One in four young Americans contemplated suicide in June: Will they feel better if they take out student loans and go to college?

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirms what Americans already know: The coronavirus pandemic is harmful to our mental health.  And young people are particularly vulnerable.

According to the CDC, one out of four Americans ages 18 through 24 contemplated suicide in June. The CDC's study did not break down that age group between college students and other young Americans. Still, everyone knows (often from personal experience) that going to college can be depressing.

Experts worry that the financial downturn will be hard on college budgets, forcing schools to cut back on counseling services for students.  But maybe not. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2018 that colleges have at least a limited duty to prevent their students from committing suicide. That decision is likely to prompt higher education to invest more resources in their students' mental health.

Personally, I think now might be the wrong time for young people to go to college. The job market is terrible, and no one knows for sure which industries will thrive after we conquer COVID-19. I think the financial turmoil will make it harder for undergraduates to pick a college major that will prepare them for a post-pandemic job.

The universities themselves are agitated by social unrest, with some institutions thinking about defunding their campus police.  Depending on how that goes, students may find themselves vulnerable to crime when they stroll across the quad on their way to Psychology 101.

And a college education has become incredibly expensive.  The National Center for Educational Statistics reported that tuition and expenses to attend a four-year college went from $5,504 a year in 1985-1986 to $$27,357 in 2017-2018 (in constant dollars). (My thanks to Steve Rhode for alerting me to those figures.)

That's a four-fold increase in college costs over 32 years. When prices are adjusted for inflation, the increase is less dramatic but not reassuring. Whose wages have kept up with inflation over the last 10 years? I know mine haven't.

If you are one of the millions of young people who graduated from high school and have no clue about what you are going to do for a living, don't take out student loans to find out. If you stumble into one of the flaky liberal arts or social studies majors (sociology, psychology, international relations, gender studies, etc.), you may well wind up with $50,000 or more in student debt and no idea how you will pay it back.

You think you are depressed now, how will you feel when your first student loan payment comes due?

If you decide to go to college anyway, do what you can to reduce the risk of depression. If you've read anything by J.D. Salinger, forget it and throw his books away. By writing Catcher in the Rye, Salinger has done more to depress young people than anyone with the possible exception of Bob Dylan.

Coronavirus alert: Mama, don't let your baby live in a college dorm this fall

I went to college during the Vietnam War. Men registered for the draft at age 18 and could be swept into the Army within a few months of registering and swiftly sent on to Southeast Asia.

There were two ways to avoid that fate: men could enlist in the Army Reserve or National Guard, or they could go to college and get a four-year exemption.

There was just one hitch for a guy who went to college. If he flunked out, he was immediately eligible to be drafted. Oklahoma State University, where I wasted four years of my life, flunked out about 50 percent of the first-year class.

 I lived in Cordell Hall, my first year at OSU. Cordell was a gloomy Georgian-style building, which may have been the model for the Shawshank Redemption.  Because it was an old dorm with no air-conditioning, Cordell was mostly full of poor, first-year students who came from small Oklahoma towns.

My dorm floor housed a bunch of these guys. They were away from home for the first time, and they had two things on their minds: beer and girls in that order. Were they worried about getting drafted? No, they were not.

Gary, a freshman from Midwest City, was my roommate. Shortly after arriving on campus, he met Susan, and he spent every waking hour with her. He never bought a single textbook, and he stopped going to class two weeks after the semester started.

In those days, male freshmen were required to enroll in ROTC, which included weekly drills and a strict rule about keeping our shoes shined and our khaki shirts clean and pressed.

Gary blew off all that stuff, and at the end of the semester, his parents received his grades. He failed every subject except ROTC, for which he received a D.

Gary was mystified. He understood why he failed five courses, but could not comprehend how he had passed ROTC without ever going to class.

We puzzled over this conundrum for hours and finally came up with two theories. Gary believed he passed ROTC because he never signed up for drill. Thus, he hadn't been counted absent, and the Army thought Gary had perfect attendance.  My theory was that the Army knew it was going to get Gary sooner or later and didn't want to discourage him so early in his military career.

Why do I tell this story? To make a simple point: 18-old college boys are oblivious to risk. Do you think college students give a damn about the coronavirus?  Can they drink beer while wearing a mask at a campus watering hole? Can they get to first base with a college girl if they socially distance?  No, of course not.

If you are a parent of a student who plans to go to college this fall, you probably received many official notices about COVID-19 and all the things the college plans to do to protect your child from becoming infected.

But you may also have noticed that the college still plans to pack students into residence halls, where they will eat and sleep close to other students, many of whom spent the previous weekend in drunken debauchery. Why all the attention to safety in the classroom but less focus on dorm life?

Why? I'll tell you why. A lot of universities built their dormitories in recent years through a legal device called a Public-Private Partnership agreement (P3).  As Rick Seltzer explained in an outstanding article for Inside Higher Ed, P3s allow universities to offload their debt from dorm construction to private corporations that assume the liability and run the dorms in return for a share of dorm-rent revenue.

This is an excellent deal for the corporations because they are virtually guaranteed a nice profit, especially at colleges that require students to live in campus dorms and even eat their meals there.

But what if the students don't show up this fall?  The money spigot gets shut off, and the corporation can't pay the mortgage on the debt. Oops!

Parents of college-age students should independently assess the risk to their child if he or she lives in a college dorm this fall. The colleges will do the best they can to keep your kid safe and will buy Purell by the barrel. Still, they may be under severe financial restraints because they have significant financial obligations to private partners that require the colleges to keep the dorms full of rent-paying students.

Waylen Jennings warned rural moms not to let their babies grow up to be cowboys--and indeed, that is an unsettling prospect.  But maybe a more useful lyric might be this: Mothers be damned careful about putting your kid in a campus residence hall this fall.

70 college groups ask Congress for more coronavirus money: Feed me, Seymour!

Writing on behalf of more than 70 college lobbying groups, Ted Mitchell, President of the American Council on Education, wrote a letter to Congressional leaders earlier this month asking for federal money to help colleges cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

Congress had already sent relief money to American colleges and universities through the CARES Act, but Mitchell asked for more--a lot more!

Mitchell said colleges need a total of $46.6 billion to cover increased student aid and lost revenues, and they need another $73.8 billion to pay the costs associated with the COVID 19 pandemic.

One congressional bill (the Corona Virus Child Care & Education Relief Act) calls for sending the colleges $132 billion, and Mitchell says that will do nicely, thank you very much.  Other legislation falls short of what Mitchell says the college industry needs.

Mitchell also asked for some other stuff:

• Colleges want flexibility in how they spend the federal money they want Congress to give them.

• Colleges want more cash even if they don't fully reopen. Or, as Mitchell put it, none of the money should be based on "an institution's reopening status."

• Universities with fat endowments (Harvard's endowment fund is $37 billion) should not be penalized just because they're rich.

Mitchell's letter contained some more requests, but the bottom line is this: American colleges and universities want more federal money. Feed Me, Seymour!

When Mitchell was asking for a federal handout, did he urge Congress to provide some relief for college students? College borrowers, after all, collectively owe $1.7 trillion in student debt.

Oh yes. Mitchell asked Congress to extend the moratorium on monthly student-loan payments and accruing interest for an additional six months.  Thanks for thinking about the students, Ted. So thoughtful!

Mitchell did not mention bankruptcy relief for distressed student-loan debtors or the tax status of forgiven student debt.  He did not mention the millions of parents who took out PLUS loans to get their kids through crumby colleges--loans that sabotaged their retirement plans.

No, Ted Mitchell's letter was all about sucking up more federal money so the college racket can maintain the status quo--which includes robber-baron salaries for college presidents, coaches, and administrators.

Of course, the higher education industry won't admit that it brought its financial woes on itself or that many colleges were sinking even before the coronavirus showed up and crapped in their mess kits. (See Jon Marcus's recent essay in the Hechinger Report.)

Public institutions refused to consolidate their regional campuses even as college enrollments dropped precipitously.  Private colleges continued to insist that the liberal arts degrees they cranked out were valuable, even though they had forgotten what a liberal arts education is all about.

Law schools and business schools refused to cut their tuition or shrink the size of their entering classes even though there was a glut of JDs and MBAs on the market.

And now the reckoning day approaches, and all the college and universities can think of to do as a group is to have their 70 lobbying organizations ask Congress for more money.

U.S.. should run a "blue light special" on bankruptcies for consumers and student-loan debtors

As a young man, I practiced law in a three-man law firm in Anchorage, Alaska. In the winter months, the firm occasionally experienced lean times when clients couldn't pay their bills.

But we three were young, optimistic, and confident. I remember one day during an especially lean winter month when our senior partner jokingly announced: "Gentlemen, it's time to introduce our Blue Light Special: Bankruptcy, name change, and a divorce for only $500!"

I have always been a firm believer in bankruptcy--a process that allows "poor but honest debtors" to get a "fresh start." Although few people know it, bankruptcy is enshrined in our Constitution, and the bankruptcy courts are the main reason why America doesn't have debtors prisons.

I never had to file for bankruptcy myself, but several of my law firm's clients did in the mid-1980s when Alaska experienced a real-life depression due to a steep downturn in oil prices.  These people wiped the slate clean of all their financial misfortunes and started over.

Today, millions of once-middle-class Americans are experiencing severe financial stress. As Steve Rhode recently reported in Get Out of Debt Guy, the economy is running on borrowed time.  Mortgage delinquencies are up, with Miami and New York City leading the way.  People are fleeing the big cities. According to the New York Times, five percent of NYC's population left the town over two months this spring--frightened by the coronavirus, soaring crime rates, and a deteriorating economy.

So far, our government has kept the wolves at bay by pumping trillions of dollars into the economy through Payroll Protection loans and enhanced unemployment compensation. Millions of student debtors have stopped making monthly payments on their loans, but the Department of Education granted a temporary forbearance that allows distressed college-loan borrowers to skip payments for a few months.

But significant sectors of our economy are going to come crashing down within the next twelve months. For middle-class families who are being swept up in this tidal wave of economic isolation, bankruptcy is their only hope of regrouping.

Unfortunately, Congress revised the Bankruptcy Code in 2005 at the behest of the banks. The nation's large financial institutions were worried about people shedding their credit-card debt in the bankruptcy courts.  The banks wanted to make consumer debt more difficult to discharge in bankruptcy, and Congress obliged.

The revised Code also made it almost impossible for debtors to discharge their private student loans. Under the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act, private student loans are nondischargeable unless the debtor can show "undue hardship," a term the federal courts have interpreted harshly. And, as we all know, that brutal standard also applies to federal student loans.

The corporate world has ready access to bankruptcy, and the federal bankruptcy courts have become a playground for big business.  But the little guys are not treated so kindly.

As the 2020 election season rolls along, we should all think about what it is we want our elected politicians to do.  Number one, in my opinion, is a revision of the Bankruptcy Code. We will never recover as a nation from the financial calamity that is bearing down on us unless working people and student debtors can get a fresh start--the fresh start that the bankruptcy courts were created to provide.

Louisiana Supreme Court votes to allow 2020 law graduates to practice law without taking the bar exam: What's black and brown and looks good on a lawyer?

What's black and brown and looks good on a lawyer? A Doberman Pinscher. Isn't that funny?

When I was young, I practiced law in a small Alaska law firm. Those years were the best years of my life. I was proud to be a licensed attorney, under oath to protect the Constitution and to be honest.

A lot of Alaskans hate lawyers, especially outside the cities. I remember eating lunch with my family at a roadhouse on the Glenallen highway. I was chatting with some guy from the bush sitting at the next table.

The guy asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I was an attorney. He immediately became loudly abusive.  He called me a crook and a lot of other things. We had to leave the restaurant with our food half-eaten to get away from him.

I remember that I wasn't angry about the incident. I was just sorry that I had been unable to make this jerk understand that the law is a noble profession.

Later, I became a college professor, and I quickly realized that attorneys, on the whole, are smarter and more ethical than the people who work in the universities. A lot smarter and a lot more ethical.

I am very sorry to see the legal profession transforming itself from being an honest calling to a racket.  And there's plenty of blame to go around.

First of all, when the market for lawyers began shrinking in the late 1990s, the law schools didn't shrink their graduating classes.  They needed the tuition revenue, and the second- and third-tier schools began lowering admission standards.

Before long, pass rates on the state bar exams began going down because a significant percentage of law graduates weren't intelligent enough to pass the bar exam. In California, only 26.8 percent of bar-exam takers passed the state bar exam that was administered last February.

Second, as everyone knows, federal judges ceased being people who were dedicated to the rule of law and became political partisans. We see this trend most dramatically in the U.S.Supreme Court. We have Republican justices, and we have Democrat justices.

Among the lower courts, judges are being called out for corruption and bias. There are plenty of examples in Louisiana, but I saw cronyism and favoritism in the Massachusetts judiciary, and it's not a pretty thing to see.

A few days ago, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 to allow 2020 law graduates to begin practicing law without taking the Louisiana bar exam--ever. What's the rationale for this boneheaded move? The coronavirus pandemic. Apparently, it is just too damned difficult to administer the bar exam through social distancing.

Louisiana Supreme Court Justice John Weimer, who voted for the move, has a daughter who graduated from LSU's law school this year.  Justice Weimer refused to recuse himself from voting on this important matter even though his vote benefited his daughter.

Typically, one out of four first-time test takers fails the Louisiana bar exam.  Thus, it appears that the Louisiana Supreme Court unleashed a fair number of unqualified people to begin practicing law in the Pelican State.

People used to say, "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall," a ringing endorsement of honesty and integrity in the American judicial system.  But we know now that the phrase is just bullshit.

Our new motto: It's a good thing to know the law, but it is a better thing to know the judge.

Louisiana Supreme Court Justice John L. Weimer: It's a good thing to know the judge.

U.S. colleges are in big financial trouble, and it's their own damn fault

I doubt that many college presidents listen to country music, but perhaps they should.

Country music is full of lyrics about people getting in trouble because they made poor decisions. In Mama Tried, Merle Haggard admits he wouldn't be in jail if he had listened to his mother. And of course, there are hundreds of country songs about guys who lost their marriages because they hung out in honky-tonks with loose women.

American colleges and universities, like country-music singers, have made spectacular mistakes. But unlike the hillbilly bards, college leaders won't admit it.  They just raise tuition and go on wild building sprees. Now they can't pay their bills.

As Jon Marcus wrote for The Hechinger Report, higher education's bad choices left it dangerously vulnerable when the coronavirus pandemic became its black swan.  What did the universities do wrong?

First of all, colleges continued hiring faculty even though they were attracting fewer students. As Marcus pointed out, overall enrollment in American colleges and universities shrank by 12 percent since the last recession (2008-2009), while higher education increased the number of employees by five percent.

In particular, many colleges didn't decrease staffing levels for programs that were in decline. Fewer and fewer students choose education or liberal arts as their major. Still, many institutions did not reduce staff or eliminated majors even though the professors had fewer students to teach.

Second, Marcus correctly noted that the trustees at many universities abdicated their leadership role to be "boosters, cheerleaders, and donors."  Many college boards paid their presidents lavish salaries with overly generous benefits, bonuses, and hefty retirement packages.  For example, Penn State University and Michigan State paid departing presidents millions of dollars in golden-parachute money after they left their positions in the wake of explosive sexual-abuse scandals.

Rather than trimming their financial costs or operating more efficiently, most colleges responded to rising costs by raising tuition, forcing students to take out larger and larger student loans. As students reacted to sticker shock, the colleges switched tactics by offering huge tuition discounts of 50 percent or more to lure students into enrolling.  That didn't work out well for most higher education institutions.  Their tuition discounts didn't reverse their financial woes, and revenues continued to drop.

Now the coronavirus has become an expensive problem for colleges and universities. Many of them will close. But they can't blame COVID-19 for their misfortune. A lot of colleges were "dead men walking" even before the pandemic showed up as a black swan event.

A financial tsunami is coming to sweep away our huckster economy: Time to scramble to high ground

I confess I have always been on the lookout for disaster, and so far, I've never experienced one.

As a practicing lawyer years ago, I was drinking a beer with one of my law partners in a harborside bar in Juneau, Alaska.  We happened to catch a breaking news story on the bar's television about an earthquake out in the Pacific Ocean. The reporter mentioned the possibility of a tsunami hitting Hawaii or some other unspecified place.

I told my associate we were leaving the bar that very minute to find high ground. He could barely conceal his mirth, but I was his senior at our law firm, and he dutifully followed me out the door, leaving his half-consumed beer on the table.

There was no tsunami, it turned out, and I admit that I overreacted. But I had a vision of being buried under a wall of cold Pacific Ocean water pouring through the streets of Juneau. I did not want to die that way.

We know, however, that catastrophes happen from time to time. The Holocaust, for example.  Some people saw it coming and escaped before the Nazis showed up, and some waited until the goons beat down their front door.

In Night, Elie Weisel's personal memoir of the Holocaust, Weisel told the story of Moishe,  a neighbor who lived in Sighet, a Jewish village in Hungary. The Nazis arrested Moishe first be because he was a foreign Jew. The Hungarian police rounded him up with other Jews and shipped them to Poland in cattle cars. There the Gestapo took over and transported the Jews to an extermination site.  The prisoners were then forced to dig their own graves, and then they were shot one by one.   Moishe escaped, however, and came back to Sighet to warn his neighbors about what he had witnessed.

Nobody believed him. It was just too incredible.  The Nazis would never slaughter civilians wholesale, they reasoned. But of course, they were wrong.

On the other hand, some people can see the future clearly in all its horror. William Shirer was a news correspondent in Germany as the Nazis came to power.  Shirer's wife was Austrian, and she gave birth to her first child in a Vienna hospital. As it happened, she was in the maternity ward when the Nazis invaded Austria. A Jewish woman in a room across the hall heard the news and knew what it meant. She jumped out a window, killing herself and her newborn baby.

For our own sake and the sakes of our family and loved ones, we have a duty not to lull ourselves into complacency during a time when an unthinkable disaster looms on the horizon.  And we are now in such a time.

The hatred toward our President has not abated since the 2016 election. It has intensified. The Democrats and Republicans are at each other's throat, and they've turned a medical pandemic into a political event.

I don't think it will matter who wins the November election. Either way, Americans are screwed. The Federal Reserve Bank is propping up the stock market to postpone an economic calamity, but that can't go on forever. The market will crash soon,  probably in less than a year.

Then we will know who acted wisely as the storm built on the far horizon and who will lose everything. And the people who did this to us--the crooks on Wall Street and their corporate cronies--will still be living large because they know the party is over and are already taking steps to preserve their wealth.

When the economy collapses, the oligarchs will be drinking mai tais in Costa Rica. The rest of us will be scrambling to pay our mortgages--and we will be damned lucky if we don't lose more than our homes.