Last week, I blogged about the increased fees that LSAC is charging potential law students (two-thirds of whom will never go to law school) for its mandatory services.  This week, the Blogfather informs us, via TaxProfBlog, that the ABA is considering permitting schools to enroll students who have not taken the LSAT.

Prof. Reynolds snarks that this is a way to deal with dropping applicant numbers.  While we’re being all cynical, I’ll add that it’s a way to ignore rampant grade inflation, especially in  “peace studies” majors.  One of the advantages of a standardised test is that it enables schools to compare students in tough majors from top schools to those in easier majors at grade-inflated schools.  It also provides some semblance of accountability in terms of whether a student has actually received a college education that teaches her critical thinking skills.  Not only do some majors lead to better job prospects, they also correlate to higher LSAT scores. Absent a requirement to take the LSAT, such differences between students, majors, and universities disappear entirely.

Cynicism aside, the biggest problem with not requiring students to take a standardised test for admissions is that they will need to take a much harder, longer, and rigourous test to practise law, Wisconsin graduates aside. The LSAT is a better predictor of first-time and eventual bar-exam success than are law school or undergraduate grades. (Faculty Lounge.) Fair or not, students who cannot do well on time-limited and multiple-choice exams will struggle mightily with the bar – and that struggle happens after, not before, they have given three or four years of their lives to law school and accumulated six figures of student loan debt.

Whether the issue be affirmative action or the LSAT, we do not do well by potential lawyers by putting up the highest and most durable barriers to practising law at the end of three years and six figures of debt.  Such barriers, to the extent practicable, belong earlier in the process.  Law schools are not required to do a darn thing with the LSAT scores of its students – it can admit an entire class full of people who score below 130, if it chooses – but requiring them to admit only students who have taken the LSAT provides some measure of accountability, or at least defeats the suggestion that a law school could not possibly have foreseen that many of its students would never pass the bar exam.

The value of the bar exam is a debate for another blog post, but its existence cannot be denied, nor the correlation between being a good LSAT examinee and becoming licensed to practise law.  The only question is whether we will put the rate-limiting step exclusively at the end of long, expensive process or keep one rate-limiting step at the beginning.

Instapundit continues his daily “higher education updates“, this time linking to an article in the Baltimore Sun, asking “Is Law School Worth It?”.  The Sun follows a few graduates of Baltimore-area schools in their quest for legal employment (which is nearly non-existent) and describes their debt loads.  This, of course, means that it’s time for the regular Roxeanne rant about reporting of law student debt:

Graduates can defer repayment for approximately two years between a grace period and forbearance. That means that the people who are just starting to struggle with their loans graduated in 2010 and started law school in 2007.  Any problems with default, reduced payment through IBR, etc. are from the class of 2009 and earlier.  Law school tuition increases faster than college tuition and even health care costs. To give you an idea: my alma mater costs 50% more than it did when I started in the middle of the ‘aughts.  So let’s do the math.  If you graduated in 2009, paying your way through a private school with loans, you probably have $150,000 or so in debt.  Move back to the class of 2004, and you’re looking at a maximum of about $100,000. However, If you are a 1L this academic year, you will probably have $210,000 in debt.

Current stats are for students whose debt load is in the high five figures, low hundred-thousand.  Current students will graduate with twice that.

How’s that going to work out? If students repay it all, how will they buy houses, cars, clothes, or even pay someone to cut their hair?  How does the economy work with a productive class whose every dollar is sucked into servicing debt?  If income-based repayment does its job and severely limits what graduates must pay, therefore permitting them to spend money on other things, how will the federal government service the debt?  There is a trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt. If the government has to pick up any non-minute cost of that, even a mere 10% (which leaves students paying 90%), that’s the cost of a Middle East war.

The problem has not quite arrived yet because those with the highest debt loads, which are also the most numerous group, are still in school or in deferment.  Give it a few years, however, and the government will be running deficits of tens of billions or a hundred billion a year.