High time

Instapundit:

I PREDICT MORE SUITS LIKE THIS: Unemployed Grad Files $50million Class Action v. Law School for Misrepresenting Placement Data. “Plaintiff would not have attended TJSL and incurred more than $150,000 in school loans if she knew the truth about her job prospects upon graduation.”

Good, and past due. Colleges have grown fat on the student debt scam, so this is going to be interesting. The parallel to the sub-prime scandal is clear enough. In the case of mortgages, people were enticed into debt on the shaky promise of a future profit when they sold the house; in the case of student loans, young people are enticed into debt on the shaky promise of a future profit when they enter a higher-paying career. Same model, same miserable result. (The education case is probably the more egregious of the two: Nobody can predict housing prices, but a university Gender Studies department knows damn well its BA degree is almost certainly worth nothing in the job market, and may even have negative value. That a college would even make it possible to graduate with such a degree is outrageous.)

University departments and programs are supposed to keep abreast of labor market trends in their specialty area, to know the likely future value of what they're selling. And, when it's in their interest, they pretend that they do:

Every time a department wants funding to launch a new program, the pitch that's trotted out is that there is, or soon will be, a large unmet demand for the kind of people that will be produced by the new program. That makes it sound like they really have their finger on the pulse of the labor market, doesn't it? But meanwhile they're claiming ignorance about the fact that the graduates they're now cranking out have no job prospects. I want to see that explained, from the witness stand.

From law schools to philosophy majors and everything in between, just to pump out graduates with no concern about their future prospects is bad enough. But when those graduates have been allowed and encouraged to pile up mountains of student loan debt in the process, it's simply criminal. There is no conceivable excuse for operating that way, except greedy self interest. The student loan scam has been an enormous boon to the business of higher education; for the student victims, the result is to go forth under a pile of non-forgivable debt that can't even be cleared by bankruptcy: Good luck, new grads -- and thanks for everything.

Byron