Legal News

The Credit Crisis & Law School Loans, Take Two: Financing Bar Prep

By Dan Slater

If you don’t have a firm picking up the Barbri tab and advancing thousands of dollars of first-year salary to cover summer living expenses, then getting through that last summer before work can get tricky.

Students have long been able to turn to private loans. But as the bar prep season begins, the Recorder reports, they may be harder to come by. Financial aid officials at Hastings College of Law are reportedly looking into why a growing number of students have been turned down in the past few months.

Linda Bisesi, Hastings’ director of financial aid, said that a larger number of students than usual have been denied private loans since December. “It’s not a big percentage of the graduating class, but it was enough to catch my eye,” Bisesi told the Recorder. She said it’s unclear whether the problem, if any, lies in the students’ applications or with the lenders. (Click here for past LB coverage on the scarcity of private loans generally.)

There are only four lenders with “law residency” loan products left, according to the Access Group, a Delaware nonprofit graduate loan provider that cited the numbers from the December 2008 issue of The Greentree Gazette. That higher-education trade magazine’s fall 2007 issue had listed 19 such lenders.

But federal funding for bar prep could be on the way. More than 75 law schools have signed on to a proposed solution by an East Coast nonprofit that wants to temporarily make federal money available to students for more of their expenses.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 17, 2009 (boomark / email).