Could Law School Be the Worst Higher Education Investment?

For decades, law school was a growth industry. Back in 1970, there were 146 law schools with an enrollment of 78,000 students; by 2013, there were 201 schools, enrolling 139,000 students. Enrollment peaked in 2010 at 147,000. (For the current year, it seems that enrollments will probably remain level with last year.)

By 2015, we were seeing articles such as this one in the Wall Street Journal: “Fewer and Fewer Students are Applying to Law School.” A number of law schools have closed since 2017, including Valparaiso, Whittier, Savannah, Arizona Summit, and Charlotte. More are on thin ice.

Evidently, many prospective law students were figuring out that the high cost of three years of study necessary to earn a JD just wasn’t worth it in a glutted market and were choosing other paths after college.

Just how right they were is highlighted in a new study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation entitled, “Objection! Law schools can be hazardous to students’ financial health.”

The study’s author, Andrew Gillen, explains the approach, “a debt-to-earnings test called Gainful Employment Equivalent (GEE). GEE compares the earnings of recent graduates with the typical borrower’s student loan debt to determine if students can afford their student loan payments.”

What he’s doing is following the method of the “Gainful Employment” regulations that were in place during the Obama administration. Under those regulations, schools could lose eligibility for federal funds if their average student loan figures were too high compared with student earnings after graduation. (Those regulations were only applied, however, to for-profit institutions, when the problem of excessive debt was also found at many public and non-profit schools. Under Trump, the regulations were suspended.)

Following the old Gainful Employment regulations, Gillen divides law schools into three categories: pass (where the typical graduate’s debt payments are no higher than 8.6 percent of earnings), probation (between 8.6 percent and 12.8 percent) and fail (more than 12.8 percent of earnings).

So, how did law schools fare?

Shockingly, 73 percent of the schools for which Gillen was able to get data (168 schools) fail.

Many of the schools that failed are smaller, but that doesn’t affect the overall picture very much. As Gillen writes, “An astounding 68% of law school graduates attended a program that fails GEE.”

In other words, a heavy majority of law school graduates will face so high a burden of debt that their schools would have been targeted under the Obama regulations if the regulations had been applied across the board.

North Carolina’s law schools don’t do well under Gillen’s analysis. Campbell, Elon, NC Central, Wake Forest, and even UNC fail. (For Duke, the data weren’t available.)

In an appendix, Gillen shows how his GEE figures vary across a wide array of academic fields, and law comes in dead last. Even programs in Design and Applied Arts, Social Work, Psychology, Health and Fitness, and English have substantially more “pass” results than in law.

What is going to happen once college students hear about these results, results that loudly confirm their apprehensions about going to law school? Except for the small percentage of schools that are in the “pass” or “probation” categories, enrollments will probably plunge, and the list of defunct schools will increase steadily.

The root of the problem is that law school costs substantially more than most students can afford to finance on their expected earnings after graduation. So why don’t school administrators find ways to reduce that cost? They can and many have nibbled at the edges, for example using somewhat more adjunct faculty and cutting back on library expenses.

Such nibbling, however, doesn’t cut very much. The big problem is that under American Bar Association (ABA) accreditation rules, law school has to be a three-year program—90 credits. A law school could lower the cost of getting a degree tremendously if it could allow students to graduate with, say, 60 credits. It would focus on the courses that are most important for the bar exam and subsequent legal practice. Many students would find that prospect attractive.

But if any school did that, it would lose its ABA accreditation. And that would be fatal in most states since no one is permitted to take the bar examination without first having graduated from an ABA-accredited law school. North Carolina is among the 44 states that require a degree from such a law school. There are good reasons to change the law.

The very high cost of law school is no problem for those graduates who find high-paying jobs, but most of America’s legal needs don’t come from wealthy people and big business. They come from ordinary people who are poor or middle-class. But they don’t have the means to pay lawyers hefty fees to handle their cases, and that often means that they have to go without an attorney.

Stanford University law professor Deborah Rhode has long recognized that we have a serious access-to-justice problem in the U.S. She is quoted here as saying, “We are overlawyered and under-represented…In this country, over four-fifths of the legal needs of the poor are unmet and half of the legal needs of people of modest means are estimated to be unmet.”

The main reason for that problem is the cost of law school. Many lawyers can’t afford to work with poorer clients and that will become a more pronounced problem as enrollments fall and schools go out of business.

The ABA’s high cost, elitist vision of law school needs to give way to a free market in legal studies. North Carolina ought to be a path-setter in this regard. It should change its law to permit individuals to take the bar exam whether they have graduated from a traditional, three-year, accredited law school, attended a non-accredited law school, or merely “read law” as Abraham Lincoln did.

Many lawyers will privately admit that law school was mostly a waste of time and money, and a few will say it in public. For instance, Hans Bader writes here that

I learned more law in two months studying for the bar exam than I did in three years in (Harvard) law school, including basic principles of law (in real estate and family law) that I was never even taught in law school.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, a few states have even waived the requirement of state bar membership for people to practice law. That might sound risky, but bar membership is no more a guarantee of legal competence than accreditation is a guarantee of quality in a college or university.

Gillen is to be congratulated for having put hard numbers behind the mass of anecdotal evidence to suggest that law school is far too costly in relation to the earnings that most graduates can expect. Since the ABA is unlikely to change its standards, it’s up to the states to release legal education from its shackles.

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/11/could-law-school-be-the-worst-higher-education-investment/

It Was a Mistake to Close Schools, UK Study Concedes

On March 12, 2020, the memo went out from the pen of Carter Mecher, bioterrorism expert advising the Veterans Administration. It went out to public health officials and others from around the nation. Close the schools. Pull the trigger now. And it happened, and with it, civic freedoms we have long taken for granted – freedom to travel, operate businesses, go to the movies, even leave our homes – were taken away.

They shut the schools. Then it was like dominos falling, one by one. The businesses had to close so that people could watch the kids at home. The shopping centers had to close because otherwise the kids would just gather there. The churches too. Entertainment venues were shut. Even parks closed. The stay-at-home orders followed from the school closures. In many ways, the whole legitimacy of lockdown hinged on the merit of the school closure.

A small group of pro-lockdown scientists cheered, as their decade-and-a-half-old dream of conducting such a social experiment was finally becoming a reality.

The school closures had a disproportionate effect on working women. They left their jobs to care for the kids, attempting to help them navigate the strange new world of Zoom classrooms and do assignments via email. Men stayed working in jobs as the primary breadwinners.

As the Washington Post reports:

The pandemic recession [lockdowns] has been dubbed a “she-session” because it has hurt women far worse than men. The share of women working or looking for work has fallen to the lowest level since 1988, wiping out decades of hard-fought gains in the workplace.

On Friday, the Labor Department’s jobs report showed that the economy has gained back just over half of the jobs lost in March and April, but the situation remains dire for women. There are 2.2 million fewer women working or looking for work now than in January, vs. 1.5 million fewer men, according to the Labor Department data.

In nine months of this hell, one might suppose there would have been a clear test of whether and to what extent severe outcomes from catching the virus were really associated with school attendance. It has finally arrived, and the news is not good for the lockdowners.

It is by now obvious (and has been since February) that almost no children are in danger from the virus. The age/health gradient of the virus affects almost exclusively the elderly with comorbidities. The children might have been helpful in achieving good public health goals and burning out the virus, rather than losing almost a full year of quality schooling thus far, to say nothing of the trauma of mandatory masks and being taught that their friends are potentially pathogen-carrying enemies.

The kids would have been fine but what about the staff and adults? Does locking up the kids in homes really keep people safe and dial back the infectiousness and mortality associated with SARS-CoV-2? How might one test this? One simple way could examine the difference in disease outcomes between domestic environments in which kids are present versus those where they are not.

This seems like an obvious test. Finally just such a study has appeared, as released by the prestigious medical journal Medxriv: “Association between living with children and outcomes from COVID-19: an OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million adults in England.”

It is the largest study yet conducted (35 authors) of Covid risk to adults from contact with children, and it has a not-so-surprising conclusion, at least for those who have followed the science so far. It discovered no increase in severe Covid-related outcomes for adults living with children. It demonstrated a small increase in infections but without bad outcomes. In fact, the study demonstrated fewer deaths associated with adults living with children at home than home without children.

To quote from the study directly:

This is the first population-based study to investigate whether the risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe outcomes from COVID-19 differ between adults living in households with and without school-aged children during the UK pandemic. Our findings show that for adults living with children there is no evidence of an increased risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes although there may be a slightly increased risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection for working-age adults living with children aged 12 to 18 years. Working-age adults living with children 0 to 11 years have a lower risk of death from COVID-19 compared to adults living without children, with the effect size being comparable to their lower risk of death from any cause. We observed no consistent changes in risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe outcomes from COVID-19 comparing periods before and after school closure.

What does this imply?

Our results demonstrate no evidence of serious harms from COVID-19 to adults in close contact with children, compared to those living in households without children. This has implications for determining the benefit-harm balance of children attending school in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The wording seems a bit abstract, consistent with the genre of this style of writing. To put it in English, fear of bad Covid outcomes was never a good reason to shut the schools. Which is to say: this was a huge mistake. It is shocking to consider what has been lost, how the children have been treated, how brutalized are the parents who have paid so much in taxes or in private school tuition. It is robbery not only of money but also of education and the good life.

AIER has in general agreed with John Ioannidis’s claim from mid-March. These policies were put into place with no solid evidence that they would mitigate the virus or improve on medical outcomes.

From the beginning, the lockdowns were a policy in search of a rationale. In all these intervening months, none has been forthcoming. And we are only now seeing the solid research proving that the skeptics were correct from the beginning. The only question now is whether and when the “experts” that produced this astonishing failure will admit their error. Perhaps the answer is: when the media start reporting on it.

https://www.aier.org/article/it-was-a-mistake-to-close-schools-uk-study-concedes/

'Unviable': Australian university proposes cutting humanities and education courses

La Trobe University has proposed scrapping or reducing about a dozen disciplines in the arts and education, telling staff on Wednesday that it is no longer financially viable to teach these subjects.

The proposal comes as the university confronts a revenue downturn in the hundreds of millions of dollars due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing it to shed hundreds of positions.

Staff at La Trobe, who have also agreed to take a 10 per cent pay cut to avoid deeper job cuts, were told that unprofitable disciplines from the schools of humanities and education could not continue in their current state.

Those that face being discontinued include creative arts, Hindi, Indonesian and modern Greek studies. Planning and community development and philosophy would be scaled back.

The bachelor of arts would also be offered as a purely online degree at La Trobe's regional campuses, staff were told.

In the school of education – where La Trobe last month celebrated leaping 42 places to 62nd in the Times Higher Education World University rankings by subject – the bachelor of technology education faces being scrapped entirely, as would the master of applied linguistics and the master of teaching English to speakers of other languages.

The number of subjects offered in outdoor education would also be reduced.

The cuts to disciplines were described as horrifying and "the byproduct of a broken higher education system" by tertiary union leader Sarah Roberts.

Ms Roberts, the National Tertiary Education Union's Victorian assistant secretary, said: “It’s deeply horrifying that what we all imagined might come to pass as a result of the pandemic has now crystallised at La Trobe. That is, liberal arts courses are being cut because they don’t generate the revenue that more vocational courses do."

Ms Roberts called on the university to consult further with staff and the community "before going ahead with its radical proposal".

La Trobe University said in a statement that the schools of humanities and education had reviewed their course and subject portfolios and found a number that were financially unsustainable.

Some of the changes would also involve a loss of jobs, requiring further consultation with staff, the university said.

"For both schools, these are proposals only and potential impacts will depend on the outcomes of the consultation," it said.

"Any impacted courses and subjects will be taught out for existing students or suitable alternatives offered."

La Trobe University vice-chancellor John Dewar said the humanities disciplines in question have had "consistently low enrolments for the last few years and in the current circumstances the university can't afford to cross-subsidise them".

Disciplines being cut in the school of education were heavily enrolled in by international students, who are blocked from entering the country, Professor Dewar said.

"The context of course is COVID and the fact that like every other university we’re facing a significant downturn in revenue this year, next year and probably some time beyond that," he said.

The university forecasts a revenue shortfall in 2020 and 2021 of between $265 million and $335 million.

It is one of just a few Australian universities that signed up to the Jobs Protection Framework, a deal between universities and the National Tertiary Education Union in which staff accepted pay cuts on the condition the university would limit job cuts.

Universities Australia has projected the Australian higher education sector could lose $19 billion in the next three years due to the loss of fee-paying international students.

Professor Dewar said the changes to education disciplines would require about five involuntary redundancies, while any possible job losses in the humanities would go out to staff consultation.

The university’s decision to sign up to the Jobs Protection Framework had spared it from having to cut hundreds of jobs, he said.

“Involuntary redundancies are unavoidable at some point but we have done an amazing job of getting as far as we have without making a very many people involuntarily redundant.”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/unviable-la-trobe-proposes-cutting-humanities-and-education-courses-20201111-p56dqu.html

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