A Faustian bargain? Rethinking the role of debt in law students' career choices

Despite the absence of strong empirical evidence to support the relationship, legal scholars have long argued that a model of financing legal education through student debt makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most students to take seriously a career path in government and public interest (GPI) law, where salaries are generally lower than private, corporate practice. Drawing from a multiwave, panel survey of law students, we take advantage of a unique tuition remission intervention that occurred at the founding of University of California Irvine (UCI) Law, resulting in a natural, quasi-experiment. Using ordinary least squares regression and an instrumental variables approach, we ask whether law student debt influences the likelihood that students will (1) launch their careers in the GPI and (2) aspire to the GPI sector 5 years after graduation. We find little to no evidence that student debt is a barrier to a graduate's decision to take a position in the GPI sector at career launch or that debt is a factor in a graduate's career aspirations at UCI law school during the study period. These counterintuitive findings provoke new questions about our understanding of debt in the context of legal education and the types of interventions that might facilitate greater entry into the public sector.