Harvard Offers Super Duper PILF Stipend
Austin Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 12:19PM Harvard has decided to incentivize careers in public service by waiving 3L tuition for students who commit to five years of public interest work:
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.”
[…]
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.
“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.
[…]
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.
Full article here. Obviously, BCLS does not have an endowment like Harvard’s, but how does this new program affect your view of the public interest opportunities at BCLS? Is this the opposite of the big law salary competition?
Reader Comments