Student loan | Balkinization: Bootleggers and Baptists in the <b>Student Loan</b> Debate |
| Balkinization: Bootleggers and Baptists in the <b>Student Loan</b> Debate Posted: 25 Oct 2015 10:05 AM PDT | Balkinization E-mail: Compendium of posts on Hobby Lobby and related cases The Anti-Torture Memos (arranged by topic) Recent Posts Bootleggers and Baptists in the Student Loan Debate Just A Few Blogs ACS Weblog Your Choice of Feeds 2. Atom Feed 3. 4. RSS 2.0 | Sunday, October 25, 2015 Bootleggers and Baptists in the Student Loan Debate Frank Pasquale 1) From Federal to Private Lending: Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire Private lenders are sure to be pleased by the editorial. Law school loans are lucrative for them because of "extremely low student loan default rates for law school borrowers." They and their foundation allies have been lobbying for years to bring us closer to the Bush era of privatized loan profits. The stage is now set for a bootlegger/baptist coalition: as prohibitionists cut off the flow of federal loans, private lenders line up to take their place. Given the unnecessarily high rates now prevailing for federal loans, that might not seem to be a problem. But things can always be worse. Just look at this chart contrasting private and federal loan terms. Moreover, as Brooks & Glater observe:
The NYT worries that "millions of poor and lower-income Americans remain desperate for quality legal representation." So, too, did the architects of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program--a federal loan program to forgive the debt of those working in the public interest ten years after graduation. The financialization of education in all its forms is problematic. But by focusing its attack on federal loans, the NYT is accelerating trends in education finance that reduce incentives for young attorneys to serve the disadvantaged. 2) Painting all Schools with the For-Profit Brush As John Quiggin recently observed, "There is now overwhelming evidence that for-profit education has been a disastrous failure wherever it has been tried, and particularly where for-profit firms can gain access to public funds through policies designed to enhance 'consumer choice.'" The American legal academy has been fortunate not to see the mass infiltration of for-profit providers. But that doesn't stop the Times from using the private equity-owned Florida Coastal as its poster child for law school excess (both in this piece and an op-ed earlier this year). The differences in outlook between nonprofit/state educational institutions, and for-profit vendors of instructional services, are profound. Universities have at least three educational functions: to prepare students for democratic citizenship and leadership, to train them for jobs, and to prepare them to compete for relative advantage in a hierarchical society (while also acting to mitigate unfair aspects of that hierarchy). They also have multiple scholarly and community service missions. Many law schools' clinics do tens of thousands of hours per year of pro bono work for the most disadvantaged. By contrast, a profit-driven governance structure almost guarantees that research and service will be increasingly legacy missions at a law school. If you want a glimpse of the future of for-profit legal education, check out the record of unaccredited schools in California, or online schools generally. At one for profit, online California law school, only one in five students graduates. I have not been able to find a record of its contributions to community legal needs, or its research. Of course, policymakers should be attentive to the emerging phenomenon of the "shadow for-profit." But they should also remember the $574 million collected by a single University of Phoenix VP, and other massive compensation packages and investor returns. The for-profit sector's issues are far more troubling than those prevailing at most nonprofit or state institutions. To paint them all with the same brush is misleading. 3) Diverging Characterizations of the Debt Crisis Student debt is far too high. And emerging empirical research is giving us a clearer picture of the problem--which is sometimes counterintuitive. From the NYT's own contributor, Susan Dynarski:
I don't endorse those debt levels--I'd much rather see an education finance system where greater public support and price controls on tuition lead to far lower debt for graduates. Bankruptcy reforms are also imperative. But if such changes are politically impossible at present, let's at least be honest about the dynamics the NYT's preferred policy position will set in motion. First, if Congress does further limit federal loans to law students, then the gains the government would have made from most of those loans will, instead, go to private lenders (who are already offering many law students lower interest rates than the government offers). There will be less money in the system as a whole to support income-based repayment options and other features of federal loans more protective of borrowers. That will lead to even more business going to private lenders, and more free cash for them to use in lobbying the government to make federal programs even worse--in order to, once again, drive more students to private lenders. Critics of federal loans may argue that any additional financing options will increase tuition. But, as Mike Simkovic has stated, they "have not shown that the introduction of income-based repayment with debt forgiveness, or changes to the terms of these programs, has actually affected the rate of tuition increase net scholarships and grants." Moreover, there is probably more chance of price controls via conditions imposed on federal funding, than there is in the "private market." Consider health care finance, where Medicare drives a tougher bargain with hospitals and doctors than private insurers do. The federal government has already outsourced far too much of its administration of loan programs. Accelerating privatization is not going to reduce the cost of legal education--and could do much to degrade its quality. It's unfortunate that the NYT can't see these dynamics. But the paper's biased view of higher education in general is inflecting its take on law schools. We can only hope that policymakers take a more holistic approach. Posted 1:05 PM by Frank Pasquale [link] | Books by Balkinization Bloggers
Balkinization Symposium on We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution
Joseph Fishkin, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Mark A. Graber, A New Introduction to American Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Stephen M. Griffin, Long Wars and the Constitution (Harvard University Press, 2013)
Balkinization Symposium on Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues Andrew Koppelman, Defending American Religious Neutrality (Harvard University Press, 2013)
Brian Z. Tamanaha, Failing Law Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
Mary Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Jack M. Balkin, Living Originalism (Harvard University Press, 2011)
Richard W. Garnett and Andrew Koppelman, First Amendment Stories, (Foundation Press 2011)
Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Harvard University Press, 2010) Balkinization Symposium on The Decline and Fall of the American Republic
Mark Tushnet, Why the Constitution Matters (Yale University Press 2010)
Jack M. Balkin and Reva B. Siegel, The Constitution in 2020 (Oxford University Press 2009)
David Luban, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge Univ. Press 2007)
Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart (Bantam 2007)
Brian Tamanaha, Law as a Means to an End (Cambridge University Press 2006) Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution (Oxford University Press 2006) Mark Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge University Press 2006) Jack M. Balkin, ed., What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said (N.Y.U. Press 2005) Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (Oxford University Press 2004) Balkin.com homepage  |
| <b>Student Loan</b> Crisis To Get Philadelphia City Council Scrutiny <b>...</b> Posted: 22 Oct 2015 10:10 AM PDT October 22, 2015 1:10 PM  Indebted students listen as councilman O'Brien announces hearings on student loan crisis. (credit: Pat Loeb) PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Philadelphia city council will take on a pressing national issue. Members joined other city officials in announcing hearings on student loan debt. They're worried about the local impact. The District Attorney and public defender are usually on opposite sides but on this they agree: the crushing debt most law students graduate with keeps them from going into public service. In fact, D.A. Seth Williams says he's still paying off his student loans. "For years I was just putting it off. I signed a little form, I'm trying to put in forbearance. Well, chickens come home to roost and I have significant problems as many people do." It's not clear how city officials can ease the burden, but Councilman Denny O'Brien says they do have a role to play. "We can drive that conversation because of the unique concentration of these institutions in the Philadelphia area, we can lead this discussion and we intend to do that." Pat Loeb's radio experience has the makings of a country song: she lived a lot of places, went down a lot of roads, but they all led her home -- to Philadelphia and to KYW Newsradio, where she started her career some 30 years ago. Born and rais... More from Pat Loeb blog comments powered by |
![[Powered by Blogger]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sMgpoWDm0GvHZH7BajFgsiZxeLtIk79X8Glvl00C6Qpb-pvqnpvG1X-iX2fwiEwl6fmKC7x5_pI-wlq0G3UgkGGJcocOdmDIm4UyLdO0Nc=s0-d){kind=small}
| You are subscribed to email updates from student loan - Google Blog Search. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment