Following what I wrote here about David Segal's most recent New York Times piece on legal education came the news that the American Bar Association rejected Duncan Law School's bid for provisional accreditation. Read about it here. According to the news article, the ABA based its decision on the low median standardized test scores of Duncan's initial students.
This is significant because, if you recall Segal's second piece, he held up Duncan as a model for what's wrong with the ABA's control of the accreditation process. In short, the ABA's mandates (particularly requiring full time faculty to teach core substantive courses) unnecessarily drives up the cost of legal education. But what of the ABA's gatekeeping role? One suspects he'd simply be writing an article decrying the ABA's failure to police law school entrance requirements. But perhaps the ABA shouldn't care about who gets into law school; simply let the bar exam sort out who's minimally competent. For what it's worth, I'm confident that law school enrollments would explode did the ABA not mandate that admitted students have a reasonable likelihood of passing a bar exam. After all, that's the bubble we're seeing in higher education generally. (A nice piece in The Economist here.)
Is there really a higher education bubble? Not according to our political leaders, which is every reason to believe such a bubble exists.
What accounts for this bubble? Indeed, what accounts for the possibility of over 200 law schools to exist in America? The short answer: easily available federally guarantied student loans. Just as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac share a large portion of responsibility for the housing bubble (and subsequent burst, the aftermath of which will dog us for at least another two years), the U.S. Department of Education should shoulder much of the blame for the foolish decisions by thousands of young folks to see higher education as a consumable experience, rather like an extended bacchanal, rather than as an investment. If school loans were priced on an investment basis, the number of students would radically decrease. And decreased demand would reduce either cost or supply and probably both.
Would this be a national disaster? Would American educational levels further decrease? Would this cause a decline in America's national security and preeminence in the world? We'll never know because the political cost of admitting the educational emperor has no clothes is too high. Federal subsidy of education is every bit the third rail of American political life as is Social Security. (See my thoughts of a couple of days ago about the later here.)
It rather pains me as an indirect beneficiary of the student loan bubble to know I'm part of this system. A sort of reverse Scrooge, if you will. My law school has a particular raison d'être, one that I believes justifies its existence. Was the mission of Regent University Law School to become simply to crank out more lawyers when a surfeit already exists, I hope I would have the courage to walk away.
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This is significant because, if you recall Segal's second piece, he held up Duncan as a model for what's wrong with the ABA's control of the accreditation process. In short, the ABA's mandates (particularly requiring full time faculty to teach core substantive courses) unnecessarily drives up the cost of legal education. But what of the ABA's gatekeeping role? One suspects he'd simply be writing an article decrying the ABA's failure to police law school entrance requirements. But perhaps the ABA shouldn't care about who gets into law school; simply let the bar exam sort out who's minimally competent. For what it's worth, I'm confident that law school enrollments would explode did the ABA not mandate that admitted students have a reasonable likelihood of passing a bar exam. After all, that's the bubble we're seeing in higher education generally. (A nice piece in The Economist here.)
Is there really a higher education bubble? Not according to our political leaders, which is every reason to believe such a bubble exists.
What accounts for this bubble? Indeed, what accounts for the possibility of over 200 law schools to exist in America? The short answer: easily available federally guarantied student loans. Just as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac share a large portion of responsibility for the housing bubble (and subsequent burst, the aftermath of which will dog us for at least another two years), the U.S. Department of Education should shoulder much of the blame for the foolish decisions by thousands of young folks to see higher education as a consumable experience, rather like an extended bacchanal, rather than as an investment. If school loans were priced on an investment basis, the number of students would radically decrease. And decreased demand would reduce either cost or supply and probably both.
Would this be a national disaster? Would American educational levels further decrease? Would this cause a decline in America's national security and preeminence in the world? We'll never know because the political cost of admitting the educational emperor has no clothes is too high. Federal subsidy of education is every bit the third rail of American political life as is Social Security. (See my thoughts of a couple of days ago about the later here.)
It rather pains me as an indirect beneficiary of the student loan bubble to know I'm part of this system. A sort of reverse Scrooge, if you will. My law school has a particular raison d'être, one that I believes justifies its existence. Was the mission of Regent University Law School to become simply to crank out more lawyers when a surfeit already exists, I hope I would have the courage to walk away.
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