Comments on: The Harvard Law Financial Aid Situation (With Emails)

By: guest

guest — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:10:02 +0000

The Harvard Law Record just came out with an article that corrects a lot of the prevailing media sentiment circulating about the changes in financial aid at HLS. The administration is pretty firm in asserting that the number of people who took PSI was around what they expected, for example: http://www.hlrecord.org/news/financial-aid-increase-makes-up-for-harvard-s-public-service-initiative-cut-1.951142

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:04:40 +0000

The PSI was a waste. Run the numbers–in almost all cases, students would have been better off taking the traditional LRAP.
Harvard continues to have one of the most generous LRAP programs in the country, led by only Yale and Stanford.

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:11:17 +0000

I’m an HLS student, and I can’t say I’ve ever understood the PSI to be that significant. It seems to amount to an approximately $9,000 / yr, five year stipend. I can’t imagine it weighs that heavily in career planning, especially in light of LIPP. I’m not saying it doesn’t help folks doing public interest work to meet their expenses. But it seems neither to be that great a recruiting tool nor a particularly great inducement to pursue a career in public service.

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:59:21 +0000

25: NYU repays 100% of loans for anyone who goes into public interest.
Clearly, you are still a student and not an alum who has tried to use LRAP.

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:54:16 +0000

public interest is for losers

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:48:21 +0000

Can’t Harvard just hit up its wealthy alumni for more dough? Shit, the Goldman Sachs guys got their bonuses, they could pitch in, right?

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:41:47 +0000

23 –
Wait, wait. You’ve misread the situation. HLS — like any top school — has an incredibly generous loan repayment program just like what you’ve described. Anyone who makes under a certain amount gets all their loans paid back. I had over 150K leaving HLS, and worked for state government (from 40K to 85K annual salary), and in 10 years it had paid back almost all of my loans. I paid back virtually nothing.
HLS has the most generous loan repayment plan in the country, far more generous than American’s. I’m not saying you have a bad school — my first boss went to American — but your loan repayment plan is worse.
PSI was a SEPARATE initiative, announced by Dean Kagan, where people get an EXTRA, UP-FRONT tuition reimbursement for pledging to working in public interest law for 5 years. That is all that is going away.

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:29:13 +0000

CK – You are a d-bag of the worst sort. Donnybrook? Seriously? Hopefully the only population you’ll be leading is a book club or we’re all in serious trouble.

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:19:57 +0000

I think Dean Minow is doing a good job. She’s dealing with a rough situation and working as hard as she can to keep everybody level headed (and this is coming from an unemployed 3L at HLS).
All rough times pass. The grace that HLS’s formal offices display during the donnybrook is what sets the school apart, in my opinion. The PSI was a great idea, but it’s unwise to expand our spending after the hedge fund endowment debacle (which was NOT an HLS decision). As with most things coming out of the Dean’s office since I started here, this was a well designed compromise.
Besides, the real value of our degrees will come decades down the line. Law students are taking out a ton of debt to afford this very valuable experience, and as we’ve learned to be effective advocates, we’re bound to push back against any public move to take away paths of least resistance.
But this post about the push back buries the lede. Even if most HLS students have a very rough next few years trying to survive in this economic climate, we’re all going to find some way to keep eating and sheltering ourselves.
Moreover, it’s probably for the best that we have to face the same economic peril the rest of the country does, if only so we aren’t insulated from the populations we’re all working so hard to one day lead (this is ESPECIALLY true for HLS students going into the public sector).
Life will not be fun for a little while. But many of us will be stronger for facing this tumult, and it might be good that everybody’s urging us to rethink our priorities.
Here’s to the long term,
CK

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:56:16 +0000

This would never hapen at Widener