If everybody who was eligible took advantage of this program, I don’t see how it is financially solvent. If you think of all the teachers, the public defenders, the physicians that are eligible for this, it is an astronomic amount of money.

That being said, I would make more money in private practice than by doing research. So if you want people to take that pay cut, you need to have something to offset that.

Hopping In and Out

Dominique Whittaker, 29, Seattle

Communications manager, Microsoft; previously worked for a nonprofit serving at-risk youth

Student debt: $114,500

I think it gives you a light at the end of the tunnel when you graduate college and you realize, “I have thousands of dollars in debt and the job I just accepted pays a fraction of what that is.”

Nonprofit work allows you to connect to causes that are really important to you, so for me it was working with at-risk youth, helping them get out of toxic living environments and learn the skills they needed to be an adult in the world.

I put in three and a half years of loan payments and recently took a job at Microsoft. (The required 10 years of public service do not need to be consecutive.) My logic was, I’ll hop out of the nonprofit world, go into the corporate world, get on a career track and make enough money so that I can come back into the nonprofit work that I really enjoy, but also be able to afford to live.

You need public servants to fill in the gaps where the government falls short, and so, for the government to say they’re going to completely abandon this program because it costs too much is a slap in the face to the people who are taking on the burden that the government leaves on the table.