The Rooster Bar, Grisham - B

                                             There are few things in life more fun than reading a new John Grisham novel. He tends to slay dragons, and here he has the for-profit education business in his sights. Three students at Foggy Bottom Law School, a diploma mill of no repute, walk away from their third year of school, repudiate hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt apiece, change their identities and start practicing law in DC. After all, in the criminal courts and, in particular, the DUI section, no one expects you went to Georgetown or asks to see your license. The cash-only business starts out well enough, but it is soon apparent that they can't run the scam indefinitely. Simultaneously, they uncover a web of misleading ownership behind the law school and others like it. They manage to leak information to assist a class-action lawsuit and to piggy-back their going-out-of-business bogus law firm into the big payday. Like many Grisham protagonists, they wind up on a beach sipping pina coladas. This is not his best effort, but it is still is a one-day read. There is a very interesting takeaway, and that is the 2006 Congressional give-away to for profit schools. There are no caps on what can be charged or lent for graduate schools, leading to hundreds of thousands of people who were taken in, and billions of dollars of loss to the Treasury. It's a classic privatization of profit and socialization of loss.