"America's $70,000/Year Liberal Arts Colleges Are Like Headless Zombies That Just Won't Die"

With a title like that, you have to have an image to go with the story.

Small liberal arts colleges in the U.S. simply refuse to die, despite a torrent of bad news about the U.S. higher education marketplace and the increasing uselessness of their degrees.

Bennington College in Vermont is one such example, according to Bloomberg. It sports famous alumni like Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis and charges $73,000 per year for admission. Located at the foot of Vermont's green mountains, it nearly went out of business in the 1990's and was still under duress at the beginning of this decade.

But the school - and its 700 undergraduates - have hung on. It's a microcosm of how these types of schools continue to defy the odds nationwide.  Massachusetts’ Hampshire College was another institution known for its artisiness than has somehow still hung on.

So, what does that have to do with the law school scam?  Perhaps nothing directly - except it is pointing out the continued pressure on higher-education as the weather gauge continues to drift, along with answering "why do the scamblogs keep complaining about law school when so few in particular have closed?"  As indicated, many schools are fighting to survive, and are pulling out the stops to stay afloat.  Law Schools, in many respects, are no different on the whole.

Though, while I have enjoyed the skewering of "liberal artists," often by other liberal artists, concerning the utility of law school over the years (RIP, JDUnderground), I do have to say that I hate to see such degrees being described with "increasing uselessness."  Cynical as I am, and even as an ex-STEMer myself, I do believe a liberal arts education has value, assuming one is taught critical thinking, rhetoric, logic, and composition  skills (what law school got away with for so long lumping together as "analysis").   Plus, a strong alumni network never hurts.

These skills are increasingly critical in every field, even now in this "AI-does-scut-work" world, and have never really "gone away" - it does no good to be the smartest coder, engineer, historian, curator, business person (or even lawyer) in the world, but unable to communicate your findings effectively to others, argue for a position in a principled fashion, or be adaptable - y'know, the things that tend to be uniquely human.

Perhaps those sound like platitudes, and it is all too easy to pick on the stories where people spent $300k on the proverbial underwater basket-weaving degree.  But I think readers of this blog understand what I am talking about.  The issue is (1) so many institutions don't actually deliver on these ideals (hello, most law schools), and (2) they charge way too damn much money for something that shouldn't cost NEAR what is being charged.  I mean, come on, really.

I would be all for more liberal arts education (and, heck, other kinds, too) for a reasonable price. That would solve multiple problems simultaneously - having an "educated" populace (what people say they want until cost comes up), a not-buried-by-debt populace, and a leaner education system that "delivers" to its graduates.  There is more impetus for growth when people aren't crushed.

As it stands, all you have to do is look at Law School as an example for how it can go off the rails. The "problem" is other schools are following suit, perhaps to our greater detriment in the short-term. The only good news is that the market can't be ignored when it is allowed to operate properly in the long-term, and even higher-education may have to finally be competitive in ways it never had to be before.    

Anyway.  TL;DR is - 0Ls, think twice.

Teacher's Union Sues the Department of Education over PSLF Denials

In a development that surprises absolutely no one who is a follower of the scamblogs:

For 10 years, Baker, who was a public school teacher in Tulsa, Okla., checked in with loan servicing companies and was told she was on track...[b]ut it turns out that her $76,000 in student loans didn't get forgiven. Baker was finally told she was in the wrong type of loan. If she'd known that at the beginning, she could have switched loans and ended up qualifying. But she says nobody ever told her.

Whelp, it looks like a lot of people don't get told a lot of things, be they teachers, police offices, or even lawyers, for that matter (unfortunately, the plight of attorneys involved in public service jobs did not seem to figure into the story, probably due to the fact that teachers, fire-fighters, and police officers probably garner more sympathy).  And $76,000 is no small sum of money, let alone the six-figures many law graduates carry. I wonder if the courts will consider public school teachers "sophisticated consumers" as well in the ongoing litigation.

The teachers union lawsuit alleges that the Department of Education "knows of — but completely disregards — repeated misrepresentations made by [student loan] servicers to borrowers who are attempting to qualify ... resulting in unwarranted denials of loan forgiveness."  In other words, people like Baker aren't given the right information or advice, and many end up in the wrong types of loans or repayment plans and get unfairly disqualified...Navient, one of the nation's largest loan servicer companies, is not commenting on the lawsuit. But the company said in a statement to NPR, "We understand the frustration borrowers face in navigating a complex federal loan program, which is why we consistently advocate for policy reforms to simplify the system."

And so the finger-pointing begins in earnest between bureaucratic government agencies and their quasi-governmental-sub-contractors.  If only people had known that PSLF was not a "done deal" at the time it was instituted, perhaps warned others to not bank on this in making their decisions to attend higher education...

Oh, wait.  Our own Antiro at the time was bringing up this issue and the other sources that were commenting on it, back in 2014, a good five years before PSLF was to "come due":

Hilariously, the WSJ reports that the Dean of Georgetown Law, Bill Traenor, says that the government's forgiveness programs are not influencing G-town's tuition, which is approximately $50,000 (don't forget the high CoL that comes along with living in Washington D.C.).  Georgetown once proclaimed that "public interest borrowers might not pay a single penny on their loans—ever!", on their website.  According to the WSJ, G-Town has been "steering" its graduates into public-service jobs "as part of its Jesuit mission."  We have data on how many people are in G-Town's public-interest program: 432, up 60% from 2 years ago.

Yep.  This was just one of many examples of the Law School Cartel handing out PSLF pipe-dreams like candy.  Don't worry about the debt, kids, Uncle Sam will take care of all that for you (somehow, someway...), especially when there is liberty and justice that needs doing!   Now, sign here.

Here's hoping that this suit will finally bring attention to these programs, and, as Navient so graciously stated, help "simplify the system."  Because nothing says loan forgiveness is here for you like having to sue to properly administer and enforce the program.

Snake oil that the Cartel was more than happy to advertise at the time, so long as it brought people in. Odd that the Cartel does not appear to be falling all over itself to help fix this issue.  As teachers and others are now learning what law grads learned the hard way, the attitude is "Let the graduates make their claims and chase a broken system, we got ours."  

0Ls, pay heed.

The Trojan horse of "diversity": scamsters win, racialized people lose

Not so long ago, many law schools would not admit racialized people at all. Texas Southern University was hastily founded in 1946 as the "Texas State University for Negroes" so as to create a pretense of a "separate but equal" university for Black people alongside the white University of Texas (see Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950)). The Supreme Court unanimously saw through the ruse and refused to countenance it. (Today, incidentally, Texas Southern still has not strayed far from its Jim Crow roots: most of the class is Black, only 10% is white, the median LSAT score for last year's entering class was an appalling 144, and for the past two years the law school has been subject to the ABA's censure and directives for remedial action.)

Long after formal segregation was abolished, many law schools showed little interest in racialized people. But the spate of toilet law schools over the past decade has changed that. Nowadays scamsters from toilet law schools today portray themselves as champions of "diversity". They would have us believe that the toilet schools' abysmal, if not non-existent, standards of admission afford racialized people an opportunity to enter the legal profession. That so-called opportunity, however, comes with a poor chance of passing the bar exams, dreadfully low rates of employment, and a whopping price tag.

A Black lawyer with a JD from Michigan lifts the lid on the scamsters' invocation of "diversity" as grounds for lowering the passing score on California's bar exam. As he says, any sincere effort to increase the diversity of the legal profession must start with analysis of the causes of the problem and the best ways to address it, not with scam-fostering proposals such as "Let's lower the passing score!".

It's true that the bar is insufficiently diverse in terms of race and certain other criteria. But that does not imply that the passing score is too high. The whiteness of the bar stems from systemic inequalities and racial injustice—the same factors that have led to the monstrous racialization of the prisons and many other manifestations of racial oppression. Address it by correcting those inequalities, not by persuading the authorities in California to license more toileteers of whatsoever race.

Nor is it appropriate to lower the passing score on the test just because few people taking the test are passing. The score should be set at an appropriate level, and anyone arguing to lower it bears the burden of giving sound reasons. The scamsters seem to "argue" that the various Black people upon whom they have been preying should be admitted to the bar just because they are there. But that's no argument at all. The very purpose of the bar exam is to protect the public by ensuring a minimum level of competence. There may be nothing wrong with the passing score even if every single candidate fails.

Nor should California be played against other states. That's the child's tactic of going to Daddy in hope of a "yes" after Mommy said "no". Why should it matter that West Virginia or Missouri has a lower score? Perhaps California is the only state with a proper standard. Or perhaps even California's score is too low.

White scamsters are cynically perverting "diversity" for their own profit (figurative and literal). Racialized people, don't fall for their ploy.