GW says Yes!

I heard the news today, oh boy:

It is my pleasure to inform you of your admission to The George Washington University Law School as a candidate for the Juris Doctor degree beginning next fall semester.

Yay yay! That probably puts GW at the top of the list right now, primarily because it's in DC and I think I'm going to prefer DC over Boston, but also because I think the curriculum GW offers (and the connections I'll be able to make there) will be more beneficial in the long run. GW also tops the list so far in the amount and quality of financial aid information included in their acceptance letter/package (medium size manilla envelope). For example, I learned that

Law students may apply for up to $18,500 per academic year [from the federal Stafford Loan Program], to an aggregate maximum of $138,500 graduate and undergraduate Stafford loans.

Previously I'd heard the aggregate max was something like $65k, so this is great news. I also learned that commercial loans have aggregate limits (no surprise there) ranging from $102k to $150k. So it sounds like fools like me should be able to find a total of something like $250k in educational loans for law school. Doesn't it sound beautiful to be so deliciously deep in debt?

Right. But I've found something to give that debt some context. I've been rereading Fast Food Nation for purposes of a class I'm teaching, and there I've been reminded that many careers must begin with massive debt. For example, an owner of a pizza franchise profiled in the book has to borrow $200k before he'd sold a single pizza. It only took the franchisee three years to pay off that debt, and that's probably a lot fewer years than it'll take me to pay off mine, but still, he started in a similarly-sized hole and pulled out. Another example is Idaho potato farmer. According to Schlosser,

The average potato farmer [in Bingham County, Idaho], who plants about four hundred acres, is more than half a million dollars in the hole before selling a single potato.

So, see, lawyers aren't the only people insane enough to borrow huge sums of money on the promise that they'll make it all back sometime soon. It's still insane, but clearly there's plenty of this insanity going around.

Posted February 15, 2003 10:35 AM | law school