ABA Journal:  Law School Transparency has resived its estimates of the total cost of financing a legal education.  The group’s new numbers show that the cost of paying full, out of state tuition prices are even higher than originally estimated. 

Previously, Law School Transparency had estimated that the average cost of borrowing money for legal education was about $195,000 for students starting law school this year, and $200,000 for students starting next year.  Law School Transparency has now revised those numbers to $210,796 and $216,406, respectively.

Business Insider:  “With law firms cutting back, thousands of law school graduates are still unemployed while stuck with six-figure student loan debt.  Some students have filed class-action law suits against more than a dozen schools alleging that officials misled them about their job prospects after graduation.  ‘The system of legal education is completely broken now,’ former Chicago-Kent College of Law student Richard Komaiko told us. ‘Almost everyone I know from law school is unemployed or seeking alternative employment.’  We wanted to hear the truth behind the crisis, so we interviewed several recent graduates, including those who have gone into entirely different fields, and one who is living just above the poverty line.”

OpenMarket.org:  “Federal financial aid policies have encouraged law students to borrow increasing amounts to attend law school, despite the glut of lawyers (oddly, government policies encourage more people to go to law school, driving up law school tuition, even as the Obama administration seeks to cut back on vocational education aimed at training the skilled blue-collar workers who are in desperately short supply in much of the country). The result, says law professor Brian Tamanaha, is a “Quickly Exploding Law Graduate Debt Disaster” in which most recent graduates of many law schools will never be able to pay off their staggering student loan debt.”

ABA Journal:  “Are the wrong people losing interest in law school?

That’s the question posed by the Atlantic, which notes a 13.6 percent drop in applicants who scored highest on the Law School Admission Test, but only a 4.3 percent drop in applicants who scored the lowest. The Law School Admission Council released figures on the one-year drop in applicants at ABA-accredited schools based on numbers collected through the end of March.”

The American Interest:  “Spring is here, which means that it’s acceptance letter season around many American kitchen tables this time of year. And because many graduate as well as undergrad schools send out acceptances around this time of year, both high school and college students will be checking the mail to see whether the school of their choice has sent fat or thin envelopes.

More than ever in these tough times, those letters will pose some hard choices in many families. To attend a more expensive liberal arts college or go for the scholarship at the bigger but less expensive state school? Does it really make sense to take out all of that debt for that graduate degree?

Many millions of students nationwide are now beginning to think about their local junior colleges, trade schools, or even start-ups as sensible post-secondary options. At the graduate level, if trends hold, close to 50,000 students, most of them probably liberal arts graduates without any real idea of what they want to do with themselves, will sign up for law school.

It’s all quite exciting for students and their families. It’s also expensive – often more so than young people realize. For those considering law school, Professor Paul Campos analyzes the picture at his blog. Close to half of all of law school graduates, he emphasizes, end up working not in big law firms, but in “small law” (firms of two to ten lawyers), or opening up their own solo practice. Given the relatively low salaries in small law firms and the high overhead costs of founding a new law firm (conference rooms, legal databases, bar fees), most young lawyers can look forward to no more than a median salary of $50,000, with those in the 75th percentile looking forward to … $62,500.”