Every Law School Mistake Ever, From One Lady
How the other half is ruined.
Law school can ruin your life if you are not careful. It’s very expensive and the rewards are far from guaranteed. And even if you reap those rewards, you might not like what you’ve become.
But if you do everything wrong, law school becomes just a tragicomic microcosm of poor planning and bad luck.
Forbes has an article up about a woman who is $350,000 in debt and living at the poverty line. Oh, but she has a law degree, and people who haven’t been paying attention are surprised by that…
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Forbes has a profile of “Lisa S.” She’s 39 years old, has two kids, and despite two advanced degrees, she’s on public assistance. One of those advanced degrees is a J.D., but Lisa’s bad educational choices started before law deans got their hooks into her:
After getting her undergrad at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, she had less than $25,000 in student loan debt, which bothered her so much, she paid it off in two years doing freelance video production and editing everything from weddings and high school graduations to public events and historical documentaries.
She then moved to California and got a master of fine arts from the University of Southern California Film School. “I assumed the more education, the higher salary,” she says.
It’s so frustrating that the pushers of higher education prey on people who have not been educated enough to spot the scam. Here’s Lisa, she’s debt-free and starting her career. Then somebody dangles magic beans in front of her — and calling a master’s in fine arts “magic beans” is a little disparaging to the nutritional quality of beans. It’s exactly the kind of degree where if you are a superstar at your calling, you don’t need it. And if you are not, it won’t help you.
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But Lisa took the bait. Then she graduated and got the same type of jobs she had before she had the degree and the debt. Then she had a kid which, well, every financial horror story, every single one, at some point involves a bad relationship choice and extra mouths to feed.
So now we’ve got a single mom / small-time film editor living in California with loads of debt. Guys, I get emails all the time from people like Lisa S. They ask me the same question. I scream the same answer over and over again. Sometimes, the threat goes on for weeks. In the end, I’m always the old guy saying “don’t go in there” before the protagonist goes in there and gets hacked to death.
It always ends like this:
She did some number crunching and decided that law would allow her to earn more than what she was then earning, even if she earned at the low end of the pay scale. She enrolled at Pepperdine Law School, deferring her loan payments from USC, “which were killing me,” she says. The total loan debt for her MFA and her JD was initially $275,000.
“Number crunching.” “The pay scale.” “Pepperdine.” EVERY DAY some prospective law student flies by and eats my liver.
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Understand, Lisa S. made the same mistake twice. And that mistake was not simply thinking that law graduates have a “pay scale” or that Pepperdine was a good call. It’s this: “I assumed the more education, the higher salary.” That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.
Lisa graduated as a C student from Pepperdine — “[t]hough she had been an A student all her life, having a toddler while she was in law school wasn’t conducive to studying,” according to the story — in 2009. So, you already know how the rest of this story plays out:
Though she did one high-paying contract gig and passed the California bar, she eventually realized the state was too expensive for her as a single mom with two sets of grad school loans, and a $15,000 post-graduate bar study loan exam.
But moving back to Minnesota meant she had to retake the bar, which was about another year of being unable to work as a lawyer, during which time she amassed $40,000 in credit card debt, mostly to cover the extra costs associated with taking care of her son, even though she took on odd photography jobs and began adjunct-teaching law.
Now a solo practitioner in a small Minnesota town, where the median income in her field is $50,000 a year, she is just starting out and making about $20,000 per year. Even with that income, and $500 a month in child support, she and her son are on food stamps, and he is in the free school lunch program.
… And then she decided to have another kid, with a different man, but they “can’t” get married because her credit is so poor it would hurt his financial standing. (Does that line actually work on women? I’m asking for a friend.)
Law school can be a bad decision on a good day. When you surround the law school choice with other terrible life choices, the combined effect is devastating. No one person is to blame for Lisa’s situation except for Lisa. But she is paying full freight for her bad choices. It’s just sad that we live in a world where we allow people to impale themselves like this in search of higher learning.
There will always be people who drive themselves into brick walls. But do we have to build roads that lead into walls if you miss the stop signs?
How This Lawyer Ended Up With $350,000 In Debt And Near Poverty-Level Income [Forbes]
