Debt for Dopes

Please read the following words and then guess where they were printed –

“Florida Coastal (School of Law) charges nearly $45,000 a year in tuition, which, with living expenses, can lead to crushing amounts of debt for its students. Ninety-three percent of the school’s 2014 graduating class of 484 had debts and the average was almost $163,000 — a higher average than all but three law schools in the country. In short, most of Florida Coastal’s students are leaving law school with a degree they can’t use, bought with a debt they can’t repay.

If this sounds like a scam, that’s because it is. Florida Coastal, in Jacksonville, is one of six for-profit law schools in the country that have been vacuuming up hordes of young people, charging them outrageously high tuition and, after many of the students fail to become lawyers, sticking taxpayers with the tab for their loan defaults.

Yet for-profit schools are not the only offenders. A majority of American law schools, which have nonprofit status, are increasingly engaging in such behavior, and in the process threatening the future of legal education.

Why? The most significant explanation is also the simplest — free money.”

Are you thinking, some conservative “think tank?”  Maybe Fox news website?  Rush Limbaugh?

You can read the entire article at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/opinion/sunday/the-law-school-debt-crisis.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

Some more highlights as one reads about this Obama fiasco:

·         Forty-three percent of all 2013 law school graduates did not have long-term full-time legal jobs nine months after graduation, and the numbers are only getting worse. 

·         In 2012, the average law graduate’s debt was $140,000, 59 percent higher than eight years earlier.

·          This reality has contributed to the drastic drop in law school applications since 2011, which has in turn exacerbated the problem — to maintain enrollment numbers, law schools have had to lower their admissions standards and take even more unqualified students. 

·         These students then fail to pass the bar in alarmingly high numbers — in 2014, the average score on the common portion of the test was the lowest in more than 25 years.

Debt for dopes.  Stupid people getting free money to do something unneeded for which they are eminently unqualified.  Lawyers are today’s “self-esteem” momma boys.  Surrounded by recognition, awards and good grades unless the school has opted out of traditional grading schemes, but unable to tie their shoe laces much less represent or defend a client.  Obama wants to let his people go – free them from jail. Well, he has the legal program to accomplish his objective – cram the court system with nincompoops who are incapable of providing a good defense so that the appellate courts can throw out their convictions on the basis of “ineffective assistance of counsel.”

Meanwhile if you are a taxpayer, America’s one true endangered species, you are paying for this.