The American Lawyer:  How Grad PLUS Loans Sustain Zombie Law Schools, by Matt Leichter:

In recent months, the most prominent defense of law school as an investment has come from Case Western Reserve University School of Law dean Lawrence Mitchell, in both an op-ed published in The New York Times and an appearance on Bloomberg Law. Around the same time, Georgetown University Law Center professor Philip Schrag wrote a much more informed defense of the status quo in a review of Brian Tamanaha's Failing Law Schools, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. Although Tamanaha has responded to Schrag's review elsewhere, Schrag leveled a few criticisms at an article I wrote for The Am Law Daily that I will address here.

Before I do so, allow me to summarize Schrag's argument, which goes as follows: If the economic model of U.S. legal education doesn't work for many students because it leaves them with low incomes against unpayable debts, the solution to their problems is the government's Income-Based Repayment plan (IBR) and its 10-year-public-service-job sibling, Income-Contingent Repayment. Most law students can borrow up to $20,500 in unsubsidized Stafford loans at 6.8% interest (less a 1% origination fee) and cover the remaining total cost of attendance plus living expenses via Grad PLUS loans at 7.9% interest (4% fee). If they fail to find a job that pays an income commensurate to their monthly payment obligations, they can go onto IBR, which saves them from the debt peonage that would have otherwise awaited them because the government will cancel their loans after 20 years.  …

Identifying himself as a conservative, Schrag asks, " 'Why not leave
it to the market'? In our Internet-saturated age, if too many law
graduates are chasing too few jobs, word will soon get out and fewer
students will apply." Given that the Internet-saturated market forces he
refers to were mainly scambloggers who call law professors con artists,
Schrag must have thick skin. Despite the ongoing nose-dive in applications, however, there's a
reasonable chance that more people will always enroll in law school than
there will be jobs available when they graduate, so the market is
unlikely to work as Schrag believes.

The more conservative
response would not be a persistent defense of IBR but would instead be a
focused attack on both Grad PLUS loans and how private student loans
are treated in bankruptcy. The changes to these two aspects of the
student loan system, which occurred in 2006 and 2005, respectively, have
insulated many ABA law schools from a credit and enrollment crisis that
would otherwise imperil them because private lenders would not be
willing to lend money to law students indefinitely while the government
has.

To
illustrate, here's the annual Stafford loan limit (subsidized plus
unsubsidized) and median law school tuition, adjusted for inflation.

In a counterfactual world without Grad PLUS loans and dischargeable
private loans, private law school debtors would have started using the
bankruptcy system to deal with their unpayable loans beginning in the
late 2000s. Lenders would have responded by raising interest rates,
demanding cosigners, ending in-school deferments, requiring clearer data
on graduates' employment outcomes from the schools, and eventually
ceasing lending to law students once they realized the low likelihood of
repayment. The result: law schools with poor graduate outcomes would
have curtailed their expansion and halted their tuition increases, if
not shut down entirely.

Sadly, in the actual world we inhabit,
the federal government has chosen to sustain a number zombie law schools
that can only be killed by convincing students who pay full tuition via
unlimited debt not to attend them. Even if some of these schools
shutter, there's no reason to believe that the remaining ones will
reduce their tuition significantly because the nucleus of the enrollment
pool consists of people willing to pay whatever law schools tell them
to. Thus, conservatives who are interested in using market forces to
manage law school pricing should start first with the Grad PLUS Loan
Program, and then wait for inflation to erode away the Stafford loan
limits.