Is there any defense for continuing to federally fund bad law schools?

Whenever it’s pointed out that there are dozens of ABA law schools that cost $200,000 or more to attend and have horrible employment outcomes for their graduates, the same by-now very tired defense is trotted out, to wit that a “peer-reviewed study” has “proven” that law school graduates have historically had higher career earnings than people with no more than a BA.

One big problem with this defense is that it assumes the career earnings of the average law school graduate in 1970 or 1980 or 1990 are going to end up predicting the career earnings of a bad law school graduate in 2015. This begs the question as to whether it’s getting tougher over time to make a living as a lawyer (spoiler: it is).

Another big problem is that it mushes up law school graduates into one big generic statistical smoothie, when it’s obvious that the career outcomes for, respectively, graduates of elite law schools, sub-elite law schools, middling but I’ve always kept myself respectable law schools, bad law schools, and it’s a scam on its face law schools are not in any sense comparable.

This second problem crops up all the time in defenses of the status quo in American higher ed in general, which similarly rely on statistics showing that college graduates on average earn a whole lot more than people with no more than a high school degree. The response to that defense ought to be:

(1) Well of course they do. These aren’t in any sense similar groups — and it’s not as if the difference in their terminal educational credentials is the most significant difference between them. In other words, treating the correlation between educational credentials and career earnings as purely causal is obviously a gross oversimplification of the social and economic factors at play.

(2) College graduates aren’t making any more than they were 35 years ago in real dollars, so the subsequent increase in the so-called college premium is purely a product of the collapse in compensation for people without college degrees. Meanwhile college has become three to four times more expensive.

(3) Again, as with law schools, treating “college graduates” as a generic group implies that an analysis that treats Princeton grads and University of Phoenix grads as part of the same cohort makes sense intellectually, and in turn justifies the federal government lending out billions per year for people to go to for-profit diploma factories with terrible completion rates and employment outcomes.

Which brings us back to very expensive law schools with terrible employment stats. Realistically, perhaps 20% to 30% of the people schools like Valparaiso are currently admitting will end up having any kind of legal career at all, even if we set the bar extremely low when defining that outcome — say, someone who makes a living wage for at least five years while practicing law. And a small minority of that minority will end up making enough money to actually pay off the loans that its members incurred in order to acquire their degrees.

Given that, is there any possible defense for a system in which people can borrow $200,000 and more to attend Valparaiso and the many schools like it?

I think there actually is such a defense, but it’s too brutal for law school apologists to put it into words of few syllables. It goes like this:

A lot of the people now being admitted into low-ranked law schools are people who have, by professional class standards, poor career prospects. These schools have gone to quasi-open enrollment systems that now admit pretty much anybody with a college degree — any degree with any GPA — and an LSAT score — it no longer matters what the score is.

These are people who aren’t going to go to medical or dental school, or any decent graduate program or business school. From a career perspective, their college degrees are of minimal value — they may (or may not) allow them to get into various low-level semi-white collar occupations, where they might make mid-five figure salaries, that might (or might not) include actual benefit packages.

On the other hand, there’s a good chance these people will end up with the kind of retail, clerical, and other service jobs traditionally staffed by people with no college background at all.

In other words, matriculants at low-ranked law schools today are drawn from that part of the pool of college graduates who are, in a changing economy, seeing little or none of the increasingly tenuous “college premium.” This cohort is chronically under-employed anyway, so why not take a spin on the low-ranked law school roulette wheel at government expense? After all, under current law they’ll never have to pay back more than a small portion of their loans unless they make a lot of money, and they won’t even be hit with a big tax bill when their loans are forgiven 20 years from now, because they probably won’t have any significant net worth.

And of course there’s always the chance you’ll end up being that personal injury guy who can afford to advertise on the radio and on highway billboards, or the head of the Fort Wayne DA office, or in any case something else that’s a lot better than working the floor at Meijers. You belong to a generation that’s been economically shafted, and while a low-ranked law school is a leaky life raft at best, it’s better than nothing.

That’s the real current argument for continuing to allow people to borrow taxpayer money to go to places like Valpo’s law school, and dozens more like it. It’s not a very pretty argument, but then again it’s not a very pretty picture out there for a large percentage of Generation Y or the Millennials or whatever they’re being called now.