NYU history major

juillet
Wed, 23 Dec 2015 21:18:30 +0000

If you can get into a top 15-20ish law school, then things are different. The market is still overall terrible, but those lawyers do have better chances overall of getting good jobs that allow them to repay their loans.

Yale Law has a 9.6% acceptance rate, with an average GPA of 3.93 and average LSAT of 173. The overwhelmingly majority take at least a year between college and law school to do something. Harvard Law is similar - average GPA of a 3.86, average LSAT of 173, most students took at least 2 years off before law school. The insane competition to get into undergrad is only intensified on the law level.

They do have very good employment outcomes. Still, Yale Law’s website reveals that their median salary is actually $72,000. There’s a big split between the median salary of their private practice lawyers ($160K), their lawyers in business and industry ($137K) and the majority of the class who go into public interest law ($72K and below). That’s somewhat due to the large percentage (31%) of the class that does judicial clerkships; most of those clerks will get a prestigious job after law school, but not all of them will go into private practice.

And getting the job is only half the battle…you can read about BigLaw jobs and their grueling hours elsewhere. (You can also ponder about whether even a $160K salary is enough to repay $200-250K in debt.

Here’s a good exercise for any aspiring lawyer. All of the ABA-accredited law schools are required to post certain information on their websites for prospective students to look at. These are generally alumni outcomes and average salaries, and it’s broken down to a pretty decent level of detail. Most law schools also have class profiles, so you can see the average GPA and LSAT scores of admitted students and also some other information about admissions.