by Jane Easter Bahls

This year’s graduates of the University of Oregon School of Law were proud of more than receiving their diplomas. Again and again, commencement speakers extolled the class’s newly announced gift to the school: a brand-new loan repayment assistance program.

Led by 3L Kurt Unger, members of the class labored for months researching similar programs at 50 other law schools, debating requirements, drafting a proposal, and presenting it to the faculty, alumni board, and board of trustees. Their goal? To make it more feasible for graduates of the school to follow their hearts into low-paying public interest law by relieving the burden of law school debt.

"Most of those involved won’t benefit from the program," says Lisa Hartrich, a class member who worked on the project. "It just seemed like the right thing to do."

Hartrich notes that, given the school’s strong public interest focus, nearly half of the school’s law grads go into public interest careers. But with the low pay and the high loan payments they have to make, many struggle to afford the basics of life.

Under the new program, qualifying graduates will receive forgivable loans of up to $5,000 per year toward their debt, for up to five years. If they work a public interest job for one year, they pay back two thirds of that year’s loan. Three years and it’s all forgiven.

"It was great to sit at graduation and hear people praise it over and over," Hartrich says. There’s still a need for funding, which is more of a challenge than at schools with huge endowments. Dean Rennard Strickland, the alumni board, and several faculty members have contributed seed money. While studying for the bar exam, members of the class were raising funds for the program through letters to law firms, alumni, and local companies, among other approaches. "We want this to be our legacy," Hartrich says.

Loan repayment assistance programs—generally known as LRAPs (and pronounced EL-raps)—are not a new concept. There’s long been a salary discrepancy between public and private legal work, and new lawyers have long had to cope with repaying debt. It’s enough to discourage many law graduates from going into public service.

But the problem is far more jarring now, when starting salaries in private practice average $80,000 but starting public interest salaries average only $34,000. And as law school tuition goes through the roof, so does student debt. An average American law graduate owes $80,000, which works out to monthly payments of $1,000 or more. After making those payments, those who opt for public interest work are left with about $17,000 a year to live on, barely more than a year at minimum wage. The net effect: 14 percent to 15 percent of law school graduates went into government service a generation ago, but that figure has shrunk to just above 3 percent today.

The statistics and anecdotal evidence bothered Robert Hirshon, the ABA’s immediate past president. Early in his term last year, Hirshon appointed representatives from various law-related organizations, including the ABA Law Student Division, to create a Commission on Loan Repayment and Forgiveness. The commission, which has been extended for 2002-03, has studied the problem, researched existing programs, heard testimony from beneficiaries, recommended changes to federal laws, and generally raised the profile of the issue.

"The cost of legal education is staggering," says San Francisco attorney Curtis Caton of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, who co-chairs the commission with Judge Frank Coffin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Then there are the astounding starting salaries that big law firms pay, nearly $100,000 more than at rural firms and public agencies. Yet the debt burden is the same.

"It makes you think something is wrong with this system," Caton says. "LRAPs try to fill the gap."

That’s especially important now, Caton says, when idealism seems to be on the rise after 9/11.

"I think it’s a sad thing that at a time when idealism is at a peak, students are deterred from even pursuing public service because of this albatross called educational debt," he says.

Caton notes that people are most idealistic when they’re young. After working in private practice for 10 years and paying off their education debt, maybe they could finally afford to live on a public interest salary, but chances are that by then they’ve grown accustomed to a middle-class lifestyle. "The moment may have passed," he says. "I look at it as lost opportunity."

As the commission found in its research, people at many levels are trying to do something about it through LRAPs. Federal law includes two avenues, both strictly limited in scope. Perkins loans may be canceled incrementally if graduates work in particular public interest fields. For lawyers, that’s limited to working on behalf of high-risk children and their families. Under the income-contingent repayment (ICR) option, federal direct loans may be forgiven after 25 years of low-income work. Acting on the commission’s recommendation, the ABA House of Delegates voted to support improvements to the ICR option for federal direct loans, which would enable loans to be forgiven sooner than the current 25 years of low-income work. Another resolution supported increasing the amount of money students could borrow under the Stafford loan program, so a higher percentage of each student’s debt would be low-interest and forgivable under ICR.

For most students, federally subsidized loans are only part of their debt load. Accordingly, during the past two decades, 52 law schools have developed LRAP programs. But in 1998-99, 70 percent of the total LRAP payout came from programs at just six law schools: Yale, New York University, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Georgetown. Now, after years of stagnation, eight law schools have launched programs, and several have ramped up theirs. In many cases, it has been law students like those at Oregon whose activism made the difference.

"I am most excited about the momentum surrounding these programs," says Sheila Siegel Ketcham of Equal Justice Works, the organization formerly known as the National Association for Public Interest Law (NAPIL). "Between 1994 and 2000, there was virtually no growth. Then we had a huge jump."

Ketcham says one reason for the growth of LRAPs is that the problem has gotten so bad. But there’s also the snowball effect, as law schools see what other schools are doing.

"Also, pre-law students are getting more savvy," she says. "They ask not just if the school has a program, but what the details are. People are choosing law schools based on their LRAPs."

Numerous public interest employers offer loan repayment assistance, including Bay Area Legal Aid in Oakland, Calif., and the Georgia Legal Services Program in Atlanta. Some law firms, such as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, offer generous public interest fellowships.

So do some local bar associations. The Chicago Bar Foundation recently announced a $100,000 gift from its second vice president, Kimball Anderson, and his wife Karen to create a 10-year public interest fellowship, which will provide $10,000 toward educational debt for one law graduate each year.

Five states (Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and North Carolina) have created and funded statewide LRAPs, and several others have legislation pending, or enacted but not yet funded.

Law students have made waves even in state-based programs. It was students from three Minnesota law schools who created the Minnesota Justice Foundation in the late 1980s and lobbied for the statewide program. Not only did they obtain two sizable foundation grants, but they also organized a drive at the University of Minnesota that resulted in the donation of $116,000 in surplus funds from the student-run bookstore.

That’s the kind of broad-based student support that in 1997 created the LRAP at Rutgers Law School in Newark. For several years, students had been gathering statistics, consulting with NAPIL, talking with faculty, and pushing for a program.

"We want our grads to be able to do what they want to do, not what they have to do because of their debt load," says Nicky Fornarotto, financial aid officer and LRAP administrator. But funding the program was a problem. "As a state institution, we didn’t have an endowment to count on," she says. Law school administrators asked every student to contribute an additional $25 each semester for loan repayment assistance. Every three years, the student body renews the plan through a referendum.

"We had our third referendum this year, and had only six negative votes," Fornarotto says. And while students are allowed to opt out, none ever has.

An anonymous Rutgers alum who heard about the students’ commitment recently donated $1 million to endow the program. Income from the gift will provide an additional $40,000 to $45,000 per year. This year, nine applicants received full coverage of their annual debt payments.

Marnie Glaeberman is a 2001 Rutgers- Newark graduate who coordinates medical advocacy for Doctors of the World in New York City. Her work includes handling HIV discrimination cases and meeting the legal needs of an AIDS clinic.

Glaeberman says she’ll never forget the day she learned she’d received a Rutgers LRAP grant, which felt like winning the lottery. With a debt of more than $48,000, she wasn’t sure how she was going to pay her bills. "It’s really something that gives you pause when you’re thinking about what you’re going to do," she says. "This amount allowed me to not think about every penny."

Not everyone agrees that the limited resources available for public interest law should be used to subsidize the lives of individual lawyers. At least that’s the argument advanced by University of Wisconsin 3L Tom Holter in a line of reasoning he admits is controversial.

"The fundamental problem with LRAP is that it conflates the very real need for more lawyers doing ‘good work’ with the coincidental preference of those law students who would like to do such work to also have more money in their pockets," Holter wrote last year in Praxis, a Wisconsin student publication. "Although few would argue that public interest lawyers should be impoverished by their jobs, it is disingenuous to argue that donations to LRAP will further the legitimate end of increasing the amount of lawyering in the public interest."

Holter noted that lawyers who do public interest work apparently find the low salary plus the job satisfaction to be adequate compensation because there always seem to be plenty of capable applicants for the few available positions in the field. And the pool of charitable resources that a law school can use toward public interest law is finite. "If we want to increase the net amount of lawyering in the public interest," he wrote, "we should instead fund additional paid positions for such lawyers."

That argument doesn’t convince David DeVries, chief deputy attorney for the state of Pennsylvania, who serves on the ABA commission. "It’s kind of an intellectual argument that doesn’t speak to the way things are," he says. Even if it’s true that there are plenty of applicants for a given position, he says, that doesn’t answer whether a particular student has the option. Maybe 10 people are interested but only five can afford to apply. That, he says, is like telling people there are enough lawyers already, so don’t go to law school.

And those applying for LRAP loans and grants aren’t just lining their pockets, DeVries adds. Consider the typical salary for a legal aid lawyer in Pennsylvania, $20,000 to $30,000, stretched over an apartment, food, and the basics of living. "The numbers don’t add up to a high standard of living," he says. "Then add a loan payment of $1,000 a month." DeVries questions the premise that lawyers who are so noble as to labor in public service all day with a caseload of 200 should be miserable at home, too. "It seems to me that people who do that should be rewarded more," he says.

Still, there’s the question of how the majority of law schools—those without enormous endowments and seemingly endless lists of wealthy alumni—can best spend limited resources. "We’re exploring the possibility of an LRAP, but we have mixed feelings," says Steven Bahls, dean of Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio. "High tuition is a problem at American law schools, and students need the money upfront."

Bahls contends it’s a myth that any student can find sufficient loan funds to go to law school. "A larger group than you’d expect can’t get private loan funds because of a blemish on their credit record, and government loans aren’t enough to meet expected tuition," he says. Many students have families to support, which makes it impractical to lead the life of a starving student. "Loan forgiveness doesn’t do much good for students who are denied access to law school because they can’t afford it," he says. "So our priority at Capital is trying to meet the financial needs of current students."

Bahls notes that in Columbus, as in most cities, many students see public defender jobs as a good way to gain experience before moving on to more lucrative work. That provides a steady stream of qualified applicants. "It results in a revolving door at the public defender’s office," he says. "But that is not a problem that law schools should be called on to solve."

It’s a question of triage, agrees Nancy Rapoport, dean of the University of Houston Law Center and commission member. "I’d like to see us do both," she says, describing her efforts to persuade wealthy alumni to adopt a student, providing full-ride scholarships to students leaning toward public interest. But students often change their minds during law school. "An LRAP is more precisely tailored to people actually demonstrating their commitment with their feet."

It’s the discrepancy between rich and poor law schools that bothers Peter Winograd, associate dean at the University of New Mexico School of Law and a liaison to the commission from the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. Why, he asks, should public-minded graduates of New York University get an average of $9,600 per year for up to 10 years, while those across town at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law get, at best, a one-time grant of $3,000? What’s needed, Winograd muses, is a national fund with, say, $500 million, which would provide $25 million per year in LRAP grants.

"That would help 3,000 people per year—that would make a dent," Winograd says. And there are willing donors out there, he adds, pointing to a $500,000 gift the University of Maryland recently received for its LRAP program from a donor who wasn’t even an alum. A few major law firms already make huge contributions to the effort. But, so far, no one has taken up the challenge of raising that much money.

In the meantime, law students are leading the charge to make a difference at their own schools and nationwide.

"You want to make sure that not only well-heeled people have the opportunity to go into public service," says Eric Besch, a 2002 graduate of the University of Maryland and one of last year’s Law Student Division delegates to the ABA House of Delegates.

One of three ABA Law Student Division representatives on the commission, Besch spent ABA Day in Washington, D.C., with fact sheets in hand, trying to raise awareness of the issue among members of Congress. On the school level, he says, the most successful programs emerge from a coalition of students, administrators, faculty, and alumni. But students may need to be the catalyst, he says. "If the students don’t make noise about it, it can get lost," he says.

That’s what Matthew Clash-Drexler did at the University of Michigan. "Michigan has gone from a very mediocre [LRAP] program to the top tier," Clash-Drexler says. That happened because he saw significant limitations in the program his first semester and assembled a committee of students and administrators to address them.

"We did a chart comparing scenarios at different competitor schools," he says, showing what a single graduate, a married graduate, and a graduate making various salaries would be able to get for debt reduction at each school. "On every one, Michigan was at the bottom," he says.

That embarrassed the administration into taking action. One of the changes for 1999 was calculating repayment of federal loans over 10 years instead of 25. Another was forgiving the entire loan for a given year at the end of that year, provided the lawyer is still doing low-income work. Before, each loan was forgiven incrementally over three years of low-income work.

The school also changed the method for considering a spouse’s income, included graduates working part time, increased the deduction for child care expenses, and allowed a deduction for undergraduate debt. Michigan’s program serves about 60 people each year, with loans that vary widely but average $6,000.

Clash-Drexler himself obtained a Skadden Arps fellowship that is making his tuition debt payments and providing his salary for two years at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C. "Without a loan repayment program, it would be a lot more difficult to make ends meet," he says. "I think LRAPs are just essential to public interest law."

Judge Coffin contends that, ultimately, dealing with this problem is a government responsibility—hence two of the commission’s three working groups focused on state and federal efforts.

"Paying off private debt isn’t a government function," he says, "but attracting the best people to public legal service is." If society feels it’s important to have very good lawyers prosecuting criminals, defending the indigent, and providing legal services to the poor, then society will have to find ways to restructure debt repayment or otherwise cope with this crisis, Coffin says. Just what form that will take remains to be seen.

"When you have enough good people working on a problem," Coffin says, "good things will happen."