http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/opinion/sunday/the-law-school-debt-crisis.html?_r=0
Why no “Medical School Debt Crisis?”
there is no crisis – just stupid decisions by Law wannabes. (P.T. Barnum was correct.)
- There's no medical school debt crisis because those grads can find jobs.
- And it is a crisis-for the taxpayers, at a minimum-as these massive taxpayer funded loans most likely will never be repaid.
@bluebayou is correct. The typical activist’s view of the world- that people (other than a few evil Republicans) are morons who are unable to make basic decisions and must be saved from their idiocy by a massive Big Government- simply doesn’t hold up in this instance; if there’s anyone who can make analytical decisions and who doesn’t need “woe is me” sympathy, it’s a lawyer.
That said, law schools in the bottom 1/2 or 2/3 of the US News ranking should vanish. Legal tech will eliminate a lot of legal jobs in the next decade, and there is simply not much market need for ill-educated junior associates (or low-grade senior lawyers) even now.
^^then the taxpayers should stop guaranteeing the loans. Simple.
But I don’t think its a crisis since the GradPlus loans are designed not to be paid back; they come with built-in forgiveness after 10 or 20/25 years. It’s a moral hazard (by design), which is therefore not a crisis, IMO.
HA-huh? The best solution here is for “Big Government” to get out the loan business which is just the opposite of the “typical activist’s view.”
And bb-notwithstanding “forgiveness” it’s still money out the door that will never be repaid. The better course is to not make/guarantee the loans at all.
That’s exactly what I meant in the first sentence of post #5.
The ONLY way for that to happen is for the Feds to stop essentially unlimited Grad loans.
@bluebayou, I agree with your posts. In addition, another way to solve the problem of too many ratty law schools is for state universities to close their law schools. (I’m not talking about U. of Michigan or Berkeley, but plenty of others ought to be closed down.)
agree, happy, but my home state has plenty of unaffiliated, unaccredited law schools which really are bottom feeders, but only exist on Federal largesse. Heck, LA’s former mayor attended one, but he ended up dong alright.
“Law School Applications Set to Hit 15-Year Low” See Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
@bluebayou, all of those dumpy law schools should shut down. In my view, anything ranked 100 or worse in the US News rankings (or unranked) should be shut down. That would eliminate about 1/2 of all law schools.
Maybe the ABA could step in and push for minimum accreditation standards for law schools and tougher standards for bar exams, too? That would eliminate a lot of dumpy law schools and incompetent lawyers.
In addition, Congress is looking at messing with highly-endowed schools’ rights to use their endowments as they wish, with a goal of shifting more funds towards student expenses/tuition. Congress should back off.
The private sector could solve this problem if government would stop messing with the situation by flooding the legal education market with money.
Except that the government caused this problem in the first place; and is enabling it further by nearly every speech they make.
“Maybe the ABA could step in”
The ABA accreditation operation is run by…law school professors and deans! So don’t look for them to eliminate half – or any – of the jobs in their field. Somebody else is going to have to fix it. Media outlets educating would-be law students about the problems are actually making a dent.
“if there’s anyone who can make analytical decisions and who doesn’t need “woe is me” sympathy, it’s a lawyer.”
But they aren’t lawyers. Many of them will never pass the bar or get a legal job if they do. This is a gigantic waste of resources. 20,000+ young people annually leaving the job market for three years and saddling themselves with six figures of debt hurt a lot of economic players besides themselves.
@Hanna, they ARE lawyers in that they’ve received legal training. As someone who graduated from law school, I don’t need a pity party and none of my classmates (or other law graduates) do, either, when there are true charity cases out there. As letters in today’s New York Times state, the default rate on loans for law graduates is far lower than for college graduates in general: 7% for law graduates vs. 22% for college graduates overall. Throw the pity party for undergrads from overpriced schools that don’t add much of any benefit for a career–which is a lot of colleges.
Do you agree or disagree that “20,000+ young people annually leaving the job market for three years and saddling themselves with six figures of debt hurt a lot of economic players besides themselves”?
@Hanna, if you’re addressing your question to me, do you agree or disagree that a 22% default rate for undergrad loans is a greater problem than a 7% default rate for law school loans, and that saddling college (non-law school) graduates with debt hurts a lot of economic players other than themselves?
Not sure why I should answer your question if you won’t answer mine, but my response is that it’s not zero-sum. There’s plenty of disapproval to go around for all kinds of wasteful and paralyzing educational borrowing. The law happens to be my field, so I put a fair amount of attention here, but feel free to critique whichever societal problems trouble you most.
If we’re discussing a problem with mugging, would you come and say, “You know, murder is way worse than mugging!” Sure it is, but mugging is still a problem, and it’s worth talking about ways to fix it.
And as Mr. Harper points out, 7% default doesn’t mean that 93% of the loans are getting repaid.
http://thelawyerbubble.com/2015/11/04/legal-educations-strange-bedfellows/
In sum, this many people with this much taxpayer-funded debt with little or no hope of a job that pays enough to pay off the debt is bad for everyone-these students, the taxpayer-and really everybody, because everyone loses except the law schools pocketing the cash.
@Hanna, if we’re discussing mugging and murder:
Would you agree that resources to devote to problems are not infinite?
Would you agree that stopping a mugging is probably not as important as stopping a murder?
Would you agree that if a lot more people are murdered than mugged, then focusing on murders is a more important societal problem, worthy of the use of more resources?