Can’t afford law school? No problem! Just go to Georgetown and get a law degree on the taxpayers’ dime.

Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post reports.

How Georgetown Law gets Uncle Sam to pay its students’ bills

Did you know that you can go to Georgetown Law absolutely free of charge? No, really. If you get in and commit to working for the government or for nonprofits, making $75,000 a year or less, for 10 years, you can get your JD absolutely free of charge. It’s called the Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP), and it’s a very good deal for students.

It’s a very good deal for Georgetown, too — but not in the way the government intended. Georgetown has found a very clever way to exploit recent reforms to federal student loan programs so as to greatly reduce the price of law school for students without costing the school anything either.

How it works

Georgetown Law students who use LRAP use loans from  Grad PLUS — the federal government’s student loan program for grad students — to fund the entire cost of going to law school. That includes not only tuition and fees but living expenses like housing and food. Grad PLUS has no upper limit on the amount you can borrow, so there isn’t any constraint on how much you take out.

Once out of school, the students enroll in an income-based repayment program, in which, if they’re working for a nonprofit, the federal government forgives all loans after 10 years. For that 10-year period, however, the borrower has to pay a share of their income. But under LRAP, Georgetown commits to covering all of those payments.

Upon first glance, it looks like what’s happening is that Georgetown is paying for part of the cost of law school and the federal government is forgiving the rest. But as Jason Delisle and Alex Holt at the New America Foundation discovered, Georgetown’s cleverer than that. The tuition paid by new students — tuition they’re often paying with federal loans — includes the cost of covering the previous students’ loan payments.