What are the financial implications of my girlfriend's career path (loan-funded PhD, then law school)?

Please, PLEASE have your girlfriend read http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html about law school graduates who can't find work and are trapped under a mountain of debt. Quote from the article: "Even if you tell them the bottom has fallen out of the legal market, they’re all convinced that none of the bad stuff will happen to them."

She brushes this off with statements like, "When I'm a lawyer I'll be able to pay it all back within a couple of years." HAHAHA. Unlikely. So, $120k for the PhD loans then probably at least $120k more for law school loans? Unless she lands herself one of the extremely limited BigLaw jobs, it's going to take her upwards of 30 years to pay back $240k.

Law school will be, at best, insanely expensive. Easily into the six digits USD. Also, there are basically no law jobs. For anyone. Yes, I'm exaggerating the tiniest bit, but I know a half-dozen recent US Law School grads and an equal number of current students. All of them, even the one who got her dream job (working for a nonprofit for very modest wages), consistently and intensely advise anyone considering law school to not do it. Not "think carefully about it," like my teacher friends say, or "be certain you want it," like the med school folks. They say don't do it. The market is absolutely glutted, and people with very good educations from very respected schools are struggling to find work that pays in the $40-50K range, while struggling under the weight of a hundred grand in debt. Saying "I'll make plenty when I'm a corporate lawyer" is not a plan. It's a dream. Her PhD alone is going to sock her with $120,000 in debt, and that alone is ruinous and crippling if you can't guarantee a really high-paying job. But corporate law isn't an easy in; right now, it's one of the most difficult fields to break into, in the entire country. To be quite blunt, if she continues down this road, it is extremely likely that, for all intents and purposes, you will never escape that debt. (I'm also a little unclear on why she's getting a PhD if her intention is to practice corporate law; then again I'm quite unfamiliar with corporate law, and it may be that her degree would specially qualify her for something.)

reddot's figure of $300k is $1000 a month for 25 years. Even amro's lower figure of $240k is $1000/month for 20 years. $1000 a month, every month, until she's well into her fifties. Forget about luxuries/disposable income; that's enough money to seriously interfere even with rent-paying, unless she gets a spectacularly high-paying job. This could seriously pass for a question on a parody of AskMe. Law school is regarded as currently very foolish; self-funded PhDs are regarded as always very foolish. Doing both is just insane.

Dang, I should'a previewed. To actually add to the discussion, I will note that all that money going to paying back her student loans won't be going into retirement and paying down a mortgage -- which is to say, she'll be in her 30's to 40's with none of the savings/nest egg a person that age earning large amounts of money would hope to have. If you are not from the US, you may not entirely understand that no-one has any faith in Social Security; the system is whacked and the BEST case scenario is that those of us under 40 may see 80% of what we're "entitled" to. I generally regard the wisest plan to be to expect nothing from the US mandatory retirement plan, and I believe this is a common approach. So. 40 years old. 10+ years of 80+ hour weeks. And to show for it. . . a whopping zero dollars. Color me skeptical. You can have nothing at 40 for a LOT less work.

anonymous: I admire her for taking her education so seriously holgate: I'm not sure if she is taking her education so seriously: Ph.Ds and law degrees are generally not complementary, and the doctorate could even count against her if she's set upon legal career. To me, it sounds frivolous ... This. This. The kind of pointless degree collecting she's doing is pretty much the opposite of taking her education seriously. Unless she has some kind of good reason that you haven't mentioned for needing these two degrees, and it's not just vanity/ego at the idea of having a PhD and a JD, this is nothing more than frivolity, really really expensive and dumb frivolity.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I teach statistics. I mentioned the distribution of law school grad's starting salaries (which John Cohen linked to) in my class last week. Partially this was because it was a good example of interesting things one can learn from a histogram that might not be obvious from just having the average and standard deviation, but mostly it was because I figured that someone in my class probably wants to go to law school and doesn't know this.

"When I'm a lawyer I'll be able to pay it all back within a couple of years." This is so wrong it's terrifying. Chiming in to agree with everyone who has shuddered at this irresponsible debt accumulation. I am about to graduate from a great law school, and I am lucky enough to have landed one of the very few high-paying jobs that remain at the big firms. So if your girlfriend is tremendously lucky, she may eventually be in my enviable position, which looks like this: - I have more than $200,000 of debt from law school alone. - My high-paying job is in NYC, where the cost of living is very high. The law firms that pay the high salaries are overwhelmingly concentrated in cities where the cost of living is very high. - If I am lucky and can sustain monthly payments of at least $2,500, I might be able to pay off the bulk of my debt in ten years. This can only happen if: 1) I don't burn out from working on mind-numbing projects for 10-14 hours a day, seven days a week and lose my high-paying job before the ten years are up, 2) the economy doesn't crash, causing me to lose my high-paying job before the ten years are up, 3) unexpected illness or other sudden life event doesn't cause me to lose my high-paying job before the ten years are up. That is pretty much the best-case scenario for your girlfriend. Except she will have more debt. $120,000 more. I went in with my eyes open because I knew I had an unusually high likelihood of landing a high-paying job. I gambled and won. Even so, I find myself very worried about the possibility of burning out, and I am also having to reassess my somewhat optimistic repayment plan. If you are considering making a long-term commitment to your girlfriend and entangling your finances with hers, you need to hear a much more specific - and much more realistic - plan from her.

Congrats to anyone who pays it off before they're fifty. I have a dear friend who is a partner at a very very fancy Big Law firm, who is married to a woman with an excellent job and who also inherited some significant money that enabled them to buy a lovely home without taking out a giant mortgage. He has just paid off his last law school loan, and he is 48. The thing is that the firms which pay big bucks are in New York and London and Tokyo and Paris and so on--in other words, they're in the most expensive places in the world to live. And you have to live up to your means if you want to make partner, which means a fancy place to live and high-end clothes and taking a table at the senior partners' favorite charity galas and all that. It's not like you can keep living like a student and move up in Big Law. So, yeah. Unless the OP's GF has some very special factors on her side, she's going to be in debt for a bazillion years, no lie.