Another Option for Aspiring Public Interest Lawyers: LRAPs

When it comes to LRAP, carefully consider what each individual school offers to help you survive on a public interest salary.

[UPDATE 6/23/15: Some calculations from a previous version of this article were incorrect. They have been corrected. ] My last two posts argued that if you want to practice public interest law, you should go to law school for free. After the second post, I received an influx of mail and comments talking up loan repayment assistance programs (or LRAPs, as they’re commonly called) as a superior alternative to scholarships.

A lightly edited example I received via email:

I am a Yale Law grad working at a nonprofit and making ¼ of what I could be making at a firm.  I passed up full scholarships to both Columbia and NYU, and it’s worked out fine for me, in that Yale’s COAP loan repayment program means that – several years out of law school – I have not paid one single penny towards my law school loans.  Assuming I stick with my current gig for another 4 years I will have gone to law school, living expenses included, for free.

Obviously that’s pretty great. I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs unpacking it.

Let me start by noting something important: Yale is atypical. According to the ABA, for the academic year beginning in fall 2013, there were 386,285 total law school applications combined from 59,400 unique individuals. And for that same academic year, Yale extended 247 offers. Forty-eight people actually turned down spots at Yale, resulting in a class of 199 people. That means that 0.3% of all law-school applicants last year ended up at Yale.  And you?  If you’re the sort of person who would take the advice offered up in a 600-word ATL column written under a pseudonym without considering any additional information, then I can pretty much guarantee that you don’t have a tenth of the sense necessary to be among the handful of people who end up at Yale in any given year. (By the way, of those 59,400 law school applications, 1931 ended up matriculating at one of the HYSCCN — that’s 0.3%.)

Anyway, as an atypical school, Yale has a gloriously generous LRAP. Let’s take a look at its terms as an exemplar of what an LRAP can be:

According to Yale’s website, Yale’s LRAP — called the “Career Options Assistance Program” —  applies to alums holding “all jobs in all sectors,” covers 100% of loan payments for alums making up to roughly $50,000 (this is adjustable based on factors like spousal income, spousal debt, and dependents) and a significant percentage for significantly higher salaries, and disbursed over $4 million last year.  Essentially, regardless of what you do for a living, Yale will pay for you to have attended Yale if you don’t make enough money after you graduate to pay your debt on your own.  There are other nice features, too (covers some undergrad debt, part time work, six months’ parental leave, and more).  Hence folks like our emailer who hasn’t had to pay a penny toward law school.

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Some other top schools have similarly generous LRAPs.  I’ll leave it to you, aspiring public interest lawyer, to sort through the details.

Now let’s jump down to lowly number 24 in the US News Rankings, the University of Washington School of Law.  According to its website, the University of Washington’s LRAP provides forgivable $5000 loans to “approximately three” new recipients each year, with the possibility that each recipient will get two additional forgivable $5000 loans over the next two years.  The first loan is forgiven when the recipient hits two years of public-interest employment; the second and third are forgiven when the recipient hits three years.  Next to Yale’s program, Washington’s seems paltry — Yale spends about $4,000,000 per year to Washington’s $45,000.

But Washington is not exactly poor; in 2005 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated over $30 million to establish — drumroll — a fantastic scholarship program for aspiring public interest lawyers.  Five renewable Gates scholarships are granted each year, covering “tuition, books, other normal fees imposed for University and UW School of Law enrollment, costs of room and board and incidental expenses.”  That’s generous.  The school’s LRAP, however, is pretty much representative of what you’d find at many schools, ranked and unranked.

And the differences between Yale’s and Washington’s LRAPs highlight the questions you should ask about an LRAP if you’re considering relying on one to help you survive a public interest salary:  How much can I get?  For how long?  For what work?  And what other features or limitations are there?

In the end, the programs also highlight an important takeaway for aspiring public interest lawyers (albeit one stated less brazenly than my previous advice): carefully consider what each individual school offers to help you survive on a public interest salary, whether that’s avoidance of debt in the first instance (my preferred track) or a generous loan repayment program (the preferred track of others).  If you explore enough, you’ll probably find some bad options (as well as plenty of good) toward the top of the rankings and some good ones (as well as plenty of bad) toward the bottom.

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Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.