Academic

Should Law Professors Expect Loan Forgiveness?

By Kevin Maillard

A caveat--this post is to incite dialogue, not to make grand pronouncements about the essential nature of Grad v. Law, or who suffers more in bearing loans.  I would just like to know if loan debt is an issue for law professors.

For PhD graduate students in arts and sciences, there are not a lot of perks to being in training for an academic career.  The mantra, repeated over and over is "delayed gratification."  Genteel poverty is the name of the game: recycled clothes, charmingly run down apartments, and lots of Ramen.  Perhaps much of the vegetarianism and simplicity emerges from financial considerations.  Grad students, as a whole, live ascetic lives, with the ever-present end goal of Tenure Track looming in the linoleum hallways.

Professional schools are quite different.  Law and business students, in particular, always live in very different worlds than "Grad Students."  (For purposes of this post, "Grad Students" are PhD students.) They live in different apartments, eat in different restaurants, and certainly read different books.  Of course, there are substantive differences because of the attraction of the subject matter.  But could we ever imagine the Economics department holding a charity auction where the students bid $900 on a weekend at Professor X's vacation house? Or $400 for a kareoke party with Profs. Junior and Young?  Offering $300 for a group lunch with your favorite Empiricist?  Probably not.

What causes the differences in spending in these types of students?  Perhaps the starting salary of professional students being much larger than that of grad students, or the ability of law students to secure firm jobs during the summer? Either way, the idea of what "payoff" means greatly determines the style of living assumed by the postgraduate student.

Law students begin their education with an expectation of return.  In current markets, that is shakier, of course, but students would not take out large, LARGE amounts of education loans without hedging some sort of bet on being able to repay the debt.  The average debt for a law student is about $100,000 (depending on your source) , and for Graduate students, $25,000. 

But many graduate students have no guarantee of repaying loans.  What they do have is funding and assistantships, so that many graduate students receive their diplomas without a dollar of educational loan debt to their name.  Fellowships, teaching classes, and grading papers have all supplemented PhD educations, gladly but slowly alleviating any future debt.

But for those professional students entering law school solely to become scholars, how do we account for the difference in eventual salaries between private firm work and law school teaching?  If the assumption is that students eventually earn enough money to pay back loans from firm salaries, how do we account for those that enter public service, and then switch to teaching?  There certainly can be no assumption that Ms. Bronx Defender or Mr. DA has knocked off $175,000 in debt on a $48,000 salary. 

Of course salary is always an uncomfortable subject for negotiations, but accounting for loan debt is perhaps an area that deserves more attention by law professors themselves.  Assuming that all law professors have worked the requisite number of years at a requisite high-paying firm in a high paying city would be unreasonable.  Even if every entering professor practiced at BigLaw, paying a extremely high and ambitious loan burden of $2,000 a month, it would take over six years to pay back $150,000, which is not an unreasonable amount of debt for a law student.  Or put another way, could hiring law schools themselves ease this burden, aside from regular salary?

The vast majority of law professors, while well compensated in the academic world, do not earn BigLaw salaries. For recent graduates of law schools, loan debt is a living and itchy issue that perhaps more senior professors are unaware of.  It is rarely discussed, or acknowledged as an important issue.

So, the big question is this:  should law schools offer loan forgiveness for law teaching, in the same vein of assisting the public defenders, district attorneys, and poverty workers?

Please, fair and constructive comments, thanks.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on July 20, 2009 (boomark / email).