student loans

The Two-Year Tuition Fallacy and Other Confusion in Legal Education Reform

08/24/13

Even the President has now weighed in about the cost of legal education, thus elevating the profile of the debate about the "dual crises" of legal education:  costs and job placement.

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Bipartisan Deal to Reduce Deficit on Backs of Student Borrowers

08/01/13

Congress and the President are making huge decisions about
the future of our biggest consumer credit markets – mortgages for homebuyers
and college loans for students. 
Unfortunately critical policy choices are being avoided, ignored, or
obfuscated.  I’ll comment on student
loans in this post, housing finance reform in a future post.

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Using Bankruptcy To Get College Transcripts

05/25/13

GraduationBankruptcy can help in a lot of ways.  One less well-known benefit is to free up a copy of a college transcript to use for employment or future school applications, when you can’t afford to pay the college back right now.

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Student Loans: Two Appeals Court Cases Question the Brunner Test

05/11/13

stu 320The winds of change may be blowing regarding student loan dischargeability in bankruptcy cases, as two recent federal appeals court cases demonstrate.

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Student Loan Bankruptcy Problem A Doozy

04/17/13
Image courtesy of Dreamstime

Image courtesy of Dreamstime

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Student Loan Bubble Data

03/01/13

The New York Fed has posted a new analysis of student loan debt.  Depending on how you read the data, student loan borrowers are either in serious trouble, or are no worse off than consumers with credit card debt or car loans.  The bad news is that only 39% of borrowers are paying down their student loan debt.

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The Legal Employment Market, Student Debt, and Legal Education Reform

02/12/13

There has been a great deal of press recently about the sorry state of the legal jobs market, student debt, and the irrelevance of legal education (see, e.g., here).  A lot of the thinking on these issues has struck me as incredibly ga-ga and muddled and as reflecting unrelated and pre-existing agendas about legal education, student debt, and the role of lawyers in society.

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Student-Loan Collections Could Be Subject to Drastic Overhaul

12/05/12

Bloomberg reports that Congress will consider overhauling debt collection in the $100 billion-a-year U.S. student loan program, replacing it with automatic withdrawals from borrowers’ paychecks tied to their income -- a system similar to those sued in the U.K., New Zealand and Australia.

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