There was a very good Op-ed in this morning’s New York Times, Steven Harper’s “Too Many Law Students, Too Few Legal Jobs.”
I know. It’s all been said before, especially by the now declining scamblog movement.
But I still encourage you to read it, especially since Harper again challenges the American Bar Association (ABA) to do something about the dysfunctional system it’s had such a strong hand in perpetuating: law schools “operating without financial accountability and free of the constraints that characterize a functioning market.” As Harper and others have critiqued, despite its recent task force on the future of legal education, the ABA persists in doing little to effectuate real reforms concerning law school funding, tuition pricing, student debt loads and earnings potential.
Bite and breadth.
The criticisms about the state of legal education have also been made before with arguably more bite — but with equal breadth by law school professor and reform advocate Paul Campos. Indeed, in September 2014, writing in The Atlantic, Paul Campos summarized the problem like this:
“. . . the Congressional Budget Office projected that Americans will incur nearly $1.3 trillion in student debt over the next 11 years. That figure is in addition to the more than $1 trillion of such debt that remains outstanding today. This is the inevitable consequence of an interwoven set of largely unchallenged assumptions: the idea that a college degree—and increasingly, thanks to rampant credential inflation, a graduate degree—should serve as a kind of minimum entrance requirement into the shrinking American middle class; the widespread belief that educational debt is always “good” debt; the related belief that the higher earnings of degreed workers are wholly caused by higher education, as opposed to being significantly correlated with it; the presumption that unlimited federal loan money should finance these beliefs; and the quiet acceptance of the reckless spending within the academy that all this money has entailed.” See The Law-School Scam
Harper, a former big law partner, has like Professor Campos, opined extensively on the same topics, including in his 2013 book, The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis and more recently in his law review article, Bankruptcy and Bad Behavior – The Real Moral Hazard: Law Schools Exploiting Market Dysfunction.
The themes are familiar ones, including the law school market dysfunction and how “Current federal student loan and bankruptcy policies encourage all law school deans to maximize tuition and fill classrooms, regardless of their students’ job prospects upon graduation.”
And as Harper explains, a “law school moral hazard” has been created where having incentives to do so, persons take more and more risks because someone else will bear the burden of those risks. He says this moral hazard has combined “with prelaw students’ unrealistic expectations about their careers to produce enormous debt for a JD degree that, for many graduates, does not even lead to a JD-required job.”
Meantime, as Harper and Campos are so good at reminding, for law schools this just means pay no mind as their beat goes on.
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Photo Credits: All photos via morguefile.com
