Ranking Over Money

juillet
Thu, 28 Jan 2016 12:20:39 +0000

I wouldn’t go to either.

I’m assuming by top 50 you mean something that is in the 30-50 range, otherwise you would’ve said “top 30” or “top 20” or so. So for demonstration purposes I picked two schools in that range: one ranked in the 30s (Boston College, tied for #34) and one ranked in the 40s (Washington and Lee, tied for #42). For a top 150 school, I picked University of San Francisco (ranked #138). All rankings are from USNWR.

BC’s post-law school employment has varied from 84% to 90% over the past 3 years. Out of 270 graduating class members, 210 are in jobs that require bar passage, which is good. Only 51 are working at large law firms (500+ lawyers); 36 are working at medium-sized law firms (100-500 lawyers). 29 went into judicial clerkships. Others went into a variety of other fields like business, government, etc.

Only those at the medium to large law firms are averaging the kind of salary (medians of $125-160K) that would enable them to repay loans of $150K+. The average salaries at the smaller law firms were all less than $85,000 a year, and the salaries at jobs outside of the law firms were all less than $75,000. The government and public lawyers were averaging around $50-60K. Those in the judicial clerkships who move onto large law firms might be okay.

At W&L only 15 were in large law firms with an additional 4 in medium law firms (out of a class of 127). There were 7 federal clerkships and 10 state and local ones. W&L doesn’t report salaries in their disclosure but all the data I’ve seen suggest that they’re probably quite similar to the BC ones - the 19 alumni who went to medium to large firms are probably the only ones cracking six figures.

At the University of San Francisco, out of 192 graduates in the class of 2014, only 73 of them got jobs that required bar passage (that’s less than half). 25% of the graduating class was still unemployed and seeking employment 9 months after graduation, and a further 5% had just found jobs and were beginning them 10 months after graduation. There were only 2 judicial clerkships.

Only 10 of those employed students were at large law firms with a further 3 at medium-sized law firms. The 10 (less than 10% of the class) made a median of $152,000 a year. The numbers at the medium-sized law firms were too small to compute medians, but those at quite small firms (50 or less) were making a median of $72,500 or less. The average salary in the the other fields were $77,000 or less, and most were in the $50-60K range.

Put another way:

-About 32% of Boston College alumni are working in jobs that average enough money to pay back $150K worth of debt.
-About 14% of Washington & Lee alumni are working these types of jobs.
-About 6.7% of USF alumni are working these types of jobs.

Now, this isn’t a full/complete picture - those law clerks can defer their loans during the clerkship and will probably get plum jobs after finishing. Also, some of those business lawyers are making good money if they are in-house counsel to big firms (although even at BC, the 75th percentile of business salaries was still only $85,000. The only other jobs there where the 75th percentile approached six figures was law firms with 25 to 100 lawyers).

So the only one I would even consider would be the top 50ish school, and I would still probably turn them down. The odds are too high that you won’t make enough money to repay the loans. And even if you did by chance get one of those Big Law jobs, you’re then shackled to it for 10+ years so you can pay down your debt. Any small financial misstep can be a catastrophe.