<p>lskinner…
By brining up the rate of inflation of education, you’ve opened up an entirely new problem. OP only asked about what could be done to fix law schools, not education as a whole. The argument has been that soon the “college bubble” will burst and people will simply just stop going. Because, in reality, college does not help all people. In fact, for a large majority of people, it only in-debts them while not gaining them anything substantial. If colleges continue the way they have been and american society as a whole continues as it has, college, along with the upper middle-class will become elitist. Eventually, only the upper middle-class and very wealthy will be able to afford education. But that’s breaking into an entirely different realm and dealing with different theories. </p>
<p>We don’t need to allow students to default on (private-only) loans, that only teaches irresponsibility and “how not to deal with debt.” And then the banks lose money and they come after you for that money. No one seems to be understand that if students default on loans, it’s everyone else that has to pay. E.g. your mortgage rates go up, the % charged on investments goes up, etc. Banks aren’t here to lose money, they like the government would with taxes, make up for the lost money in other places. Let’s not have another repeat of “financial crisis” like we just did. We saw how badly the US government handled that one. </p>
<p>Also, you seem to directly correlate the availability of loans to law schools being at fault for charging their tuition rates. There’s no logical deduction there. You’re leaving out the decisions of students. Students should not be taking out loans for things that will not make them better off. This is faulty decision making on the student’s part. Not on the lenders part. Assume an excellent student gets into H/Y (other T14) and assume it’s likely for them to come out a top student and land a big law job. Assume also that they need loans to pay off the cost. If we were to do it your way, you would make this student worse off by not allowing them to take out loans to attend law school. Is this a solution? Certainly not. You’ve now cut off students with great potential because of cost AND you’ve blamed the wrong people for the current problem. Loans are not the issue. The law schools themselves are.</p>
<p>Viable solutions still remain: Restrict the number of law schools allowed in the US. That way only X number of students graduate each year for Y number of jobs. Currently there are simply too many lawyers and not enough jobs. Easily the result of allowing too many law schools / too many people to attend. This way, no one is restricted from going if they will be made better off by going, rather than your way, which simply restricts who may go.</p>