Churning out lawyers shows a lack of judgment

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

The Prime Minister was right to say too many students are studying law. Lawyers and law graduates are massively over-­represented in almost every field: the parliament, bureaucracy and big business. The three longest serving prime ministers — Robert Menzies, John Howard and Bob Hawke — were lawyers, as are the present Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader.

If only more of us understood that the cost of enforcing even well-meaning laws often outweighed their benefits — let alone the inevitable unintended consequences that come with them — we’d all be better off.

As renowned economist Willem Buiter put it in 2008: “Except for a depressingly small minority … lawyers … are incapable of logic; they don’t know the difference ­between necessary and sufficient conditions, indeed any concept of probability is alien to them (and) they don’t understand the concepts of opportunity cost.”

Spot on. Lawyers tend to think passing laws moulds reality. If that were so we’d be living in paradise by now, given our parliaments generate thousands of pages of new laws and regulations every year. Instead our economies are increasingly sclerotic and voters angry, not least because many of the highest-paid jobs entail interpreting, avoiding and influencing laws, rather than doing anything productive.

In any case, few students will take the PM’s advice. Individuals are meant to be the best judge of their interests, and they are studying law in droves.

Almost 18,000 university students enrolled in law courses in 2016, up 16 per cent from 2011, ­according to government data. But the market for lawyers is growing even faster: there were more than 71,500 lawyers in 2016, according to the Law Society, up 13,900, or 24 per cent, on 2011.

And law graduates get jobs more easily. Over the two years to 2017 only a quarter of recent law graduates were unemployed compared to between 38 and 41 per cent for graduates of science, mathematics, humanities or “communications” (whatever that might be). Someone should tell that to the army (of probably ex-law graduates) who relentlessly promote so-called STEM courses.

The demand to study law has little to do with a desire to learn about the law. Most law graduates will never be lawyers, and probably realise that.

University is mainly about signalling one’s ability to employers compared to others, rarely about learning anything vocationally useful. Employers can’t simply ask job candidates how good they are.

“If you want to have a general humanities degree that is an intellectual endowment that isn’t particularly specific in a vocational sense then you would be better off doing languages, history, literature, philosophy,” Mr Turnbull told ABC radio last week.

Yet law is a much better discipline for sending a positive signal about the three things employers want most: diligence, intelligence and conformity. Law is difficult but, unlike advanced mathe­matics, not excessively so, thereby offering the chance to excel to a large pool of middling but conscientious students.

Law degrees signal conformity. They are remarkably boring, ­requiring countless hours of painstaking reading of material that will be quickly forgotten.

Law graduates have demonstrated a high capacity to endure levels of tedium that would crush the will to study of many others. And studying law, especially by students from upper-middle class families, is a cliche, signalling little desire to rock the boat. For all the waffle about thinking outside the square, most employers do not ­actually want disruptive or experimental staff.

In any case, Turnbull should actually have gone further: forget law, too many students are studying at university full stop.

A brilliant book by Bryan ­Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, in Virginia, argues that higher education has become an incredibly costly waste of time for the economy. For the individual, getting a degree is like bringing a stool to a rock concert to get a better view. It helps. But once everyone starts doing it you’re no better off and still have to fork out for the stool.

Hence the stupidity of successive Australian governments deliberately trying to push increasing numbers into university.

Sure, students with degrees earn more than those without them, but that has little to do with what they have actually learned at university. Anyone can sit in university lectures, for free, and binge on knowledge for as long as they want; but without the piece of paper at the end, it’s all, vocationally speaking, a waste of time.

Uni students typically rejoice when their teacher cancels class because their position hasn’t been affected relative to the other students. They’ll still get their personal, non-transferable signal, which they and taxpayers have paid thousands of dollars for, at the end.

For job interviews, candidates typically cut their hair, shave and don a suit. These signals are easy to send — unlike a three or four-year university degree that involves considerable financial and opportunity costs.

This is why cheating occurs and can pay off. “Employers ­reward workers for the skills they think those workers possess … ­unless everyone cheats all the time, students with better records are, on average, better workers,” ­Caplan writes.

All this is far from orthodox economics, which argues univer­sity education imparts “human capital”, which lifts graduates’ productivity and hence their wages. Yet outside narrow disciplines such as medicine, it’s hard to see how much of what is taught and produced at university today is useful for any occupation. The vast bulk of graduate jobs, which are typically white collar, require skills that are learned on the job. Universities would be better off teaching MYOB accounting software and mastering Google calendar.

Some say the economy is more complex than it was, yet information technology has made most jobs easier. The internet, for ­instance, has unwittingly often made memory redundant.

Naturally, it’s in the interests of the education sector to talk up its value. Someone has to justify the $10 billion a year the government lavishes on universities and their small army of pro and deputy vice-chancellors on hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Governments need to think about how they can give students the opportunities to prove their diligence, intelligence and conformity more cheaply. “It is precisely because education is so affordable that society expects us to have so much. Without the subsidies you would no longer ‘need’ the education you can’t afford,” writes Caplan.