Loan Forgiveness for Public Service

As I may have mentioned in the past, we at Chateau Steelypips have benefitted greatly from Yale Law School's loan forgiveness program for graduates taking public service jobs. Since Kate shattered my dreams of a self-funded basement lab by deciding to use her pricey law degree for good rather than racking up billions as Evil Corporate Scum, the funds they provided to help pay off her loans were a crucial element of our finances for the first few years of our marriage. In fact, you could argue that they're the reason there's a physical Chateau Steelypips in the first place-- even in 2002, I doubt a bank would've loaned us the money to buy this house without them.

So, I'm favorably disposed toward such programs in general. As such, I'm very pleased to see Inside Higher Ed reporting on a new program at Tufts:

[O]n Tuesday, Tufts University unveiled a new program that will, beginning next year, allow any student or alumnus who has educational loan debt incurred while in a degree program at Tufts and works for a nonprofit group or government agency to apply for grants to help them repay their loans.The program will be financed with $500,000 a year from the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund, which was created last year with a $100 million gift from the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, and his wife, Pamela.

"Every student who graduates with a loan worries about how to pay it off," Lawrence S. Bacow, the Tufts president, said in a news release about the Tufts Loan Repayment Assistance Program. "We would like alumni to be able to pursue their passions -- to do what they really want to do -- without being unduly focused on the need to retire a student loan. It is especially appropriate for Tufts to make this commitment, since as an institution we seek to encourage a spirit of public service in our students."

Good for Tufts. This isn't enough to take the place of a sensible allocation of societal resources to encourage good people to go into the fields where they're really needed (as opposed to going to Wall Street to invent new forms of wildly irresponsible financial speculation), but it's at least a small step in the right direction.