Coming to a State Bar near You ¬– Beggar Thy Neighbor

In my last post on the Massachusetts Bar Association’s underemployment report, I was flying blind because the link to the report was broken, and it wasn’t readily available on the MBA’s Web site. It’s up today, so I can give it a fairer read, and I was surprised to find two endnotes to the LSTB. [...]

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 [...]

ABA Journal Discovers U.S. News’ Debt Rankings

Debra Cassens Wiess, “Average Debt of Private Law School Grads Is $125K; It’s Highest at These Five Schools” ABA Journal The average education debt for law grads at private schools last year was nearly $125,000, while the average for grads of public law schools was more than $75,700, according to new figures released by the [...]

‘U.S. News Data Show 2011 May Be Beginning of End for Law School Tuition Bubble’ on the Am Law Daily

Didn’t have time to write this one here for the LSTB, so this post is all original. “U.S. News Data Show 2011 May Be Beginning of End for Law School Tuition Bubble“

It’s the Rent, Not the Regulations

“In 1995 … the Department of Justice in an antitrust suit … charged that A.B.A. standards had artificially inflated faculty salaries. The A.B.A. signed a consent decree, agreeing to a number of strictures intended to pry the process out of the hands of legal academics and end the fixing of salaries. Since then, the cost [...]

The Law School Debt Blob

Many readers know of U.S. News’ “Graduate Debt Rankings” page, which contains crucial information on law graduate debt that for some reason is not published in the Official Guide even though the ABA is surely collecting it. Law School Transparency does us the favor of providing the same data from the previous two years on [...]

THE LAW SCHOOL DEBT BUBBLE: $53 Billion in New Law School Debt by 2020

So we know that in 2010, a majority of 44,245 law graduates took on $3.6 billion in student debt based on comparing Official Guide and U.S. News data. Without back issues of U.S. News, is it possible to figure out how much debt previous classes took on, and—*gasp*—project it into the future? Yup. The ABA [...]

Update on News in the Law School World

There were a bunch of articles I couldn’t get around to this past week, and they’re worth consolidating into one post. (1)  Law School Lawsuits “New York Law School fights class-action suit over job rates,” Thompson Reuters. NYLS’s attorney states: “The allegations are not only baseless, but also belied by the plaintiffs’ own complaint, which [...]

2010 Law School Grad Debt at $3.6 Billion

A reader recommended I calculate total law school debt for 2010 grads. How? By taking the number of grads from each law school in the Official Guide and then multiplying them against the average debt levels and the percentage of students taking on debt in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings. Why this isn’t in [...]

The Law School Problem Is Vertical, Not Horizontal as Most Law Professors Believe

I take [the LawScam critique] to be that legal education is hoodwinking prospective law students into law school and conspiring to produce an oversupply of lawyers that face diminished job prospects and crippling debt loads. –Usha Rodrigues (Associate Professor of Law, University of Georgia), “ScamLaw: The Master’s Forum,” The Conglomerate So, if I’m right, then [...]