When A Full Ride Is Half-Empty

Even with "free" law school, some bills still need to get paid.

Last month, I wrote that prospective public interest lawyers should go to law school for free. At some schools, it truly is possible to go for no cost at all: for example, I’ve mentioned the University of Washington’s comprehensive Gates Public Service Law scholarship program. But at many schools, going for “free” means having biggest expense — tuition — fully covered, but still having to find a way to manage other expenses, like food, clothing, and shelter.

A reader emailed me about this problem. Here’s a lightly edited excerpt:

Even a full ride doesn’t always avoid debt. I got a very good deal on law school and still had to take out federal loans to live, as well as a private loan to get myself through those miserable four months between graduation and bar results. After four-plus years of non-stop full-time employment, I’ve still got well over six figures of law school debt.

Ouch.

This seems to be a common problem. I’ll admit that though I myself went to law school on a full scholarship, I didn’t completely avoid debt. I took out a subsidized federal loan for each year of law school, added a small chunk of unsubsidized federal loan money to cover my bar-study summer, and graduated with debt in the low five figures. This plan left me with very manageable loan payments.

Of course, by themselves, the subsidized federal loans were not enough to live on. So maybe sharing how I managed to scrape up some additional money for food, clothing, and shelter will help others to do the same.

  1. Significant Other

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t begin with the income my significant other brought in in the form of a grad student stipend. As you can probably imagine, the stipend was hardly a panacea; it was barely enough to keep one person comfortable and certainly not enough to support two people. But it did provide a buffer — if nothing else, we could always pay our rent.

  1. In- and Out-of-School Work

To help pay the bills without taking on much debt, I filled quite a few of my off-hours with paying work. Some of this was through my law school: early in my 1L year, I began working as a research assistant, and I kept it up through graduation. Not only did it provide a little extra income, but — because I was helping with work like brief-writing rather than strictly academic research — it brought the added benefit of actually helping me prepare to be a lawyer.

Also, beginning the summer before law school and continuing through my bar-study summer, I worked for a private tutoring company doing mostly SAT-prep sessions. This was a pretty low-key way to make a not-insignificant dent in my monthly expenses, and I’d recommend it.

  1. Summer Stipends

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I found two sources of financial support for otherwise unpaid summer work at public interest organizations: Equal Justice Works and my law school’s summer stipend program.

Through its Americorps JD program (formerly called Summer Corps), Equal Justice Works pays $1,212 toward a recipient’s educational expenses, including debt. To qualify, the recipient must work 300 hours providing civil legal assistance, and cannot be paid for that work except through a grant, stipend, or living allowance. Although these funds don’t go directly into your pocketbook, a summer in the Americorps JD program will help you cover a loan payment or three down the road. And you can enter the program up to four times, so in the end the benefit could conceivably be close to five thousand dollars.

Even more helpfully, many schools offer stipends to students doing unpaid summer work. Most reasonable ones are in the ballpark of a few thousand dollars; mine was. Indeed, while other sources of income can help, this is really the essential funding piece to look into if you’re considering a full ride from a school to do public interest work: does the school have a program in place to pay you a halfway decent stipend for summer work that would otherwise be unpaid? You can start by checking here, and ask the school for more information.

Of course, to some extent this discussion glosses over the more important issue: what’s to be done if you’ve already accepted the big scholarship, nevertheless accumulated significant debt to pay for rent and food, and now find yourself making $40,000 as a legal services attorney? If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions for a systemic fix beyond IBR/ICR/PAYE/PSLF, please leave them in the comments or email me at publicinterestatl.gmail.com.