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Legal Education

Georgetown University Law Center

Series

2018

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Case For More Debt: Expanding College Affordability By Expanding Income-Driven Repayment, John R. Brooks Jan 2018

The Case For More Debt: Expanding College Affordability By Expanding Income-Driven Repayment, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) for federal student loans is rapidly becoming the primary tool that the federal government uses to provide progressive funding to individuals to pay for college. Under these programs, borrowers can choose to pay back their loans as a percentage of income, with eventual debt forgiveness after 10-25 years. If administered well, these programs can make student loans affordable for everyone, regardless of income. In this symposium essay, I argue that for IDR to meet its goal of providing affordable higher education to everyone, the federal government needs to raise the individual borrowing limits on Direct Loans and …


Curing The Cost Disease: Legal Education, Legal Services, And The Role Of Income-Contingent Loans, John R. Brooks Jan 2018

Curing The Cost Disease: Legal Education, Legal Services, And The Role Of Income-Contingent Loans, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The costs of both legal education and legal services have been rising steadily for decades. This is because they share a common root: the constant above-inflation growth in the cost of labor-intensive goods and services known as the “cost disease.” The cost disease story roots cost growth not in market failure or bureaucratic waste, but in natural, even healthy, economic forces—productivity and wage growth. Because the source of this cost growth is productivity growth, the nature of the cost disease is such that an economy as a whole can afford these rising costs. But in a world of deep income …