Who's at Fault for the High Cost of Law School?

Too Much Easy Money

Correction: There's no risk to the private lenders. If/when a student defaults, the government rides to the lender's rescue. But there is plenty of risk to the student.

Default on your loan, and you can kiss your future goodbye. Thanks to Sallie Mae and her banking lobbyist friends, private lenders have debt collection powers that would make a loan shark jealous.

So remember, Kiddies: Your student loan payments are more important than food, more important than rent, more important than getting married or having kids, more important than life itself. Now get back to work.

To Much Easy Money

Risk-free, government-backed loans that are impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.

That's what driving all tuitions skyward. Because there is NO risk, private loan lenders can't wait to get in on the action. So they lend to anyone with no regard whatsoever to whether he/she is going to a great school, a good school, or a diploma mill. To get "preferred" lender status, the lenders give the financial aid officers big, fat, juicy kickbacks; e.g., an all-expenses-paid trip to attend a student loan "conference" in Bermuda.

The easy availability of so much easy money allows the schools to charge whatever they want. To lessen the sticker shock, the schools print false and misleading employment statistics in glossy brochures: "90% of our graduates are employed 9 months after graduation and the median salary is $125,000." What they fail to mention is that Starbucks Barista counts as "employed" and that the median figure doesn't take into account graduates who didn't respond to the school's survey, most likely out of anger or embarrassment.

Restore basic consumer protections to student loans, the consumer protections Sallie Mae and the banking lobby killed not too long ago, and you'll see tuitions start to fall and many diploma mills get shut down.

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USNWR Rankings DOES influence ....

.... the incentives according to which law school act. To ignore this would be foolish. However, this is the one time I side with USNWR (for the most part). A lot of the law schools outside the 30-40 elite institutions do, as Bob Morse asserted, function as "cash cows." The recent upheaval at DePaul University, where close to 25% of law students' tuition revenue is raided, is a good example. USNWR, if it does anything, serves as a check AGAINST raiding revenues by giving schools credit for spending more money on the law school.

That being said, there is no doubt that USNWR is partly responsible for the sky rocketing tuition at UC law schools. Contrary to popular opinion, UC law schools lost much of their public funding during the budget crisis of 2003 and have been operating at a disadvantage to peer institutions since that time. UCLA and Boalt were justifiably aggrieved that their standing suffered in the rankings as a result. The current move to 'market pricing' was part of a plan approved back in 2006, and not in response to the current fiscal disaster.

USNWR's law school rankings are deeply flawed and create perverse incentives, but this (overhead$/student) isn't one of them.

Some possible improvements.....

(1) Get ride of the acceptance rate, as a selectivity metric. 'Purchase decisions' are easily measured by the LSAT/GPA of the incoming classes. I see no reason to penalize a school for not receiving a truckload of applications from sub-par applicants. Moreover, this metric is easily fudged. Its no secret that NYU and UVA send fee waivers to people so that they can reject them.

(2) Get rid of the employment numbers. Working at Starbucks should not count as much as working at a law firm. Instead, report the median private sector salary for graduates, i.e. exclude clerkships, government and public interest employment from this pool. People aren't going to take on $100K in debt for a school where the median private sector salary is $40K.

(3) Give more weight to grant aid offered by schools. If USNWR is going to reward skyrocketing tuition, maybe start rewarding schools more for making the experience affordable.

Professors teach half time

I am a former law school instructor and my weekly teaching load was 6 hours of classroom instruction and 5 office hours. I was expected to spend about 1/2 of my time on research. The same expectations applied to professors. Therefore, it seems to me that about 1/2 of law school tuition is going to pay for faculty research and publication. And I have great doubts about how much of the published research is ever read by anyone. So one way to get the tuition down is to make the teachers teach more and do less research. I do not think the legal academic community or practicing lawyers would suffer.

laughable

I think this is a laughable claim by the GAO. It is akin to saying that restaurant reviews influence the price of an evening out at a fine establishment. Sure there are costs associated with improving the 'services' of an educational program, but at the end of the day it is the institution itself that sets the price tag.

the greedy law school administrators

the law schools have lots of young people clamoring to get into law school because they think that law school graduates make lots of money when they get a job after graduation. However, those law school graduate employment and salary stats are a big lie put out by the law schools and their front organization, the NALP.

The salary and job data are greatly by the law schools using a variety of deceitful techniques.

Thus, a false picture is given by these stats, which drives up the demand for law school among young people.

If the real truth were known about how many law school grads cannot make a living or cannot find a job as a lawyer, there would not be so many people applying for law school, and the demand would drop, and so the law school tuition would drop.

The Dept of Justice needs to prosecute some of these law school administrators for fraud.

Are you serious?

"There are weaknesses in the report's methodology." POT. KETTLE. BLACK!