In, “Why Law School Enrollment Is Way Down,” Marketplace teaches us:
While law school was once seen as a golden ticket [Ugh, so lazy.] to a financially stable future, the profession is becoming less popular. New technology is helping lawyers work more efficiently, allowing them to handle a bigger workload. But it also cuts down on a firm’s need to hire more lawyers, which means fewer graduates nab full-time permanent jobs.
Tell that to the productivity data. In terms of output per hour, the legal sector is 8 percent less productive than in 2007. It may be that potential applicants are hearing stories that law firms are filled with robo-lawyers, but if so it’s thanks to misinformation from outlets like Marketplace, not facts. It boggles my mind that reporters can get away with simply passing memes off as explanations for people’s behaviors. It’s not something that should be taught in journalism programs.
Speaking of higher education, that same article tells readers they should like another published in October titled, “Arne Duncan: Education Beyond High School Is Absolutely Necessary.” Oh joy. According to the interview:
When asked if he thought everyone should go to college, Duncan said he believed everyone needed additional education beyond high school: “If young people drop out of high school today, they are basically condemned to poverty and social failure. There are no good jobs out there… the economy has changed.”
I have no idea why Obama didn’t replace Duncan in his second term. The education secretary strikes me as an uninspiring one-term posting, like every other no-name in executive branches you didn’t even know existed. But we’re stuck with Duncan for a while longer, and with quotes like these, we can expect a warm seat for him at the student loan welfare Lumina Foundation. I forget if I’ve said this before, but in the coming decades when politicians start flinging mud at one another over the student loan write-down, Incompetent Arne will be long gone. At least the voters deciding the issue will have watered-down credentials to help them make the right policy choices.
The Last Gen X American 
What people don’t seem to realize is that “education beyond high school” does not mean college. It includes trucking school, beauty school, culinary school, plumbing school, medical billing assistant school, computer repair school, and so on. What’s worse is that people don’t realize that back in 1969 the trade school lobby worked its way out of the stronger regulatory control of the Labor Dept. and into the Higher Education Act, which was only four years old at the time. Guaranteed Student Loans soon became their mother’s milk. It doesn’t need to be this way. Put them back under Labor Dept. — or even under Secretary Duncan but within Vocational & Adult Ed, where these schools would be receiving small institutional grants indirectly through the States instead of direct access to the spigot of Pell Grants and federal student loans. . .