HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: American Lawyer: Congressional Showdown Over Law Student Loans Is Inevitable, With Law Schools The Likely Losers. “The Post’s editorial cites with approval a law reintroduced by Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), dubbed the Financial Aid Simplification and Transparency (FAST) Act, which would drastically rein in federal lending to college and graduate students. The law would fix annual lending to undergraduates to $8,000 per year with a $37,500 aggregate limit, but graduate and professional students would only receive $30,000 per year in total, with a lifetime cap of $150,000. As of now, graduate students can borrow as much as their schools charge them, on top of $20,500 per year in unsubsidized Stafford loans.”

This will be a big blow to legal education, though it will probably be unevenly felt. The University of Tennessee College of Law, for example, is one of the ten schools where students graduate with the least debt already, so I imagine borrowing limits, etc., would hurt us less than schools at the other end of the list. They might even help.