Category: General

Law school is now for rich kids

While looking over the latest debt numbers for law graduates, it’s striking how high these numbers have gotten; conversely, it’s also how many people are graduating with no law school debt at all. Nationally, about 15% of the class of 2012 graduated with no law school debt, but this percentage varied widely between schools, from a high of 30% to a low of 0% (32% of UC-Irvine’s initial class graduated with no debt, but this is a special case as the entire initial class paid no tuition).

You don’t have to be an ethnologist to detect a certain pattern in the distribution of these percentages as they relate to, among other things, matters of socioeconomic status. For example, here’s a half dozen schools with especially high percentages of graduates who incurred debt:

Thomas Jefferson 98%
Phoenix 97%
Western New England 96%
Regent 98%
Appalachian 96%
Texas Southern 100%

Now here are six schools that had relatively low percentages of graduates taking out any law school loans:

SMU: 70%
Penn: 71%
Fordham: 72%
Texas: 74%
Emory 76%
Vanderbilt: 76%

Note that the estimated cost of attendance at the schools with lots of debt-free graduates is on average quite a bit higher than that at the schools where essentially everyone is graduating with law school debt. So how is it that, for example, nearly three out of ten graduates of Fordham manage to graduate without taking out any law school loans?

The answer, of course, is that lots of really rich kids go to Fordham (and SMU and Vanderbilt, etc.). These schools have become staggeringly expensive to attend: For instance, Fordham now charges just under $50K per year in tuition and fees, and has a nine-month estimated cost of living of over $25,000. (Federal loan programs only allow people to borrow living expenses when they’re enrolled in school, so summer expenses aren’t covered for most students.

Fordham also gives out very little in the way of scholarship money: two-thirds of the class gets nothing, and the median grant for those who do get tuition breaks is $10K, meaning that the school’s effective tuition rate is around $46K per year.

Yet three out of ten Fordham grads are coming up with $240K in cash to pay for three years of tuition and cost of living expenses in mid-town and environs. What happens to the rest?

The 72% of the 2012 graduating class that took out loans during law school took out an average (mean) total of $134,350 over the course of law school. But this total is misleading. First, a significant minority of that 72% are borrowing only minimally. From what I’ve seen at various schools, about 10% to 15% of the graduating class takes out relatively small loan totals, to cover for example part or all of their living expenses, while parents pay the full cost of tuition. In addition, until last summer it was possible to get $25,500 in interest-free subsidized Stafford loans over the course of law school — the government paid the interest pre-graduation — and I know some people who took out such loans purely for the arbitrage opportunity, and then paid them off at graduation.

So probably about 60%, roughly speaking, of the Fordham class took out really large loan amounts. This means the median amount borrowed among the 72% of the class that borrowed was quite a bit higher than the mean. And as of last year, all such loans accrue interest as soon as their issued, and average rate of about 7.5%. What this means is that the median amount owed in law school loans by the more than half of Fordham grads who took out significant loans was probably more on the order of $200,000 — and this doesn’t include other educational debt, or consumer debt.

Now it’s true that one third of Fordham’s 2012 class got high-paying big firm jobs (how long they’ll hang on to those jobs is a different question). But for what should be obvious reasons, it’s unlikely that the distribution of such jobs was random between the 60% or so of the class that’s incurring massive debt totals, and the 40% that’s incurring no or relatively little debt.

This back of the envelope calculation leads to the conclusion that around half of the 2012 class at this highly-ranked school is basically screwed (100 of the class’s 466 graduates were either completely unemployed nine months after graduation, or working in short-term and/or part-time “jobs” funded by the school itself, to pump up the school’s putative employment rate). And that half is likely to largely overlap with the three-fifths of the class that doesn’t come from major money.

A very similar story can be told about the graduating classes at Emory and Vanderbilt and Texas and SMU — hyper-expensive schools catering in large but all too limited part to the children of the one per cent, where the large majority of the graduating classes don’t get anything close to a high-paying entry level job, or in some cases any job at all. (A commenter points out that UT is not hyper-expensive relative to these other schools, at least for in-state residents. Although even for in-state residents annual COA is $53K a year, which will produce nearly $190K in debt if fully debt-financed. Out of state COA is $70K per year).

And, comparatively speaking, these are among the best law schools out there, in terms of “investment value.” Compared to Thomas Jefferson et. al., these schools feature good outcomes — in the sense that breaking your ankle is a good outcome relative to getting your leg amputated.

The Politics of “Grand Bargains”: All Downside

I don’t know if I would go quite so far as to say that a “grand bargain” including Social Security cuts would destroy the Democratic coalition.   But it’s certainly true that it wouldn’t attract anybody to the Democratic coalition — since Pain Caucus pundits don’t actually represent any meaningful constituency — and it would give a lot of people less reason to vote for the Democrats.   The only question is how big the downside would be.

And, of course, not only are the politics terrible, but the whole idea of “grand bargains” is senseless even on their own dubious terms. Even if you succeed in reducing deficit projections, it will all go to upper-class tax cuts the second Republicans control the White House and House of Representatives simultaneously.

The Thatcher Legacy

• On apartheid, she was, for all intents and purposes, for it: “The Conservative prime minister had dismissed the ANC as “a typical terrorist organisation” and refused to back sanctions against the apartheid government, pursuing instead a policy of “constructive engagement”. South Africa was then seen as a vital ally in stemming communist expansion.”
• She was a pioneer of disastrous pension privatization schemes.
• Her economic record was not terribly impressive.  Her record on poverty and inequality, in particular, is as horrible as you would expect.
• To show you what an outlier American conservatism is, though, her AIDS policy was humane and effective.

“It Passed Our Fact-Esque Checker”

There are, if you want to be charitable, multiple ways of interpreting the assertion that “[Chavez has left] the same Venezuela as ever: one of the world’s most oil-rich but socially unequal countries.” But none of them are consistent with any known empirical data. Anderson seems to be using the same research methods that caused Peggy Noonan to project a Romney landslide.

Mad Men: One foot in “The Doorway”

For reasons that should be clear if you read between the lines of the post’s last sentence, I’m providing a link to my analysis of the season premiere of Mad Men instead of posting it in its entirety here. This situation should be rectified soon enough, but in the meantime, this is how we must roll.

Things In Politico That Will Make Charles Pierce Want To Gargle Antifreeze

The increasing prominence of Rand Paul, the neoconfederate ophthalmologist, proves that libertarianism is going mainstream! All that was necessary was to define “libertarian” as “utterly orthodox conservative Republican.”

Breaking! Conservertarian Speculation Inconsistent With Empirical Evidence!

David Nieporent would like to instruct feminists that they should not worry their pretty little heads about such trivialities as “reinforcing the sexist stereotypes that have contributed to the gross underrepresentation in public office”:

It used to be said that women couldn’t be involved in politics because they were just too frivolous, unable to handle serious issues and suited only to superficial, flighty topics. Then feminists came along to try to prove them right.

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Only:

A number of unlikely sources defended President Obama last week when he called California Attorney General Kamala Harris “the best looking attorney general” and was later forced to apologize for it. His defenders mostly sang a common refrain: What’s the harm in complimenting a woman’s appearance?

As if on cue, a study released Monday showed that media coverage of a woman candidate’s appearance actually makes people less likely to vote for her — even if the comments are positive.

“Women candidates pay a real price when they are covered in a way that focuses on their appearance,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake of Lake Research Partners, which conducted the survey along with Chesapeake Beach Consulting, said in a statement. “Even what we thought was benign coverage about how a woman dresses has a negative impact on her vote and whether voters perceive her as in touch, likeable, confident, effective, and qualified. And, in close races, sexist coverage on top of the attacks that every candidate faces can make the difference between winning and losing.”

Also:

Name It. Change It.’s report didn’t run a similar experiment for coverage of Dan’s looks, so we don’t know how praise of his cuticle maintenance would have affected his chances. But we do know that despite President Obama’s commitment to equal-opportunity physical flattery, female candidates contend with far more superficial coverage of their campaigns than do men, and that seriously undermines their success. In Women for President: Media Bias in Nine Campaigns, Erika Falk examined media coverage of every female presidential candidate in American history, from Victoria Woodhull in 1872 to Hillary Clinton in 2008. Female candidates were subjected to four times the appearance-based coverage that male candidates were. And the trend didn’t budge across the 136-year sample: Journalists in 2004 described Carol Moseley Braun’s body more frequently than journalists in 1872 touched on Woodhull’s looks. Independent studies have found similar gender discrepancies in media coverage of 2008 vice presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, and 2000 presidential contenders Elizabeth Dole, George W. Bush, Steve Forbes, and John McCain.

These issues are, in fact, entirely serious. The disproportionate focus on the appearance of women is well-established and clearly harmful.

Glenn Greenwald is making sense

Today, on the implications of the “don’t speak ill of the (recently) dead” rule:

But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren’t silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person’s death to create hagiography. Typifying these highly dubious claims was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: “The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend.” Those gushing depictions can be incredibly consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms.

To quibble: I don’t believe I’d describe Obama’s unfortunate linguistic choices as “incredibly consequential,” which seems like a bit of an overstatement, although I certainly wish the he’d gone a more generic direction with his statement today. I’m open to arguments for the appropriateness of a weaker version of the rule: a recent death is perhaps a time for heightened caution about how you speak ill of the dead; perhaps taking extra care to avoid unfair or needlessly personal attacks. The larger point, though, is clearly correct: the “don’t speak ill” rule is wielded as a tool to create a zone of protection around a particular rhetorical tool. No thanks.

Not Just Stupid, Illegal

A federal judge has persuasively ruled that the Obama administration’s disgraceful decision to refuse over-the-counter access to emergency contraception for young women under 18 was illegal. The decimation of the administration’s farcical invocation of 11-year-olds is particularly strong, but the entire opinion is well-constructed and devastating.

As I said at the time, not only was this decision procedurally arbitrary and indefensible on policy grounds, as a first approximation the votes gained by an irrational pro-unwanted-teen-pregnancy position was “none.” I hope the Obama administration will use this as a signal to just let this foolish mistake die a deserved death.