Student Debts

Is Law School Loan Debt Ruining Your Love Life?

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The old ball and chain.

Of the many things we’ve spoken about when it comes to student loan debt, romance and dating generally hasn’t been one of them. You probably never thought that your student loans would be both financially and romantically ruinous, but as it turns out, young adults aren’t keen on getting into bed with six-figures of debt every night.

Sure, you may never be able to buy a house, but you already knew that — after all, you’ve already got a mortgage on your education. That being said, it might take a while to find that special someone to rent with for the foreseeable future. Or hell, let’s be a little more realistic: you might be living with your parents. Do you really feel comfortable bringing home dates to a room filled with stuffed animals or high school football trophies?

If you feel like your love life is becoming a parodic version of that Carly Rae Jepsen song (Hey, I just met you / And this is crazy / But you’ve got loan debt / Lose my number, maybe?), fear not, because you’re not alone….

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Law School Over-Promises Financial Aid; Will Have $2.4 Million Shortfall Over Three Years

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It finally looks like the out-of-control cost of legal education came back to bite a law school in the behind.

A scandal is erupting at the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. The law school reportedly made more financial aid commitments than the school had a budget for. Brandeis blew their financial aid budget by more than 100%. That is, they promised more than double the money the school had budgeted.

Louisville Law’s assistant dean of admissions, Brandon Hamilton, has resigned. It appears that Hamilton may have been offering more money to students who had not yet decided on an Louisville in order to entice them to matriculate.

Maybe if Louisville had done more to contain tuition costs it wouldn’t have felt pressured to throw so much financial aid money at students to make their education cost effective?

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TTTrading Places: Law Schools Acquire New Territory

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Law school deans should bet a dollar on whether or not change the name of a law school makes more people come.

And the band plays on. No matter what happens in the economy. No matter what kind of evidence we get that the market for legal jobs is totally in the tank. No matter what, law schools continue to expand and continue to find new ways to convince more people to spend a lot of money getting an education that might not lead to employment.

Of course, I’m talking about something new and annoying Cooley did, because you basically can’t have a conversation about what is wrong with law schools anymore without referencing some kind of fresh horror enacted by the people who run the Thomas M. Cooley Law School.

But this impulse towards MOAR LAW STUDENTS obviously isn’t just a Cooley problem. Even though some schools that are already in the law game have thoughtfully looked at reducing class sizes, there are always going to be schools and universities eager to provide prospective law students with educations they can waste money on.

Time for some stories about law school acquisitions, a plague that has now made it all the way down to Texas…

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Embarrassment of Riches, Class of 2011 Graduate Has TWO Job Offers

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Yeah, you read the headline right. We’re talking about the class of 2011. The class that Jim Leipold of NALP thinks probably faces the very bottom of the legal job market. You could make a movie — a horror movie, a goddamn snuff film — about the struggles of the class of 2011.

But there are people in the class of 2011 who did not crash and burn. It’s a struggle, it’s a war, and there’s nothing that anyone’s giving. But… at the end of the day, there are some people who are making it.

Apparently, success is so rare for the class of ’11 that some of them don’t even know how to handle it. Yesterday, the wife of an idiot 3L asked us how to stop her husband from making a huge mistake. Today we’re giving advice to a different person — a woman who has worked hard and come out of the muck and now finds herself in a position of strength.

Most people in the class of 2011 are just taking whatever they can get. Let’s see if we can help this lady with her distinctly “first world problem.” I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s gonna get weird. She has two offers…

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3L With Law School Debt and Underwater Mortgage Wants A New Car. Stupid Is As Stupid Does.

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This kid should buy the Jaguar from Mad Men and call it a day.

You know, at some point you’ve got to stop trying to help people save themselves and instead just sit back and watch the tremendous destruction.

The Washington Post runs an advice column for people trying to save money. This weekend a distressed wife of a soon-to-be 3L had her question answered. It appears that her husband is determined to pursue a destructive and financially ruinous path, and there’s nothing she can do to make him think reasonably.

Well step aside, 3L wife; like the pull yourself together scene in Airplane, I think we can organize a line of people on the internet willing to slap some sense into this joker…

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Law School Success Stories: High Risk, High Reward

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Last month, in the inaugural post in our series of Law School Success Stories, we focused on the theme of “the value of thrift.” We outlined a “low risk” approach to law school, profiling happy law school graduates who secured their law degrees without going into excessive debt — under $50K upon graduation, which is the recommendation of Professor Brian Tamanaha, author of a new book (affiliate link) about reforming legal education.

Today we’re going to cover the flip side: the “high risk, high reward” approach to legal education. In some ways this is a dangerous theme. The promise of Biglaw bucks is the siren song that leads many to crash on the rocks of joblessness and crippling debt (as Will Meyerhofer discussed earlier today).

Some law schools clearly exaggerate the ability of a legal education to increase a person’s career prospects and earning potential. But for some subset of law students, however small, law school does turn out to be a golden ticket. Their numbers might be inflated, but they do exist. Law school has allowed these individuals to increase their incomes dramatically. And — shocker! — many of these J.D. holders actually enjoy their lucrative new jobs.

Read about a young woman who went from being a secretary to having a secretary — along with a six-figure paycheck. Meet a young man with a rather unmarketable undergraduate degree who now, thanks to law school, makes bank in New York City.

Here’s another way of describing today’s success stories: “Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you….”

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Who Is the Great Satan of the Legal Profession?

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Ed. note: This post is by Will Meyerhofer, a former Sullivan & Cromwell attorney turned psychotherapist. He holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work, and he blogs at The People’s Therapist. His new book, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist, is available on Amazon, as is his previous book, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy (affiliate links).

I participated recently in a panel discussion at a conference, speaking with other lawyer/blogger types in front of an audience consisting largely of people from law firms and law schools. After we finished, I did the decent thing and sat and listened to the panel that followed mine. I happened to choose an empty seat next to a woman who introduced herself to me later as a dean at a law school, in charge of career placement, or whatever the euphemism is for trying to find students non-existent jobs. The law school was a small one — yes, one of those dreaded “third tier” places.

She confronted me afterwards. “I guess I’m the bad guy, huh?”

I was startled by her candor, but I knew what she meant. This was one of those people from a third tier law school — the greedy cynical fraudsters signing kids up for worthless degrees, then leaving them high and dry, unemployed and deeply in debt.

Despite her participation in crimes against humanity, I had to admit she didn’t seem so bad, in person.

Then I snapped back to my senses — and went on the attack, assuming my sacred role as The People’s burning spear of vengeance….

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Quote of the Day: The Broken Economics of Legal Education

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Brian Tamanaha

The average debt of law graduates tops $100,000, and most new lawyers do not earn salaries sufficient to make the monthly payments on this debt. More than one-third of law graduates in recent years have failed to obtain lawyer jobs. Thousands of new law graduates will enter a government-sponsored debt relief program, and many will never fully pay off their law school debt.

– Washington University Law professor Brian Tamanaha, author of Failing Law Schools (affiliate link), painting a rosy picture of what life is like for recent law school graduates.

(What can be done to remedy this situation? Additional insights from Professor Tamanaha, after the jump.)

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Law School Success Stories: The Virtue of Thrift

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Last month, we solicited law school success stories from you, our readers. We’re often quite critical of law schools around these parts. So, to even out the scales a bit, we’re going to be running a series of happy stories, focused on graduates who are glad they went to law school.

We’ve tried to organize the success stories under a few broad themes, to lend some structure to the discussion. Some of the themes exist in tension with each other, and not all themes will apply to all readers. By the time the series is done, however, we hope that the stories will collectively shed some light on the question of whether one should go to law school.

Let’s launch into our first collection of law school success stories. They could be grouped under the theme of “go cheap, or go home”….

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Dreams Do Come True: You Can Pay Off Your Student Debts In Cash

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There’s a Canadian out there living the dream. He graduated from law school at the University of Toronto in 2009, during the heat of the recession.

But now, just three years later, he’s completely debt-free. A little while ago, he made his last debt payment of over $100,000, in cash.

Of course, he didn’t make that kind of money being a lawyer. There aren’t a lot of people who graduated in 2009 from law school who were able to pay off their debts through their work in law.

But I still consider Alex Kenjeev my hero. Slow rolls his debts, makes a bunch on money, then dumps bags of cash on the bank to leave him alone.

It could still happen….

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