In other words, for many young Americans, going to law school will mean literally signing away their financial independence for the rest of their adult lives. They will spend the next twenty-five years of their lives (if they never earn more than their Income-Based Repayment amount) — ten years if they work in public service — servicing debt they incurred for a skill that didn’t pay off. They might spend even longer before they are ever in the clear if they took those federal loans out before 2009 (when IBR kicked in), or if they have high interest private loans.
This isn’t just a problem for the people involved. The result is a situation no one wants: young people who aren’t in a financial position to make major steps in life — marriage, purchasing a home, having children, or saving for retirement — because they spend the majority of their life financing a decision they made at 22…
But a very large number of the other 200 odd law schools in the United States might serve their students better if they turned the JD into a shorter, skills-based course providing hands-on experience at a cost that won’t throw young Americans into debt peonage. An internet-based program that prepped students for the bar exam might, for many Americans, be a much more effective and efficient way to get the skills they need for the $50,000 to $65,000 jobs at the end of the rainbow.
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