Having just expounded on declining law school enrollment, and why maybe the legal community ought not to worry too much about it, and perhaps if it is going to worry it ought to reconsider its approach to the problem, if there is one, I'll separately note this topic.
Recently, there's been a lot of commentary about how students amassing debt to go to law school can't pay it off with the depressed wages they're now receiving as lawyers.
The question this raises is this. Why give student loans to people who want to go to law school?
That may sound harsh, but in a flooded market, why fund failure? Indeed, why do we give loans to go to art school, or just about any degree program we can think of?
Student loans, as a species, stem from the GI Bill, which allowed, very successfully, a lot of demographics to go to college for the first time in our nation's history. This, it is often noted, resulted in a huge economic boon to the country, repaying the country in economic gain again and again. The thought, correctly, was that student loads would do the same thing.
They did, but that also resulted in a vast expansion of fields of study, and over time, we graduated so many into the general population that it's really no longer true. Or at least its not true for all fields. Perhaps the time has arrived to give loans where our society needs them.
So, perhaps it's time to fund people to go into engineering or the sciences. For certain targeted minorities, law still makes sense. But it doesn't make sense to give loans out to everyone who, at age 18, decides they want to go to college in any field. It can end up hurting them, and it doesn't seem to be benefiting society at large.
This may seem harsh, but perhaps its not as harsh as funding somebody all the way through a Masters in Art when there's no job to be had, and then asking them to pay it back on wages they won't be making.
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