Law schools, and some business schools, often encourage their graduates to consider public service by establishing programs that help pay off their student debt. Tufts University is taking that concept further, offering loan-repayment assistance to alumni of any of its undergraduate or graduate schools, or professional-degree programs, if they take on public-service or nonprofit careers.
Since 2008, the program has given out $1.3-million in awards to more than 800 graduates who have studied in disciplines as varied as the liberal arts, science and engineering, international relations, and medicine and veterinary medicine.
Based on their need and income, alumni can receive grants of $500 to $5,000 each year to use toward paying off student-loan balances. Students receiving assistance or loan forgiveness from other sources are still eligible to apply for the grant, too.
“I haven’t heard of another program that’s as generous as theirs,” says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid, a Web site that provides student-aid advice.
Judi A. Kennedy, administrator of the program at Tufts, says the assistance supports alumni working in a wide variety of fields.
One Tufts graduate in the program worked with disease management for Boston’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. Others have worked with homeless and uninsured families in need of dental care in New Hampshire, and with organizations for the arts in New York City.
For Matt MacGregor, who studied international affairs at Tufts both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, the repayment-assistance program meant that he was able to spend his first year out of graduate school working with the Vietnam Ministry of Agriculture’s rural-development center in Hanoi.
“Since I went to Tufts twice, I spent a lot of money there. I was looking for opportunities far and wide to help me manage my debt,” he said. His loan balances “weren’t overwhelming,” he said, “but they were something I was going to have to be dealing with for a long time.”
Mr. MacGregor has received assistance from the program since it first began, once getting almost $3,000, an amount that covered his loans for about four months.
And in 2009, he said, the assistance made it easy for him to accept an offer to become the executive director of Timmy Global Health, a nonprofit that expands health care in developing countries and brings students training as doctors to work in them. He chose the position over pursuing a more lucrative job with the United Nations, whose recruitment exam he’d passed that same year.
Mr. McGregor said he thinks continued support of the program is going to be essential to Tufts’s mission to encourage graduates to pursue public-service careers. “As the cost of education rises, they are going to face a challenge to push people into these high-value but lower-paying sectors,” he said.
Similar programs exist at the national level. Since 2007, the federal government has offered some loan forgiveness to students from any college who enter public service. After graduates have made 10 years of monthly loan payments as full-time public-service workers, the government may forgive any remaining debt they have on certain federal student loans.
Tufts’s program is paid for by a gift from the estate of George B. and Helen J. Hargens, and the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund, which Tufts alumni Pierre and Pam Omidyar established in 2005 with a $100-million donation. (Mr. Omidyar is the founder of eBay.)
Ms. Kennedy, the Tufts program administrator, says that it’s important for students and alumni to keep in mind that the program does not offer loan forgiveness, and that it should not be the sole factor that determines a Tufts graduate’s choice to work in the public or nonprofit sector. But, she adds, “we hope if that’s their passion, this will help them pursue that.”