I’ll Do Public Service If The Public Will Service My Debt

On Saturday night, President Obama spoke (via taped message) to the American Bar Association’s Opening Assembly. He told the gathered lawyers to renew their commitment to pro bono work and public service.

Obama has of course made public service a centerpiece of his campaign and administration. No matter what field you work in, you can be sure that Obama will be taking his message of contributing to the public good to a town hall near you.

And I’m all for it. But it is a little hard to focus on what things I can do for my country for free when my primary creditor — my country — threatens to bust my kneecaps with the hammer I’m using to build affordable housing with Habitat for Humanity.

On Monday, public universities served notice that professional school tuition might be the only “recession proof” industry. The National Law Journal reported that law school tuition at some of the top public law schools would be going up by percentage increases in the double-digits.

Double digits tuition increases to get the entrance degree into an industry that is shedding jobs and cutting salaries? Am I taking crazy pills? Aren’t we in the middle of a recession? Over on Above the Law, I report daily on the ways in which the recession is affecting the legal industry. Trust me, lawyers are getting laid off and losing money just like the workers are in any other American industry.

We are creating an army of well educated people in this country that are indentured servants to their debts. Lawyers and other professionals might well want to give back to their community. In fact, some professionals might want to do more than volunteer. There are professionals out there who would be willing to work relatively low income jobs that are in the public interest, if they could just get out from under their debts.

Of course, not all lawyers are so altruistic. There are many young and upwardly mobile bourgeois wannabes who simply want to buy cars and stocks and McMansions. And they’d be doing that if they were not paying off boom time tuition on downturn salaries. Professional schools attract a certain kind of lean and hungry person who was not born into wealth, but is willing to bust heads in order to get a share of the good life.

And of all people, President Obama should know this. The Obamas have been down this road. They didn’t have family money, they used debt to finance their education, and then … well let’s look at how they paid off their debt after the jump.

We all know the powerful personal story of Barack Obama. He graduated from Columbia and then Harvard Law School. One can imagine he had a mountain of debt so high Edmund Hillary couldn’t have scaled it. But instead of taking the obvious pay day of working at a high paying law firm, Obama went back to Chicago to work as a civil rights attorney.

Yes, he is very special. He is a better man than me.

But what the political biography doesn’t tell you is that Barack and Michelle Obama would probably still be in educational debt, but for Obama’s best selling book, Dreams from My Father.

Obama should know that not everybody has a best selling manuscript sitting on the shelf waiting for the adulation of the public. And he should know that absent a winning lottery ticket, educational debt is the biggest determining factor in the post degree career choices of many young professionals. You want more public service lawyers? Help them pay their loans!

During the good times when salaries for those with a college degree or better were going up (though those salaries never increased at the same astronomical rate as tuition), enormous debt loads were the lower middle class price for upward mobility. But now, those debts make seeking a post-graduate degree without family financial support seem as dumb as Elle Woods.

Now, this isn’t a slam dunk moral argument. If somebody lends you money, you should be expected to pay it back. Only the government is allowed to have debts it has no intention of paying.

But we are in the middle of a ridiculous recession. And for a lot of people, the federal government is their primary lender. Right now the federal government is running around desperately trying to get money into the economy. There are so many things that the government could do to ease the debt burden on its educated citizens, and those citizens would likely turn into the consumers the government is trying to encourage.

There are small changes we could make in the way we finance higher education in society that would help people. For instance, right now, educational debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy like all other kinds of debts. Think about that. If I buy high definition televisions and expensive vacations on credit, screw up, and declare bankruptcy (the debtor’s way of crying out “please, no more, I’ll tell you what you want to know”) those debts essentially go away. But if you go to college or professional school and things don’t work out the way you planned, too bad. The government still expects you to pay for the audacity of trying to educate yourself.

Thanks to federal loans, education is accessible to nearly all who want it. But thanks to skyrocketing tuition completely unchecked by any federal control, actually building wealth off of becoming educated is an increasingly difficult proposition.

There are a lot of possible solutions to this problem, but the most important first step is to get the Obama administration to even notice that there is a problem. There is nothing in this country that is going up by double digit percentage points from 2008 to 2009. How is it even conceivable for public universities — you know, the ones that we the taxpayers are already paying for — to raise their rates like that in the middle of this mess?

The next time President Obama speaks to a bunch of lawyers he needs to be talking about how the government is going to be more responsive to the debt situation of its citizens than the average community bookie.