Are fewer people applying to law school? Forum

[NYSprague]

Spiveys blog from a few days ago has a solid discussion of the drop for the upcoming season.

I think it is worth linking here:
http://spiveyconsulting.com/blog/what-w ... look-like/

[roranoa]

Spiveys blog from a few days ago has a solid discussion of the drop for the upcoming season.

I think it is worth linking here:
http://spiveyconsulting.com/blog/what-w ... look-like/

Thanks for the link!

[PDaddy]

Nevermind that Law School enrollment will always be somewhat inflated until the feds stop giving graduate programs a blank check for tuition. The entire system is a demented scam. In a round about way, the US government has essentially implemented an insane QE program for graduate schools in which it blindly buys the educational equivalent of LIAR loans "underwritten" by schools, allowing them to externalize all risk, privitize all profits, rinse, and repeat.

When this scam collapses, there should be another dramatic drop in enrollment to go with it (if only because a number of law schools would cease to exist...). It's hard to say what might set that off, but a heated national conversation on government waste (perhaps inspired by outrage over an iconic issue in a totally unrelated area, like the F-35 procurement fiasco) should naturally turn to higher education, and law school is the most disgusting example of the perverse incentives of higher education financing at work.

I'm not against QE if it's used to counter deflationary pressures in a system (such as our economy a few years ago)...but the problem with legal education is that you have a market with inflationary competition cost pressures. When you add infinity demand to such a market, it becomes broken pretty quickly.

It's hard to imagine why the federal government puts zero accountability on schools benefitting from it's loan guarantees. It would be so easy for them to just say "you can't get any money from government loans if tuition crosses this threshold." In any other country, this would be classified as a pyramid scheme, and the people responsible for it would be perp-walked.

Agreed! So tell me why, back in 2009 - when I suggested that law schools were essentially committing FRAUD - everyone here laughed at me.

[Hopefully2012]

Nevermind that Law School enrollment will always be somewhat inflated until the feds stop giving graduate programs a blank check for tuition. The entire system is a demented scam. In a round about way, the US government has essentially implemented an insane QE program for graduate schools in which it blindly buys the educational equivalent of LIAR loans "underwritten" by schools, allowing them to externalize all risk, privitize all profits, rinse, and repeat.

When this scam collapses, there should be another dramatic drop in enrollment to go with it (if only because a number of law schools would cease to exist...). It's hard to say what might set that off, but a heated national conversation on government waste (perhaps inspired by outrage over an iconic issue in a totally unrelated area, like the F-35 procurement fiasco) should naturally turn to higher education, and law school is the most disgusting example of the perverse incentives of higher education financing at work.

I'm not against QE if it's used to counter deflationary pressures in a system (such as our economy a few years ago)...but the problem with legal education is that you have a market with inflationary competition cost pressures. When you add infinity demand to such a market, it becomes broken pretty quickly.

It's hard to imagine why the federal government puts zero accountability on schools benefitting from it's loan guarantees. It would be so easy for them to just say "you can't get any money from government loans if tuition crosses this threshold." In any other country, this would be classified as a pyramid scheme, and the people responsible for it would be perp-walked.

Agreed! So tell me why, back in 2009 - when I suggested that law schools were essentially committing FRAUD - everyone here laughed at me.

The problem with the quoted solution of setting a tuition threshold for government loans/aid is that it would create a huge economic divide between a top legal education and a bottom-tiered one (worse than there is now). It would definitely cause a lot of lower-tiered schools to close, but with unintended consequences.

There will still be enough rich students/parents to pay the highest tuition rates at the top without government loans. The best professors/employers will likely still go to the top schools, creating a huge access problem. The change you're proposing might be possible under a conservative administration, but the potential discrimination and unfairness means that no liberal fed. regime would dream of allowing higher education to become a true marketplace.