Why Do Nigerians Still Study Law? By David Hundeyin – TheNigerialawyer

The 2015 movie “The Big Short” tells the true story of Steve
Eisman, a Wall Street fund manager who becomes aware of an
opportunity to profit heavily by shorting the US housing
market.

Wanting to investigate it for himself, he takes a trip to South
Florida where he discovers a hyperinflated local housing market,
unscrupulous mortgage brokers and clueless mortgage borrowers. It
turns out that due to relaxed regulatory compliance and corporate
greed, banks are issuing mortgage loans to pretty much anyone who
wants them, even giving out so-called NINJA (No Income No Job or
Assets) loans worth hundreds of thousands of dollars against all
common sense.

What really makes his mind up for him is when he meets a
stripper who informs him mid-dance that she is paying mortgages on
five houses she “owns.” He immediately buys $50 million worth of
shorts against the housing market with a potential 20-1 payout. The
reasoning is simple – there is a housing asset bubble caused by an
oversupply of easy credit and willing takers with a steep deficit
of borrowers who can actually pay back their loans. Sooner or
later, the bubble will pop and the whole house of cards comes
crashing down – which happened in 2008, netting Eisman over $1
billion in profits.

This incidence of heavy investment going into an asset class
without reliable evidence that said assets are valued correctly
underpins every market bubble, from the Dutch tulip bubble in the
1630s to the dotcom bubble at the turn of the millennium. We may
not realise it, but it also underpins the bubble we have created
around higher education in Nigeria. Like the pre-2008 financial
credit rating agencies who kept giving worthless mortgage-backed
securities AAA ratings, the highest rate for creditworthy,
investment-grade assets -. Nigerians continue to regard certain
university programmess very highly, even though their objective
value – determined by job market outcomes – is practically nil.

Educational investment as a bubble: The curious example of
law

In 2008, I started a programme of study that many Nigerians –
most notably my parents – thought of as borderline insane. Whenever
I met other Nigerians on campus and I got the “what are you
studying?” question, I got used to the almost pitying looks that
followed my answer – Creative Writing and Media, Culture &
Society. Apparently, it was almost unthinkable that Nigerian
parents would make the 3-year investment worth circa £50,000 for a
foreign degree if it were not Engineering, Business, something
Science-y or Law. Especially law. Nigerian parents love to send
their children to school in Nigeria and beyond to study law, and I
had several Nigerian acquaintances studying law at Hull
University.

After three years studying a difficult LLB programme, many
returned to Nigeria to make a wonderful legal career for
themselves. Only after Law school and NYSC though, which
cumulatively swallowed a further two years, but no matter – those
fantastic jobs at elite law firms like Banwo & Ighodalo and
Falana & Falana Chambers would make the time and money
invested, hard work, sacrifice, paying dues and all that worth
it!

The jobs, however, did not materialise.

It wasn’t that the big boys weren’t hiring. It was that there
was such an oversupply of qualified lawyers competing for a tiny
number of spaces that getting a good entry level legal job became
like getting into NASA. In an employers’ market, the few who did
get into the much-coveted spots at elite law firms found themselves
burning both ends of the candle, working from dark to dark for a
salary often less than $450/month. Those who did not make it into
these spots found themselves unemployed, underemployed and
ridiculously underpaid.

A good friend of mine with an LLB and LLM found himself working
at a mid-sized law firm in Abuja for a king’s ransom of
N40,000/month. Eventually he and his partner packed up and moved to
China to teach English for two years, where they saved up money for
an eventual move to Canada earlier this year. Any lawyer practicing
in Nigeria who graduated at any point within the last 15 years
probably has similar stories, and yet as you read this, naïve
teenagers and pushy parents all over the country are still putting
down “law” on JAMB forms.

Like the pre-2008 U.S. housing market, there is no evidence that
the asset in question (a Law degree) offers value commensurate to
its rating and perceived desirability, but investors (students and
their parents) keep putting their time, money and energy into it
anyway. Even worse, unlike a stock market bubble which at least
goes away after it pops, it seems as if the penny is not about to
drop with Nigerians on the subject of investing in overvalued
degree programmes like law.

The LLB and LLM basket clearly has too many holes to
successfully fetch water anytime soon, but the tap above it is
still rushing, pouring out tens of thousands of new law graduates
every year for no reason at all, adding to the existing number of
unemployed and depressed ones.

Short the bubble and try something new

Like Eisman in “The Big Short” who famously stated that his
investment strategy was based on “a willingness to call bulls**t”
on irrational asset valuations and go against conventional market
wisdom, one way to make a significant short term dent in Nigeria’s
long term unemployment problem is for Nigerians to become
ruthlessly pragmatic and data-driven about what their education
choices represent. Law is the most obvious and egregious example,
but there are several other conventional university programmes that
remain significantly overvalued in Nigerian consciousness.

Medicine is another example of an overvalued study program,
consuming anything from 7 to 12 years of a Nigerian student’s life
just to be qualified to practise as a junior doctor. I know a
doctor who got into Medical School at 18 and completed his first
degree at 29 – 11 years later. For reference, in the 11 years since
I entered university to study my “unconventional” programme in
2008, I have worked across several jobs, founded two businesses and
grown a significant portfolio of local and international work.

The doctor by contrast, is only now qualified to start his
career at the lowest possible rung, and getting even a house
placement and a job afterward will be extremely difficult. If he
decides to move abroad, he then faces the prospect of further
expensive, difficult examinations to enable him practise– exams
that must be passed within a limited number of tries with no
guarantee of success. From a numbers point of view, can one really
justify the years and money invested in that medical degree when
compared to the left-field route I took?

This of course does not mean that avoiding Law and Medicine in
favour of Creative Writing will necessarily result in similar
results to mine. It just means that when making the most important
investment decision of a young adult’s life – post-secondary
education – students and their parents must first of all analyse
the job market to make an informed decision about what to fill in
on that JAMB form. In a world where companies like IBM, Apple and
Facebook have removed university degrees from their list of
recruitment requirements, it also means that Nigerians must focus
now on practical skills over high-sounding degree certificates.

In the job market of today, a 19 year-old with an SSCE
certificate, an online nano-degree in Python and six months of
remote experience as a developer will be significantly more
employable and better remunerated than a 31 year-old with an LLB
and an LLM who spent seven years acquiring these qualifications
across university and Law School. Some companies like Siemens in
Germany even offer apprenticeship programmes to teenagers, which
take them straight from high school into paid work, awarding the
equivalent of a degree certificate afterward.

Unlike Steve Eisman, we may not make $1 billion for recognising
that the world has changed and “calling bulls***t” on the false
valuations Nigeria currently gives to certain types of education.
Like Eisman though, we will at least be in a position to benefit
from rapid change instead of being consumed by it.

Editors Note;  Written by David
Hundeyin and originally published in BusinessDay^[1]