WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Student Loan Program Pumps Legal Ed Bubble: For Now.
From the admirably thorough if sometimes forbidding info that Hastings provides, a few facts jump out. The first is the staggering rise in the cost of law school tuition over the last decade, even as total applications to the school fell by nearly a third, and as employment opportunities for newly-minted JDs collapsed during the same period. As the report highlights, Hastings’ tuition revenue nearly doubled from 2003 to 2011, while in-state tuition at the institution more than doubled, from $21,000 to $47,000 from 2004 to 2012.
But the story gets bleaker. For those readers just starting college this fall but considering law school (i.e. starting in the 2016-2017) academic year or who have kids in this position, total non-resident tuition and fees at Hastings by then is projected to rise to nearly $59,000 per year. Taking into account living expenses, that means that the average graduate of Hastings – who, the school’s administration freely admits, face difficulty getting jobs in a Bay Area market where Stanford and Berkeley graduates dominate – will face nearly $200,000 in non-dischargeable student loan debt. That’s the kind of number that we at Via Meadia are referring to when we talk about a War on the Young.
It would be one thing if all of these naïve liberal arts graduates were paying for the privilege of a Hastings education with money from the family vaults. But they’re not. Close to 100 percent of the tuition that students paid was financed by federal loans, like the Stafford, Perkins, and GRADPLUS programs. The student loan system is effectively allowing Hastings to raise its tuition beyond any reasonable or sustainable point and it is encouraging students to make bad investments — in much the same way federal debt programs encouraged the housing bubble of the last decade.
And this is key: “Most student loans do not get discharged if you go bankrupt. They are a ball and chain that will drag you down for decades. Please, look very carefully before you leap.”
I’m not saying don’t go to law school. I’m saying don’t borrow money to go to law school. At the very least, read Brian Tamanaha’s book before you do.