The reform I think ultimately most important in all of this is to uh impose restrictions
on federal loans let me just explain up until recently the Federal Government guaranteed
student loans with no limit and a few years ago they began providing student loans directly
through the graduate plus program as long as these loans are provided without any evaluation
of the likelihood of repayment any evaluation of the economic return without any limits
on the size of the loan that students can take out law schools will continue to raise
tuition as long as they have students who are willing to come the Federal loan program
provides them with the ability to come uh so in the book I propose different sorts of
caps and outcome tests for loans now the main opposition to these proposals will come from
legal academics who say that's outrageous the loans are important to provide access
to the legal profession and my response to that objection is that what limits access
today isn't the unavailability of Federal loans what limits access today is the extraordinarily
high tuition that we charge and if law schools are really committed about access we can provide
need based financial aid uh so what's inhibiting access is us the fact that our tuition is
now up to fifty thousand dollars a year uh so I hope the senators I hope someone reads
this part of it the op-ed in the New York Times that I published two weeks ago focused
on the federal loan program for that reason I wanted to communicate to senators that you
need to take a look at the impact of providing unlimited funds no questions asked as long
as that's the case condition will continue to go up the problem seems to me to be that
not all law schools can afford the high aid that would solve the problem under your suggestion
that the law schools which can afford it are quite often perhaps not always but quite often
uh those schools which whose uh uh student bodies are comprised of the already affluent
and that schools which make an effort to educate people who have been shut out of education
generally and legal education in particular and who accordingly charge very low tuitions
probably cannot afford to stay in business without federal loans and if they can't stay
or guarantees and if they can't stay in business then the very schools that are making an effort
to provide social and economic mobility will be the ones harmed by curtailment of federal
loans well that's the objection and you know what do you think about that you're right
except in so far as that should be an important consideration when the cap is set so for example
I propose two different kinds of caps one is to cap how much money an individual student
can borrow from the federal government the other is to cap how much money any particular
law school can get from the federal government in a given year and so the cap can be set
at a level that takes into consideration precisely your concern the figure I came up with and
it could be any I was just using it as an example as to say that law students should
not be allowed to borrow more than a hundred twenty thousand dollars which is a lot by
the way now that's what I was gonna say so really all that's saying to law schools is
set your tuition at twenty thousand you'll be okay in fact you can set it at twenty five
thousand you'll still be okay uh so I wasn't saying cut it off of course we need access
and students need to borrow I borrowed money to go to law school my parents are school
teachers uh the problem is that because there's no cap there are law school with average indebtedness
of a hundred fifty thousand and these students are not gonna they will not pay this money
back uh especially if you look at the schools and the placement rate upon graduation which
I have uh so I'm really setting a cap as a way of protecting the students ultimately
from taking on debt that will be unaffordable to them and imposing restrictions on the law
schools in terms of how high they set their tuition but I absolutely agree with you that
we need to whatever caps are put into place need to be done with attention to maintaining
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