What is the catch?
First, you have to choose public interest work after law school.
Second, you have to get admitted to Georgetown University Law Center, which is no easy task in and of itself.
Obstacles aside, it is not often that you hear the term free and law school in the same breath.
As reported by WNBC, the Georgetown Law program dovetails with a new federal law, which allows people working a public service job to pay only 10 percent of their income toward their student loans. After 10 years, the entire debt is forgiven. Georgetown will cover that 10 percent for graduates earning less than $75,000 a year.
Professor Philip Schrag, who developed Georgetown's loan repayment program, says many law students have hoped to do public service, "and then discovered they couldn't really do what they'd come to law school to do, and ended up in a private law firm where they felt they weren't themselves."
(Law professor Philip Schrag is pictured).
UVA has a similar program. It's a great deal!
If you do public service after graduation, you can get in the loan forgiveness program. If you earn less than $35k, your loans are completely paid. You pay half of everything you earn above that until you're phased out. Ex: A salary of $50k means that you pay $7.5k per year (half of $15k) towards loans. UVA picks up the rest. Not quite free, but still very helpful.
Posted by: Andrew Flusche | December 02, 2009 at 09:03 PM