ABA Proposes Law Student Loan Relief
Nov 11th, 2009 | By mrposse | Category: Student loan debt, Top Story
11 November 2009
The American Bar Association is lobbying the Obama administration and Congress to extend relief to recent law school graduates who went into debt to finance their legal educations but haven’t been able to find a job because of the recession.
The ABA wants the government to let unemployed graduates convert private loans into federal ones. The change could allow them to defer repaying those loans for as long as three years.
The effort is in its early stages — executives of the largest provider of private law school loans, Access Group Inc., weren’t even aware of it, according to spokeswoman Linda Smith.
“This is really intended to give them some breathing room,” said ABA President Carolyn Lamm.
For the full article click here.
Now they want to do this……we’ve been suffering for 10 yrs—through 9/11 fallout of no jobs—and they want to do this NOW??? Oh wait, of course….ONLY for new graduates. Am I the only person who thinks the ABA is worthless?
I’d much rather pay off my law student loans before having them deferred or rolled over into federally-backed loans. But it’s a bit of a brave new world out there.
Take a look at my finances. http://laidofflawyer.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/fourth-day-of-accounting/ Not sure where the money’s supposed to come from to pay them. My mother’s helping now because she’s wants to but also, I suspect, because she’s a co-signor on one of them. Kinda crazy that mom’s paying my student loans, eh?
So you want to now socialize the risk of someone who borrowed too much money to go to a sub-optimal law school and have the US taxpayer bail him and the sheisters in the private loan industry who lent him the money out?
SHAME
What is a new graduate? I graduated in 2006, do I count? They had better try to do this thing across the board for all of us. I would be nice if the ABA would work for students a little more and less on fighting tort reform!
I agree with the first commenter. The ABA only cares about big-law.
And to “Law talking guy”: you should realize that when big-law sends their deferred candidates to work in non-profits for a year it impacts those of us who were prepared to carry debt in order to do things that we were interested in, despite the low salaries. I would hope that you also decry bailing out Goldman and AIG and people in foreclosure, too.