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A pretty amazing article appeared in the NY Times at the beginning of this year, and it began like this:

If there is ever a class in how to remain calm while trapped beneath $250,000 in loans, Michael Wallerstein ought to teach it.

Here he is, sitting one afternoon at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a tall, sandy-haired, 27-year-old radiating a kind of surfer-dude serenity. His secret, if that’s the right word, is to pretty much ignore all the calls and letters that he receives every day from the dozen or so creditors now hounding him for cash.

“And I don’t open the e-mail alerts with my credit score,” he adds. “I can’t look at my credit score any more.”

Mr. Wallerstein, who can't afford to pay down interest and thus watches the outstanding loan balance grow, is in roughly the same financial hell as people who bought more home than they could afford during the real estate boom. But creditors can't foreclose on him because he didn't spend the money on a house.

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

The article is astonishing on many different levels, but one of the most important ramifications of the so-called Law School Industry, is this:

It is an open secret, says Professor Henderson of Indiana University - one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves - that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey's guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as "employed after nine months" even if he or she has a job that doesn't require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee's? You're employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You're working, too.

Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think of law schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it.

They are also cash cows.

"If you're a law school and you add 25 kids to your class, that's a million dollars, and you don't even have to hire another teacher," says Allen Tanenbaum, a lawyer in Atlanta who led the American Bar Association's commission on the impact of the economic crisis on the profession and legal needs. "That additional income goes straight to the bottom line."

This is a huge article, both in detail and in ramifications for the Law School industry.

Read it and weep.

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