Are there too many law graduates in Australia…? Maybe not.

Ever since the day I was one of what seemed several hundred students sitting my Property Law B exams at the University of Queensland, I wondered whether there were too many of us actually studying our law degree.

Once I graduated, and reflecting on my time spent on a course I’d accumulated thousands of dollars in HECS debt, I also wondered what bang we law students actually got for our buck. The cynic in me noted that each individual undergraduate law subject – crackers like compulsory Constitutional Law A or electives such as Public International Law – all cost noticeably more than my friends’ comparable undergraduate science subjects.

Arts students (of which I was also one!) might have pointed out that we had benefits like an air-conditioned law library and a wood panelled moot court, but to me, the costs we were outlaying (albeit deferred) seemed unreasonable compared to those students studying science degrees. With a “cheaper” (to study) degree, those who could balance chemical equations had access to labs stuffed to the gills with relatively “expensive” Bunsen burners, beakers and compound microscopes. Even today, a cursory glance at the “Indicative Fees” link for study at UQ still has law more expensive than science.

Little wonder then, I thought, that universities saw us gullible law students as cash cows!

Which brings me to an interesting article I read last week about the ever increasing numbers of not only law graduates, but law schools popping up in Australia.

http://catallaxyfiles.com/2016/08/18/law-school-for-lawyers/

The first suggestion put forward confirmed my initial concerns that there are “15,000 [law] students [in Australia who] finish their degree each year, and enter a market where there are only 66,000 solicitors… [Universities] seek to maximise income by untrammelled recruitment and get access to thousands of federal dollars for every full-time student.” Hard to disagree with that.

But on the other hand, and an argument I hadn’t fully appreciated, was the demand for a broad generalist legal education, which these days has well and truly replaced the generalist Arts degree of years gone by. Or,as the author suggests, “the Bachelor of Arts…has been destroyed by hippies and post-modernists.” Ouch.

But back to the argument, and some interesting numbers, “the national average for [law] graduate employment is a bit under 69 per cent”… Compare that with other degrees and you will see, “those with Bachelors degrees in Maths had an employment rate of 62 per cent, chemistry graduates a rate of 50 per cent and physics graduates a rate of 54 per cent…” And finally, “the average starting salary for law graduates is above the average salary for graduates of all degrees and in the top ten degrees by salary for recent graduates.”

So perhaps after all, that “generalist” law degree you undertook (maybe like me because I was challenged mathematically) isn’t such a bad piece of paper to have on your resume, even if it was relatively “expensive”. And while there may not be the places in law firms to accommodate the huge numbers of law graduates, the critical interpretation, analysis and reasoning skills you learn during your law degree can evidently set you up nicely in other fields outside of law firms….especially compared to those scientists!