Links for 1/11/11

Kelli Space

I had bought into every piece of college propaganda on the supposed personal and financial benefits of campus life and getting my degree. Unfortunately, I had also overlooked the minor detail of how I would pay for this coveted experience. “Private loans,” advisers suggested. “Everyone does it. It’s good debt!”…

Elyse Ashburn

legacy applicants got a 23.3-percentage-point increase in their probability of admission…

Josh Fischman

“We have a boutique problem,” said Mark David Milliron, deputy director of higher education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who joined Ms. Thor on the panel, which was about using technology to improve graduation rates. There are plenty of good ideas, the two said, but colleges are reluctant to adopt solutions that did not arise from their own campuses.
There is an institutional mind-set, Mr. Milliron said, that if something was not invented on a particular campus, it is not appropriate for that particular campus…

“Higher education has been good at creating islands of innovation,”…

DAVID SEGAL

He spent it on a law degree. And from every angle, this now looks like a catastrophic investment.

Well, every angle except one: the view from law schools. To judge from data that law schools collect, and which is published in the closely parsed U.S. News and World Report annual rankings, the prospects of young doctors of jurisprudence are downright rosy.

In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades…

How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson… “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”…

Apparently, there is no shortage of 22-year-olds who think that law school is the perfect place to wait out a lousy economy and the gasoline that fuels this system — federally backed student loans — is still widely available…

law school is a pie-eating contest where the first prize is more pie…