Law schools have a subset of the higher ed bubble all to themselves.

George Leef examines the issue in a new post at See Thru Edu.

We Have Oversold Law School – Now What?

Articles on the huge gap between the number of students graduating from law school and the number of jobs available for people holding the key credential for entry into the legal profession (the Juris Doctor) have become commonplace. Just about the time law schools were beginning their new academic years, lawyer Steven Harper, author of the book The Lawyer Bubble, penned an op-ed for the New York Times entitled “Too Many Law Students, Too Few Legal Jobs.”

What is especially interesting in Harper’s piece is the news that the American Bar Association is looking into solutions.

It has set up a task force under Dennis Archer, formerly the mayor of Detroit. The task force has been listening to witnesses who have suggested “capping law student loans, requiring law schools to have ‘skin in the game’ by being responsible for loan repayment … and even scrapping the current federal student loan program altogether.”

Those are meritorious ideas.

As things now stand, students who pursue legal degrees (and others too) are able to borrow enormous amounts from the government – far in excess of their probable earnings after graduation. (This August 18 Wall Street Journal article highlighted a recent Tulane Law School graduate, Virginia Murphy, was borrowed $256,000 to get her degree, and has a job as a public defender that pays only $56,000 per year.) If there were a limit on student borrowing, they would have to either look for less costly schools or look to private lenders, where they would encounter greater skepticism about their prospects.