Tuition Comes Due -- Panic

The end of September is when Urbane’s tuition comes due. I had let the bill sit on my desk for weeks. For fall semester alone I owed $18,144, which included tuition, student health insurance, and the student recreation center fee. I would graduate owing more than $75,000. In my debt, I was not alone, Seventy-five percent of my class, those who had to borrow to finance their education, owed on average in excess of $80,000. The class of 2008 would owe on average close to $90,000. The cumulative educational debt of a single graduating class at a private law school could well exceed ten million dollars.

With tuition and fees closing in on $40,000 a year, Urbane was one of the more expensive law schools in the country. And Dean Gottlieb knew more than most the toll such fees can take on students. In his article, “Paying for Law School,” first published in the early 1980s when the average tuition of a private law school was half what it is today, Dean Gottlieb estimated that three years of law school, includ­ing room and board and opportunity costs, had a price tag of about $59,000, although he acknowledged that for quite a few it was much more. Debt manageability for most students, he concluded, even with debt financing, was “marginal.”

Using Urbane’s projected costs for 2009-2010 as a model, the cost of a private law school education today looks something like the following:

Tuition and fees for three years $120,000
Room & board, health, miscellaneous $ 36,000
Lost opportunity costs for three years $120,000
Total $276,000


The figures can make a person’s mouth dry. If loans are taken to finance the education, the interest of ten or twenty or thirty years is also a cost to consider. Today, the cost of attending a private law school is roughly ten times as high as it was thirty years ago when Scott Turow paid $3,000 a year to attend Harvard. Starting salaries for all but a few have struggled to keep pace. The fact that one professor teaches up to 140 students at a time is supposed to make law school reasonably accessible, but today tuition is more likely to be set as high as the market will bear.

One criticism of the high cost of law school is that graduates burdened by debt can’t afford to take jobs in the public interest. A number of schools have responded to this criticism by offering qualified graduates loan forgiveness programs. In 1988, Urbane became the fifteenth law school in the country to offer such a program. To be eligible, a graduate has to earn less than the starting salary for a federal lawyer and work full-time as an attorney in a private non-profit public interest organization, government agency, or private law firm for which at least 50 percent of the “billable hours” are devoted to work for persons or organizations financially unable to obtain adequate legal services. If the qualifications are met, eligible graduates pay only six percent of their disposable income toward educational debt. Urbane pays the rest, funding the program from the tuition of present students.

It is a hard subject to talk about, debt, and only rarely does it come up in conversation among students. Occasionally, someone will mum­ble something about borrowing $40,000 a year, usually with a wry smile. Below the surface, though, there is an anger, a frustrated anger that will spend years looking for someone to blame. But those who go to the most prestigious and expensive school they get into have no one to blame but themselves. They have already lost to their enemy. They will leave school with a degree and debt and the chance to get going, get even, get ahead. They will find themselves telling clients they certainly do not want to run up legal bills, and they will say it so often they almost believe it themselves.

Last year, the subject of debt came up most often with Tommy Wong. “You guys don’t know,” he would say, “I’ve got a wife and house payments.” I had some sympathy for him, but it was hard to yield entirely. He had money in the bank. His wife was working. He wasn’t taking the loans Katie and I were. From where I stood, my situation looked worse than his.

But still there was Dean Gottlieb’s orientation speech rallying the stu­dents: Law is big business.... It’s a multi-billion dollar a year industry. There are billions of dollars to be made providing legal services.... And we all sat there thinking, if there’s so much money out there, surely I can have $80,000 of it each year. After all, that was what Urbane graduates made, on average, or at least close to that, at least if you were male and went to work for a law firm and graduated in the top third of your class. That was what was printed in Urbane’s admissions bulletin. That was what we all understood from the bar graphs and the breakdowns we had been shown. And during orientation, that was what we were asked to dis­regard at a peculiar ceremony where we all signed a document that seemed to absolve the law school from any and all such representations.

But not to worry, Dean Gottlieb told us, we would at least pass. He didn’t promise we’d all be lawyers by the end of the three years or even that we’d all think like lawyers, but he did imply that we would gradu­ate. Very few people fail out of Urbane. “Look to your left,” he told us at orientation. “Look to your right.... By the end of three years you will have slept with one of these people.”

Yes, we would all get our degrees, as long as we paid our bills. The teaching of law, you see, is also a billion-dollar business, but we all sat there with too many dollar signs in our eyes to see there was something perverse in spending so much money to learn how to practice law from people who didn’t want to practice law and that we weren’t really learn­ing how to practice law at all but learning how to “think like a lawyer” and the bar review course would teach us the law if we paid them six hundred or sixteen hundred dollars and our employers would teach us how to practice law if we could find someone who would pay us for the privilege while we learned

My parents tried to send some money each month. Katie’s parents took over her car payments. I decided I lived better when I was delivering newspapers. At least then I could afford to buy records, see concerts, go out with friends. We were spending a fortune on education, a fortune, and our choices were being limited more each day. I told Katie I thought I could live on milk, peanut butter, lettuce, and orange juice. We frequently ate tuna casserole. We tore up the house one day searching for a missing $20 check.

“It’s depressing,” I told my mom. “We’re spending all our wedding money on law school.”

“Just think of it as an investment in your future,” she said.

Yeah.

I felt bad about bringing up the subject at all. She was absolutely right. I was investing in my future.

That’s what Dean Gottlieb would say. A master with facts and fig­ures, the dean had recently begun to put numbers on the blackboard to convince us we were getting our money’s worth.

“Eighty thousand in loans,” he told us, “consolidated, you pay $800 a month. The aver­age legal job pays $50,000, if you get a job, but the average at Urbane is a little higher. From this you subtract $13,000 in state and federal taxes. I sat down and did the math myself. That’s $37,000, paying $800 a month, that’s $9,000, which leaves you with $28,000 in your pocket after debt and taxes, and in three-and-a-half to five years, the debt is paid off.... That’s not bad. Can you buy a Mercedes? No. Can you buy a new car? Maybe. People worry about their debt, but you’ll all do fine. You’ll all be Yuppies.”

We’ll pay $1000 a month for the next fifteen or twenty years to get out from under the yoke. A few will get rich. A few will become very rich. The rest will muddle through, looking up at their classmates who did well, who went with the big firms, who joined the imperial class, the dream that keeps the rest of us in shackles.

Excerpted from LAW SCHOOL RED INK WHITE COLLAR BLUES
By Kenneth David Westphal
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