The Discourse of Law School Loans

• In Event: 1184 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 11. Higher Education

Abstract

Drawing from an interview-based study of lawyers between the ages of 17 and 44 living in the Northeast and currently employed as lawyers, this article explores the ways that people discuss their decisions to attend law school and how they deal with the subsequent student loan debt. In order to interpret my interviews, I draw on insights from work on the financialization of the household and on the commercialization of intimate life. My findings demonstrate that while market discourse is prevalent throughout respondent’s discussion about their finances, there is little evidence that market logic was or has become the hegemonic factor in family and career decision making. This would suggest that monetary discourse has seeped into our vocabularies for evaluating and justifying decisions which have financial ramifications but not necessarily into our calculus for how we balance work and family. While current trends in sociology have treated the impacts of increased financialization of the household as separate from work on the effects of consumer culture on intimate life, I find that there are parallels between both realms of study that, when put in concert with one another, help to explain the relationship individuals have between their private and public sphere lives.

Author

• Abby Jean Stivers, State University of New York-Albany