Give Credit Where Due

Rachel M. Zahorsky, “Law School Closings and Changes to Student Loan Bankruptcy Laws May Be Ahead, Says Former Dean,” ABA Journal. Former law school dean at Nebraska and Houston, Nancy Rapoport, favors bankruptcy reform for student debtors. This is important because law professors are usually more interested in discussing the need for reforming legal education [...]

Bloomberg Casually Slaps Law Schools, Uses Some Misleading Facts

Josh Block and Janet Lorin, “Law School Debt Exceeds $100,000 Amid Jobs Shortage,” Bloomberg. I have to say this has been a weird week for media coverage on law schools. On the one hand they’re somewhat more critical of law schools and show a willingness to research some facts, but on the other hand, they’re [...]

There Is No Foreclosure Crisis, on Average

Let there be contrarianism! Tami Luhby, “There is no student loan ‘crisis’,” in CNN Money (“Debunking the Student Loan Crisis,” in the banner). [T]here’s no need to panic. Most borrowers have a reasonable amount of debt, and the total balance is not likely to cause major damage to the economy like the mortgage crisis did, [...]

March 2011: Economists Discover Tuition Increases

It’s really not as glamorous as it sounds. The main impetus for the discussion is the November election. Candidate Obama said: “We’re putting colleges on notice: you can’t assume that you’ll just jack up tuition every single year … If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each [...]

Mark Thoma Will Never Appear on the Today Show

Economist Mark Thoma writes, “If the distribution of income is distorted by monopoly power, political power, and other market failures (e.g. taking advantage of informational asymmetries to sell questionable assets to unsuspecting customers who are reassured by triple A ratings, and so on), then taxing away some of the money and redistributing it to where [...]

NY Fed Researchers Believe High College Tuition is Necessary

Data on student loan debt isn’t easy to come by. Rightly or wrongly there’s much reliance on finaid.org’s student loan debt clock, and wrongly, there’s over-reliance on ED’s two-year cohort default rate. That’s why I hope people take a good long read of the NY Fed’s report on student loan debt based on data supplied [...]

Eating America’s Young on the Today Show

If you haven’t already seen the clip on NBC’s Today where Matt Lauer asks a panel of professionals what they think of law graduates’ lawsuits against their law schools, don’t waste your time. It’s nothing new, just three well-off Boomers (Star Jones (b. 1962), Donny Deutsch (b. 1957), and Nancy Snyderman (b. 1952)) wagging their [...]

‘At Last, a Rational Explanation for Why Law School Tuition Keeps Rising’ up on the Am Law Daily

A revised, more entertaining version of last week’s post. “At Last, a Rational Explanation for Why Law School Tuition Keeps Rising“ I’d like to add that this is the first post I’ve busted out on the Colemak keyboard layout. I got sick of typing on QWERTY, and since I write for a living, I decided [...]

Center for College Affordability and Productivity Study Calls Out Law Schools

The CCAP published its revision of the explanation—called the “Bennett Hypothesis”—of why higher education institutions increase tuition. Looking at CPI data, higher ed. costs have soared above inflation and other notable goods and services over the last 34 years: (Source: BLS) The original Bennett hypothesis is named for former Secretary of Education, William J. Bennett, [...]

Bankruptcy Attorneys Publish Survey on the ‘Student Loan Debt Bomb’

National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA), “The ‘Student Loan Debt Bomb’: America’s Next Mortgage-Style Crisis?“ The survey of 860 members finds four in five bankruptcy attorneys have seen “significant” (48 percent) or “somewhat” increases in potential clients with student debt. 39 percent of them saw potential student loan client cases grow by 25-50 percent [...]