I wouldn’t be so quick to praise the US system. Yes, there are scholarships and grants, but most people wind up with huge loans. While the law schools facilitate the loans, the actual lenders are commercial companies and charge commercial rates of interest.
Add to this that law is only available as a post-graduate course, and you’re talking 7 years of full time study—plus pssing the bar exams in your state—in order to qualify. An undergrad education at a good private university can cost upwards of $200,000 (about 130,000) for the four years. Even public universities charge $20,000+ per year of law school. Private law schools can charge more than tiwce that. So total tuition etc. fees if you go to a top university for undergraduate and law school will set you back $350,000 or so. You have to have obscenely wealthy parents not to wind up with some kind of debts at the end of the process. Compared to that, 3,000/year as an undergrad and 15,000 for a BVC is *nothing*.
American law school grads wind up with horrendous debts. There is a story that Clarence Thomas was still paying his student loans off at the time he became a Supreme Court justice. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it’s believeable.
People take on these debts because they believe they will get well-paid jobs in large law firms. If you’re earning $150,000 a year, you can clear your debts pretty quickly. Of course, some people do get these jobs, but many do not. And they can be saddled with the debts for many, many years. Laywer friends of mine in the US complain about how there are too many law school places for the number of jobs/amount of work available and that the size of debt incurred is not justified if you cannot get a big law firm job. They have said that there’s not much point in going to a law school unless it’s highly ranked nationally (if you want a big firm career) or regionally (if you want a local practice). But there are very many mediocre law schools out there taking tens of thousands of dollars from wannabe lawyers.
Going back to the original subject of the thread, I’m ot sure what can be done to bring the number of BVC studetns and number of pupillages into line. I would personally start by limiting the number of BVC places to a number much smaller than the current crop. There should probably be fewer BVC providers in London, so the fixed costs of online subscriptions, courtroom furniture etc. could be reduced.
It should be for BVC providers to do a better job of screening applicants. I don’t know whether an entrance exam is needed for this or just a more rigorous application form. I think a fair number of my BVC classmates (the ones unlikely IMO to get pupillage anyway) could have been weeded out by an application that required more critical thinking/analysis/legal knowledge. I also don’t understand why people with 2.2s are admitted on to the course.
