Law School Debt: By the Numbers
What does $153,000 in student debt look like?
Here’s the annotated script for the segment, courtesy of our friends at Bloomberg Law. Source material is bracketed.
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LAW SCHOOL DEBT BY THE NUMBERS — BLOOMBERG LAW — ANNOTATED SEGMENT SCRIPT
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Just how onerous is the debt load for law students? Consider the graduates of San Diego’s California Western School of Law. They have an average of more than $153,000 in loans, the biggest debt load of any law school in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report.
[US News blog post: http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/the-short-list-grad-school/articles/2012/03/22/10-law-schools-that-lead-to-the-most-debt]
That’s enough to buy this forty-one foot yacht, complete with hydraulic Jet Ski lift.
[From an eBay listing, which has since been deleted.]
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Or stay on this private Caribbean island for more than one hundred days.
[Petit Saint Vincent in the Grenadines. http://www.petitstvincent.com/rates/nightly-rates.html High season rates for 1-bedroom of $1,350. It would take 113 days to spend $153,000.]
Or dine at an Outback Steakhouse every night for more than sixteen years.
[Nation’s Restaurant News article: http://nrn.com/article/outback-steakhouse-owner-plans-300m-ipo?page=0,2&ad=full-service Outback Steakhouse’s average check was $20 in 2011. With a generous tip, call it $25 per meal. You could dine for 6,120 nights, or 16.8 years, on $153,000.]
Even if they stretch out the loans over twenty-five years, graduates could be spending as much as twenty percent of their gross income just to pay off the debt.
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[We used the US Department of Education’s loan repayment calculator: http://www.direct.ed.gov/RepayCalc/dlentry1.html]
[We used a blended interest rate of 7.3 percent, which is the rate Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law Professor William Henderson – an expert in legal education reform – says is typical for students who incur up to $150,000 in debt: http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_law_school_bubble_how_long_will_it_last_if_law_grads_cant_pay_bills/]
[Using the Direct Plus loans calculation, graduates stretching loans out over 25 years would pay $930 a month, or $11,160 a year. To calculate how large that could be, at maximum, as a percentage of the graduate’s gross income, we used the median salary of $52,000 for government jobs, as listed in the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools on page 39. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/misc/legal_education/2012_official_guide_for_web.authcheckdam.pdf]
While Cal Western tops the charts, it’s hardly the only law school where graduates are saddled with massive debt. The average law student nationwide leaves school owing more than one hundred thousand dollars.
[US News blog post: http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/the-short-list-grad-school/articles/2012/03/22/10-law-schools-that-lead-to-the-most-debt]
And there are far more law school graduates than available legal jobs. This decade, U-S law schools will produce four times as many new lawyers as there will be new lawyer jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
[The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a growth of 73,000 lawyer jobs during the decade 2010-2020. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Legal/Lawyers.htm#tab-6 For the number of law school graduates, we used 40,000 as the approximately number each year (or 400,000 over the decade), based on data from the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools on page 81: http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/misc/legal_education/2012_official_guide_for_web.authcheckdam.pdf]
So it’s no wonder that the number of people taking the LSAT has dropped twenty-four percent over the last two years.
[Law School Admissions Council data: http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/Data/lsats-administered.asp]
Law school isn’t the ticket to riches it once was.
Law School Debt By the Numbers [Bloomberg Law / YouTube]
Large Numbers of Law, Week of 8/22/11 [Constitutional Daily]
10 Law Schools That Lead to the Most Debt [U.S. News & World Report]
Earlier: From J.D. to Food Stamps: The Personal Cost of Going to Law School
