A recent law school graduate was interviewed by Business Insider and makes a compelling case against following in his footsteps, especially in terms of high debt and low quality of life (via Instapundit).

This law school graduate’s answers are sobering. He attended a school that’s one of the top 20 in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report, and yet he struggled to find decent work.

He believes his law school tricked him into thinking he’d easily find a prestigious job after graduation.

“I consider law school a waste of my life and an extraordinary waste of money. I feel like I was duped and tricked,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s my own fault for being a sucker and I learned an extremely hard lesson.”

These days, he makes $45,000 and has $200,000 in education debt. He lives with his parents in Virginia, doesn’t have a car, and doesn’t even date. In his free time, he does contract work to try to pay down his debt.

The full interviews details his challenging post-graduate employment experiences, and is well worth reading for law school wannabes. Here is a snippet:

Do you think your law school misled you about your job prospects? How?

Unquestionably. My law school offered job statistics that were materially misleading and they knew it. The job statistics offered by law schools are carefully designed to induce new students to take out a life-destroying amount of debt that is, by law, non-dischargeable in bankruptcy in all but the most dire circumstances.

It’s pretty easy to hop on the Internet Wayback Machine and see what law schools do. They told me the median starting salary of graduates was $160,000 and some absurd percentage — like 90%+ ± of graduates were employed within 9 months of graduation.

This reasonably lead me to believe that even if I wasn’t going to be in the top of my class and make $160,000, surely the jobs in the tier below the top big firm jobs would pay a living wage. Never in my worst nightmares did I think I’d find myself with $200,000 in debt, making less than $50,000, struggling to find job openings and to move on in my career.

Law schools know exactly what they’re doing and survey a small percentage of graduating classes to concoct these job and salary numbers. Because there’s been a large outcry of criticism against this practice, the schools have begun to offer slightly more factual job and salary data. Law school is called an “investment,” but you couldn’t get away with the sales pitches that law schools use to induce new students to give them loan money, which is all they are interested in.