This practice will likely extend into a system where elite students who plan to go into the private sector are recruited and promised loan forgiveness, while tuition skyrockets ever higher for students in the middle and at the bottom of the class. There is no upper limit on how much one can borrow with a Grad Plus loan, so as long as there are naive students willing to pay to go to Georgetown, the school can keep raising tuition to infinity.
Don’t look at the system as it is how. Think about the logical, grotesque direction that an institution unfettered by ethics or morals can take this practice.
We have law schools asserting that their free speech rights are being violated by having to disclose bar passage rates. The ABA is a cartel that has already been disclplined by the Department of Justice on at least a couple of occasions from engaging in anti-competitive conduct. There is no conduct that law schools (and universities in general) will not engage in to keep the money rolling in and provide cushy jobs for faculty.
Per research conducted by Brian Tamanaha and Paul Campos, many law schools have done away almost entirely with need based aid, preferring to give scholarship money to people who can raise the median GPA and LSAT scores. What will stop them from extending offers of free (to them) law school to students as applications keep dropping and students’ leverage continues to increase?
I agree that at some point, students will wake up and realize that they are being taken. But, up until that time, law schools will do everything can, ethical or not, legal or illegal, to protect their bottom line.