Law School Letdown
Law School Letdown [ 0 ] May 4, 2008 | Robert Pellegrino
In U.S. News and World Report’s 2009 edition of its annual law school rankings, Howard University Law rates as a third tier school, placing it among the lowest ranked legal institutions in the country. Yet the school’s career service office publishes a median starting salary for all 2007 graduates of $135,000—a sum that indicates Howard Law graduates rank among the highest paid legal professionals.
A closer look reveals that the salary data is suspect.
Howard Law collects its students’ salary data by distributing voluntary surveys to graduates. In 2006, Howard graduated 146 students from its law school and reported that the median starting salary for graduates entering private practice was $135,000, according to numbers published on the school’s career services website. However, of those surveyed, only 54% had reported their salaries to Howard. Based on numbers provided to U.S. News and World Report, Howard knows that only 18 students or 12% of its graduating class earn at or above $135,000.
LuEllen Conti, career services director at Howard University School of Law, says the numbers are accurate for the students who reported their salaries.
Because law schools typically distribute voluntary surveys to graduates as a way of calculating the starting salaries, the accuracy of the salaries law schools report is often dubious, as some schools publish survey results applicable to only a small fraction of an entire class.
A Widespread Problem
The most common way schools acquire their salary information is by distributing employment surveys to graduates nine months after graduation. A survey found on Northeastern University Law School’s website asks for the graduate’s employment status, employer information, source of employment, salary and date of offer as well as various employment categories sub-divided into private practice, business, government, public interest and academia.
At Duke Law School, the director of career services, Tedi Mason, says the reported median starting salary of $135,000 corresponds to half the graduating class entering private practice, based on voluntary surveys distributed to recent graduates and denies that any numbers are purposefully inflated.
“That means if you line everybody up from lowest to highest, from $35,000 to $135,000, the median is the number in the middle, so at least half of our graduates make $135,000,” Mason says.
Yet a closer look at the data reveals that number is misleading.
In 2006, Duke Law graduated 220 students and reported that the median salary for students working in private practice was based on voluntary salary surveys, according to data published in U.S. News and World Report. Of the students who responded to the survey, Duke was aware of the salary information for only 130 students working in the private sector. Half of those students, or 65, reported earning the median of at least $135,000 or above. That means while 65 students could have earned the published median, 155 student salaries, or 70% of the class, went unreported or reported earning less than the median.
“The reason that those numbers are so high is because a lot of our students go to New York or D.C., where starting salaries are very high,” Mason explains. “So that’s why those numbers seem somewhat inflated
Boston University Law School’s policy for collecting salary data also involves distributing employment surveys, yet Boston University’s median private-sector salary of $135,000 is based on the survey results of 61% of the graduating class and only 37% of private-sector students, based on numbers published in U.S. News and World Report.
Director of communications and marketing at Boston University Law, Mary Gallagher, declined to comment.
Voluntary student surveys are the most commonly used salary collection practice. But some schools employ alternate approaches or decline to reveal their data collection procedures in some cases.
Boston College School of Law advertises a median starting salary of $135,000 on its career services website targeted for prospective students. However, the director of career services, Maris Abbene, would not disclose how the school acquires its salary data.
“Our numbers are accurate. I can’t disclose how we get them,” Abbene insists.
At Cornell Law School, Suzanne Hess, the assistant director of career services, says the reported median salary of $160,000 isn’t based on what recent Cornell graduates actually report earning, but on a survey of what top law firms say they are paying entering graduated from all top-ranked law schools.
“Salaries are market specific,” says Hess. “All big law firms pay a market rate to students coming from top tier law schools. We’re aware of what students make in law school, but [the numbers published] are really about this market rate.”
Scott H. Greenfield, a practicing New York attorney for nearly 25 years and legal expert and analyst for the television news shows “60 Minutes” and “20/20,” thinks the data schools publish are misleading and do not providing a service to students.
“How do they come up with $160,000 if that’s the going rate of Big Law in New York?” questions Greenfield. “What the hell happened to the rest of them? That leaves out at least three quarters of the class. Where’d they go?”
Genesis of the Problem
While some students earn impressive six-figure starting salaries, those highly coveted jobs typically belong to the top 10 % of students at most schools.
According to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), first-year associate salaries at large firms with over 500 lawyers rose to $145,000 as of April 1, 2007, an increase of $10,000 in just one year. However, most graduates started work in small firms with 50 or fewer lawyers, the NALP reports. Just 14 % of salaries were either $135,000 or above while 42 % earned $55,000 or less.
Based on U.S. News and World Report’s 2009 rankings, 36 law schools reported an average starting salary of $100,000 and above while 23 schools reported median starting salaries over $135,000.
Loretta Deloggio, who works as a consultant for minorities applying to law schools, thinks that schools should work out a more reliable way of reporting salaries.
“The biggest problem is that the reporting of salaries is voluntary,” says Deloggio. “Kids can lie. There’s the incentive to report a higher number because it looks cool. As long as students are the ones telling you the number and whether or not they’re employed, you can’t get accurate data.”
At the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, the school’s assistant career services director, Carla Sally, says the published median salary of $135,000 for private practice associates is equal to at least half of the salaries reported in the school’s survey distributed to graduates.
“We do ask our students for salary information and most of them reply,” Sally says.
Of Michigan’s 436 graduates in 2006, the school is aware of the salary information for 243 students working in the private sector, according to data used in U.S. News and World Report.
Half of the students in the private sector, or 122, reported earning a salary equal to or above the median salary of $135,000, while 310 students overall either reported earning less than the median or withheld salary information altogether, meaning the University of Michigan’s published median salary corresponds to only 28% of its graduating class.
Although the biggest law firms in major cities like New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington D.C. do offer hefty paychecks to newly minted J.D.s, over-saturation of lawyers in the job market has made competition for those jobs keen and availability slim.
“Law is now the default profession,” says Greenfield. “Kids are getting pushed into going to law school because they either can’t get into medical school or they’re pushed into it by mom and dad or they have a desire to be professionals of some kind.”
Greenfield says that the problem begins when students come to law school expecting to strike it rich rather than wanting to practice law.
“It used to be that if you had a law degree you were special,” says Greenfield. “But now we’re seeing that more law schools are opening as the need for lawyers becomes smaller.”
As a result, Greenfield says law schools pour money into what he calls “law porn” to ensure that students will still want to earn a law degree despite the realities of thinning job markets.
“Students read the schools’ brochures and it looks wonderful,” says Greenfield. “They give the impression to entering law students that all they need to do is stay middle of the pack at school to make $160,000 a year. It’s tantamount to fraud.”
A Numbers Game
With so many law schools to choose from in the United States, many students turn to college guidebooks to help them narrow down their search. Two of the more popular publishers of these books are U.S. News and World Report and The Princeton Review, which both publish law school rankings that are highly regarded by students.
“You’d be stupid not to look at the guidebooks at this point,” said prospective law school student, Patricia Hohl, who is in the process of choosing a law school. “The rankings are so important, and in the end, very helpful to students like me, who have no idea where to even start.”
Although the guides may provide useful information, their sources often aren’t clear.
Both The Princeton Review and U.S. News and World Report rely on statistical data provided by individual school surveys and do not conduct their own data collection.
“The Princeton Review compiled the lists based on its surveys of 18,000 students attending the 170 law schools in the books, and on school-reported data,” according to a press release by The Princeton Review. U.S. News publishes a low and a high number, or midrange, for each school’s salaries in the private sector, which is equivalent to the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentiles, said the director of data research for U.S. News, Bob Morse, in an interview.
“Does U.S. News do anything to validate information schools give us? No,” Morse says. “Is it possible for us to do so? No.”
At Northwestern Law School, the director for the career strategy center, David Diamond, says the school collects data by surveying students, but lists a range of starting salaries, from the 25th to 75th percentiles, which he believes shows a more accurate representation of what students earn.
“Roughly 75 percent of our graduates work in law firms and approximately 60 percent work at AmLaw 100 law firms (American Lawyer’s rankings of the largest law firms in the country), meaning that likely somewhere between 60 to 75 percent of the class is making $135,000, with a few potentially making more. Thus we list a salary range,” says Diamond.
Northwestern Law School’s career services website also lists the percent of students employed after graduation and the percent of students reporting their salaries in the survey.
“We do our best to provide a range of detailed and specific information so that anyone reading our website will view data in total so they can reach accurate conclusions to questions they may have,” says Diamond.
U.S. News also publishes the percent of students reporting salaries in the surveys— but for a price.
“We only publish the percent that report salaries in the Premium Online Edition, which means that in order to see percentages, you would have to pay $14.95,” says Morse.
Mislead by data
While guidebooks publish median salary data for public, business and educational law related careers, most graduates fixate on the private sector jobs, which in 2007 can reach as high as $160,000 a year for new graduates at top schools.
Yet only a small percentage of students entering the private sector ever see their paychecks swell that large.
University of Michigan Law alumni Nick Roersma says that law schools “job the income numbers” by only reporting the median salary, which corresponds to the midpoint of salaries arranged from lowest to highest, and not the average.
“Like all statistics, if you game the numbers enough you get the desired outcome,” says Roersma, who worked as a temporary attorney earning $30 an hour after graduation despite having a 3.25 GPA, which ranked him somewhere in the top 50% of his median class GPA range of 3.20-3.30. “The inequity of reporting only that number is that 49% of the class could be unemployed, but if 51% got top-tier private jobs, the median would be the top-tier salary.”
On January 10, 2008, DePaul University Law graduate David Wold became popular among legal internet bloggers when he attempted to auction his law diploma on eBay, unhappy with poor job prospects and high student loans.
“Why am I selling this great item? Because it has been nothing but a curse and aggravation in my life,” writes Wold on eBay. “Going to school for this degree has been a joke, and has only brought me stress and misery. It has helped me develop great relationships with bill collectors, as I can’t afford the cost this great privilege has afforded me.”
Susan Cartier Libel, who works as a consultant for attorneys starting their own private practice and also owns a law blog, says she sympathizes with people like Wold.
“Like many, he has been sold a bill of goods about job prospects and not been provided reasonable alternatives during the course of his education which included entrepreneurship with his degree,” Libel writes in her blog. “He came to believe, as many, that going to law school is a ticket to making money and that jobs abound.”
In U.S. News and World Report’s 2009 edition of its annual law school rankings, Howard University Law rates as a third tier school, placing it among the lowest ranked legal institutions in the country. Yet the school’s career service office publishes a median starting salary for all 2007 graduates of $135,000—a sum that indicates Howard Law graduates rank among the highest paid legal professionals.
A closer look reveals that the salary data is suspect.
Howard Law collects its students’ salary data by distributing voluntary surveys to graduates. In 2006, Howard graduated 146 students from its law school and reported that the median starting salary for graduates entering private practice was $135,000, according to numbers published on the school’s career services website. However, of those surveyed, only 54% had reported their salaries to Howard. Based on numbers provided to U.S. News and World Report, Howard knows that only 18 students or 12% of its graduating class earn at or above $135,000.
LuEllen Conti, career services director at Howard University School of Law, says the numbers are accurate for the students who reported their salaries.
Because law schools typically distribute voluntary surveys to graduates as a way of calculating the starting salaries, the accuracy of the salaries law schools report is often dubious, as some schools publish survey results applicable to only a small fraction of an entire class.
A Widespread Problem
The most common way schools acquire their salary information is by distributing employment surveys to graduates nine months after graduation. A survey found on Northeastern University Law School’s website asks for the graduate’s employment status, employer information, source of employment, salary and date of offer as well as various employment categories sub-divided into private practice, business, government, public interest and academia.
At Duke Law School, the director of career services, Tedi Mason, says the reported median starting salary of $135,000 corresponds to half the graduating class entering private practice, based on voluntary surveys distributed to recent graduates and denies that any numbers are purposefully inflated.
“That means if you line everybody up from lowest to highest, from $35,000 to $135,000, the median is the number in the middle, so at least half of our graduates make $135,000,” Mason says.
Yet a closer look at the data reveals that number is misleading.
In 2006, Duke Law graduated 220 students and reported that the median salary for students working in private practice was based on voluntary salary surveys, according to data published in U.S. News and World Report. Of the students who responded to the survey, Duke was aware of the salary information for only 130 students working in the private sector. Half of those students, or 65, reported earning the median of at least $135,000 or above. That means while 65 students could have earned the published median, 155 student salaries, or 70% of the class, went unreported or reported earning less than the median.
“The reason that those numbers are so high is because a lot of our students go to New York or D.C., where starting salaries are very high,” Mason explains. “So that’s why those numbers seem somewhat inflated
Boston University Law School’s policy for collecting salary data also involves distributing employment surveys, yet Boston University’s median private-sector salary of $135,000 is based on the survey results of 61% of the graduating class and only 37% of private-sector students, based on numbers published in U.S. News and World Report.
Director of communications and marketing at Boston University Law, Mary Gallagher, declined to comment.
Voluntary student surveys are the most commonly used salary collection practice. But some schools employ alternate approaches or decline to reveal their data collection procedures in some cases.
Boston College School of Law advertises a median starting salary of $135,000 on its career services website targeted for prospective students. However, the director of career services, Maris Abbene, would not disclose how the school acquires its salary data.
“Our numbers are accurate. I can’t disclose how we get them,” Abbene insists.
At Cornell Law School, Suzanne Hess, the assistant director of career services, says the reported median salary of $160,000 isn’t based on what recent Cornell graduates actually report earning, but on a survey of what top law firms say they are paying entering graduated from all top-ranked law schools.
“Salaries are market specific,” says Hess. “All big law firms pay a market rate to students coming from top tier law schools. We’re aware of what students make in law school, but [the numbers published] are really about this market rate.”
Scott H. Greenfield, a practicing New York attorney for nearly 25 years and legal expert and analyst for the television news shows “60 Minutes” and “20/20,” thinks the data schools publish are misleading and do not providing a service to students.
“How do they come up with $160,000 if that’s the going rate of Big Law in New York?” questions Greenfield. “What the hell happened to the rest of them? That leaves out at least three quarters of the class. Where’d they go?”
Genesis of the Problem
While some students earn impressive six-figure starting salaries, those highly coveted jobs typically belong to the top 10 % of students at most schools.
According to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), first-year associate salaries at large firms with over 500 lawyers rose to $145,000 as of April 1, 2007, an increase of $10,000 in just one year. However, most graduates started work in small firms with 50 or fewer lawyers, the NALP reports. Just 14 % of salaries were either $135,000 or above while 42 % earned $55,000 or less.
Based on U.S. News and World Report’s 2009 rankings, 36 law schools reported an average starting salary of $100,000 and above while 23 schools reported median starting salaries over $135,000.
Loretta Deloggio, who works as a consultant for minorities applying to law schools, thinks that schools should work out a more reliable way of reporting salaries.
“The biggest problem is that the reporting of salaries is voluntary,” says Deloggio. “Kids can lie. There’s the incentive to report a higher number because it looks cool. As long as students are the ones telling you the number and whether or not they’re employed, you can’t get accurate data.”
At the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, the school’s assistant career services director, Carla Sally, says the published median salary of $135,000 for private practice associates is equal to at least half of the salaries reported in the school’s survey distributed to graduates.
“We do ask our students for salary information and most of them reply,” Sally says.
Of Michigan’s 436 graduates in 2006, the school is aware of the salary information for 243 students working in the private sector, according to data used in U.S. News and World Report.
Half of the students in the private sector, or 122, reported earning a salary equal to or above the median salary of $135,000, while 310 students overall either reported earning less than the median or withheld salary information altogether, meaning the University of Michigan’s published median salary corresponds to only 28% of its graduating class.
Although the biggest law firms in major cities like New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington D.C. do offer hefty paychecks to newly minted J.D.s, over-saturation of lawyers in the job market has made competition for those jobs keen and availability slim.
“Law is now the default profession,” says Greenfield. “Kids are getting pushed into going to law school because they either can’t get into medical school or they’re pushed into it by mom and dad or they have a desire to be professionals of some kind.”
Greenfield says that the problem begins when students come to law school expecting to strike it rich rather than wanting to practice law.
“It used to be that if you had a law degree you were special,” says Greenfield. “But now we’re seeing that more law schools are opening as the need for lawyers becomes smaller.”
As a result, Greenfield says law schools pour money into what he calls “law porn” to ensure that students will still want to earn a law degree despite the realities of thinning job markets.
“Students read the schools’ brochures and it looks wonderful,” says Greenfield. “They give the impression to entering law students that all they need to do is stay middle of the pack at school to make $160,000 a year. It’s tantamount to fraud.”
A Numbers Game
With so many law schools to choose from in the United States, many students turn to college guidebooks to help them narrow down their search. Two of the more popular publishers of these books are U.S. News and World Report and The Princeton Review, which both publish law school rankings that are highly regarded by students.
“You’d be stupid not to look at the guidebooks at this point,” said prospective law school student, Patricia Hohl, who is in the process of choosing a law school. “The rankings are so important, and in the end, very helpful to students like me, who have no idea where to even start.”
Although the guides may provide useful information, their sources often aren’t clear.
Both The Princeton Review and U.S. News and World Report rely on statistical data provided by individual school surveys and do not conduct their own data collection.
“The Princeton Review compiled the lists based on its surveys of 18,000 students attending the 170 law schools in the books, and on school-reported data,” according to a press release by The Princeton Review. U.S. News publishes a low and a high number, or midrange, for each school’s salaries in the private sector, which is equivalent to the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentiles, said the director of data research for U.S. News, Bob Morse, in an interview.
“Does U.S. News do anything to validate information schools give us? No,” Morse says. “Is it possible for us to do so? No.”
At Northwestern Law School, the director for the career strategy center, David Diamond, says the school collects data by surveying students, but lists a range of starting salaries, from the 25th to 75th percentiles, which he believes shows a more accurate representation of what students earn.
“Roughly 75 percent of our graduates work in law firms and approximately 60 percent work at AmLaw 100 law firms (American Lawyer’s rankings of the largest law firms in the country), meaning that likely somewhere between 60 to 75 percent of the class is making $135,000, with a few potentially making more. Thus we list a salary range,” says Diamond.
Northwestern Law School’s career services website also lists the percent of students employed after graduation and the percent of students reporting their salaries in the survey.
“We do our best to provide a range of detailed and specific information so that anyone reading our website will view data in total so they can reach accurate conclusions to questions they may have,” says Diamond.
U.S. News also publishes the percent of students reporting salaries in the surveys— but for a price.
“We only publish the percent that report salaries in the Premium Online Edition, which means that in order to see percentages, you would have to pay $14.95,” says Morse.
Mislead by data
While guidebooks publish median salary data for public, business and educational law related careers, most graduates fixate on the private sector jobs, which in 2007 can reach as high as $160,000 a year for new graduates at top schools.
Yet only a small percentage of students entering the private sector ever see their paychecks swell that large.
University of Michigan Law alumni Nick Roersma says that law schools “job the income numbers” by only reporting the median salary, which corresponds to the midpoint of salaries arranged from lowest to highest, and not the average.
“Like all statistics, if you game the numbers enough you get the desired outcome,” says Roersma, who worked as a temporary attorney earning $30 an hour after graduation despite having a 3.25 GPA, which ranked him somewhere in the top 50% of his median class GPA range of 3.20-3.30. “The inequity of reporting only that number is that 49% of the class could be unemployed, but if 51% got top-tier private jobs, the median would be the top-tier salary.”
On January 10, 2008, DePaul University Law graduate David Wold became popular among legal internet bloggers when he attempted to auction his law diploma on eBay, unhappy with poor job prospects and high student loans.
“Why am I selling this great item? Because it has been nothing but a curse and aggravation in my life,” writes Wold on eBay. “Going to school for this degree has been a joke, and has only brought me stress and misery. It has helped me develop great relationships with bill collectors, as I can’t afford the cost this great privilege has afforded me.”
Susan Cartier Libel, who works as a consultant for attorneys starting their own private practice and also owns a law blog, says she sympathizes with people like Wold.
“Like many, he has been sold a bill of goods about job prospects and not been provided reasonable alternatives during the course of his education which included entrepreneurship with his degree,” Libel writes in her blog. “He came to believe, as many, that going to law school is a ticket to making money and that jobs abound.”
Data:
Schools that have median starting salaries of at least $100,000, and the percentage of students at each school known to be making at or above the school’s median salary, based on salary surveys reported to U.S. News and World Report and calculated by these reports.
Columbia, NY: 40%
University of Pennsylvania, PA: 40%
University of Chicago, IL: 37%
Emory University, GA: 35%
Northwestern University, IL: 33%
Harvard, MA: 33%
New York University, NY: 32%
Cornell University, NY: 32%
Stanford, CA: 32%
University of California-Berkeley, CA: 31%
Fordham University, NY: 30%
Duke University, NC: 30%
UT Austin, TX: 28%
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, MI: 28%
University of California Los Angeles, CA: 27%
University of Virginia, VA: 27%
University of Southern California Gould, CA: 26%
Washington and Lee, VA: 26%
Boston College, MA: 25%
Vanderbilt, TN: 25%
Georgetown, D.C.: 22%
George Washington, D.C.: 22%
Notre Dame, IN: 22%
University of Illinois-Urbana Campaign, IL: 21%
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, MN: 21%
College of William and Mary, VA: 20%
Washington University-St. Louis, MO: 19%
Yale, CT: 19%
University of Iowa, IO: 19%
Boston University, MA: 17%
University of Washington, WA, 16%
Howard University, D.C.: 12%
Source: U.S. News and World Report America’s Best Graduate Schools, 2009 Edition. Figures represent data from the class of 2006 and account for the number of total graduates, percentage employed at time of survey, percentage working in the private sector and percentage reporting salaries. Salaries do not count toward U.S. News’s rankings.
Schools that have median starting salaries of at least $100,000, and the percentage of students at each school known to be making at or above the school’s median salary, based on salary surveys reported to U.S. News and World Report and calculated by these reports.
Columbia, NY: 40%
University of Pennsylvania, PA: 40%
University of Chicago, IL: 37%
Emory University, GA: 35%
Northwestern University, IL: 33%
Harvard, MA: 33%
New York University, NY: 32%
Cornell University, NY: 32%
Stanford, CA: 32%
University of California-Berkeley, CA: 31%
Fordham University, NY: 30%
Duke University, NC: 30%
UT Austin, TX: 28%
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, MI: 28%
University of California Los Angeles, CA: 27%
University of Virginia, VA: 27%
University of Southern California Gould, CA: 26%
Washington and Lee, VA: 26%
Boston College, MA: 25%
Vanderbilt, TN: 25%
Georgetown, D.C.: 22%
George Washington, D.C.: 22%
Notre Dame, IN: 22%
University of Illinois-Urbana Campaign, IL: 21%
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, MN: 21%
College of William and Mary, VA: 20%
Washington University-St. Louis, MO: 19%
Yale, CT: 19%
University of Iowa, IO: 19%
Boston University, MA: 17%
University of Washington, WA, 16%
Howard University, D.C.: 12%
Source: U.S. News and World Report America’s Best Graduate Schools, 2009 Edition. Figures represent data from the class of 2006 and account for the number of total graduates, percentage employed at time of survey, percentage working in the private sector and percentage reporting salaries. Salaries do not count toward U.S. News’s rankings.
