There are two sides to law school career services. One side you meet at conferences and events. The CSO employees you meet in public are smart, earnest people. They care about their students, and they know better than their deans the challenges of the legal job market. They’re pleasing to look at and interested in meaningful reform. You end conversations with them feeling like they’re underpaid.
The other side of CSO is the side you only hear about from the disgruntled students who actually need them. If the student has a job, they say there is one good CSO person in an office beset by lazy morons. If the 3L doesn’t have a job, the whole office is a solitaire-playing, baby-making, incompetent den of secretaries who are contractually obligated to use the word “network” in every single sentence.
I think both sides are true. There are some real CSO gems who work hard, and the law schools like to show these people off. But the system of law school career services is based on legal jobs economy that is gone and never coming back. People are using 2003 skills to contend with the 2013 job market, and it’s failing students all across the country.
It’s failing even students at Ivy League schools, as this story will point out. But I have two simple solutions that law schools could implement for next fall that would significantly improve the performance of law school CSOs….
Today’s amazingly disgruntled 3L goes to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In fairness to Penn, there are a number of schools where students are totally underwhelmed by their career services officers. But it is a little weird to hear this from a 3L at an Ivy:
Many of the graduating 3Ls from UPenn Law (who have attended other undergrad Ivies and schools such as Stanford and Berkeley) have been upset with the incompetency of UPenn Law’s Career Planning office (I know, it may not sound like news). This school is like a faux Ivy.
Many of us are still unemployed or stuck with undesirable back up jobs, even though we worked for consulting firms, the government, and major corporations before coming to Penn Law. There are still many of us with decent grades who are unemployed. And a lot of us have massive debt.
The Career Planning office at UPenn appears to do little to get job for students who strike out at On Campus Interviewing (or for those who want to work in public interest or government). It does not matter if you are west coast or east coast, the situation is bad all round.
Throughout the year, Penn’s career office will send a “job of the week” job posting email to the 3L class. Yes, that includes ONE job of the week. Other comparable schools (Duke and Harvard) send “job posting
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