Showing posts with label LSAT scores. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LSAT scores. Show all posts

Friday, April 2, 2021

President Biden ponders $50,000 student-loan cancelation: That doesn't go nearly far enough

 President Biden has asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to prepare a memo on the president's legal authority to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt.  

If he did that, the experts tell us, President Biden would forgive all college-loan debt for 36 million people--about 80 percent of all borrowers. 

Is that a good idea? 

Sort of. Anything the federal government does to provide relief to distressed student-loan debtors is good, so I support a massive cancelation of student debt.

Nevertheless, one-time debt forgiveness is the wrong approach. 

Wiping out student debt without reforming the student-loan program is like fixing a flat tire on a broken-down car and then putting it back on the highway with no brakes. Someone down the road is going to get hurt.

The whole damned, rotten student-loan system has to be torn down. Otherwise, the corrupt, venal, and incompetent American higher education system will continue ripping off the American people.

Obviously, massive reform can't be accomplished overnight.  But here is what we need to do for starters:

1) Congress must remove the "undue hardship" clause from the Bankruptcy Code and allow insolvent student-loan debtors to discharge their loans in bankruptcy. 

2) We've got to shut down the Parent Plus program.

3) The federal government has got to stop subsidizing the for-profit colleges, which have hurt so many young people--especially people of color and low-income people.

4) We've got to stop shoving student borrowers into 25-year, income-based repayment plans that are structured such that no one in these plans can ever pay off their loans.  There almost 9 million people in IBRPs now. 

5) The universities have got to start offering programs that help their graduates get a real job. Degrees in ethnic studies, diversity studies, LGBT studies, and gender studies only prepare people for jobs teaching ethnic studies, diversity studies, gender studies, and LGBT studies.

6) Finally, we must restore the integrity of the nation's law schools.  We've got too many mediocre law schools. California alone has more than 50 law schools, with only 18 accredited by the American Bar Association.   And the law schools need to go back to admitting students based on objective criteria--the LSAT score, in particular.

If we had fewer but better-trained lawyers, we'd have less litigation and fewer attorneys who see their job as being hired political hacks.

Will the Biden administration do any of the things I've outlined? I doubt it.

Higher education is in desperate need of reform. A college education is far too expensive, and much of what is taught at the universities is not useful.  Wiping out student debt will bring some relief to millions of college borrowers. But if the colleges don't change how they do business, the student-debt crisis will not be solved.








Monday, November 20, 2017

Law schools give most financial aid to students who need it least: Legal education is "rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell"

To borrow a phrase from James Howard Kunstler, American law schools are going through their own private version of "The Long Emergency." Law school applications are down, enrollments are down, and the job market for attorneys continues to be terrible.

Meanwhile, tuition prices at American law schools keep going up, which means most law-school graduates begin their careers with mountains of debt. A 2015 report  by the American Bar Association found that average debt for people attending private law schools was $127,000. But average debt loads at for-profit schools is often higher than that. The average debt load for students who attended the now defunct Charleston School of Law was reportedly $200,000.

With fewer people attending law school and fewer people actually enrolling, law schools have done two things to keep their enrollments up:

First, the second- and third-tier law schools began lowering admission standards, which means more and more of their graduates are failing the bar exams.

According to Law School Transparency, some schools have admission requirements so low that half their students are at "extreme risk" of failing the bar.

Second, law schools have been investing more and more money on financial aid, hoping to lure students through their doors.

Unfortunately, most of this financial aid is going to students who have relatively high LSAT scores and who are most likely to have successful careers. Law schools are increasingly happy to admit students with low LSAT scores, but the schools are not supporting these students with adequate financial aid..

"The net effect," writes retired law professor William C Whitford, "is that lower-LSAT students are subsidizing the legal education of higher-LSAT students, when the latter are more likely to have the postgraduate income that will allow them to repay substantial student indebtedness without undue hardship."

Moreover, the law students with low LSAT scores and overall poorer credentials are likely to be less affluent than law-school applicants with high LSAT scores. As Brian Tamanaha put it in a recent book on law school admission practices, "Law schools have in effect constructed a reverse Robin Hood arrangement, redistributing resources between students making the (likely) poorer future graduates help pick up the tab for the (likely) wealthier future graduates" (as quoted by Whitford).

In short, the middle-tier and bottom-tier law schools have concocted a witches' brew of declining admission standards, inequitable financial aid policies, and high tuition costs, which is forcing the least qualified law students to take out loans that they can never pay back.

Paul Campos summarized this state of affairs in his 2012 book Don't Go To Law School (Unless). Job prospects are so poor for graduates of bottom-rung law schools, Campos warned, that some students would be better off financially if they dropped out after the first year rather than continue with their studies.

All of this is eroding the quality of American lawyers. As bar pass rates go down, the pressure is on state bar associations to lower the pass rate on state bar exams. So far, California has resisted this trend in spite of low pass rates on the California bar exam. At least two states, however--Oregon and Nevada--have caved in to pressure and lowered the pass rate on their state bar exams.

The American Bar Association bears most of the blame for this slow rolling catastrophe. It needs to close the bottom-tier law schools--both public and private. In my view, at least 20 law schools should be shut down.

Apparently the ABA doesn't have the courage to do what needs to be done to preserve the integrity of the legal profession, which, in the words of the immortal Merle Haggard, is "rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell."  As a result, the long-term health of our democracy is being threatened by a chain of forces driven primarily be greed and cowardice.

Merle Haggard:  "Are we rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell?"


References

Natalie Bruzda. Nevada lowers the bar for state legal exam as passage rate skids. Las Vegas Review Journal, August 2017.

Paul Campos. Don't Go to Law School (Unless) (2013).

Cathryn Rubino. Oregon Finds Out Easiest Way To Improve Bar Exam Passage Rate is To Lower Its Cut Score. Above the Law (blog), October 5, 2017.

Brian Tamanaha. Failing Law Schools (2012).

Task Force of Financing Legal Education. American Bar Association Report (2015).

William C.Whitford. Law School-Administered Financial Aid: The Good News and the Bad NewsJournal of Legal Education, 67(1) (Autumn 2017).