“Watch your step, law grads. It's a dangerous world out there," warns Third Tier Reality — one of the many blogs created by angry law school graduates who feel cheated by their expensive education and shortage of legal services jobs.

Many law students have been hit hard by the 2008 economic crisis and are unable to find adequate employment to pay back their student loans. Despite the national trend, University of Michigan Law School Students — though struggling the past couple of years — fare better in the job market than law students from other universities.

Where the University stands

The University of Michigan Law School — established in 1859 — has always been a national leader in legal education. While there are 200 law schools currently operating in the United States, the University’s is currently ranked the ninth best law school in the country by U.S. News & World Report.

“I’ve never seen any kind of ranking in which Michigan wasn’t in the top 10,” said Sarah Zearfoss, the Law School's assistant dean and director of admissions.

“But that’s just not how I think about anything related to Michigan,” she said, describing how she prefers to focus less on the rankings and instead gauge the Law School’s success in other ways.

Nevertheless, a law school’s ranking is vital to attracting students and getting them hired by law firms.

Douglas Kahn, who has been a Law School professor at the University since 1964, said “the status of the school in law plays a really significant role — maybe more so than in other fields.”

Kahn said the University’s current ranking upsets a lot of alumni who are used to the Law School being ranked fifth, at worst.

“You have to be concerned about it. It affects students and what schools they’re going to. It will affect faculty — when you’re hiring, they look at it,” Kahn said.

Second-year Law School student Paul Sanderson-Cimino said there is a lot of pressure to attend a school in the top 14, and that a school’s ranking is a huge predictor of a student’s job placement.

“It’s a very prestige-obsessed profession — pathologically so. It’s kind of a pathology that impresses upon everyone. It makes you kind of crazy,” Sanderson-Cimino said while laughing. “You’re always judging yourself, it’s not healthy.”

The current landscape

Law school applications decreased dramatically this year both nationally and at the University. As said by Zearfoss, the amount of students taking the LSATs have dropped 22 percent this year, but hasn’t affected enrollment too much considering that number was up almost 20 percent last year.

Zearfoss explained the number of law school applicants increased dramatically when the legal market suffered, and the number decreased when the market started to improve. She acknowledged that the trend is odd and most people expected the opposite to happen.

“My gut tells me that last year when the economy was bad, people were grappling trying to figure out how bad it was, and more people may have been interested in pursuing higher-ed that year,” Zearfoss said. “Then this year, the news really started seeding that for the legal sector there had been problems in the market, and people reacted to that by saying ‘OK, that’s not what I want to do.’ ”

In spite of the increased interest in obtaining a law degree, the economic downturn has caused much difficulty for students looking for jobs. “Certainly the economy is harder right now, and it is more challenging even for our Law students,” Zearfoss said.

For law students, the summer before their second year is a pivotal time, as all universities hold on-campus interviews where potential employers look for students to work for them the next summer.

In many cases, that same employer will also hire students once they graduate from law school.

“Three or four years ago, employers were in here begging (students) to come.