Just as the academic year geared up this fall, both The Washington Post and The New York Times ran editorials sharply attacking the generous federal lending programs that law students depend on. The pieces came just months after an ABA task force charged with finding solutions to excessive law school debt issued its final report and recommendations. The report was a huge disappointment: Instead of calling for lending reforms, the task force trivialized the problem, pointing to income-based repayment plans and claiming that underemployed, indebted law school debtors would find highly paid work at an unspecified future date.

The Post and the Times weren't impressed either.

The Post's Charles Lane appropriately characterized the Grad PLUS Loan Program, which provides essentially unrestricted lending to graduate and professional students, as a “de facto bailout” for law schools. The schools capture the increased lending to law students and then perversely pass it back to them as higher tuition charges. Consequently, efforts to make legal education cheaper backfire, turning the federal loan program on its head. Eventually the government will write down the loans for what it intended to be a deficit reduction program.