GS-12 for attorney one year out of law school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:9:13 is 100% correct. The saving grace of litigating for the government is that you can become a non-supervisory GS-15 in just a few years.

It is extremely difficult for most new attorneys to make headway on their student loan debt on the GS-11 salary. Fed.gov needs to fix that.

Please explain why it falls upon the taxpayer to fix someone's student debt?

It has nothing to do with the taxpayer fixing other peoples' debt any more than it does for any other professional in government. If salaries do not make sense balanced out against the qualifications those jobs require, there is no way to attract and retain qualified professionals. As a taxpayer, I'd much rather have someone who is motivated and qualified, as opposed to have government jobs be full of people who didn't have any better options. If you don't want to increase salaries than you should get involved in the movement to make tuition more affordable. And before you say it--no, law students are not merely paying for the cost of their education. The justification behind law school tuition has historically been that laws made a lot of money so law school students were milked for money that went to subsidize other parts of universities, especially research programs. This is still the case for most law schools, even though the salary correlation isn't true. It seems vastly unfair to me that a lawyer should make the same or less than a researcher in the sciences, when that lawyer paid through the nose for law school and delayed their lives because their tuition was going to provide a stipend (however small), labs, and health insurance for a student (and often their family) who was in a PhD program. If we continue to treat law students the way we do, we're going to end up with a lot of morons as lawyers. We may not need the quantity of lawyers we've historically had, but it's important to retain the good ones. Right now, smarter people are turning away from pursuing the profession but TTT schools (as Justice Thomas referred to them) are still going strong.

Excuse me??? You think it's vastly unfair that a lawyer makes the same or less as a PhD? DH went to school for his masters (3 years, same as a JD. A lot of STEM masters aren't 2 year programs) THEN he got his PhD. No stipend because he went to night school after work. He is a GS-13 with no hope of ever being promoted to a GS14/15 because only managers can get the 14/15 slots and he doesn't want to manage (he actually wants to do the work that he got his PhD in). He's in a critical, hard to fill position. Pretty sure most people would think that his work is more important than the Solicitors who are reviewing my contracts at work.

It really bothers me when lawyers think they're more intelligent than everyone else around them. Just stop.

No one said anything anout intelligence. Also, the one thing lawyers are good at is understanding conditional statements like the one above, which you clearly missed. My point was more about the strange reason why law school tuition is high. Did your husband pay for his PhD? Probably not, if he was as smart as you say. So there wasn't a level playing field to begin with and its an incomparable compensation structure. Employers have historically compensated people for taking that risk, just like there is a risk/reward relationship in lots of business situations. PhD candidates are not taking nearly the same risk of financial ruin as law school students do. I wish that weren't the case, but it is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:9:13 is 100% correct. The saving grace of litigating for the government is that you can become a non-supervisory GS-15 in just a few years.

It is extremely difficult for most new attorneys to make headway on their student loan debt on the GS-11 salary. Fed.gov needs to fix that.

Please explain why it falls upon the taxpayer to fix someone's student debt?

It has nothing to do with the taxpayer fixing other peoples' debt any more than it does for any other professional in government. If salaries do not make sense balanced out against the qualifications those jobs require, there is no way to attract and retain qualified professionals. As a taxpayer, I'd much rather have someone who is motivated and qualified, as opposed to have government jobs be full of people who didn't have any better options. If you don't want to increase salaries than you should get involved in the movement to make tuition more affordable. And before you say it--no, law students are not merely paying for the cost of their education. The justification behind law school tuition has historically been that laws made a lot of money so law school students were milked for money that went to subsidize other parts of universities, especially research programs. This is still the case for most law schools, even though the salary correlation isn't true. It seems vastly unfair to me that a lawyer should make the same or less than a researcher in the sciences, when that lawyer paid through the nose for law school and delayed their lives because their tuition was going to provide a stipend (however small), labs, and health insurance for a student (and often their family) who was in a PhD program. If we continue to treat law students the way we do, we're going to end up with a lot of morons as lawyers. We may not need the quantity of lawyers we've historically had, but it's important to retain the good ones. Right now, smarter people are turning away from pursuing the profession but TTT schools (as Justice Thomas referred to them) are still going strong.

Excuse me??? You think it's vastly unfair that a lawyer makes the same or less as a PhD? DH went to school for his masters (3 years, same as a JD. A lot of STEM masters aren't 2 year programs) THEN he got his PhD. No stipend because he went to night school after work. He is a GS-13 with no hope of ever being promoted to a GS14/15 because only managers can get the 14/15 slots and he doesn't want to manage (he actually wants to do the work that he got his PhD in). He's in a critical, hard to fill position. Pretty sure most people would think that his work is more important than the Solicitors who are reviewing my contracts at work.

It really bothers me when lawyers think they're more intelligent than everyone else around them. Just stop.

Saying "Just stop" is the most juvenile way to end a discussion, and shows you know how wrong you are. If what lawyers do is so easy, why do you struggle with it so much? It's a good thing your DH is smart so he can take care of you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Moreover, whenever a student defaults on her student loan debt, the federal taxpayer pays the tab; student loans are guaranteed by the federal government. THAT's when we all pay.

Better to start lawyers off at GS-12 to keep with the market.

You see to not understand how the market works. There is an oversupply of attorneys that are new graduates. The government has found that there are plenty of quality applicants at GS-11.

Applicants is not the same as quality applicants.

I've been on the hiring end. There are plenty of quality applicants from gs-11 legal positions. You seem very unfamiliar with the glut of
lawyers out there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Moreover, whenever a student defaults on her student loan debt, the federal taxpayer pays the tab; student loans are guaranteed by the federal government. THAT's when we all pay.

Better to start lawyers off at GS-12 to keep with the market.

You see to not understand how the market works. There is an oversupply of attorneys that are new graduates. The government has found that there are plenty of quality applicants at GS-11.

Applicants is not the same as quality applicants.

I've been on the hiring end. There are plenty of quality applicants from gs-11 legal positions. You seem very unfamiliar with the glut of
lawyers out there.

The legal job market has been rounding for quite some time now. Qualified applicants in my practice have a lot of good options, and many of them are leaving government for higher paying jobs all the time. It doesn't mean you can't hire them as a GS-11, but it does make retention more difficult once they have sufficient experience to leave.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Moreover, whenever a student defaults on her student loan debt, the federal taxpayer pays the tab; student loans are guaranteed by the federal government. THAT's when we all pay.

Better to start lawyers off at GS-12 to keep with the market.

You see to not understand how the market works. There is an oversupply of attorneys that are new graduates. The government has found that there are plenty of quality applicants at GS-11.

Applicants is not the same as quality applicants.

I've been on the hiring end. There are plenty of quality applicants from gs-11 legal positions. You seem very unfamiliar with the glut of
lawyers out there.

The legal job market has been rounding for quite some time now. Qualified applicants in my practice have a lot of good options, and many of them are leaving government for higher paying jobs all the time. It doesn't mean you can't hire them as a GS-11, but it does make retention more difficult once they have sufficient experience to leave.

Rounding = rebounding

[Anonymous]

Excuse me??? You think it's vastly unfair that a lawyer makes the same or less as a PhD? DH went to school for his masters (3 years, same as a JD. A lot of STEM masters aren't 2 year programs) THEN he got his PhD. No stipend because he went to night school after work. He is a GS-13 with no hope of ever being promoted to a GS14/15 because only managers can get the 14/15 slots and he doesn't want to manage (he actually wants to do the work that he got his PhD in). He's in a critical, hard to fill position. Pretty sure most people would think that his work is more important than the Solicitors who are reviewing my contracts at work.

I'm sure your husband is very important and hardworking, but the fact is that the majority of people who get advanced degrees in STEM fields are not paying the same tuition as those in law school. My husband has a PhDs in physics, and had no debt at all (and not because his family paid). To a certain degree, it would make sense that if the entry costs to get into a profession are higher, the pay would be correspondingly higher. I'm sorry you look down on lawyers, but if you don't like millions of dollars of taxpayer money going to claims from Boeing and L3, or having our national defense potentially disrupted due to bid protests, someone is going to have to review those contracts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Moreover, whenever a student defaults on her student loan debt, the federal taxpayer pays the tab; student loans are guaranteed by the federal government. THAT's when we all pay.

Better to start lawyers off at GS-12 to keep with the market.

You see to not understand how the market works. There is an oversupply of attorneys that are new graduates. The government has found that there are plenty of quality applicants at GS-11.

Applicants is not the same as quality applicants.

I've been on the hiring end. There are plenty of quality applicants from gs-11 legal positions. You seem very unfamiliar with the glut of
lawyers out there.

The legal job market has been rounding for quite some time now. Qualified applicants in my practice have a lot of good options, and many of them are leaving government for higher paying jobs all the time. It doesn't mean you can't hire them as a GS-11, but it does make retention more difficult once they have sufficient experience to leave.

Still a glut, sorry. we get several hundred applications for each legal opening we advertise. Yes, you can make more at a firm, but you have a limited shelf life and worktwice as many hours.