The Indentured Generation
(Page 3 of 4)
September / October 2003
By Garance Franke-Ruta, The American Prospect
RELATED CONTENT
Multinational mining corporations are forcibly evicting indigenous populations...
As the cost of higher education has grown at an unprecedented rate and government-backed loans have...
Puzzling out what a dream might mean is hard enough. But there's a deeper question: What does it wa...
Today the attitude in the environmental movement toward nuclear power may be changing. Atomic energ...
While society urges the young to save and invest in the future, the new structural realities -- rising tuition, declining federal aid, high college debt, easy credit card access, low salaries, and high housing costs -- combine to make young people net debtors, not net savers. And though it is seldom acknowledged as such, debt is another of the many social and cultural factors that make young people today defer growing up. Nellie Mae reports that a substantial portion of college graduates say their debts have delayed their purchasing of a home -- even with today's low interest rates -- and some have even put off having kids.
The exceptions, of course, are young people with big corporate salaries, or those who can avoid substantial debt thanks to affluent spouses or parents. For the children of the middle and lower classes, going to college and graduate school should be the single greatest opportunity to get ahead. Yet the very student loan system designed to help them realize their dreams is, ironically, now leaving many of them falling behind.
When Stefanie Davis, 27, was a student at Georgetown Law School in 2001, the subject of student loan debt and future legal salaries was an ever-present topic of conversation. Davis, who is married to a software developer, had the privilege of attending law school relatively debt-free. Most of her contemporaries were not so lucky, however; 94 percent of law school students nationwide borrowed to cover their legal education.
While her debt-laden classmates worked as summer associates at large corporate law firms, earning as much as $30,000 for three months' work, Davis could afford to take a lower-paying fellowship in the field of public-interest law. Now a staff attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, Davis earns a salary that she describes as being "in the low 30s." Meanwhile, her fellow recent grads earn anywhere from $80,000 to $135,000 as associates at big-city law firms.
The plight of poorly paid attorneys is unlikely to generate much public sympathy. Yet the staggering increase in law school tuition costs, which have jumped 140 percent at public law schools and 76 percent at private ones since 1991, is beginning to have some worrisome social consequences. Thanks to "mortgage-size law school debt payments, public-interest organizations are facing pressing challenges to recruit and retain talent, and low-income communities are dealing with a lack of representation," says Sheila Ketcham, a former program associate at Equal Justice Works, the national association of public-interest lawyers. "This is one of the largest crises in the legal profession."