SoFi Blog

Law careers are traditionally viewed as lucrative and enviable. Yet, many attorneys are saddled with mortgage-sized law school debt after graduation.

About five years ago, Harvard Law School left one law school grad and blogger, DebtFreeJD, with nearly $150,000 in student loan debt. After a few years of payments, she’d made a $25,000 dent in that total. Then, she and her husband made an ambitious vow to tackle her remaining law school debt in one year and two months—about the same amount of time it took to build the Empire State Building. Today, thanks to diligence and a refinance, she has earned her DebtFreeJD moniker.

When choosing a law school, your decision is most certainly based on the prestige of the faculty, the academic qualifications of the student body, and the institution’s success in placing graduates in satisfying careers. But what about the big money unknowns—the salary you’re likely to earn upon graduation and how much of your rookie attorney paycheck will go toward paying for your education?

To help take some of the guesswork out of your legal education strategy, we analyzed more than 60,000 student loan refinancing applications submitted to us from January 2014 to December 2016 to formulate SoFi’s Return on Education (ROED) Law School Rankings. After taking a long, hard look at the average salary and student debt load of law school graduates three years out of school, we compiled objective data that can’t be found anywhere else—verified income and debt, not just reported figures. The result: Rankings of how the top (and bottom) JD programs stack up when it comes to how your financial future will fare.

In our latest member spotlight, we speak to Ashleigh Shepard and learn why she chose The University of Florida to pursue her graduate degree in Physician Assistant Studies, and how she tackled a monthly student loan payment that was more than her rent – all the while she and her fiancé save for their first home.

Life, interrupted. That’s what millennials with student loans are discovering as they try to meet their financial goals, such as buying a home.

But there’s a way to eliminate that debt faster. Refinancing your student loans to reduce interest rates is a strategic move savvy borrowers are making to save money over the life of their loans. Then they can turn their attention to saving for retirement and improving their quality of life.

We talked to three of our members, each with a different set of life circumstances, who were tired of putting their dreams on hold. For James Hilton Harrell, Melonia Bennett and Josh Grant, refinancing their student loans with SoFi has help put them on the path to a brighter financial future.

These days, “pension” and “company men” are terms about as relevant as “on fleek” will be in five years. Until just a few decades ago, it was commonplace for a college graduate to get an entry-level job and work his way up the corporate ladder, retiring 40-some years later with a healthy pension and a parting gift.

But not anymore.