Debt U

continued

In a phone interview from Cincinnati, Pennington tells me that he's landed on his feet as a category analyst for the Boston Beer Company, maker of Samuel Adams. He believes Denison's good reputation helped him find work in a cruel economy--in a previous job, with Coors, he was one of fourteen hired from 700 applicants--but even so, his debt hangs heavy.

"I'm getting married in October," Pennington says. "We definitely want to have kids. [But] we're going to have to wait a while--five to seven years--in order to decrease the amount of student loans."

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Kerene Moore works at the handsome brick house on Fourth Avenue that houses Legal Services of South Central Michigan. Better known as Legal Aid, it's the place of first, and sometimes only, resort for people who are broke and need legal advice.

Moore arrives at our interview looking drained; she was on the phone for half an hour with a tearful undocumented immigrant she's not sure she can help. "Sometimes, it's tough," she says of her job. But when she decided on law school, public interest commanded her attention--when she tried a couple of classes on corporate-related law, she says, she "was bored out of my mind."