You get what you pay for in legal education

[Lt-Col A. Tack]

By UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky
The National Law Journal

July 23, 2012

Professor Brian Tamanaha, in his provocative new book, Failing Law Schools, argues for a new approach to legal education that involves law schools that are dramatically less expensive.

In fact, he singles out for criticism me and the University of California, Irvine School of Law (UCI) for creating an "elite" law school rather than one charging students less than $20,000 a year.

Although everyone wants legal education to be less expensive, he proposes a model that is economically impossible without dramatically decreasing the quality of legal education.

His solution is to advocate much lower-cost law schools. But is it possible?

More: http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticl...=1202564055135

[Flagg]

By UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky
The National Law Journal

July 23, 2012

Professor Brian Tamanaha, in his provocative new book, Failing Law Schools, argues for a new approach to legal education that involves law schools that are dramatically less expensive.

In fact, he singles out for criticism me and the University of California, Irvine School of Law (UCI) for creating an "elite" law school rather than one charging students less than $20,000 a year.

Although everyone wants legal education to be less expensive, he proposes a model that is economically impossible without dramatically decreasing the quality of legal education.

His solution is to advocate much lower-cost law schools. But is it possible?

More: http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticl...=1202564055135

Law Schools are suffering from the same problem the rest of the higher education industry and it's customers are facing.

The economic has gone through a stroke.

Which traditionally funnels more uni grads through graduate school to "hide out" and upskill to wait out a recession.

The differences being THIS recession is a much longer lasting series of events that will not end for quite some time.

The cheap credit mess that saw house prices explode also saw higher education prices explode at a rate far above inflation over the last 20 years.

The cost/benefit value proposition has been destroyed for the majority of degree programs in the majority of universities.

Attending university has become a negative value proposition for more and more students......a boat anchor of student debt that can not be defaulted on.

But probably the worst example of the mess of higher education(specifically law school) is when Loyola Law School RETROACTIVELY raised the grades of graduates to make them more competitive in a tough market:

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/03/loyol...flates-grades/

That's just insane......not only is the country printing more paper(which led to the credit crisis, commodity inflation, and a host of other direct/indirect problems), but now it's stooped to printing grades.

Higher education in the US is in for a WORLD of hurt.

I suspect that unless a big bailout is made by government for something akin to a "Manhattan project for alternative energy" targeted at universities to keep the FIRE economy in higher education going a bit longer, then I think it's safe to say there will have to be considerable consolidation in higher education........school mergers and/or closures.

Meanwhile....the number of over educated and under employed graduates suffocating in student debt increases every single day.

Over educated and over indebted hipsters who are in no position to buy babyboomer homes as they downsize and in no position to afford to purchase durable goods to keep the economy going.

It's an intertwined downward spiral.

If Uni graduates have too much debt and are making too little money it will come back to collectively haunt us as it will significantly disrupt the intergenerational sale of property.

Baby Boomers will be the landlords until the day they die, or they will have to sell their property at a price the overindebted graduate hipsters can afford.....which isn't much.

The disconnect with $1+ trillion student debt, negative return on educational investment, long duration poor job market, and the flow on effects of intergenerational asset sales is NOT to be underestimated.

This law school article is just a single indicator of a truly serious problem that I would put almost into the category of potential existential threat.

[Lt-Col A. Tack]

Sagacious and well considered post, as usual, sir

[JJC]

I feel bad for those that are attending 3rd tier law schools right now. At this point, those schools should be shut down because like predatory lenders they give false hope that graduates will become career lawyers.