Tell the ABA how to fix our Profession Forum

[MKC]

As I said before, keep the Federal funding, but have the schools disburse the loans. The schools can determine interest rates or whatever, but they have to pay back the federal money if their students default. That way we can kill some of these TTTT shitholes when the economic consequences of their worthless degrees come back to haunt them.

[timbs4339]

Most people are completely and infuriatingly irrational. That doesn't mean you can't nudge them in the right direction through market-pricing information. By that I mean that maybe people will have second thoughts when their student loan interest rate to attend Cooley is 112% because of the default rate, and Columbia is .05%. I WISH I had that kind of interest rate information to compare schools with.

Some 22 year olds may not even know what a fucking interest rate is, won't care as long as the lender shoves the paper in front of them, or they will get their idiot boomer parents to co-sign using their houses and 401Ks as collateral because people suffer from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias.

I'm going to go ahead and say that's just economic Darwinism, and you can't save everyone.

I don't think letting people make a single financial mistake at 22 years old that will haunt them and their families for decades is right, or a matter of good policy. Recessions caused by lending bubbles aren't good for anybody, "rational" actors included. And of course if you're going to do that it should be with federal money.

It's like drunk driving. You may not take a guy's keys because you care about him, but you care about the poor sod he's going to hit that night.

[MKC]

The default is to let retard 22-year-olds out of their life-destroying decision. Oops. I bought a $300,000 JD from Cooley and wasted three years of my life. Time to throw away the JD and do something else. Cooley eats the loss when said 22-year-old defaults.

Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about a risk-rating for a school, not for individual students. I'm not suggesting anybody put up their house for collateral.

[timbs4339]

The default is to let retard 22-year-olds out of their life-destroying decision. Oops. I bought a $300,000 JD from Cooley and wasted three years of my life. Time to throw away the JD and do something else. Cooley eats the loss when said 22-year-old defaults.

I'd be on board with that.

[sinfiery]

Increasing the disparity between Columbia's cost and Cooleys cost just serves those attending CLS. There is already a giant difference in investment. Taking out the government backed system only materializes the difference between the two investments at two levels and further creates a gap in quality of investment.


Is that really the problem? The problem is in information. You need to able to inform prospective students of exactly why it is a bad idea which the current climate can and is beginning to, to a larger degree, do. Which is absolutely having positive results.

Problem is the data and way it is analyzed is hidden away and hard to obtain. How can we fairly judge the rationality of a consumer without them having the data? For most, there is no reason to question becoming a lawyer. It should be the ABAs duty as an agency caring for the wellfare of this field to properly inform students of the data and to demand more be collected and dispursed in proper scientific fashion.


One thing I think we may fail to realize is that the law schools are a much stronger entity than the ABA

[Ded Precedent]

The default is to let retard 22-year-olds out of their life-destroying decision. Oops. I bought a $300,000 JD from Cooley and wasted three years of my life. Time to throw away the JD and do something else. Cooley eats the loss when said 22-year-old defaults.

Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about a risk-rating for a school, not for individual students. I'm not suggesting anybody put up their house for collateral.

If you're talking about tying interest rates to the number of defaulting students from certain schools you're going to disproportionately disincentivize certain lower class and minority students. They might default at a higher rate but we still ought to extend them the opportunity at social mobility.

[MKC]

The default is to let retard 22-year-olds out of their life-destroying decision. Oops. I bought a $300,000 JD from Cooley and wasted three years of my life. Time to throw away the JD and do something else. Cooley eats the loss when said 22-year-old defaults.

Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about a risk-rating for a school, not for individual students. I'm not suggesting anybody put up their house for collateral.

If you're talking about tying interest rates to the number of defaulting students from certain schools you're going to disproportionately disincentivize certain lower class and minority students. They might default at a higher rate but we still ought to extend them the opportunity at social mobility.

Florida Coastal isn't really helping anybody with social mobility. Nor are the types of schools where a large proportion of students would be willing to give up their JD after graduation. These types of schools either need to drastically lower tuition or go under. Right now, anyone who pays sticker at this level gets fucked.

[rwhyAn]

I am all for doing away with federal funding, or at least limiting it; I will be taking out home equity loans with a fixed 3.09% interest rate through my parents, which I prefer even if it doesn't come with the suppressed payments of programs like PAYE.

Even so, I still don't think that the current issues we're facing in the legal field can be addressed fairly or adequately by limiting federal funding. On the one hand, if you want to limit who the fed funds, you can simply change which law schools are accredited, but as I mentioned previously, this is an extremely "grey" issue. On the other hand, if you want to cut off federal funding completely, you will lock a large portion of the lower class out of a post-graduate education. First, you are assuming that private lenders would do a by-school analysis to determine whether they will lend you the money. Second, even if they do this, then they also have to decide that the majority of students who aren't going to one of the few law schools with a decent chance at a lucrative job (which excludes most schools in case you weren't aware) are okay to fund; if they don't, then students will only be able to receive funding if they go to one of the top few law school.

The highlighted isn't necessarily true. If the funds were tougher to come by, the schools would most certainly react by making tuition more manageable, because it would be either that or go out of business. Honestly, there is no good reason why a public state flagship should be charging more than $10-$15k/yr for tuition. I don't think lenders would balk to dish out a $40k-$50k loan to a 22-year-old at a middling law school; it's the six-figure loans that would stop for these schools. I understand that these loans may not cover total COA, but have the students finance their COL by saving up and getting a job for a few years or getting it from mommy and daddy. The T14 could still get by charging crazy tuition since they'd be able to get the loans to finance it as a result of the good job prospects for its students.

Also, I think these law schools are going to have to change their business models and take a page from the MBA programs. There are part-time, flex MBA programs with classes during evenings, weekends, and even off-site. I realize that there are some part-time evening programs, but I believe the only two law schools with weekend programs are Cooley and Hamline. Opening up the curriculum a little bit would enable students to finance their school as they go and keep them from drowning in a sea of debt.

[Ded Precedent]

The default is to let retard 22-year-olds out of their life-destroying decision. Oops. I bought a $300,000 JD from Cooley and wasted three years of my life. Time to throw away the JD and do something else. Cooley eats the loss when said 22-year-old defaults.

Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about a risk-rating for a school, not for individual students. I'm not suggesting anybody put up their house for collateral.

If you're talking about tying interest rates to the number of defaulting students from certain schools you're going to disproportionately disincentivize certain lower class and minority students. They might default at a higher rate but we still ought to extend them the opportunity at social mobility.

Florida Coastal isn't really helping anybody with social mobility. Nor are the types of schools where a large proportion of students would be willing to give up their JD after graduation. These types of schools either need to drastically lower tuition or go under. Right now, anyone who pays sticker at this level gets fucked.

TCR would be just to shut down those schools with a certain default rate. If they can't find their student's jobs and are only serving to stuff the pockets of the school they should just be closed.

[20141023]

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[TheBiggerMediocre]

I am not aware of the specifics and therefore will stfu

[timbs4339]

lol @ "opportunity" for a poor kid to take on 200K of debt for a school with sub 40% job placement and jobs paying 40K. One of the shitty things about being poor (or middle class) is always having to carry around debt, much of it at high interest rates.

This idea that a college degree = middle class is going to crush the poor and lower-middle class, just like the idea that house = free money did.

[TheBiggerMediocre]

I am not aware of the specifics and therefore will stfu

[20141023]

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[20141023]

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[ph5354a]

Oh my god... please be a troll.

Many law-school graduates coming from "lowerranked" schools are unable to find decent work because they are kept out of the market by
underachievers at "higher-ranked" institutions who are flooding the market.

Edited to clarify that the above quote is the least offensive sentence in this two-page monstrosity.

[20141023]

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[North]

Lastly, although the U.S. News and World Report rankings have done the legal community nothing but injustice since the time of their inception, they just got a lot worse this year by taking advice about their methodology from organizations such as Law School Transparency. Law School Transparency claims that the employment rates at schools like Florida Coastal School of Law are in the low-30%s, but they use an arbitrary method of calculating an equally arbitrary "employment score" that discounts many forms of desirable employment. As reported by the school itself, the real employment rate for the class of 2012 was actually 74.3%. Accordingly, the ABA needs to do something about the blatant misreporting of data over the Internet because it is affecting the ability of intelligent graduates at good schools to find decent employment.

I don't even.

[CaptainLeela]

Welcome to TLS

[A. Nony Mouse]

Oh my god... please be a troll.

Oh dear... I mean, I have some sympathy for the argument that GPA/LSAT aren't the best indicators of whether you'll be a good attorney and that rankings take on too much importance. But I don't think holding up Florida Coastal as an example to which Harvard should aspire is really ever a winning argument.

[North]

I can't tell which is worse... that one, or the one that North posted earlier...

The one I posted was mostly incoherent babbling. This dude appears to have put serious thought into this. This one is worse because, after putting all that thought in, he still managed to sit down and type this.

For someone who uses the word 'illogical' so often, you'd think he'd know how to recognize it in his own drivel.

[North]

Oh my god... please be a troll.

Oh dear... I mean, I have some sympathy for the argument that GPA/LSAT aren't the best indicators of whether you'll be a good attorney and that rankings take on too much importance. But I don't think holding up Florida Coastal as an example to which Harvard should aspire is really ever a winning argument.

Yeah he didn't pussyfoot around by matching Coastal up with, say, UF.

Right for the throat.

[justonemoregame]

Sounds like Lloyd Jackson is singing the ABA's tune. They'll probably put his shit to a vote by Friday (whatever his point was), much like that proposal to allow schools to push back their employment reporting date. It's funny, the comments section is chock full of ideas, some directly on point and some objectively, mind-blowingly confused and mis-informed, and the one they prioritize is some left-field attempt to massage the numbers ever further.

[buddyt]

What if a Harvard graduate comes out of school with no money, no job, and nobody to help them study for the bar? What good will their JD do them in such a scenario? Inversely, students at schools like Florida Coastal University, which has an Enhanced Bar Pass Program, will be in a much better position to become a practicing attorney after law school.

lolol

[LST is]...an arbitrary method of calculating an equally arbitrary "employment score" that discounts many forms of desirable employment.

Barista = desirable employment. Got it.

there's too many, i just can't

[20141023]

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