Highly selective law schools have the best return on investment (ROI), according to a new study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW). However, those schools educate a small share of law school graduates. Across all law schools, women and members of historically marginalized communities—who are more likely to graduate from law schools with lower post-graduate earnings and higher unemployment outcomes—face disparities in earnings.
The study ranked 186 law schools based on their graduates’ median annual earnings net of debt payments four years post-graduation. These calculations did not include cost of attendance (tuition, fees, and living expenses)—just the debt associated with a school’s program.
“When it comes to law school, the best returns are concentrated among a small number of institutions, educating approximately 20% of law students,” CEW Director and lead author Jeff Strohl says in a press release. “Graduates earn the highest salaries from highly selective institutions. The top 26 law schools lead to six-figure salaries and a bar passage rate of 97%.”
Law school tends to be more expensive than many other graduate programs and can leave graduates with high levels of debt. “Graduates leave law schools with a median debt burden of $118,500, and lower earnings make it harder to pay back this debt,” says Catherine Morris, report co-author and senior editor and writer at CEW. High levels of debt can offset high post-graduate earnings.
For all law school graduates, the median earnings net of debt are $72,000 four years after graduation. However, those earnings net of debt exceed $200,000 at seven top law schools: Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, Cornell University, Stanford University, Harvard University, and Northwestern University. At 33 of the 186 law schools included, graduates earn less than $55,000 net of debt payments four years after graduation.
Narrow pathways to top-paying jobs
Top law schools are pipelines to prestigious, high-paying jobs. “[H]ow easily recent graduates can find work, and how prestigious that work turns out to be, tends to skew the best returns to the top handful of institutions,” the study says. CEW researchers found that graduates from the 26 highest-earning law schools are more likely to be hired at the nation’s largest law firms or be federal clerks. Over the last three years, 16% of all law graduates landed full-time, full-year positions at big law firms, compared to 44% of graduates from the 26 highest-earning law schools. Three percent of all law school graduates worked in federal clerkships, compared to 8% of graduates from the highest-earning law schools. Graduates from top law schools are also more likely to earn Supreme Court clerkships. In over four decades, more than two-thirds of those clerkships were filled by graduates of just five law schools: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Chicago.
The study also found disparities in earnings and employment outcomes by race, ethnicity, and gender, especially among Black and Latine women. Since 2016, women have accounted for 56% of law school students, but they make up 39% of all practicing attorneys. Male lawyers also tend to have higher median earnings than female lawyers. In entry-level law positions, the gender pay gap in median earnings is $12,000, but among all prime-age working lawyers (ages 25-54), the gender pay gap increases to $28,000, “indicating that institutional barriers and attrition in the legal profession contribute to the lack of earnings parity later in lawyers’ careers,” the press release says. Latine and Black lawyers have the lowest median earnings compared to higher-earning white and Asian lawyers, and they are more likely to leave law school with higher debt burdens than their peers.
To address these inequities, law schools should ensure scholarships go to more students with lower LSAT scores and GPAs, especially as some schools are eliminating race-based scholarships, Shirley Jefferson, vice president of community engagement, government relations and professor of law at Vermont Law School, tells Diverse Issues in Higher Education. “They should start spreading the money through everybody, from the lowest [LSAT score] to the highest,” says Jefferson.