Law School Deans, Law Schools

Law School Deans Whine About The New York Times Calling Out Their Debt Scam

Faced with high-profile criticism, law school deans pull out the scare tactics in defense of the lucrative status quo.

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Last week, the New York Times editorial board took a bold stance against the “Law School Debt Crisis” because of their ongoing commitment to report “all the news that’s fit to print… about six years after the fact.” Still, despite the delay, it was nice to see the august publication join the chorus calling for significant reforms in legal education. And as expected, the parade of butthurt deans immediately took to the pages of the Gray Lady for damage control — and in the case of Florida Coastal, to spout some questionable “facts” in their defense.

The Times focused on the government’s Grad PLUS loan program for contributing to the debt crisis by yanking the ceiling off the amount a student can borrow to cover tuition and living expenses and giving law schools every incentive to jack tuition into the stratosphere. It’s been over two years since Georgetown was caught on video counseling students on methods of gaming the system so the school could collect hefty tuition payments and the students could find forgiveness down the road, leaving the taxpayers holding the bag. But don’t let that promise of forgiveness fool you, the students are still getting a raw deal when the school makes its cash grab.

As one might expect, law school deans weren’t going to take this lying down and fired off a bevy of scurrilous letters to the editor protesting this eminently factual critique. But the best response comes from Florida Coastal School of Law Dean Scott DeVito, whose program was ripe for specific scorn with its $45,000 a year in tuition and floundering employment scores, and DeVito wanted to “set the record straight”:

Your editorial referring to Florida Coastal School of Law paints a picture that is not supported by the facts.

Intriguing. Remember Dean DeVito got this job after another candidate suggested at an internal meeting that the school needed to improve its standing and was ejected from the premises and a federal judge has called out Florida Coastal for playing fast and loose with its facts. So this scolding is going to be good.

In February 2015 we had a 75 percent first-time bar pass rate, third best out of 11 law schools in the state, and an institutional ultimate pass rate of 87 percent.

Fascinating but irrelevant. The New York Times did say that Florida Coastal’s focus on recruiting students with weak test scores and abysmal undergraduate grades (per LST, the Fall 2014 class averaged a 143 LSAT and a 2.9 undergrad GPA) rendered the student body unlikely to pass the bar exam — which is untrue. But this isn’t really the point as much as the fact that Florida Coastal grads labor under tremendous debt and are highly unlikely to net a full-time, long-term job in the law (with a 33.5 percent employment score and a 41.5 percent underemployment score).

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In such a context, it is improper to judge schools on the size of student debt rather than on how well students repay their debt. Our alumni repay their loans at a higher rate than many “elite” universities; only about 1.1 percent of alumni at Florida Coastal are in default.

How is this possibly true with 29.5 percent of last year’s graduates unemployed? There must be some fancy accounting at work here. Dean DeVito isn’t going to tackle the unemployment numbers, obviously, but he is quick to change the subject!

You are right that Florida Coastal is a for-profit law school. But you are wrong to imply that for-profit is inherently bad. Sometimes it takes a for-profit entity to right a wrong — in this case the lack of diversity in law schools. At Florida Coastal 44.8 percent of the student body are members of minority groups.

You are also right that our students have a higher debt load than we would like. That is an area we take very seriously. But if you want to diversify the profession, then you will have to admit students who do not have the same resources as students at “elite” law schools.

Wow. The argument is that the school deserves a pat on the back for helping minority groups (who impliedly lack resources) earn a law school education before failing to become working lawyers. One might say that a diverse law school class means very little if the profession itself isn’t getting more diverse, but that’s not the sort of nuance we’d expect the Florida Coastal propaganda ministry to understand.

But more serious voices also complained about the article in decidedly non-serious ways. Like Blake Morant, Kellye Testy, and Judith Areen, “respectively, president, president-elect and executive director of the Association of American Law Schools.” Morant is the dean of George Washington, Testy is dean of the University of Washington, and Areen is a Georgetown professor — the very school that first demonstrated the pitfalls of the Grad PLUS program:

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The New York Times fails to make its case on law school debt. Law students borrow more than undergrads, but most are able to repay, and do. The graduate student default rate is 7 percent versus 22 percent for undergrads.

Many law schools are downsizing to maintain standards. Since 2010, first-year enrollment has dropped from 52,500 to 37,900, a level last seen in 1973 — much smaller and the rule of law may begin to fray. Our country needs lawyers, prosecutors, defenders and judges, not only lawyers in big cities and big law firms.

Most of them pay it back at tremendous financial cost to themselves and their families so rising tuition isn’t a problem. Moreover, as the Times editorial makes perfectly clear, many law graduates forego the sectors of the industry most in need of talent because they need higher paying jobs to avoid default, a point deftly made by CUNY Dean Michelle Anderson:

But another social justice issue relates to law school debt. For many students, high debt drives legal employment preferences and decisions — in exactly the wrong direction. Being deeply in debt at graduation drives young lawyers away from crucial but less highly compensated public interest practice, which leaves low-income and moderate-income communities chronically underrepresented.

To this end, the lower default rate Morant and crew cite (which is for all graduate students, not just law graduates) is not exculpatory, but proof of the ongoing crisis. The crocodile tears that the country needs “MOAR LAWYERS” is cynicism at its finest as the leadership of the Association of American Law Schools blames the students and the media — but never their members’ onerous tuition hikes — for the shortage of new lawyers and the “downsizing to maintain standards” that law schools are experiencing. Yes, we see that commitment to high standards everywhere we look…

Capping graduate federal loans as the editors suggest would fall hardest on students from modest circumstances who will not be able to attend law school or will need to resort to private loans, which are typically more expensive, and repayment is not income-contingent.

Well, it would if the school chooses to keep its tuition artificially inflated. Rolling back tuition to levels seen before the Grad PLUS extension might help those “students from modest circumstances” they care so much about when trying to defuse a PR nightmare. But that’s implicitly a non-starter in these letters. Whether law schools really need all this tuition money to provide a solid education is largely ignored (except for one comment by David Stern of Equal Justice Works, who posits that “practice ready” education costs more, begging the question whether “practice ready” education is worth the investment).

But that’s the cycle of the law school reform discussion — warranted criticism meets disingenuous scare-mongering about hurting low-income students.

Here’s a follow-up question that we dare these complaining deans to answer: If you were forced to cut your tuition 15 percent, how would you adjust your budget? No one would volunteer a response to that question because getting into the nuts and bolts of bloated administrative budgets and useless classes would expose this lie right quick.

Instead, the deans will keep this discussion at the 30,000-foot level. There wasn’t a single specific reform offered to address the debt load facing law students other than “don’t take away our free money,” which is disgraceful when the legal profession faces the crises of declining enrollment, lower standards, and a widening justice gap.

Keep aiming for that iceberg, law schools — this thing is unsinkable!

The Law School Debt Crisis [New York Times]
The Debt Burden of Law School Graduates [New York Times]
Letter to the Editors [Florida Coastal School of Law]

Earlier: Law Schools Devise Trick To Game Taxpayers
Who Is To Blame For The Dumbing Of The Legal Profession?
School Threatens To Call Security When Dean Candidate Suggests It’s A Crappy Law School
Judge Says Never Trust Anything A For-Profit Law School Tells You

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