I receive a number of emails each week from readers of my column here and my website Student Debt Diaries. And feel free to reach out to me with any questions or comments you might have! Predictably, many of the people who communicate with me are lawyers or individuals who eventually want to become lawyers. This makes sense, since most of my articles are focused on issues facing the legal industry.
I also receive a number of emails from other professionals, including dentists, veterinarians, and doctors. Above the Law should be happy to know that their content is appealing to a wide variety of professionals! Most of the time, other professionals reach out to me to tell me their own student debt stories, and it has been interesting to learn the experiences of so many people.
I recently received an email from a dentist who conveyed his disdain for lawyers who complain about student debt. This dentist told me that he borrowed a large sum of money to attend dental school and worked hard to pay off his student loans all by himself. This dentist believes that attorneys who have issues with their student debt have no one to blame but themselves, since they knew what they were doing when they borrowed student loans and have the power to pay off this debt.
As someone who sacrificed much to pay off his student loans, I have much sympathy with this sentiment. And in a perfect world in which information is unbiased, and people have complete agency over their situations, individuals would have no one to blame but themselves for problems with student debt. However, the legal industry is unique, and it unfair to compare debt-burdened lawyers with other professionals who borrowed money to earn their degrees.
For instance, many law students were fed bad information when they decided to borrow student loans. For years, law schools inflated employment statistics, such that this data suggested that law students would be able to easily land a job that would allow them to pay off their student loans. If you think law school is an easy way to earn a fat paycheck and put your financial house in order, then of course you are more likely to borrow massive amounts of student loans.
As we all have come to understand, the information that was provided to many prospective law students was flawed. Many law schools selected only a sample of their graduating classes when compiling data, and numerous institutions played other games with their employment statistics. In reality, far fewer law school graduates were able to obtain gainful employment than had been advertised by many law schools.
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