Reflections on the Decreasing Affordability of Legal Education

This Article offers two different lenses for thinking about the “affordability” of legal education. Part I discusses a historical perspective focused on aggregated data over time: average tuition in relation to average salaries of law school graduates. Part II discusses a present day perspective, estimating the percentage of Class of 2011 graduates for whom legal education might be considered affordable using a formula drawing on debt-to-income ratios associated with mortgages. Part III discusses the extent to which affordability may vary among public and private law schools, law schools in different states or regions, and for students with different LSAT and GPA profiles. Part IV concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges legal education will face as a result of legal education’s decreasing affordability

Good Faith and the Discharge of Educational Loans in Chapter 13: Forging a Judicial Consensus

In the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 19781 Congress sought to accomplish many goals, some of which appear internally incompatible. For example, Congress enacted section 523(a)(8) to limit the dischargeability of educational loans in Chapter 7 liquidations. At the same time, however, Congress enacted the new Chapter 13 to encourage consumer debtors--including student borrowers--to elect repayment plans whenever feasible. Chapter 13 contains a superdischarge provision, which offers debtors a much broader discharge than the discharge that is available under section 523(a) in straight bankruptcy. While section 523(a)(8) excepts educational loans from discharge, section 1328(a) of Chapter 13 does not except them from discharge.This Article examines the tension that seems to exist between these two Bankruptcy Code provisions. Part II discusses the nature of federal educational loan programs. Part III reviews the legislative history of section 523(a)(8) to evaluate Congress\u27 intent and purpose. Part III then inspects the history and operation of section 1328(a), Chapter 13\u27s super discharge provision, to see whether the two sections are reconcilable. Part IV analyzes recent decisions that attempt to reconcile these two code provisions through the good faith requirement of section 1325(a). Part V considers the appropriateness of excepting educational loans from discharge in bankruptcy. Part V concludes that a court asked to confirm a re-payment plan that will result in the discharge of educational loans best serves Congress\u27 purposes by analyzing the totality of circumstances when making an inquiry into the good faith of a pro-posed plan. Finally, part V discusses the way recent congressional legislation implements the totality of circumstances test

Net Tuition Trends by LSAT Category from 2010 to 2014 with Thoughts on Variable Return on Investment

The “macro” discussion of legal education highlights that law school is expensive. This general point fails to highlight the extent to which differences exist at a “micro” level due both to geography and LSAT profile. First, some regions of the country are more expensive than others. Second, where one is on the LSAT distribution profile influences the average net tuition because of scholarship patterns associated with institutional efforts to preserve or improve ranking. As a result, law school is not equally expensive across the entire LSAT distribution. This article begins in Section I by briefly summarizing the geographic differences in tuition, which are not insignificant. Then, in Section II, this article briefly describes a dynamic net tuition model I developed for calculating net tuition trends by LSAT category and describes the results of that dynamic net tuition model. The results demonstrate that the variability of average net tuition by LSAT category increased significantly between 2010 and 2014 after accounting for inflation, with two LSAT categories seeing increases of 9.1% and 11.9% and four seeing decreases ranging from 2.8% to 13%. Section III looks at various outcome measures—specifically, bar passage rates, “bad news” employment outcomes, and imputed average first-year income—and demonstrates that, on average, the short-term return on investment varies significantly depending upon where someone is in the LSAT distribution. Section IV concludes with some thoughts on what this might mean for prospective law students and for law school

Report on the Survey of Perspectives on Being a Lawyer

Over the last several years, there has been a significant growth across law schools in the number of required first-year courses/programs focused law student professional development. We do not know very much, however, about which of these approaches to fostering professional formation is the most effective. To a large extent these courses/programs have been designed based on convenience/motivation. Within a given law school, someone who wants to champion this effort to promote professional development/formation takes the initiative and within the particular curricular ecosystem and political economy of the faculty of that law school designs something they think is interesting and beneficial that also is palatable to enough faculty to get approved as an addition to the curriculum. As a result, these professional development courses/programs come in a variety of stripes with a variety of points of emphasis. These courses/programs have not necessarily been designed with a specific set of learning objectives or a plan for assessment of whether those learning objectives have been accomplished. There has not been much assessment (or at least, not any published assessment) of the effectiveness of these courses/programs. With the addition in 2022 of ABA Standards 303(b)(3) and Standard 303(c), law schools will now have to generate more opportunities for students to reflect upon their professional identity as a lawyer and to become more cognizant of bias and racism within the legal system as well as the need for cultural competence to provide meaningful access to justice for people from different cultural backgrounds. Over the last two decades, there has been a growing awareness that the first-year of law school functions as a formation/socialization experience as law students begin their journey into the profession. Starting with the research work of Larry Krieger and Ken Sheldon, the first-year has been shown to facilitate a decline in well-being among law students along with a shift from intrinsic motivation to extrinsic motivation. This research endeavor was designed to try to begin the process of developing methods for assessing the effectiveness of professional formation/development courses while also providing further insights into the consequences of the first-year socialization experience (and whether the professional formation/development courses ameliorated or changed some of the socialization experience)