National Jurist - February 2008 - (Page 17) financial aid. Schrag lobbied heavily for additional debt relief for law-school graduates. Previous federal repayment programs were helpful, Schrag said, but students had to wait To view Schrag’s full as many as 25 years article on the CCRAA, before their loans were go to http://www.law. forgiven. Such a long georgetown.edu/news/ term discouraged stureleases/documents/ dents from using those Forgiveness_000.pdf. programs to help them have public-ser vice careers. Many left public service within the first five years for more lucrative jobs in the private sector. “Nobody wanted to sign up for 25 years of repayments because they’d still be paying their own loans when their kids went to college,” Winograd said. Schrag notes that about 85 percent of law students have to borrow to finance their law-school years. Students who graduate from public law schools borrow around $55,000, while private law-school graduates owe more than $86,000, in addition to accumulated undergraduate debt. The median entry-level salary for an attorney at a civil legal services organization was $36,000 in 2006, according to NALP. Meanwhile, the median first-year associate salary at firms of more than 500 lawyers was $145,000. While more than half of all U.S. law schools have their own loan repayment and assistance programs, only a few students in public service received theses limited funds, Schrag said. Others benefited from state or federal assistance programs. Financial aid officials like Kristi Jovell, Director of Financial Aid for Suffolk University Law School in Boston, are applauding the new repayment program. But they also note that financial-aid offices are still learning about how it will work over the long term. Schrag and Winograd note that the act has one outstanding issue that they and others are working to resolve — some students might be taxed on the amount of the write-off. Winograd said they hope to have this provision changed or eliminated by the time the first students enrolled in the program are affected by it. The Income-Based Repayment Calculator — www.finaid.org/ calculators/ibr.phtml. This calculator, created by Mark Kantrowitz, compares the cost of repaying Federal student loans using the IncomeBased Repayment (IBR) option and the standard repayment option, including the net present value of those payments. February 2008 THE NATIONAL JURIST 17 http://www.law.georgetown.edu/news/releases/documents/Forgiveness_000.pdf http://www.law.georgetown.edu/news/releases/documents/Forgiveness_000.pdf http://www.law.georgetown.edu/news/releases/documents/Forgiveness_000.pdf http://www.law.georgetown.edu/news/releases/documents/Forgiveness_000.pdf http://www.finaid.org/calculators/ibr.phtml http://www.finaid.org/calculators/ibr.phtml http://ejw.newsweek.com http://ejw.newsweek.com
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