What you really really don’t want to do here, and what Harvard lawyer in the article is predicting will happen, is decrease the cost of going to law school or make it easier to be involved in law without being a lawyer. You have to think that the demand for lawyers is somewhat inelastic, and therefore demand relatively stable. If you make it cheaper for people to go to law school and ease up the rules, you suddenly have a drastic increase in the supply of lawyers and people who provide similar functions with little change in the demand for them, and therefore you wages go down across the board, in both sectors. Clearly, decreasing the costs won’t help if the benefits go down proportionally; the debt will be the same.

Going back to the two main issues, I think you could solve the debt problem by solving the disparity problem. I know some of the top-tier school, particularly Harvard and NYU, are doing this by paying off a certain amount of the debt (often a pretty large amount) for graduates who go into the public sector, essentially subsidizing their wages. This also could cause wages to converge slightly between the two sectors as more people are willing to work in public service, so the demand between the two shifts. This is particularly helpful if you’re taking people from the top-tier schools, who usually have the easiest time of getting high paying private firm jobs, placing them in the public sector, and therefore opening the private sector jobs to a wider range of students.