Whiz Kid Goes To Law School At 18, Living 'Nightmare' Of Paying Off $215,000

The Los Angeles Times has a sobering profile of a young law school grad who seemed to be "fast-tracking his way through life" but ended up with $215,000 in debt along the way.

Andrew Carmichael Post was just 22 when he became a member of the California State Bar after graduating from USC's Gould School of Law. Now he's 24, living with his parents, and having to fork over a minimum of $2,756 a month to pay down $215,000 in student loan debt.

"It's like some sort of nightmare where someone gave me a bank mortgage but forgot to add the deed to the house," Post told the LA Times.

His debt situation was aggravated by his inability to find a full-time job as a lawyer after school.

Things have been looking up for him since he got a well-paying job as a programmer, but he still faces an unfathomably high monthly student loan payment.

Post represents an extreme version of the financial burdens facing law school graduates. Students who go to private law schools have an average debt load of $125,000, and those who graduate from San Diego's Thomas Jefferson School of Law carry an average of $168,800 in debt.

Post's inability to find full-time work as a lawyer wasn't unusual, either.

In March, the ABA Journal reported that just half of 2012 law school grads had gotten full-time, long-term legal jobs. Those kinds of job prospects make the idea of paying off six figures of debt all the more daunting.