We've gone through all the stages of grief while trying to warn our prospective law school friends before they fade away into the Dickensian, fluorescent debtors prison that is Respectable Legal Career: anger, snark, gleeful anger. But now we've come to acceptance—acceptance that for a good long while, there will be no good reason to recommend law school to anyone who isn't razor sharp or filthy rich. This has dawned on newly minted attorney Chris Fletcher, who calmly (considering his own mountain of debt) explains in the Wall Street Journal how law schools have continued to obscure the fact that there are only 21,880 new legal careers for 44,000 law school graduates.

Fletcher persuasively makes the case that law school simply isn't worth it: only 56.7% of law grads found long term, full time employment in 2011, and it's not unusual for them to have more than $150,000 worth of debt, all while salaries have shrank by as much as 16% from 2009. Fletcher's own case as an international lawyer working for a tiny firm illustrates the noxious choice many law grads have to make: take a completely soulless mega-firm job that nominally helps pay down the debt or a fulfilling job that pays peanuts.

But the saddest part of the piece is this:

One wishes that moral suasion would prompt law schools to alter their ways—admitting fewer students, making tuition less ruinous—but change is likely to come only through financial pressure when enrollment drops significantly.

As long as it's legal to bleed student loans from idealistic 22-year-olds, why would they ever stop?