In the course of a discussion of H-1B visas, John Derbyshire is concerned about the career choices of young people if they are indeed being displaced or discouraged by imported workers:

Smart youngsters will drift away into junk disciplines — or worse yet, into Law School, adding to our already way-overstock of verbal-ability parasites, and piling yet more nuisance lawsuits on the ever-shrinking productive part of our economy.

If only it were so! In reality, today’s law school graduates have far dimmer job prospects than the info-tech folks he is (still rightly) concerned about.

There are two reasons for this. First, we’ve got way too many law graduates already—there’s a limit to how many parasites can feed on any host—yet both applications and available places continue to increase. Second, even those who do find well-paying legal jobs after graduation are often quickly miserable and seeking a way out.

Why the latter? The ratcheting up of work hours and expectations in recent decades has been at its fiercest in law firms…and to what end exactly? For those of us under 40, we’re not sure. The problem of the dead hand of the Boomers is as strong in the law as anywhere: the higher echelons are jammed full of them, and they are remorselessly reluctant to get out of the way, or to cut us anywhere near the same deal they got when they do make way. (Academia—your humble Goliard’s second line of qualifications, in addition to law—is even worse in this regard.)

As an academic advisor at a large state university, I try to educate and/or disillusion my young charges, who think their only career choices in this world are lawyer, cop, or doctor, and that two of these three are a guaranteed ticket to the upper classes. (At best only the latter is…and you might be surprised there too.)

Their naïveté I understand—they’re young and know little of the world beyond the fantasies they’ve had planted in their heads in school, and almost every prime-time television drama they’ve ever seen has been either a cop show, a lawyer show, or a doctor show. What continues to amaze me is that their parents overwhelmingly share this perspective. Don’t they know how the work world works themselves? Don’t they have any friends with kids who went off to law school and came back home with a J.D., $100,000 in debt, and a short-term gig doing document review for $20 an hour?

(Think that’s an outlandish scenario? See this entry on the WSJ Law Blog, and the Journal article it links to. The blog’s comments section is worth a browse too.)

Now I know that there are people in my age cohort who have nonetheless done very well for themselves, and that I could be one of them if I had more of a knack for making money and rising in this world. Or if at least one of the many things I am very good at had a tendency to pay well. Also, my life is sweet and full in any number of non-financial ways. So I don’t seek pity for myself, or to seem more whiny than is called for on behalf of my age cohort.

On the other hand, I know that I am far from the only thirty-something who—whatever my numerous flaws—is bright, highly (over?) educated, works hard, plays well with others, is honest and upstanding…and feels stuck. (And, in my case, lucky to be making nearly $30,000 a year with good benefits—and that after a mere six years in the job and ten years of higher education!)

How much of this has to do with immigration, how much with the changes and disruptions in family life, how much with education, how much with the broader crisis in young men, how much with Gen-Xers simply sucking as an age cohort…I dunno. What I do know is that precious few of these concerns seem to be reflected in any of the political campaigns so far this year.

Which may, actually, be one of my generation’s few bits of luck: being mostly overlooked by the folks in Washington. Life is challenging enough without the President and Ted Kennedy trying to help us.