Harvard Law, Hoping Students Will Consider Public Service... Forum

[the rza]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/18law.html

Harvard Law, Hoping Students Will Consider Public Service, Offers Tuition Break

By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Published: March 18, 2008

Concerned by the low numbers of law students choosing careers in public service, Harvard Law School plans to waive tuition for third-year students who pledge to spend five years working either for nonprofit organizations or the government.

The program, to be announced Tuesday, would save students more than $40,000 in tuition and follows by scant months the announcement of a sharp increase in financial aid to Harvard’s undergraduates. The law school, which already has a loan forgiveness program for students choosing public service, said it knew of no other law school offering such a tuition incentive.

“We know that debt is a big issue,” said Elena Kagan, dean of the law school. “We have tried to address that over the years with a very generous loan forgiveness program, but we started to think that we could do better.”

For years, prosecutors, public defenders and lawyers in traditionally low-paying areas of the law have argued that financial pressures were pushing graduates toward corporate law and away from the kind of careers that they would pursue in the absence of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

“The debt loads that people are coming out of law schools with are now in six figures,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. “When the debt load is that great, I have had a lot of applicants who’ve said, ‘I’d like to take the job, but I really can’t afford it.’ ”

Perhaps worse, Mr. Marquis said, some indebted young lawyers who choose to try to survive on a low salary as a junior prosecutor may decide to leave to earn more just as they gain enough experience to handle more important cases. For that reason, he added, Harvard’s program sounded like a “great idea.”

Harvard’s third-year-free program is expected to cost the law school an average of $3 million annually over the next five years, Ms. Kagan said, but that number is just an estimate because it is unclear how many students will take advantage of the offer. The law school’s share of the university’s endowment of $34.9 billion is more than $1.7 billion.

From 2003 to 2006, as many as 67 and as few as 54 of the 550 students graduating from Harvard Law went to work for a nonprofit organization or the government. That translates to 9.8 to 12.1 percent of the graduating class. A vast majority of students have chosen to join law firms, where they can earn well over $100,000 a year immediately after getting their degree.

“This is an interesting move,” Larry Kramer, dean of the law school at Stanford, said of the Harvard initiative. Compared with other loan repayment assistance programs, Mr. Kramer said, “It’s unclear whether it is more generous.”

It may be, he said, that loan forgiveness over a longer period of time may encourage more students to go into public service and stay there. He added that it would take time to see how students reacted to the program.

Brandon Weiss, 26, a third-year student at Harvard Law who plans to join a public-interest law firm after he graduates, said he thought the tuition waiver program might sway students concerned about their debt to consider more career possibilities.

“Some students come in and know that public interest is what they want to do,” said Mr. Weiss, who will not benefit from the program himself because it does not begin until next fall. “There are probably other students that know they want to go to a big law firm. This program will help those students who are in between.”

Michelle J. Anderson, dean of the law school of the City University of New York, said the waiver of tuition sounded like an ambitious experiment.

“Harvard Law School is an extremely expensive, elite law school,” Ms. Anderson said, adding that tuition at CUNY Law was less than $9,000 a year. For Harvard, she added, reducing the price “is a different way of trying to attract students” interested in public-interest jobs.

Harvard law students who want to participate in the program will have to demonstrate their commitment to public interest while in law school, through participation in clinical programs working with real clients or other activities and projects.

Students who are currently enrolled will get a partial benefit, with those who will be third-year students next year getting a $5,000 grant toward tuition if they commit to public interest, and second-year students, $10,000.

Students who clerk for a judge after they graduate will be able to count that year toward their five-year commitment. Graduates will still be able to take advantage of the existing loan-repayment assistance program.

Lawmakers have also begun paying more attention to the ways in which student debt deters graduates from going into public-interest careers. Legislation passed in the fall by Congress provides student loan forgiveness for public servants, like public defenders, librarians, teachers, firefighters and nurses, after 10 years of service.

A problem could arise for Harvard’s program if a student took the free year of tuition but then, at some point before the five years were up, decided to leave public-interest or government work to make more money. Ms. Kagan said the school would be ready for that because it already had to track graduates’ income under its existing loan forgiveness program, which provides assistance with loan payments to students in public-interest jobs.

If a student tried to switch to a high-paying job on the sly, Ms. Kagan said, “then we’re going to ask for the money back.”

[EmmyD]

This has already been posted.

[the rza]

cool, now it's posted twice

[pokey]

Not anymore:

"Less than two years after announcing that it would waive tuition for third-year students who pledge to spend five years working for nonprofit organizations or for the government, Harvard Law School is suspending the program — in part because almost twice as many students as expected signed up."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/educa ... l?_r=1&hpw