the survey.
• A glossy admissions brochure for Brooklyn Law School, considered second-tier, reports a median salary for recent graduates at law firms of well above $100,000. But that figure doesn't reflect all incomes of graduates at firms; fewer than half of graduates at firms responded to the survey, the school reported to U.S. News. On its Web site, the school reports that 41% of last year's graduates work for firms of more than 100 lawyers, but it fails to mention that that percentage includes temporary attorneys, often working for hourly wages without benefits, Joan King, director of the school's career center, concedes. Ms. King says she believes the figures for her school accurately represent the broader graduating class. She says the number of contract attorneys is "minimal" but declined to give a number.

Declined to give a number? When annual tuition for full-time students at Brooklyn hovers around $40,000 before expenses (which tack on another $20,000)? That says it all. If these were for-profit companies trying to raise funds from clueless investors and publishing questionable data in their prospectuses, the SEC would be all over them. Universities get away with a lot, so buyer beware.

And note that the US News rankings do not provide information you can necessarily rely on. Their data is self-reported by the schools, and schools have huge incentives to fudge the numbers.

Finally, note that tuition and expenses are about the same to attend Brooklyn Law School as to attend Columbia Law School, even though graduates face wildly different job and income prospects during law school and afterwards. It is simply not rational to pay Columbia-level tuition to attend Brooklyn Law School. That's just one example, but you get my point.

Udate: here.

Hylô! Bore da! Cymru am byth! (I’m showing off my limited Welsh.)

My vacation is supposed to be over today, and I’m supposed to be flying back to Boston as I write this. United has completely bungled its flights out of Heathrow, so while it turns out I’m not flying today after all, I’m officially getting back in the blogging saddle.

Two things I learned from my holiday:

1. I’m the only person who comes back from remote Wales with a sunburn and
   
2. even in remote Wales, it’s impossible to escape societal hand-wringing over Gen Y or the abject misery of highly paid lawyers.

Who knew?

From the Daily Mail (“Mothers are Raising a Generation of Wimps”):

Enjoying a glass of early evening wine at a friend's house the other day, we were rudely interrupted by the wailing tones of her 12-year-old son. His plaintive yelp of hunger was swiftly attended to by his mother, who instructed him to "raid the fruit bowl".

He would, he said, but could she "peel an apple" for him. Embarrassed by my hearing this, she attempted to ignore him. He continued, repeating Dalek-fashion: "Mum, I'm hungry, Mum I'm hungry."

Finally, exasperated, she crashed her glass down on the table, stomped through to the kitchen, bashed a couple of doors about and returned with a face as a red as a tomato.

"Why couldn't he do that for himself?" I asked her.

"He doesn't know how to," was her snappy reply.

My friend's son is a wimp. Not in the traditional sense. He is not physically scrawny or the target of bullies (he plays junior rugby for our Gloucestershire town, and is popular with his peers) but he lacks backbone, gumption....

So who is responsible for this unenviable state of affairs? For more than 30 years, and heightened in intensity over the past decade, the women of Britain - as primary carers either with a husband or partner, or as a single parent - have systematically mollycoddled their sons to within an inch of their lives.

And not one but two headlines from today’s London Times:

• “Children to Get Lessons in Money – and Debt,” about a new mandatory curriculum “to help youngsters to prepare for financial pressures after leaving school” and
  
• “Never Letting Go,” subtitled “Are we in danger of producing a generation of tethered teens who are so cosseted and indulged that they will never be able to withstand life’s hard knocks?”

While we're on the subject of helicopter parents: I read an interesting article in a German newspaper last week. It quoted a high school geography teacher complaining about parents who threaten to sue if she gives their kids a C, and she talked about how she has to document all of the kids’ failings in the classroom, CYA style, in case she gets hauled into court. What strikes me as so interesting about her experience is that teachers are obviously still able to distinguish between good and bad achievement, but parents do so much bullying and buffering that their kids never hear anything but praise. What horrible Hilton-Lohan-style parenting, and what a disaster for their kids.

Also in the news over here? How much big-firm lawyers hate their jobs even as they make gobs of money. From an article in the London Times (“One in Four Lawyers Wants to Change Jobs”):

Almost a quarter of lawyers want to leave the profession because of stress and long hours, according to a survey published this week.

The poll of 2,500 lawyers also indicates that assistant solicitors — those who are not partners — are even more unhappy, with more than a third wanting to give up their jobs.

The YouGov survey for The Lawyer magazine confirms that there is widespread dissatisfaction with the work-life balance in law, despite record levels of pay.

It coincides with an inquiry by the Law Society of England and Wales into the long hours and lack of career prospects for lawyers with families.

The survey also shows that 20 per cent of managing partners — those in charge of the the firm — wish they were in another job. But few lawyers feel able to leave their jobs, chiefly because of the pay cut.

Almost a quarter of lawyers want to leave the profession because of stress and long hours, according to a new survey published this week.

The poll of over 2,500 lawyers also indicates that assistant solicitors - those who are not partners - are even more unhappy, with more than a third wanting to give up their jobs.

Where are the headlines about investment bankers hating their jobs despite the gobs of money they earn? No such headlines. Law firms are deluding themselves if they think their lawyers are miserable just because of "stress and long hours."

Getting at the crux of the problem is a follow-on story in the Times called “Why Are Lawyers Miserable: Want a List?”

The juxtaposition of two stories in The Times last week – one reporting that top-flight City lawyers were charging as much as £1,000 an hour for their expertise, another that a quarter of lawyers wanted to leave their profession – raised a pertinent question: just why are those in the legal business so miserable?

. . .

You see, as with everything else, America has been doing lawyer dissatisfaction bigger and better than us for decades. Polls have at various times established that not just a quarter, but up to 40 per cent of US lawyers want to leave their profession; and whereas British lawyers are only just waking up to the fact they are miserable and want to die, their American counterparts have been alert to it since 1989, which saw the publication of Deborah Arron’s Running From the Law: Why Good Lawyers are Getting Out of the Legal Profession.

What follows in the article is a great -- make that a really, really great, dead-on, must-read --  list of reasons why highly-paid lawyers are so unhappy. Item 3 in particular caught my eye:

3. the yawning gap between the ideals of those entering the profession and the reality. Some go into law because they dream of fighting injustice, but discover on entering that most of what lawyers do benefits big business.

Others enter the profession because they are seduced by the apparent glamour of the trade, as portrayed in Ally McBeal and LA Law, only to find that the work is about as glamorous as getting a verruca (cf point 2). Then there are those graduates – as much as 47 per cent of the profession, according to a recent survey – who drift into the job because they don’t know what else to do, assuming vaguely that it might be fun, and find on entering that it is about as amusing as breaking a limb in a traffic accident (cf point 1). Repeatedly. For 90 hours a week.

Lots to chew on, and I hope I've made up for lost time. Happy reading!