Six-Figure Salaries or Six-Figure Debt? New Data Questions if Law School is Worth It

If you’re currently in or looking to go to law school, a recent survey may not be super encouraging. New data shows that the earning potential of law grads isn’t as lucrative as commonly thought, and often doesn’t keep pace with the debt taken to get a legal education.

The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) is a research and policy institute within the university’s school of public policy. The Center studies the links between education, career qualifications, and workforce demands. CEW recently released a report titled “A Law Degree is No Sure Thing: Some Law School Graduates Earn Top Dollar, but Many Do Not.” The title says a lot, but let’s break down some of the findings.

Is Getting a JD Worth It?

Compared to a bachelor’s degree, data shows that a law degree does offer a boost in earnings throughout one’s lifetime. But the ROI that a JD offers depends on a range of factors, such as: the type of work the graduate goes into, the type and size of the firm they work at, and the city or state they work in. CEW calculates salaries as “earnings net of debt payment,” which factors in the amount of debt owed compared to the salary one makes. For example, if a lawyer made $80,000 per year but had to pay $2,000 in student loan debt per month, their earnings net of debt payment would be $56,000.

The median net of debt income for law graduates four years after graduation is $72,000. Unsurprisingly, the best earnings outcomes are those made by graduates of a few institutions, somewhat correlated to the ranking of the school. At 26 schools, graduates earn, even accounting for debt, at least $100,000. On the other end of the salary spectrum, graduates of 33 other schools earn less than $55,000 after accounting for debt. Most graduates earn somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. At the top seven law schools, median net earnings exceed $200,000.

The highest earners come from Columbia Law School, with a median $253,800 net of debt four years after graduation. This is followed by law grads from the University of Pennsylvania ($238,000), the University of Chicago ($230,700), Cornell ($227,100), and Stanford $227,100. On the other end of the spectrum, we have graduates from Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School making net $32,100, those from Inter American University of Puerto Rico-School of Law making net $29,000, and Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico-Ponce making net $22,000.

It's also important to note that while a JD may offer an earnings premium over a bachelor’s degree, the disparity depends a lot on what the undergraduate degree looks like. Since law school doesn’t require a certain type of undergraduate degree or course load (unlike med school), law students come from a variety of undergraduate disciplines. The majority of law students come with an undergraduate degree in the social sciences, the humanities, or business. For humanities undergrads, getting a JD more than doubles their earnings. For social sciences undergrads, it will double earning. And for business undergrads, it will only increase earnings by 50%; the same is true for undergrads who majored in a STEM field. The trends play out similarly both for men and women. Thus, the “JD premium” is a lot more meaningful for those who majored in the humanities or social sciences in undergrad – which make up the major shares of law students.

The Gender Gap

It’s been true for a while now that women outnumber men in law schools. Recent data shows that women make up 56% of students enrolled at ABA-accredited schools. The number of men enrolled at law schools has been decreasing much more rapidly than women.

Even at elite institutions, the pattern holds; women outnumber men at 17 of the top 20 law schools. However, top institutions have a gender ratio much closer to 50-50 than lower-ranked schools, which skew higher in percent of women over men. This means that women make up a bigger percentage of students at law schools where graduate earnings are lower and unemployment higher.

This is meaningful because there are more women working in the legal field. This data may explain why the women in the legal workforce still don’t nearly match the men, even though the percent of women law students surpasses men in 2016 and since. Women still only make up 39% of practicing lawyers. Although data earlier this year showed that there were finally more women associates at law firms than men, there are still disparities in senior positions and partners.

This is reflected in average earnings for women. The gender wage gap we’ve all heard of holds true in the legal industry: at most law schools, men earn more than women four years after graduating. For lawyers relatively new into their careers, there is a $12,000 wage gap between men and women. Across all lawyers of working age, that gap more than doubles to $28,000.

Takeaways and More to Read

Jeff Strohl, the Director of CEW Director and lead author of the report, has a takeaway for aspiring law students: “Those contemplating a legal profession need to consider factors like tuition costs and living expenses, existing and additional student loans, and disparate earnings outcomes. But the most important thing to understand is that debt may constrain the career choices that graduates can make after earning their degree.”

There are a lot more data points that the CEW tracked in their report, including looking at data across racial and ethnic demographic groups, the relationship between bar exam passage and debt, and statistics of non-JD legal degrees. The full document is 84 pages, and filled with charts and tables to help visualize the data. You can read it for yourself here.

Related Resources:

• Why Go to Law School? (FindLaw's Law Students)
• Have Law Firms Achieved Gender Parity? Partially. (FindLaw's Practice of Law)
• Paying for Law School (FindLaw's Law Students)