When the mouse is away, the cats will play or (to mix my metaphors) the nannies have put the children in charge of the nursery at American colleges and universities

"When the mouse is away, the cats might play," Churchill remarked about one of his political colleagues. I believe he was speaking of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who sealed the Munich Pact with Hitler. (And we know how that turned out.)

I thought of Churchill's line as I contemplated recent events at the University of Missouri, a fine public university with one of the best journalism programs in the United States. As everyone listening to the news now knows, Timothy Wolfe, Mizzou's president, stepped down after being accused of inadequate sensitivity to racism on the university campus.

This incident follows similar outbreaks of hysteria on other university campuses, including distinguished institutions like Yale and Dartmouth.

Apparently, there is a general perception among college students, the elite media, and even the Obama administration that America's college campuses are bastions of sexism and racism.  It is said that one in five college women are victims of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault and that minority students are repeatedly victimized by racist slurs.

Personally, I don't believe it. America's colleges and universities have many sins to answer for, but racism and sexism are not among them. No senior university administrator would last a moment in the politically correct atmosphere of academia if he or she said or did anything that could even remotely be considered as being insensitive on matters of race or gender.

In fact, the nation's college communities are in a frenzied debate about bathroom etiquette. Back in the Neanderthal age (20 years ago), benighted Americans thought that men should go to the men's bathrooms and women should use the women's bathrooms.  But now that simple rule has been undermined by people who are oh so much more sensitive than you or me.

And Christian student groups, once seen as inoffensive and perhaps even moral paragons, are now being kicked off campus by such prestigious institutions as Berkeley and Bowdoin. Mustn't allow Christians, with their benighted views on family life, to be recognized as a student group. They might pollute the rarefied atmosphere of our enlightened universities.

So if universities have turned their attention to toilet rules and to booting Christians off their campuses, I can't imagine that college administrators are insensitive to the very important issues of gender and race.

My guess is that President Wolfe did not resign out of shame about his insensitivity to racism.  He just said to hell with it.

I will make one final point about the witch-trial atmosphere of American colleges and universities, and it is this: Apparently no one at our higher education institutions has a remote notion of what free speech and academic freedom mean.

Worse than that, we've allowed students to tell professors and administrators what these concepts mean. If indeed college students know more than their teachers about academic freedom and our precious right to freedom of speech than their instructors and deans, why in the hell are students paying $40 grand a year to get a college education?

The University of Missouri imbroglio is not a new phenomenon. Tom Wolf's essay "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" was written more than 40 years ago, and it describes exactly the kind of behavior that we see at the University of Missouri.  Our college leaders either don't understand the principles of civil discourse and academic freedom or they are so cowardly that they will submit to being lectured on racial civility by their uncouth and ignorant students.  Or perhaps both.

Personally, if I were mom or pop, I would consider telling my kids to skip college altogether. Certainly, no one should borrow money simply to buy a seat in a guerrilla theater. And any university alum who makes a monetary donation to an American college or university is a fool.

Neville Chamberlain: Sensitive to Hitler's point of view

Suicide and Student Loans: Is There a Link?

Death rates among white, middle-aged Americans have gone up significantly in recent years. According Anne Case and Angus Deaton, two Princeton economists, death rates for people in the 45 to 54 age group began rising in 1999. For middle-aged white people with a high school diploma or less, the mortality rate rose 22 percent between 1999 and 2013.

Why are relatively young white Americans dying at a higher rate than they did 15 years ago? Case and Deaton say most of the rising mortality rate can be attributed to suicide or deaths related to alcohol or drug abuse.People in this age group are experiencing a lot of stress, including economic stress; and they are turning to alcohol and drugs to deal with it. “What we see here is a group that’s in quite a lot of distress,” said Ms. Case in a Wall Street Journal interview.

As Case and Deaton said in their report:

Although the epidemic of pain, suicide, and drug overdoses preceded the financial crisis, ties to economic insecurity are possible. After the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education. 

As everyone knows, Americans' accumulated student-loan debt has been going up steadily for the past 20 years. Could there be a  link between student-loan debt and rising mortality rates among middle-aged white Americans?

Deaton and Case did not examine student-loan indebtedness in their study, and any attempt to link student loans to rising death rates would be speculative. Moreover, Case and Deaton found that middle-aged people with college degrees had not experienced higher mortality rates.

Nevertheless, suicide rates for the Baby Boomer generation have gone up dramatically in recent years. According to a report by Katherine Hempstead and Julie Phillips, the suicide rate  for people in the 40-64 age group has gone up 40 percent since 2007.

Hempstead and Philips suggest that economic problems may have contributed to the rising suicide rate among Baby Boomers, and that "adverse effects of economic difficulties on psychological well-being may have been greater for those who did not anticipate them; this may well have been the case for those who were educated and wealthier . . . ."

One thing is certain: Our federal government has constructed a student-loan scheme so heartless that it almost seems to have been designed to plunge millions of Americans into long-term clinical depression.  So isn't it reasonable to conclude there is a connection between crushing student loans and rising suicide rates among middle-aged people?

Let's examine some of the evidence pointing to growing stress among student-loan debtors:

• As the New York Times recently pointed out, ten million people are in default on their student loans or delinquent on their loan payments.

• According to a recent report by the Brookings Institution, loan balances for a significant number of student-loan debtors actually went up after they entered the repayment phase  of their loans. Why? Because a lot of people have obtained economic-hardship deferments that exempt them from making loan payments due to dire economic circumstances.  But because they are not paying down accruing interest, their loan balances are getting larger, making them more difficult to pay off.

• The percentage of elderly Americans with unpaid student-loan debt is going up. According to a report from the General Accounting Office, the percentage of people in the 65 through 74 age group with outstanding student loans grew from 1 percent in 2004 to 4 percent in 2010, a four-fold increase   And the amount of student-loan debt owed by elderly people is growing as well.  In fact, the amount of debt held by elderly Americans grew six fold between 2005 and 2013--from $2.8 billion in 2005 to $18.2 billion.

• The federal government is  garnishing more and more Social Security checks to collect on unpaid student loans.   In 2002, only 31,000 people had Social Security benefits garnished because they had defaulted on their student loans. That number ballooned five fold in just 11 years. In 2013, 155,000 Americans saw their Social Security checks reduced due to unpaid student-loans.

Let's consider that last bullet from a more personal perspective. According to a story posed on Market Watch, the U.S. government is garnishing the Social Security checks of Naomia Davis, an 80 year old woman who is suffering from advanced Alzheimer's Disease. Ms. Davis's only income is her $894 Social Security check, and the feds take $134 of it to pay down on an old student loan.

In short, it is reasonable to conclude that crushing student-loan debt contributes to depression and even suicide among Baby Boomers who are struggling to pay off college loans they took out when they were young.  The student loan crisis is not only eroding Americans' sense of economic well being; it may be literally killing them.

References

Jillian Berman. When your Social Security check disappears because of an old student loan. MarketWatch, June 25, 2015.  Accessible at: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/when-your-social-security-check-disappears-because-of-an-old-student-loan-2015-06-25

Anne  Case and Angus Deaton. Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white
non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.  Accessible at: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.full.pdf

Editorial. Death Among MiddleAged Whites. New York Times, November 5, 2015.

Editorial. Why Student Debtors Go Unrescued. New York Times, October 7, 2015. Accessible at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/opinion/why-student-debtors-go-unrescued.html?_r=0

General Accounting Office. Older Americans: Inability to Repay Student Loans May Affect Financial Security of a Small Percentage of Borrowers. GAO-14-866T. Washington, DC: General Accounting Office. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-866T

Katherine A. Hempstead and Julie A. Phillips. Rising Suicide Among Adults Aged
40–64 Years: The Role of Job and Financial Circumstances.  American Journal of Preventive Medicine 84(5):491-500 (2015). Accessible at: http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(14)00662-X/pdf

Jason Iuliano. An Empirical Assessment of Student Loan Discharge and the Undue Hardship Standard. American Bankruptcy Law Journal 86 (2012), 495.

Gina Kolata. Deaths Rates Rising Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds. NewYork Times, November 3, 2015. Accessibe at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html

Betsy McKay. The Death Rate Is Rising for Midle-Aged Whites. Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2015. Accessible at: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-rate-is-rising-for-middle-aged-whites-1446499495

If you have to enroll in a 25-year income-based repayment plan to pay for your college education, you attended the wrong college

In his 2012 book entitled Don't Go To Law School Unless), Paul Campos made a statement that startled me by its intense clarity. "The truth is," Campos wrote, "that people who are likely to end up in [income-based repayment plans] if they go to law school should not go at all" (48). 

And of course Campos is right. But isn't the same observation true about undergraduate education as well? A person who must enter a 25 year income-based repayment plan to pay for a college degree either enrolled in the wrong college or chose the wrong academic major--and probably both.

For example, Ron Lieber of the New York Times wrote a story about five years ago that featured Cortney Munna, who borrowed almost $100,000 to get a degree in women's studies and religious studies at New York University, one of the most expensive universities in the world.. At the time of Lieber's story, Munna was working for a photographer for $22 an hour and enrolled in night school in order to defer her loan payments. 

As Lieber pointed out, going back to college simply to postpone student-loan payments on the degree one already has is not a good long-term option because interest continues to accrue on the debt.

I wonder how Ms. Munna is doing today. I think the chances are very good that she is in a 25-year income-based repayment plan

Campos said in his book that "there's a good argument to be made that law schools [that] promote IBR[income-based repayment plans] are participating in  a fraud on the public." (50) Again, I think Campos is right.

 Most people who enter into 25-year income-based repayment plans won't make payments large enough to cover accruing interest and also pay down the principal on their loans. In other words, most people in IBRs will see their loans negatively amortize. This means the taxpayer will be left holding the bag when the loan-repayment term ends and the unpaid portion of the loan is forgiven.

To return to Ms. Munna's story, shouldn't NYU bear some responsibility for allowing her to borrow so much money for a degree that is not likely to lead to a job that will allow her to pay back the debt?

Of course, universities are not in the habit of admitting that some of their degree programs are overpriced. But maybe it is a habit they should acquire.  How many private universities could look their students in the eye and say their degrees in women's studies, religious studies, sociology, urban studies etc. etc. etc. are worth going $100,00 into debt? Not many.

References

Paul Campos. Don't Go To Law School (Unless). Self-published, 2012.

Ron Lieber. Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt. New York Times, May28, 2010. Accessible at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/your-money/student-loans/29money.html

Income-Based Repayment Plans are a fraud on college students: Reflections on Paul Campos' analysis of IBRs

Don't Go To Law School (Unless), Paul Campos' excellent book on the economics of legal education, was published in 2012, and I am embarrassed to say I did not read it until this week. Campos delivered a devastating critique of American law schools, which have charged insanely high tuition for turning out more lawyers than the nation needs. No one should make a decision to go to law school without reading Campos' book, along with the recent report on law-school admissions standards put out by the public interest group Law School Transparency.

Even people who don't plan to go to law school should read Campos' book, because his indictment of legal education also applies to higher education in general. All over the United States, colleges have jacked up their tuition, forcing their students to borrow more and more money. It is now apparent that millions of students are saddled with unmanageable student-loan debt.

To keep the gravy train rolling, higher education's insiders now back long-term income-based repayment plans (IBRs) that lower borrowers' monthly loan payments but extend the repayment time to as long as 25 years. Policy think tanks like the Brookings Institution, the Obama administration, and the New York Times have all backed IBRs.

Let's look at what Paul Campos had to say about IBRs in Don't Go To Law School (Unless).  (Campos also criticizes public service loan forgiveness plans (PSLFs), but I will not comment on PSLFs in this essay).

"The truth is," Campos wrote, "that people who are likely to end up in IBR . . . if they go to law school should not go at all" (48).  People who participate in these long-term repayment plans will generally be making payments so low that they don't cover accumulated interest, which means that many debtors will never pay off their loans. Moreover, Campos notes, under current IRS regulations, any debt that is forgiven at the end of a long-term repayment plan is considered taxable income.

Campos trenchantly pointed out that IBRs are simply a way to prop up the law schools' broken business model:

When law schools push the supposed benefits of IBR . . . to prospective students, what they're really doing is advertising that they're operating under a business model that doesn't work unless it is subsidized heavily at both ends by the American taxpayer. Law school is subsidized on the front end by federal educational loans, which allow students to borrow money they won't be able to pay back, and by IBR  . . on the back end, which allows graduates to have the "privilege" of being in debt servitude to the U.S. government for ten or, more likely, twenty-five years, with the added bonus of being hit by a huge tax bill at the end of it all. (51)

Indeed, Camps suggests that law schools that push the benefits of IBRs are engaging in unethical behavior. "Given that the American taxpayer will be left holding the bag for all the unpaid debt accrued by law graduates in these programs, there's a good argument to be made that law schools who promote IBR are participating in a fraud on the public" (50) (my emphasis).

Every criticism Campos raised about IBRs as a means of financing legal education applies to higher education in general. Twenty-five year repayment plans (or even the less onerous 20-year repayment plan developed by the Obama administration) force students to pay a percentage of their income to the federal government for the majority of their working lives.

These long-term repayment plans demonstrate the intellectual vacuity of our higher education community. In their desperate effort to maintain the status quo, colleges and universities are throwing their students under the bus.  Rather than change their business model, they raise their tuition rates every year and soothingly assure their students not to worry---they will have 25 years instead of 10 to pay off their student loans.

American universities are using IBRs to throw their students under the bus.

References

Paul Campos. Don't Go To Law School (Unless) (published by the author, 2012).

"Press on, Press on, boys!" Alan DiCara: Welcome to the fight!

Press on, Press on, boys!

                                         George Washington, December 26, 1776

 A few years ago, I read David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, the story of  General George Washington's famous Delaware Valley campaign in December 1776. I found myself wondering why anyone stayed in Washington's army during that bleak winter and why anyone would get in a boat to cross the Delaware River to face the Hessians, the British Empire's hired killers. The weather was bitter cold, and some of Washington's men died from exposure.

But somehow, a few brave men stuck it out with George Washington, and the Continental Army won an important victory that heartened a new nation in its struggle for independence.

I would not compare the battle for student-loan reform to Washington's crossing of the Delaware, but I am surprised how few people have raised their voices in protest at the ruthless exploitation of college students by the higher education industry--exploitation made possible by a corrupt and mismanaged federal student loan program.

Thus, I was heartened to hear from Alan DiCara of Winsted, Connecticut, who has launched his own blog about the student-loan crisis called Student Loan Action Group. Welcome to the fight, Alan.

 I encourage my readers to check out Alan's web site at: http://studentloanactiongroup.blogspot.com/

And, as General Washington said to his troops on December 26, 1776: "Press on, Press on, boys!"

"Press on, Press on, boys!"

References

David Hackett Fischer. Washington's Crossing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Does South Dakota need a law school? Probably not.

Among Alaska's many admirable distinctions is the fact that the state does not have a public law school. Alaskans apparently decided that the United States has enough law schools (203) and that Alaskans who want to become lawyers can enroll in a law school out of state.

But every other state has at least one law school, including the states of North Dakota and South Dakota.  Unfortunately, neither state has been particularly good at attracting high-quality students. According to a recently report prepared by Law School Transparency, 25 percent of the students admitted to the 2014 class of students at both states' law schools were so low as to put them at "extreme risk" of failing the bar exam.

Wouldn't it make sense for North Dakota and South Dakota to close their law schools and send their best students to study at an out-of-state law school like Alaska does?  And wouldn't it make sense for Ohio to close Ohio Northern Law School and for Illinois to close the law school at Southern Illinois University, two law schools with high percentages of students with abysmally low LSAT scores?

And let me raise another question. In the dawning years of the 21st century, do we really need historically black law schools like Texas Southern and the law school at Louisiana's Southern University? Both law schools had 2014 classes with high numbers of students with extremely low LSAT scores.

Texas Southern's law school is just down the street from the University of Houston School of Law, and Southern's law school is just a few miles from LSU's law school. Why are the states of Texas and Louisiana maintaining two public law schools in the same city?

Unfortunately, law schools serve other functions besides training lawyers. Universities want the prestige attached to having a law school along with the high tuition rates they can charge for offering relatively cheap educational experiences. Historically black colleges and universities have a great deal of political clout, and closing a historically black law school would raise a howl of protest.

But our nation's refusal to face the crisis in legal education is going to have catastrophic consequences. Thousands of people are graduating from law school with massive debt and no job, and the quality of our lawyers is deteriorating as law schools lower admission standards to attract students.

As a person who practiced law in Alaska for nine years, I can attest that lack of a law school created no hardship for Alaskans.  During the 1980s, when I was a lawyer in Anchorage, the city had one lawyer for every 200 residents. Somehow, the state muddled along without a law school and seems to have suffered no ill consequences.

And I will end this blog on a somber note.  Seattle University School of Law recently announced plans to open a satellite-branch law-school campus in Anchorage, and the University of Alaska at Anchorage has entered into some kind of partnership with Willamette University College of Law and Washington Univesity School of Law.

Poor Alaska: No law school!

References

Law School Transparency. 2015 State of Legal Education. Accessible at: http://lawschooltransparency.com/reform/projects/investigations/2015/

Seattle University School of Law reaches agreement to house satellie law campus at Alaska Pacific University, June 17, 2014. Accessible at: https://www.alaskapacific.edu/seattle-university-school-of-law-reaches-agreement-to-house-satellite-law-campus-at-alaska-pacific-university/

Anything to make a buck: Many law schools should be closed

Law School Transparency, a public interest organization, issued a report containing some alarming information about law school enrollments. Anyone thinking about going to law school needs to read this report, including the information it contains about individual law schools.

LST reports that law-school enrollments have declined 28 percent since 2010, which has caused a budget crunch for law schools because they are heavily dependent on tuition money to keep their doors open.

As a result of declining law-school applications, many law schools have lowered their admission standards to attract more students, particularly students with low LSAT scores. As LST points out, LSAT scores are the best predictor of whether law graduates will pass or fail their bar exams. Thus, declining LSAT scores for American law students promises to bring a higher failure rate on bar exams.  Obviously, a student who borrows a significant amount of money to attend law school and then fails the bar exam will experience a financial catastrophe because that student cannot practice law.

LST broke down LSAT scores into categories that measure the risk of failing the bar exam, and it identified law schools that are admitting a significant number of students with LSAT scores so low that they run a high risk of failing the bar exam after graduating from law school.

The picture LST paints is not pretty.

In 2010, 30 law schools admitted at least 25 percent of  their students with LSAT scores so low that those students ran a significant risk of failing the bar. By 2014, the number of law schools admitting high-risk students had more than doubled--from 30 to 74 in just four years.

In 2014, 37 schools "admitted classes consisting of at least 50% at risk students . . ." In other words, based on their LSAT scores, at least 50 percent of the students at 37 law schools were at risk of failing the bar exam once they graduated.

LST went on to report:

Every for-profit law school enrolled classes consisting of at least 50% at-risk students. The Infilaw-owned schools [Florida Coastal School of Law, Charlotte School of Law and Arizona Summit Law School] enrolled classes consisting of between 75% and 100% at-risk students. For-profit school graduates have lower bar passage rates, worse job rates, and more debt. For-profit schools also graduate a higher percentage of students with debt and receive more total federal student loans on a per-school basis than public or private schools.

(emphasis added)

"Based on available salary data from serious risk schools," LST observed,  "graduates from these programs cannot service their debts without generous federal hardship programs." Moreover, "[e]ven top earners at the more affordable schools face economic difficulty; the rest range from economic difficulty to catastrophe."

What, in a nutshell, is the LST report telling us? Less prestigious law schools, including the for-profit law schools, have lowered their admission standards in an effort to counteract declining enrollments. On average, tuition at many of these schools is almost as high as the tuition rates at more elite schools, so students who attend many of these lower-tier law schools are borrowing almost as much money as students who take out loans to attend a Harvard or a Stanford.

I have three comments to make about LST's report:

1)  Given the imploding demand for new attorneys, it is utter madness for the government to continue propping up for-profit law schools with federal student-loan money. Many people attending these schools will face a grim financial future when they graduate: poor job prospects and crushing student debts.

2) Based on a review of LST's report, it's not only the for-profits who are admitting students with low LSAT scores. A number or public universities have low admissions standards. According to LST's data, one out of four students at several public law schools have LSAT scores so low that they are at "extreme risk" of failing the bar exam.  These schools include: Southern University, Texas Southern University, Ohio Northern University, University of North Dakota and the University of South Dakota.

3) Law schools that are admitting students with low LSAT scores are not only doing their students a disservice. They are also lowering the overall quality of the nation's legal community. Many of these students will fail the bar, but many marginal ones will pass it. This country doesn't need an oversupply of minimally qualified attorneys.

In short, this state of affairs cannot continue.  Law schools with low admission standards need to be closed, and the students who accumulated massive amounts of debt to attend them should have their loans forgiven.

References

Law School Transparency. 2015 State of Legal Education. Accessible at: http://lawschooltransparency.com/reform/projects/investigations/2015/