The U of T Faculty of Law’s student newspaper, Ultra Vires, releases a yearly report that includes hiring data for 54 law firms and government agencies. In 2018, 428 students from across Canada were hired for summer positions. In the last 10 years, according to Ultra Vires’ data, hiring has ranged between a low of 351 people in 2013 and a high of 444 people in 2010.

However, that carries with it other burdens – discharging debt negatively impacts credit and makes it difficult to make other large purchases in the future

There are far more law school graduates than there are paid positions for them. While programs such as the Law Practice Program, introduced by the Law Society of Upper Canada in 2014, have tried to address this issue, there will inevitably be law students who won’t get high-paying jobs and will be left unable to pay their student loan debt.

Debt carries a high mental and social burden. The Just or Bust report found that higher debt levels had negatively impacted the mental health of students. An Ipsos poll commissioned on behalf of RBC Economic Research found that more than 50 per cent of respondents with student debt didn’t have enough savings in case of emergency, while more than 40 per cent had put off buying a home or weren’t saving enough for retirement.

Unlike loans issued under the Canada Student Loan program, private lines of credit can be discharged in bankruptcy at any time after the student graduates. (CSLP loans can only be discharged seven years after graduation – five if the student can show demonstrable financial duress).

What all this means is that, by and large, the same kind of people – says Donkers – are getting accepted to law school and becoming lawyers. The classes are, by and large, filled with people who have had either lawyers as parents or family members or just professional people who have been highly educated, she says. Their families can provide financial and emotional support, providing them with guidance about how to navigate white collar professions.

We’re excluding the many groups of people and the many individuals who haven’t had that kind of guidance [or] financial support.

But her perspective on what a legal career is has changed. Going into law school, I thought law would be, I don’t know, not a working-class profession. But with her debt load – now more than $90,000 – and the lower comparative pay of family law versus corporate law or working at a Bay Street Firm means that, for all intents and purposes, her financial reality is much different than what she thought it would be after becoming a lawyer.

People don’t talk about money, Tronin says, reflecting on a culture at school where it even felt impolite to talk about finances.

She hopes that she’ll find an associate position after her articling is done, so she can start chipping away at her debt. I don’t really know what kind of future I’m looking at, Tronin says. It’s so hard to say.

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Some of these lines of credits come with certain perks or competitive terms. At Scotiabank, fees are waived on credit cards offered through the bank. RBC offers students a two-year grace period to start repaying the line of credit. At TD, law students can be approved for up to $125,000.

We don’t talk about students being poor or living in poverty or having those barriers, Tronin says. We just talk about [it] as if it’s an outside concept that we’re going to deal with once we’re out there.

There are no official statistics on who is choosing not to apply to law school. But the cost, and the debt involved, make it highly likely that some of the people who could make law a truly diverse profession are blocked from attending law school for financial reasons.

The research by Ben-Ishai, Schwartz and Werk shows that some law students assume they will get jobs that pay Clare payday loans reviews well enough to pay off these loans. Students seemed to believe – rightly or wrongly – that their earnings from the jobs the degree would make available to them would be sufficient to repay the accumulated loans without undue hardship, wrote the three researchers.