When to start thinking about law school
Thinking About Law School? Be Wary Of The Stats
my name is Ben Trachtenberg I'm an
associate professor of law at the
University of Missouri someone who's a
college senior who's thinking about
going to law school
sees a statistic that says 90% of our
graduates are employed and the average
salary is one hundred and thirty
thousand dollars that's the kind of
thing that if crew makes law schools
sound like a really good financial
investment and if not true is a problem
average salary statistics are generally
anything but average lawyers have what
are known as a bimodal distribution of
salary data you have a lot of people
making a lot of money
and a lot of people making a lot less
and not much in between for example in
New York and in Los Angeles and in
Chicago and other big cities you have a
lot of first-year law firm associates
getting paid 160 thousand dollars a year
it's a lot of money and then you have a
lot of lawyers making less than $50,000
a year there's very few new lawyers
making a hundred thousand dollars
because there just aren't that many
firms that pay that number and so what
happens is if a huge number of your
graduates are over here a couple people
over here can skew your average make it
look like the average is over here not
only is there a very small number of
people who respond to these surveys with
their salary a lot of people respond
saying whether they're working or not
where they're working but a lot of
people's response to how much money are
you making is mind your own business
imagine you have two people who graduate
from law school one gets a job at a
fancy law firm in New York City and is
getting paid $160,000 a year the other
he's working at Starbucks which of those
two students do you think is more likely
to respond to the career services office
salary survey and imagine that neither
of them respond to the survey because
the Starbucks guy's a little embarrassed
and the fancy lawyers too busy well the
law schools are allowed and indeed
encouraged to look online and to find
out what their graduates are up to which
is only sensible that they would try to
do this but the thing is salaries of
those law firms are public information
so the law school career services office
will diligently type that publicly known
number into the database whereas
Starbucks guy is invisible and even if
they know he's working at Starbucks they
don't know his salary so you have a huge
upward skew I think you should ask
yourself what
kind of job do I need to get to pay back
the debt I'm planning to incur and then
you can say and is that the kind of
thing that most graduates of this school
are able to do students who are
considering going to law school should
think about what it's really going to
cost
