Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, there's an emotional and personal story of an individual graduate who got in debt and then didn't even try to pass the bar.

On the other hand, we have this citation: "On average, our graduates earn $750,000 more in their lifetime than if they hadn’t received their law degree from Coastal Law."

I find it curious, how the article author decided to treat such a critical piece of information. Statistics gives a better view on a situation concerning millions of people than one emotional story. Yet, this citation is given without any analysis or proof. There's no attempt to understand, if this is true or not; instead, it's only present in the article as citation of a clearly interested party (the college administration), so that the reader who's already involved on one side of the debate, is ready to disregard it as excuses and advertisement.

May be it is excuses and advertisement indeed. But the article doesn't stop to think about it. The most important question you could ask yourself: is it worth it, for median student, to spend all this money? — is not addressed. What is it, if not bad journalism?

It shouldn't be a question of the median student. If it's worth it in aggregate, the loan company should have at least as much liability as the student does for loans that don't pay off. The loan company is the one that has the resources to manage risk, the student has no resources.

The problem right now is that all of the liability sits on the student, and the loan company actually stands to make more money off "bad" loans than "good" ones because of interest and deferred payments. The incentives for the loan companies are totally backwards.

So then they simply start pulling the stats over which demographic group does worse after going to a big school. I'll bet you on average its the lower income people.

The perspective from an eastern european friend of mine: "everything in the US is a business, and every business has a thousand middlemen making money". Education should be a service provided by the government of the people, so that accountability is the responsibility of the people.

That $750k fact sounds fishy to me. People who self-select into advanced degrees generally possess qualities that are correlated with earnings (intelligence, ambition, rich parents, etc). Does the $750k figure compare that group against similarly ambitious and intelligent people who went another route in life? I have no idea how you'd create a fair control group to make such a comparison.

A well-paid lawyer makes several hundred thousand dollars more per year than the comparison group they're referring to (which as you suggest, is probably deliberately defined to be low-earning). Those are tough jobs to get, especially coming from an uncompetitive law school, but for those who manage to do it, their lifetime earnings could plausibly be $10 MM higher. It only takes a few of those to pull the average up by $750k.

Agreed.

But why didn't journalist investigate this further? That's what I find most disturbing about the article.

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