Essay
I Want My Money Back (on Everything)
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| Daniel Vasconcellos |
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: January 8, 2011
PART of making money in this topsy-turvy world is to see the opportunities others don’t. Back when a single computer filled a whole room, this meant recognizing the potential for a personal computer. And it meant knowing that someday millions of people would reach into the ether with desktop machines of unimaginable power to look at porn and give money to Nigerian princes.
Not all such feats of human imagination pay off, and it’s not always easy to tell why. People have bought millions of Snuggies, for example, but nobody seems interested in my idea for a Chia Robe, allowing environmentally conscious couch potatoes to wear a soft blanket of greenery.
The fact that my genius goes unrecognized saddens me, but no longer surprises. I’ve grown accustomed to sentences that begin, “But Schwartz, you moron.” Surely, there’s some envy at play there.
The upside of this scorn is that it’s made me sensitive to the genius of others.
Consider the student at Boston College Law School who recently sent an anonymous open letter to its dean. The student wrote that he was in “a more desperate place than most,” with a baby on the way and enormous debt piled up from paying B.C. tuition. He said he was “resentful at the thought that I was convinced to go to law school by empty promises of a fulfilling and remunerative career.”
Where you or I might cry in our beer, or wait and see what kind of job we can get after getting out of school, or take responsibility for our decisions, he decided on the kind of plan that Wile E. Coyote used to call “super genius.”
He wrote: “I am willing to leave law school, without a degree, at the end of this semester. In return, I would like a full refund of the tuition I’ve paid over the last two and a half years.”
A moment of appreciative silence, please.
I went to law school myself, back when a guy like me could get into law school. I don’t recall seeing a money-back guarantee. But let’s not quibble. The law student, who took up a seat that somebody else would have paid for, and who listened to professors whose salaries his tuition helped to pay, thinks a money-back guarantee is the way to go.
Because law isn’t a sure thing? Wow! What graduate degree would put him on a more certain path? A degree in journalism? Good luck with that. How about English, or semiotics?
There’s no doubt that law schools have overbuilt and that the legal profession has overpromised. The lawyers’ own professional organization, the American Bar Association, has warned college students considering law school that it’s no sure path to riches.
“The combination of the rising cost of a legal education and the realities of the legal job market mean that going to law school may not pay off for a large number of law students,” the group wrote on its Web site. While many lawyers have satisfying careers, it said, “students should think twice before going to law school simply for the money.”
Some have called the letter to the Boston College Law School dean a joke or a stunt, but I see it as the glimmering of an economic revolution. Roll with me here. What college wouldn’t want to broaden its appeal with a money-back guarantee? That’s what Lansing Community College in Michigan announced last March: take its vocational courses, show up for every class, make the grade and the school will guarantee you a job or refund the tuition.
The courses are for jobs like call-center specialists, pharmacy technicians, quality inspectors and computer machinists. If call-center specialists can get guarantees, why not lawyers?
There are guarantees all around us. Luvs diapers promise that “if you are not satisfied with the leakage performance of Luvs (compared to your current brand), we will refund your money.”
The comparisons to getting a legal career are, I should hope, obvious. Don’t make me spell them out. This is a family newspaper.
And speaking of family newspapers, how about a money-back guarantee on that wonderful activity that our Edwardian standards allow us to call the ultimate act of love? That’s the promise of LuvEssentials, a company that sells pheromones. The company — and with a name like LuvEssentials, how could it not be scientifically rigorous? — says on its Web site, “if for any reason you are not satisfied we offer a NO QUESTIONS ASKED FULL REFUND policy.”
The company makes very specific promises, as well, from “increased frequency of dates” and “increased frequency of affectionate gestures” to “increased frequency of sexual intercourse.”
Single and looking. Email me
As far as I know, however, none of this is helping our poor law student friend. So I called Stephen P. Younger, the president of the New York State Bar Association. He’s given a lot of thought to the problems of people like that student, and suggested that the current foreclosure crisis could be a full-employment act for the legal profession.
“We have all these people in America who need lawyers — their houses are foreclosed, they have consumer debt,” he said. “They can’t get a lawyer.”
The problem, he said, is that somebody shouldering $150,000 in law school debt can’t afford to work for less than about $65,000 and hope to pay off the creditors. While big law firms that have been derided as “robo-signers” may make plenty of money by turning the foreclosure business into a mass production line, newly minted individual practitioners can’t benefit from those economies of scale. And so, he said, today’s students can’t cash in.
“I call them the lost generation,” he said.
He’s calling for some kind of debt forgiveness plan, but I’m thinking much bigger than that. Try to follow my logic: If lawyers in the financial-distress business can’t pay off their bills, well, they can always file for bankruptcy. Who better? They need to spend a lot of time at the courthouse anyway. Call it on-the-job training. And their personal failure could be great business for another lawyer. The circle of good grows and grows. Talk about paying it forward!
But don’t call it a Ponzi scheme. That’s unkind. Shame on you.
I brought this vision to Mr. Younger. He laughed nervously. “You’d better ask a bankruptcy lawyer, not me,” he said.
Scoffers, everywhere! But I tell you, this can work. It will work. It must work — for the legal profession, and for the future of our great nation.
Or your money back.
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