Harvard: The Black-White Student Debt Gap Among Law School Graduates

Meghan Dawe (Harvard Center On The Legal Profession), The Black-White Student Debt Gap Among Law School Graduates:

My research draws on a rich and novel data set on law school graduates from the first ever national study of lawyers’ careers. After the JD (AJD) employs a rigorous and sophisticated multimethod research design to track the first 20 years of lawyers’ careers, collecting data on a broad array of topics including social and educational background; legal education financing; earnings and hours worked; job mobility; fields of practice and legal specialties; career and job satisfaction; family formation; mentorship and professional networks; gender-, race-, and class-based inequality; and experiences of workplace discrimination. ...

Among law school graduates who participated in the AJD study, Black respondents are 13.7 percent more likely than White students to graduate from law school with student debt (see Figure 1), and Black borrowers graduate from law school with 7.8 percent more student debt than White borrowers (see Figure 2). By midcareer, these differences are even starker: Black borrowers are 26.6 percent more likely than White borrowers to have student debt remaining, and, among midcareer debtors, Black borrowers owe 38.7 percent more than their White counterparts. Black women are the most likely to graduate with student debt (95.9 percent), followed closely by Black men (94.6 percent), and Black women graduate with the highest average debt among student loan borrowers ($78,500). By midcareer, Black women and men who graduated with student debt are about equally likely to remain indebted (73.1 percent vs. 73.9 percent), and indebted Black men owe the most ($79,583), suggesting they encounter greater difficulty than Black women in repaying their loans.

Harvard Center on the Legal Profession, The Practice Magazine (Sep/Oct 2023):

Introducing the September 2023 Issue
How is student debt impacting lives and careers—and the legal profession? A brief overview of our goals in this issue.

The Black-White Student Debt Gap Among Law School Graduates
The student debt crisis disproportionately impacts Black Americans, reflecting and perpetuating the Black-White wealth gap and reverberating over generations and the life course. Among law student populations, this disparity has spillover effects onto democratic processes and access to legal services, further creating and compounding inequality in the United States.

Debt Takes a Toll
How does debt impact physical and mental health? In this story, we talk to one researcher who studies long-term health trajectories to understand how debt affects people's lives over time, trying to understand for whom debt is and remains a deep burden.

Rethinking Law School Financing
Student debt is a public problem, but can the private sector help? A pair of case studies—on patent lawyer training and income share agreements—offer ways of rethinking how we pay for law school.

Understanding the Law of Debt
Dalié Jiménez, professor of law at The University of California, Irvine School of Law and director of the Student Law Loan Initiative, offers her perspective on lawyering for justice, the problems with debt collection and bankruptcy law, and ways students and society might move forward in confronting debt.

What We Owe Our Students
Senator Elizabeth Warren has been a fierce advocate for higher education reform and student debt cancellation for years. In this conversation with CLP faculty director David B. Wilkins, the senior senator from Massachusetts and former Harvard Law professor offers her thoughts on what is wrong with the current system and what should change if we want to bet on the next generation.