Toil and Trouble

One subset of the higher education bubble--in which tuition increases far outpaced the ability of students and their families to pay for them--is the law school bubble [bold added]

the legal industry is stagnating, and suffers from a severe overabundance of young graduates, many of whom applied to law schools under the false pretenses that their degree would be an express ticket to a six figure salary. Instead, many graduates are now contending with six figures of crushing debt and murky career prospects.

These new statistics are the latest evidence that young Americans are getting the hint that the market for lawyers is perhaps not what it once was....The number of applications also dropped dramatically, which could force law schools to ease up on their mind bogglingly expensive tuition.

When a bubble begins to deflate, data are fudged in a desperate attempt to keep the party going. (Recent instances are real estate appraisals and tech companies' reported earnings.) Law schools are no exception. A WSJ article reports how three law schools consistently under-reported the amount of debt their students accumulated before graduating.

The errors weren't insignificant. The originally reported / corrected debt loads were: Barry Law School - $41,190 / $137,680, University of Kansas - $41,574 / $67,598, and Rutgers - $27,423 / $80,446. If the errors were random, one would expect to see over- as well as under-reporting, but of course the mistakes weren't random but self-serving.

Not a proud chapter in the life of a profession that hounds everyone else for their ethical lapses.