Trump Just Killed The $200K Law School Loan

How Law School Got This Expensive

Watch from 0:00

In 1985, private law school cost about $7,500 a year, roughly $23,000 in today's money. Public school was cheaper still, with some state schools running two or three thousand dollars a year all in. In practice, that meant students worked summers at a law firm, covered most of it themselves, and walked out with a loan they could actually pay off on a normal lawyer's salary. Not big law, a county prosecutor making $50,000 a year, a neighborhood real estate attorney, a first-year public defender. The math worked.

1987 is the year it broke. That's the year a journalist named Bob Morse, working at US News and World Report, started ranking law schools. Nobody cared at first. But 10 years later, those same law schools were restructuring their entire admissions and financial aid operations around it, because deans had figured out the rankings had specific inputs they could game.

The 4 Inputs Deans Learned to Game

Watch from 1:42

Input one was LSAT medians. To keep a median up, a school needs a critical mass of applicants above that number, so schools started handing out big scholarships to high-LSAT applicants, regardless of whether those applicants came from rich families or personally needed the money. Meanwhile lower-scoring applicants, often from working-class backgrounds, paid full sticker price to subsidize them. Pull up any law school's LSAT medians next to its merit scholarship recipients and the pattern holds: the applicant with the 172 whose parents are surgeons gets a full ride, the applicant with the 158 whose parents clean offices pays for it.

Input two was GPA medians, which pushed admissions to favor applicants from easy-grading majors over applicants with harder resumes: a 3.9 in communications could get in while a 3.4 in mechanical engineering from MIT got wait-listed. Input three was employment numbers nine months out from graduation, which is what the ABA tracks. Schools started hiring their own unemployed graduates into nine-month research fellowships timed to land right before that survey date. Whether a graduate was employed at graduation itself didn't matter, only their status at the nine-month mark did. The ABA cracked down on this in 2011, but schools got more sophisticated about it. Input four was expenditures per student: the more a school spends, the higher it ranks, so schools raised tuition just to have more money to spend, which raised the ranking, which justified more tuition hikes. A flywheel running on debt.

In November 2022, Yale Law School pulled out of the US News rankings. Harvard followed within 48 hours, then Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, Georgetown, and Michigan. Within a month, basically every top law school had announced it was boycotting the rankings, with deans writing op-eds about how the rankings had corrupted legal education. Six months later, they were quietly submitting their data to US News again, because the alternative was dropping in the rankings and losing applicants. Even the schools that publicly called the game broken couldn't stop playing it.

Where the Debt Stands Today

Watch from 4:24

The average law student now graduates with about $130,000 in debt from law school alone. Add undergrad debt and it's around $140,000. A growing share are over $200,000, and at the most expensive private schools like Columbia and NYU, grads come out with $250,000 to $300,000 in debt in some cases. All of that money runs through one federal loan program called Grad PLUS, which has no cap. A school can charge whatever it wants because the government will lend whatever it takes, with no real credit check, no income test, and no analysis of whether the loan will ever get paid back. Sign a master promissory note and the money shows up in the school's bank account. That's why tuition skyrocketed: it's not a coincidence that Grad PLUS got expanded in 2006 and law school tuition started climbing 6% to 8% a year for the next decade.

At Columbia right now, tuition runs $88,000 a year. Add at least $35,000 a year in New York living expenses, plus interest that starts accruing the day you borrow, another $25,000 over 3 years, and a student can walk out with $440,000 in debt. But Columbia grads land big law at a high rate, roughly three-quarters of the class into firms paying $225,000 a year, so the math works out, even if it's tough. Go 150 schools down in the rankings and the picture flips: schools charging $55,000 to $65,000 a year for a 3-year degree, placing 30% of their class into jobs paying below $70,000, another 20% into jobs that don't even require a law degree, some with first-time bar passage rates below 60%, all running on the same loan program.

The Bimodal Salary Curve

Watch from 6:33

New lawyer salaries don't follow a normal bell curve. NALP's yearly data shows a bimodal curve with two peaks and almost nothing in between. The right peak is big law at $225,000 a year, a small slice of the class going mostly to T14 graduates plus the top of strong regional programs. The left peak is under $100,000, roughly $65,000 to $100,000, which is about half of all reported salaries. The theoretical middle-class lawyer job basically ended in the 2008 recession and never came back.

Run the numbers on borrowing $200,000 to earn $80,000: standard repayment runs around $2,200 a month for 10 years, more than rent in a lot of cities. Income-driven repayment lowers the monthly bite but adds tens of thousands in interest over the life of the loan. Either way, the math isn't working in the borrower's favor.

What Changes Starting July 1st

Watch from 7:45

Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a sprawling piece of legislation with a provision buried in the higher education section that ends Grad PLUS lending for everybody, cutting off July 1st. Starting that day, no new graduate or professional student can borrow more than $50,000 a year in federal loans, with a $200,000 lifetime cap. Medical school gets a narrow exception. Law school doesn't.

At a school charging $65,000 a year in tuition plus $20,000 in living expenses, a student needs $85,000 a year to attend. Federal loans cover $50,000, leaving a $35,000 gap per year for 3 years, meaning $105,000 in private loans on top of $150,000 in federal debt. Private student loans are a different animal from federal loans: they want a co-signer, run hard credit checks, charge higher interest, and don't qualify for income-driven repayment or public service loan forgiveness. Taking on six figures in private law school debt is close to a financial life sentence, with no bankruptcy escape.

Law School Splits in Two

Watch from 9:09

Schools that can't justify sticker price have nowhere to hide. They can't keep raising tuition because the blank check is gone, so they've got to drop the price, beef up merit aid, or watch applications collapse. Law school is splitting into two groups. On one side, the T14 and strong regional schools with good outcomes get more valuable after Grad PLUS dies, not less, because with federal money capped, fewer students can afford sticker price, so seats at schools that lead to real big-law outcomes get scarcer and more competitive. On the other side, schools in the bottom half of the rankings have ROI that doesn't make sense, and now people can't even take out the loans to attend in the first place. Some of those schools will close, some will merge, some will dramatically cut tuition to survive. Whether the goal is a T14 school for big law or a lower-ranked school with a full ride, the path forward is the same either way: a higher LSAT score.

On Retaking the LSAT and What a Score Actually Means

Watch from 11:19

LSAT registration numbers that look alarming months before a test date typically shrink as test day approaches, a pattern called melt in the industry, with 10% to 20% of registrants usually not showing up. People who did well on an earlier administration withdraw from the next one, and people who aren't scoring at their goal postpone to a later date, so headline registration numbers reported weeks out are consistently higher than the number who actually sit for the test.

There's no universal good or bad LSAT score. A score is only good or bad relative to the medians and 75th percentiles of the specific law schools someone is targeting, which is why the same score can be more than enough for one school and short of the median at another. On retaking: since law schools haven't averaged multiple LSAT scores in about 20 years and only the highest score on record counts, there's little downside to a retake, and a strong GPA paired with a lower LSAT score usually means there's real room to gain by retaking rather than applying with the lower score. Practice test scores also tend to run a few points above actual test-day performance, so it's worth calibrating a target score with that gap in mind.

Scholarships: What the 509 Reports Actually Show

Watch from 29:55

There's no formula that guarantees a full scholarship anywhere short of a near-perfect LSAT and GPA. The better approach is checking a target school's ABA 509 report for its LSAT and GPA medians and its 75th percentile: scoring above the 75th percentile gives the best odds of a full ride. Conditional scholarships deserve real caution. Most students assume they'll be the one who keeps it, and most of them are wrong. Look up in the 509 report what percentage of students offered a conditional scholarship actually keep it, since at some schools the majority don't. It's worth trying to negotiate a conditional scholarship into an unconditional one, and worth remembering that the school has far more information about typical outcomes than an incoming student does.

There's no universal answer to picking a lower-ranked school with less debt versus a higher-ranked school with more debt either, it depends on career goals. Higher-ranked schools have stronger pipelines into big law and clerkships. Columbia, for example, sends roughly three-quarters of its class into big law but charges some of the highest tuition in the country and gives out less merit aid. Lower-tier schools are more willing to offer a full ride or significant scholarship money, but their pipelines into big law and clerkships are close to nonexistent. Either way, a higher LSAT score widens the options on both paths.

Score Inflation, Testing Changes, and a Few More Answers

Watch from 41:26

LSAC is returning the LSAT to in-person-only testing starting in August, mainly because of cheating on the remote, online version of the test. But most high scores aren't the product of cheating, likely only 1% to 2% are, so eliminating remote testing isn't expected to meaningfully slow LSAT score inflation. What is driving the inflation: LSAC approving roughly 98% of requests for extra-time and extra-break accommodations, and the LSAT being offered more often than before, up from four administrations a year to eight, combined with the fact that only the highest score on a person's record counts. Scores and medians at every law school are expected to keep climbing as a result. [Update, September 2026: LSAC's latest report puts it at about 99%, not 98%. LSAC Technical Report TR 26-01 says around 99% of accommodation requests were approved for the 2024-25 testing year.]

A few other recurring points: building reading comprehension endurance is best done with the roughly 400 official reading comp passages from previously administered LSATs rather than outside articles, especially with a test date less than 6 months out. Letters of recommendation matter far less than the LSAT, GPA, and application essays, and applicants years removed from school can lean on employers, professional colleagues, clients, or community leaders instead of professors. A bad letter is more likely to hurt than a good one is to help, so it's not worth pushing someone hesitant to write one. And a low-tier law school can still be worth attending if it's free, but the decision should come down to that specific school's bar passage rate and its percentage of graduates employed in law-required jobs within 9 months of graduation, both published in its 509 report.