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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

One thing I think is interesting here is the uncontrolled growth in costs. Paul Campos of Lawyers, Guns, and Money posted the average private-school law tuition [1]:

  All figures have been adjusted to constant 2016 dollars:

  1956:  $4,178
  1974: $11,232
  1985: $16,803
  1995: $26,480
  2005: $35,550
  2015: $45,123

That just blows me away.

[1] http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/end-game

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It's funny because you look at these figures, you look at real estate prices, you look at stock prices, and you think, wait we are in a double digit inflationary environment!

Actually what is inflationary is the activities of the middle/upper-middle class (college, housing, stocks, etc), which are of course underrepresented in the CPI indices. The combination of the never ending debt bubble and quantitative easing has created a very localised inflation.

A 25% increase in 10 years is not double digit inflation / year. It's around 2% / year.

Those figures were already adjusted for inflation (it says 2016 dollars)

Thanks. I didn't catch that. Still not double digit...

Also, you can still get a degree for under 20k/year http://www.thebestschools.org/blog/2011/11/18/10-affordable-... at many public law schools.

At least with respect to 2005 and 2015, that increase looks to be in line with private undergrad tuition increases.

Of course, the top private undergrad institutions give much more in the way of financial aid than their legal graduate school counterparts.

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