In this recent post on his TaxProf blog, David Caron links to a piece by Cleveland State’s David Barnhizer, which contains distressing news for a lot of law schools: they could go belly up.

Law schools are good evidence for my argument that we have oversold higher education. For many years, people kept hearing that law school was a good “investment” that would pay off even if you didn’t land a lucrative job in the legal profession. And now we have a surfeit of them, with many highly-paid professors and deans nervously hoping that other schools will fail and they’ll survive.

But if you think about law school the way the higher ed establishment types usually do, it’s hard to see any problem. After all, on average lawyers earn way more than do people without college degrees, and quite a lot more than most people with them. Therefore, doesn’t it follow that we need more law school graduates? Based on the argument we usually hear from the establishment, it would seem that we should be opening more law schools and enrolling more students to fill the apparent demand.