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Do young people still want to be lawyers?
Despite the major influx of legal education, young people are becoming less likely than their parents to see the law as a “dream job”, with research finding that the profession has taken big hits when it comes to future careers for the world’s young people.
Naomi Neilson
The research from Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found young people no longer desire a career as a legal practitioner than they did back in the early 2000s. Both girls and boys ranked a law career much further down.
“And yet, in spite of completing an unprecedented number of years of formal education, young people continue to struggle in the job market, and governments continue to worry about the mismatch between what societies and economies demand and its education systems supply,” wrote Tencent cofounder Charles Yidan in the report.
Whether it can be attributed to the increased number of years of study or the societal attitudes towards the profession, the research found girls went from ranking lawyer as third in the list of “dream jobs” in 2000 to fourth in 2018. For boys, the ranking dropped from seventh in 2000 down to ninth place in 2018, taking a harder hit.
For disadvantaged students, the change was a lot less damaging. In 2000, both female and male students ranked law as their third choice but dropped to fifth in 2018.
Its biggest hit was in the dream jobs of low-performing students. Girls and boys ranked law in fourth place but it dropped to eight and fifth respectively in 2018.
“The research literature is clear that one of the best indicators of world’s young people capacity to understand and progress in the labour market is the extent to which their educational expectation of a young person while still in school is appropriate to their occupational expectations,” the OECD report noted.
“In many countries, a teenager who aspires to be a lawyer should anticipate attending university and pursuing postgraduate study. Misalignment, particularly when a young person plans to pursue less education than would normally be expected to secure his or her career goal, is an indication of career confusion.”
Naomi Neilson
Naomi Neilson is a senior journalist with a focus on court reporting for Lawyers Weekly.
You can email Naomi at:
