[quote=north park girl]…I was considering an MBA last year, even applying to a few top schools for technology (Stanford, MIT, Berkeley). After getting rejected from all three, I thought about casting a wider net, then saw this article about law school debt: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html
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…WHEN Mr. Wallerstein started at Thomas Jefferson (in Old Town San Diego) he was in no mood for austerity. He borrowed so much that before the start of his first semester he nearly put a down payment on a $350,000 two-bedroom, two-bath condo, figuring that the investment would earn a profit by the time he graduated. He was ready to ink the deal until a rep at the mortgage giant Countrywide asked if his employer at the time — a trade magazine publisher in New Jersey — would write a letter falsely stating that he was moving to San Diego for work.
“We were on a three-way call with my real estate agent and I said I didn’t feel comfortable with that,” he says. “The Countrywide guy chuckled and said, ‘Everyone lies on their mortgage application.’ ”
Instead, Mr. Wallerstein rented a spacious apartment. He also spent a month studying in the South of France and a month in Prague — all on borrowed money. There were cost-of-living loans, and tuition of about $33,000 a year. Later came a $15,000 loan to cover months of studying for the bar.
Today, his best guess is that he should be sending $2,000 to $3,000 a month in total, to lenders that include Wells Fargo, Citibank and Sallie Mae.
“There are a bunch of others,” he says. “I’m not really good at keeping records.”
Mr. Wallerstein didn’t know it at the time, but Thomas Jefferson leads the nation’s law schools in at least one category: 95 percent of students graduate with debt, the highest rate in the U.S. News rankings.
The reason, Ms. Kransberger says, is that many Thomas Jefferson students are either immigrants or, like Mr. Wallerstein, the first person in their family to get a law degree; statistically those are both groups with generally little or modest means. When Ms. Kransberger meets applicants engaged in what she calls “magical thinking” about their finances, she advises them to defer for a year or two until they are on stronger footing…
