<p>I’ve attached some selections from this article below. You’ve got to love the messed up incentives that law schools have to increase class sizes and raise tuition.</p>
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WITH apologies to show business, theres no business like the business of law school.</p>
<p>The basic rules of a market economy even golden oldies, like a link between supply and demand just dont apply.</p>
<p>Legal diplomas have such allure that law schools have been able to jack up tuition four times faster than the soaring cost of college. And many law schools have added students to their incoming classes a step that, for them, means almost pure profits even during the worst recession in the legal professions history.</p>
<p>It is one of the academys open secrets: law schools toss off so much cash they are sometimes required to hand over as much as 30 percent of their revenue to universities, to subsidize less profitable fields.
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From 1989 to 2009, when college tuition rose by 71 percent, law school tuition shot up 317 percent.</p>
<p>There are many reasons for this ever-climbing sticker price, but the most bizarre comes courtesy of the highly influential US News rankings. Part of the US News algorithm is a figure called expenditures per student, which is essentially the sum that a school spends on teacher salaries, libraries and other education expenses, divided by the number of students.</p>
<p>Though it accounts for just 9.75 percent of the algorithm, it gives law schools a strong incentive to keep prices high. Forget about looking for cost efficiencies. The more that law schools charge their students, and the more they spend to educate them, the better they fare in the US News rankings.
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For years, it made economic sense for smart, ambitious 22-year-olds to pay the escalating price for a legal diploma. Law schools have had a monopolists hold on the keys to corporate lawyerdom, which pays graduates six-figure salaries.</p>
<p>But borrowing $150,000 or more is now a vastly riskier proposition given the scarcity of Big Law jobs. Of course, that scarcity hasnt been priced into the cost of law school. How come? In part, its because schools have managed to convey the impression that those jobs arent very scarce.
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