Venting Forum

[dingbat]

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[jstr00az]

I was looking at a thread for people applying to an extremely expensive (COA $70K) low-ranked school with horrendous employment outcomes (less than 40% of the 2011 class purportedly got legal jobs of any sort, and nearly half of those were either with very small firms of ten lawyers or less or solos), located in a city with several much higher-ranked schools whose graduates are also struggling badly.

People were talking excitedly about how they were getting five-figure annual "scholarships" (with stips, that even if they keep them will leave them with $180K loan balances at graduation), while others expressed how nervous they were about hearing back from an admissions committee that may grant them the privilege of incurring huge debts they'll never pay back. Anyway there were lots of posts in the thread, and of course there are similar threads for many of the dozens of other schools that strongly resemble this school in the most important respects.

It all drove home to me that, while progress is definitely being made, it's just incredibly bad public policy that we allow people to take on six figures of unsecured debt to get degrees that have about a 90% chance of being worse than worthless.

I guess I'll mention that I'm going to be on Huffington Post live today at 1 PM eastern to discuss the higher ed crisis in general and the law school mess in particular.

Vent mode off.

In what capacity is the gvmt morally obligated to correct the "market-failure" (mixed-market failure?) of the law school industry? I wanted to ask on this huff po thing but I have to create another username

The government isn't "morally obligated" to do anything, I guess, except to stop killing and imprisoning people for victimless crimes.

But it should STOP subsidizing stupid behavior. It isn't a market failure that people are heavily subsidized through government loans to go to law school. There's nothing market-oriented about that at all.

[Aawaldrop]

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