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Universities must be ‘held accountable’ for law grad oversupply
A managing director has responded to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s now infamous comments about there being “too many kids doing law”, saying that the onus must fall on the universities.
Emma Musgrave
According to McDonald Murholme managing director Alan McDonald, the law grad oversupply problem is largely due to the number of places universities offer students wanting to study law.
“The universities have been very irresponsible as a group in allowing the oversupply for their short-term financial gain,” Mr McDonald said.
“Cashing in on people thinking erroneously that having a law degree will benefit them needs to be addressed by regulation and not merely by the Prime Minister’s rhetoric.
“There are a raft of problems that will be created if issues are not quickly addressed.”
Mr McDonald added that “in the usual supply and demand economics, reducing income of young lawyers directly in an already flat wage growth environment is a concern”.
“It is also stripping the economy of young people that should have been trained in different skill base areas so that they would perform valuable work for worthwhile incomes,” he explained.
“These issues include that we are incorrectly training young minds to look at work through the prism of a lawyer, which is a discipline not suited for most workplaces.”
Mr McDonald’s comments come after PM Malcolm Turnbull told Canberra radio station 2CC that he had counselled younger people against studying law unless they had plans to become a lawyer. He went on to say that university students looking for what he called an “interesting background qualification” should study humanities or business.
“I actively discourage kids from doing law unless they actually want to be lawyers,” the PM said.
“I’m a lawyer... If you want to be a lawyer, you’ve got to do a law degree full stop, but a lot of kids do law as though it’s a sort of interesting background qualification and it’s not.
“If you want to have a general humanities degree that is an intellectual endowment but isn’t particularly specific in a vocational sense, then you would be better off doing languages, history, literature, philosophy.
“Frankly you’d be better off doing economics.”
Emma Musgrave
Emma Musgrave (née Ryan) is the managing editor, professional services at Momentum Media.
Emma has worked for Momentum Media since 2015, including five years spent as the editor of the company's legal brand - Lawyers Weekly. Throughout her time at Momentum, she has been responsible for breaking some of the biggest stories in corporate Australia. In addition, she has produced exclusive multimedia and event content related to the company's respective brands and audiences.
Prior to joining Momentum Media, Emma worked in breakfast radio, delivering news to the Central West region of NSW, before taking on a radio journalist role at Southern Cross Austereo, based in Townsville, North Queensland.
She holds a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) degree from Charles Sturt University.
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