Insanity in Education--Law School Tuition Skyrockets as Employment Propsects Dwindle

While browsing over my alma mater's webpage I looked at how much it wanted for law school tuition and thought to myself, "That's not much more than what I paid a couple years ago."  Then I realized that that rate was not per year, but per semester!

This is another instance of Insanity in Education.  While employment prospects for lawyers have decreased precipitously in the past two decades, the cost of becoming a lawyer has increased dramatically with tuition seeming to have skyrocketed by about 80% in the past ten years.

According to the law school rankings page at U.S. News & World Report, the sticker price to attend a top law school is now around $43,000/year.  If you add in $15,000 for living expenses, the total cost is about $58,000/year or about $174,000 round trip.  At least JDs from the top ten law schools have some employment value and many of the students will earn some money doing summer associateships.

What is even more sickening is that the prices have also increased at many no-name third tier toilet schools as well, some of which want as much as $40,000/year ($165,000 total cost) with many asking for $30,000/year ($135,000 total cost).

How their unemployed, underemployed, and mostly unemployable graduates are supposed to pay back those amounts in addition to whatever undergraduate student loan debt they have is beyond me.  In the meantime, naive students continue to bust down schools' doors hoping to gain admission to these institutions of higher debt.

Blogger Esq. Never has an amusing take on what the Federal government's new Income-Based Repayment plan portends for law school loans--the taxpayers will end up footing the bill.  I suspect that taxpayers would probably end up footing the bill anyway even without IBR because the Education Bubble will have to burst at some point.

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