SoFi Blog

Last year, we had the opportunity to help our members in their quest to tackle debt head on. The #WhyISoFi contest brought in an overwhelming response from our community. As stories of both success and setback poured in, one thing became clear: SoFi members aren’t just accomplishing goals to get ahead, they’re doing good and making a name for themselves in the process.

It’s the beginning of a perfect modern romance: You met on an app, and after engaging in some above-average banter, you’ve been on two drink dates and out to dinner at least once. You’ve finally saved their number in your contacts under their real name (as opposed to “John/Jane Bumble”), and you’re feeling good about moving out of the “hanging out” stage toward something more serious.

And then, out of nowhere, your potential future mate drops a bomb —they’ve got debt, and lots of it. They’re carrying $100K+ in student loans. Do you walk away or stay? And if you do stay, who pays for dinner?

We’ve got debt on the brain year-round here at SoFi, but with Valentine’s Day just days away, we’ve got love on the brain too, so we surveyed 2,000 Millennials to learn more about how they think about debt in the context of their love life.

If you’re a young lawyer working at a law firm, you probably envision being named partner someday. But, as you know, the road to partnership can be tough to traverse, even for the most prepared associate—and it’s only gotten more rigorous in recent years. Consider this: The number of equity partners at firms has increased by only 27% over the past 15 years, while the number of all other attorneys has increased by nearly 86%. Additionally, the demand for law firm services has been fairly stagnant for the past eight years, with the exception of a brief rise in 2011, according to the 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market. The increasing competitiveness among firms has resulted in a thinning of the ranks for equity partners, which means a much longer timeline to being named one, if at all.

While you can’t predict whether you’ll be named partner, you still have significant ability as an associate to steer your career in the right direction. Because it’s now more difficult than ever to make partner, you’ll want to know if you are on the right track, so you can come up with a game plan to reach that goal more quickly—or decide whether you want to pursue other options.

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.

With the world’s longest election campaign season finally behind us, people across the country are trying to understand what a Donald Trump presidency means for them. If you’re one of the 40 million Americans with student loans, that means taking a closer look at President Trump’s statements about the runaway growth of college tuition and student loan debt, and his proposed plans to remedy the problems.

And if you missed our CEO Mike Cagney’s recent article in Business Insider discussing how the student loan industry will change this year, we recommend checking it out.