American Gentry, or, the GOP's College-Educated Whites

[Santander]

An average senior SWE at a mid-prestige firm makes about 120 base , 150 TC. That’s probably what a senior law associate makes with the feds in an expensive city as a GS-14 or working in a law office with 30 other lawyers in a place like Tampa or Minneapolis.

You cannot compare someone making $120k in the Bay Area (poverty wage) vs $120k in Tampa or the job security of federal employment. You can get a 6-figure pension if you start your fed career as a GS-15 to max out the steps (hard to guarantee maxing out the steps if you start at GS-13 or 14), but then again, GS-15 jobs tend to be real jobs and are not that chill.

[H. Ross Peron]

A subsection of this group would be the party kids : They go to a party school; CSU Fullerton as an example; but then they don't need to worry; because their parent knows someone who works in sales management.

CSU Fullerton is one of the flagship academies of the California State University system. Bizarre to describe it as mainly a party school when it has thousands of students from middle class or even first generation college student backgrounds.

[Person Man]

An average senior SWE at a mid-prestige firm makes about 120 base , 150 TC. That’s probably what a senior law associate makes with the feds in an expensive city as a GS-14 or working in a law office with 30 other lawyers in a place like Tampa or Minneapolis.

You cannot compare someone making $120k in the Bay Area (poverty wage) vs $120k in Tampa or the job security of federal employment. You can get a 6-figure pension if you start your fed career as a GS-15 to max out the steps (hard to guarantee maxing out the steps if you start at GS-13 or 14), but then again, GS-15 jobs tend to be real jobs and are not that chill.

I’m talking about tech jobs in Places like Charlotte or Atlanta. I would need 200k tc at least  for the Bay Area. There are smaller law jobs in Brooklyn that pay 83k as a jr-mid associate. There are 100-120k tech jobs in the Bay Area, but they are for QA, prod support, and no-code jobs. One guy got a 95k job out of school as a QA, automated it in a few months, and played league of legends until he was fired 5 years later.

[Person Man]

Back before rocks cooled, and tuition was perhaps 10K per year in current dollars, rather than 60K, the idea among the upper, upper middle class, was you went to college and studied the humanities and social sciences, etc., to enrich your life, discover yourself as a person, hone your writing and reasoning skills, and then went to "trade school," be it law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. I suspect there is not much currency left in that ideal now. It's just too prohibitively expensive.

That’s basically what I did on accident.

This strategy was viable pre-2008, when the most popular elite career tracks were finance and corporate law.  You could study the humanities and then get those jobs, particularly if you perform well on standardized tests and make the right friends.

Since then, elite jobs have become more and more tech dominated and the problem with the traditional humanities undergrad path is that it basically shuts you out of the tech world.  Also, academic humanities has basically become an impossible career path, so it doesn't give you a good plan B if the increasingly scarce banking jobs and high end law school slots don't work out for you.

The medical doctor path falls somewhere in between.  You don't have to major in science, but you do have to consistently get A's in science classes.  In today's environment, you might as well just major in something that could also get you a tech job as a plan B.  

That would be much more true in finance than in the law. Being tech savvy is not what makes the best lawyers. Rather it is logic and the power of the pen. And that skill is about a liberal arts education and be widely read, and to use just the right words and phrases and tone at the right time.

I agree.  I'm just saying high end lawyers are declining as a % of elite jobs with the rise of tech, etc. making academically successful people on the fence less likely to choose that path.  

An average senior SWE at a mid-prestige firm makes about 120 base , 150 TC. That’s probably what a senior law associate makes with the feds in an expensive city as a GS-14 or working in a law office with 30 other lawyers in a place like Tampa or Minneapolis. The former you can get into from just having an OK GPA from an OK school, the latter you probably either need to get into a large state’s flagship’s school or a place Case Western Reserve and get A’s and B’s or get into a school like Fordham or Vanderbilt.

At a prestigious tech firm…well just look at levels.FYI. An engineer with an average level of experience makes about a quarter to a third million a year and their version of a junior law partner makes well north of half a million. You can’t ever get into a law firm like that from a non-ivy.

I wonder if it would be better for states to actively regulate law schools. Because there are so many low ranking law schools; and they don't have the quality that I would expect to create high quality lawyers.

Require only 100 law schools to be open at a time and require a minimum 160 LSAT? It’s around that level that you can get the mid-tier jobs and about 170 where you can get the jobs that you can get rich at.

[Torie]

Back before rocks cooled, and tuition was perhaps 10K per year in current dollars, rather than 60K, the idea among the upper, upper middle class, was you went to college and studied the humanities and social sciences, etc., to enrich your life, discover yourself as a person, hone your writing and reasoning skills, and then went to "trade school," be it law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. I suspect there is not much currency left in that ideal now. It's just too prohibitively expensive.

That’s basically what I did on accident.

This strategy was viable pre-2008, when the most popular elite career tracks were finance and corporate law.  You could study the humanities and then get those jobs, particularly if you perform well on standardized tests and make the right friends.

Since then, elite jobs have become more and more tech dominated and the problem with the traditional humanities undergrad path is that it basically shuts you out of the tech world.  Also, academic humanities has basically become an impossible career path, so it doesn't give you a good plan B if the increasingly scarce banking jobs and high end law school slots don't work out for you.

The medical doctor path falls somewhere in between.  You don't have to major in science, but you do have to consistently get A's in science classes.  In today's environment, you might as well just major in something that could also get you a tech job as a plan B.  

That would be much more true in finance than in the law. Being tech savvy is not what makes the best lawyers. Rather it is logic and the power of the pen. And that skill is about a liberal arts education and be widely read, and to use just the right words and phrases and tone at the right time.

I agree.  I'm just saying high end lawyers are declining as a % of elite jobs with the rise of tech, etc. making academically successful people on the fence less likely to choose that path.  

An average senior SWE at a mid-prestige firm makes about 120 base , 150 TC. That’s probably what a senior law associate makes with the feds in an expensive city as a GS-14 or working in a law office with 30 other lawyers in a place like Tampa or Minneapolis. The former you can get into from just having an OK GPA from an OK school, the latter you probably either need to get into a large state’s flagship’s school or a place Case Western Reserve and get A’s and B’s or get into a school like Fordham or Vanderbilt.

At a prestigious tech firm…well just look at levels.FYI. An engineer with an average level of experience makes about a quarter to a third million a year and their version of a junior law partner makes well north of half a million. You can’t ever get into a law firm like that from a non-ivy.

I wonder if it would be better for states to actively regulate law schools. Because there are so many low ranking law schools; and they don't have the quality that I would expect to create high quality lawyers.

Most law schools are low ranking, and the financial premium to get in an elite law school is huge, and if you get on law review at an elite law school, you won the lottery ticket. It is the ultimate Darwinian struggle.