Catholic law schools and the student debt crisis

Yesterday the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) released the 9-month employment data for the class of 2011.  Only 65% of graduates obtained a job for which bar passage is required.  Fewer than half of the graduates obtained a job in private practice.  (Paul Campos estimates that the real numbers are much lower once we subtract law school-funded jobs and other temporary positions.) Salary data will be released in August, but I'm guessing that won't be a pretty picture either, as the restructuring of the legal services market continues to put downward pressure on salaries.  Along with the bleak jobs picture, the class of 2011 emerged with a mountain of debt.  The debt is every bit as high at Catholic law schools as anywhere else.  Here is the average debt for 2011 graduates of Catholic law schools:

Catholic U ($142,000)

St. Thomas (FL) ($137,000)

San Francisco ($137,000)

Loyola (LA) ($132,000)

Georgetown ($132,000)

Fordham ($131,000)

DePaul ($126,000)

St. John's ($126,000)

Detroit Mercy ($124,000)

Villanova ($122,000)

St. Louis University ($120,000)

Marquette ($117,000)

Santa Clara ($117,000)

Creighton ($116,000)

Loyola (NO) ($115,000)

Seton Hall ($113,000)

Loyola (Chi) ($112,000)

San Diego ($110,000)

St. Mary's ($109,000)

Seattle Univ. ($109,000)

Ave Maria ($108,000)

Dayton ($107,000)

St. Thomas (MN) ($105,000)

Gonzaga ($104,000)

Boston College ($100,000)

Duquesne ($97,000)

Notre Dame ($94,000)

Barry ($41,000)

In many ways, we want to be like everyone else -- strong scholarly cultures, top professors, a full roster of clinical opportunities, top-of-the-line student services, etc.  And of course, we want to be highly ranked, so we give scholarship aid to high-LSAT/high-GPA applicants -- subsidizing that aid with the the full tuition paid by students with weaker entering profiles and (on average) weaker job prospects coming out.  The growing gap between the salary and debt of law school graduates is getting plenty of attention now, though Catholic law schools have hardly been models for charting a path forward.  If Catholic legal education is designed to equip students to practice law as a vocation, serving God by serving others, the crippling effect of huge student debt should be even more painful for us than for our colleagues at secular schools.

John Breen and Lee Strang are exploring the history of Catholic legal education, noting the lost opportunities over the last century when Catholic law schools could have charted a distinct path in terms of the substantive education they provided.  By working so hard to be like everyone else, much of our capacity to be salt and light to the world of legal education was lost.  When future generations of scholars look back at our era, will they see a similar lost opportunity for Catholic law schools to bear witness to the injustice of how we finance legal education?