 Hey Vsauce, Shane here. So the reason you clicked on this video is because you want to know if being a lawyer is a good career. And I'm just going to answer your question right away. For most people the answer is going to be no, for more people the answer is going to be hell no, and for a very select few people the answer is maybe. Watch the rest of the video to find out, and if you appreciate me giving you the answer right away instead of making you watch the whole video in order to find out, then gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. So I've evaluated a lot of different careers and college degrees while doing research on this channel, and I have to say becoming a lawyer has to be one of the most overrated that I've seen. Now wait a second, I said overrated. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's not a viable career. In fact, I just did a video on careers that create the most millionaires and lawyer was part of the top 10. They came in as the number four most common career for people that are in the 99th percentile of earning as well as the 90th percentile. So by overrated, what I mean is the idea of what the career is like is very, very far from the actual reality. Lawyers just like doctors is a career that's been put on a pedestal and it's been glorified for decades with countless different shows. In fact, many people grow up with their parents telling them that the only acceptable careers they can go for is being a medical doctor or a lawyer. And for a long time, being a lawyer was a fantastic career, so the hype was justified. Not anymore though, and in this video I'm going to explain exactly why that is. So part one, first of all, I've talked about this on this channel before. Graduate schools are extremely expensive and on top of that, the loans that you have to take out to get into a graduate level program, they're known as grad plus loans, are much, much worse than the undergraduate variety. Now, the degree that you would be going for in order to become a lawyer is known as a JD or a jurist doctor. Generally speaking, this is going to take about three years in a full time program in order to get this degree and most people that get accepted into a JD program are going to have a bachelor's, so seven years overall. Now, as I said before, graduate schools are very expensive. I explained this in other videos, but essentially what's happened in the last couple decades is the government has given grad schools the go ahead to write a blank check and put just about any amount that they want on that check in order to charge for higher level degrees. The average debt for a law school student coming out is going to be $145,000. And again, these aren't going to be any type of loans. Grad plus loans, the types that you would take out for grad school, are much, much worse. And I'm just going to go ahead and have Margot Robbie explain. So whenever you kiss. Grad plus. Thank you. Shit. Thank you, Margot. Now, the DTI ratio or the debt to income ratio is something else that you want to think about. Now, I recently did a video about the debt to income ratio of different types of graduate level degrees and law school had a pretty bad one. It wasn't one of the worst, but it also wasn't one of the best. The debt to income ratio in that video was 2.8 to one. It's likely a lot lower than that just because I used numbers that were from a website that is dedicated to helping people who are in deep student loan debt. But overall, it's still pretty bad. Now, as a lawyer, you can expect to make about $122,000 a year. There's going to be 823,000 jobs out there. And it's growing at 6%, which is as fast as average. I will note here that there is a huge discrepancy and pay when it comes to lawyers. So if you go into nursing, for instance, there might be a little discrepancy and pay. Some nurses make $60,000. Others make $100,000 depending on the specialty you go into, depending on where you live and all kinds of other things like that. When it comes to lawyers, it could be the difference between making $30,000 to $40,000 a year and making $20 million a year. There is a huge discrepancy and the people at the very top make the average look a lot higher than it actually is. So that's just something to keep in mind. Now, the second thing I want to talk about is the fact that law schools are just churning out lawyers. Now, to be honest with you, this is killing a lot of different professions out there. It's something that needs to be addressed. It's a huge problem. And if it doesn't get addressed, many other professions are also going to be laid to rest. Now, I talk a lot on this channel about how you really need to think about your goals in the future and have a solid plan if you're thinking about getting a college degree. And that is especially true if you're thinking about becoming a lawyer. You have to be smart, careful and calculated. And really, I'm not going to sugarcoat it here. You're going to want to go to a top law school. You're going to want to be one of the top people in your class. Then if you're lucky, you might start off at the very bottom in a good company, work really, really hard for years in order to become a partner, and then you're going to get set. Oh yeah, and there's one more thing that I haven't mentioned. Old lawyers aren't retiring because to be honest with you, they have really easy jobs that pay really well. And you, as the new grad, are going to end up doing all of the grunt work for them. And speaking of doing all of that grunt work, let's talk about part three, which is job satisfaction. You get to wear a suit. You get a big paycheck. You can be anyone in an argument. And that's whether you actually believe in what you're saying or not. What's not to like, right? What if I was to tell you that being a lawyer has the worst job satisfaction out of any common career in the United States? That's right. Career Bliss, which is a website basically dedicated to giving the job satisfaction for all kinds of different jobs out there. One of the better websites that I've researched when I'm looking at this sort of thing. A few years ago, they ranked associate attorneys as having the worst job satisfaction out of any job in the US. They've consistently ranked it as one of the worst since then and a bunch of other websites basically show the same thing. So for instance, the happiest profession on this list was real estate agents. And they came out being about 4.26 out of five overall. To contrast that, lawyers were 2.89 out of five. Yikes. Now, why is this? There's a million different reasons for that. I'm sure people who are lawyers that are watching this video, you can tell me down in the comments. If you really wanna know, just go check out a subreddit that has a bunch of lawyers on it and they'll be more than happy to tell you why. But you've got 60 plus hour work weeks, of course. You're gonna be doing grunt work for most of that time, especially when you're new. You're gonna have to take whatever you can get, whether you believe in it or not, whether you wanna do it or not. You basically just have to take whatever they give you. There's a lot of idiots out there in the world and if you're a defensive attorney, you're gonna have to defend them whether you want to or not. Oh, and you're gonna be arguing and competing against some of the smartest and most energetic people in the world. All the time. Your work pretty much never ends. Not only do you take your work home with you, but you also take it on vacation. Are you still on vacation? Yes! A couple of years ago, I was hanging out with one of my friends and her cousin and we were at this rooftop bar in Las Vegas and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she gets a call, she has to check her email, she pulls her laptop out of her purse, her giant purse and she starts working on her case in the middle of the bar. She's on vacation, she's all the way across the country in a different city and she's still having to do work in the middle of a bar. It couldn't even wait like an hour for her to go to her hotel room. There is no work-life balance when you become a lawyer, especially when you're at the very beginning of your career. Oh, I'm such a sh-t. The saturation and the competitiveness of it makes everything else worse as well because you're replaceable. Part four, getting a job in the first place. Now, I did a ton of research for this video on the placement rates of different schools and to be honest with you, it's completely different depending on the school that you go to, but as an average, only about 50 to 60% of the people who graduate are going to be able to get a job as a lawyer. Many lawyers end up working for free at first because they can't find themselves a job even though they send out hundreds of applications. Many compete for internships that are meant for people that don't even have a degree. Many work lower level jobs that don't even require a law degree. A ton of people realize that they don't wanna be a lawyer because it's so much different than what they pictured in their head and they never get a job and they just completely leave the profession. Many also start working as a lawyer, realize it's not the career that they want and they end up leaving the profession that way as well. So sometimes when you're looking up numbers on the internet that show surveys and polls that show how much lawyers make, that's going to be response data which has inherent bias. Usually people who are lawyers are going to be the ones who respond to that data and so those are the ones who actually made it and actually got a job. The reality of the situation is many people who graduate with this degree aren't gonna get a job and so therefore they wouldn't respond to lawyer surveys. Part four, we're gonna talk about why it doesn't pay nearly as well as it seems. Now I talked before about how the average that's shown on BLS about $120,000 a year, a lot of that is going to be propped up because the people at the very top are making way more than the people at the bottom. I also talked about how many people end up just not even getting a job as a lawyer and so therefore they can't report the fact that they didn't get a job as a lawyer salary. Now on top of that most of the good jobs for the people that are lucky enough to get a good job right out of school are going to be in big cities which have a high cost of living and so therefore yes the salary is going to be higher but your cost of living is also going to be higher as well. Now there's a lot of different things that contribute to this as well. A lot of the time when you first start out you're gonna have to be doing very low level just data entry rolls where you're not really learning a lot of the stuff that you need to learn in order to be an actual lawyer. You know, someone who argues for someone else in court that's what everyone imagines it being but the best way to put this one is this is just one of those careers where it's very high risk and high reward. The truth is a lot of people are never going to end up in those really high paying jobs. If you are able to make it to being a partner or owning your own practice, you're gonna be set, you're gonna be good to go, you can definitely build that up and become a millionaire if you want to but overall the average person that attends law school if they're lucky enough to even get a job in the first place is probably not going to make it to that level where they get a really good one. So after all of this evidence that I've presented I know some of you still won't be convinced. So part five there's this hilarious song that people made. A lot of the time people will become lawyers and they end up going into a completely different career and I believe the people who made this song actually ended up becoming writers for different shows for instance. So I'll just play a little bit of this song so you can get an idea of it. Don't be a lawyer. Don't do it. The quickest way to ruin your life. Don't be a lawyer. Not worth it. It'll leave you dead inside. That's why you've never met a lawyer who's happy. So yeah, I don't know any other profession where they literally dedicated an entire song that probably cost them like hundreds of thousands of dollars just to make that music video. They dedicated an entire music video, an entire song to a profession and saying that you shouldn't go into it. You know, you're always gonna have people who are just negative in general and they're gonna tell you to not go into whatever career that you're trying to go into. Real estate for instance, it's ranked as the happiest career out there. But guess what? I'm sure there's tons of real estate agents that say absolutely don't go into this. Don't go into this at all. It's a horrible idea. Okay, so you're always gonna have negative people that tell you that you can't do something and that's gonna be in any career no matter how good it is. But overwhelmingly, people said to not go into this career when I was doing research on it. Go ahead, smash the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms. I especially appreciate ones that come from people who are actual lawyers. And definitely don't forget to check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.