HLS in Focus

Q: Why has HLS created its new 3L tuition Public Service Initiative, as opposed to simply increasing funds to LIPP?

A: The new 3L tuition initiative is something I’ve been dreaming about for many years but never thought would see happen because it is so revolutionary. In the beginning of my time at HLS, I thought we should put all of our back-end resources into our loan repayment program (which was the first in the country and remains one of the very best).

But after a while I began to realize that the specter of debt hanging over their heads deterred many students from going into public service, no matter how great our loan repayment program is. We knew they could afford to do it with our support, but the psychological debt aversion was real and we wanted to help with that. At the same time, we didn’t want to do an up-front, selective fellowship.

I’ve learned over the years that you can’t take out a crystal ball and figure out who will go into public service work. Some of the people most committed to post-law school public service work are the ones who worked in the private sector before law school and needed to use all of our wonderful resources to build a public interest track record while here.

We also didn’t want to use this as a recruiting tool and just select people on criteria like LSAT or GPA. We thought all of our students should get the extra help to boost them into public interest work. That’s why we’ve made it non-selective and that students can make the decision to participate as late as their 3L year. That’s what makes this unique (and we don’t even have any idea of how expensive it will be because it is an entitlement program). Students can still take advantage of our fabulous LIPP program for the rest of their debt, they’ll just enter it with one-third less tuition debt.

We are not naïve enough to think that the extra $41,000 is going to pull people who really want to go to a firm for a while from going there – but we do hope and think it will help more people take the plunge if they want to do public interest work but were just afraid of having too much debt hanging over their heads. We genuinely hope and expect that this new initiative, along with our other generous programs, will help a critical mass get into and stay in public interest work. I’m really grateful to Dean Kagan for her willingness to create what is potentially a very expensive program.