Should You Get Both An MBA And A Law Degree?
6 December 2006USAToday’s “Young and In Debt” series has an update for this week here, focusing on a young woman who is struggling with her student loan debt at the same time that she is getting her MBA. It wasn’t a particularly illuminating article, but I did notice that it mentioned in passing her career plan, which struck me as an awful idea:
Now, she’s working full time at a health services company, but she’s returned to school to get an MBA from Lakeland College in Sheboygan. And in three or four years, she’d like to get a law degree, too.
Don’t get me wrong. A JD or an MBA is a great degree to have - it’s a big bump salary-wise for most people. The problem is that at best there is a marginal benefit to having both - and in her case, this idea would be a big drag on her career. Yet a lot of people go this path. How could it possibly be a bad idea to get two good degrees at once? There’s a few reasons:
1) Her timing is poorly planned. What she wants to do is get her MBA, work for three or four more years, then take another three years off to get a JD. Think about what happens in the interim: she is working for three or four years climbing the ladder on a career track that she doesn’t intend to stay in. If you get a JD, you’re not just going to go back to the same job you had before. In fact, that can be extremely difficult to do even if you want to, because many companies fear they’ll have to pay you a salary premium for the extra education - and they’d rather hire someone less educated and cheaper. So she’ll spend that three years getting experience in a field that won’t have much resemblance to the practice of law, in what she has turned into a dead-end job.
2) The MBA is not all that helpful to a career in law, or vice versa. It’s good to understand the basics of business if you want to do corporate or transactional legal work. But you can pick that up by reading the Wall Street Journal. No one is going to ask you to calculate the rate of return on an investment decision or do anything you learned in a quantitative analysis class. And it’s not that useful from a hiring perspective, because for the most part the high-paying legal jobs aren’t given out based on your experience in another field, or your other degrees, or anything else you’ve done. The biggest factor in whether you get a job out of law school is your first year grades. There are a few degrees where this statement isn’t as true (intellectual property law is a glaring exception, because having a technical degree of some kind is considered very important). But an MBA isn’t one of them - it won’t give you much benefit over all the other attorneys who don’t have one. As for jobs outside the legal sector, many of them will be reluctant to hire a lawyer - both because of the presumed pay premium and because a law degree isn’t all that useful if you’re not practicing law. A consulting job might be an exception - but on balance, if she wants to stay in the same line of health care work, she’d be better off spending three years getting experience on the job than getting the JD.
3) It sounds like she just doesn’t want to live in the real world. I’ve met a lot of “professional students” who keep racking up degrees until well into their thirties. Often they’re useless or overlapping. A communications undergraduate degree, then a communications masters degree, then a communications PhD. I can think of more than one person I know who has gone this exact route - and all it ends up being is a way to delay having to go in and be the corporate drone you don’t want to be. The problem is that like the woman in this article, you’re just adding on debt and delaying your eventual escape. You have to make money to be financially independent - and going to school for multiple, redundant degrees is sucking money away from you. You can only do it for so long, and only borrow so much.
One final point: I do know of one situation where it might be a good idea to get dual degrees: some schools will allow you to do a joint program, where you go for four years and get both diplomas. That’s not as bad a deal. You aren’t jumping in and out of the workforce, you’re there for one block of time. You don’t spend as much time to get the extra degree. And your studies are coordinated, so it’s a lot easier to focus on an aspect of business where you want to practice law. Her plan, however, is not something I’d recommend.
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4 Responses to “Should You Get Both An MBA And A Law Degree?”
December 6th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
I’ve seen more than a few joint law and MBA degrees, so I would think it must have some benefit. As you suggest, she should go for one of these if she wants to take path.
December 6th, 2006 at 10:27 pm
I think the theory is that you’re learning about the basics the businesses you’re going to be advising. A lot of people who go this route end up doing transactional work if they practice law - writing contracts, handling mergers, etc. There’s probably some benefit to that if you don’t have much experience in business or finance. I also know that many consulting firms hire lawyers, and in that case an MBA could help. But it’s not a particularly big pool of potential jobs, and you have to be on the upper end of things gradewise to do that. And for most legal jobs, I don’t think an MBA gives you much weight. It’s a bonus to your resume, but not a big one.
One thing I’d add is that people who aren’t out of college yet should see if their school has a finance or accounting program. You won’t get as good an education as with an actual MBA - but having one of those as your major would give you the background knowledge without forcing you to get both graduate degrees.
December 10th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
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October 31st, 2007 at 2:27 pm
A Businessweek article in 1995 examined salary figures for UVa graduates with an MBA and JD. It found no differences. The programs are popular because of all sorts of anecdotal reasons, but I have yet to see salary or promotion figures at time of graduation, or even 5 years out, that would justify the added expense and time. So you would be working very hard for little added benefit.
The one exception might be if you are hoping to work in a highly technical field, such as international petroleum long-term finance, for third-world oil fields financed primarily through American markets.