If you’re anything like us, you’ve gotta be sick and tired of reading article after article after article about rising law school tuitions, declining law school enrollments and the presumption that law school just isn’t a good investment anymore. Enter Michael Simkovic of Seton Hall and Frank Mcintyre of Rutgers who have some data – actual, numerical, non-empirical data – to prove otherwise. Here’s the conclusion: “for most law school graduates, the net present value of a law degree typically exceeds its cost by hundreds of thousands of dollars”.
Simkovic and McIntyre mined a good amount of data, taking into account various factors that might affect salaries other than a legal degree. Ultimately they determined that the median earnings benefit of a law degree is a little more than $32,000 per year and the average increase is about $53,000 per year. Over time, these increases become even more pronounced; comparing law school graduates to those graduating college with a bachelor’s degree Simkovic and McIntyre found that in comparing 23-65 year olds with a bachelor’s degree to a law degree, the annual mean salary increased more sharply for those with a JD or other law degree.
The salary differential is not limited to those who graduated at the top of their class. The study reveals that even those students who graduate at the bottom fourth have a lifetime differential of $350,000 (before the cost of law school is taken into account).
Simkovic and McIntyre recognize that recent years have seen an overall drop in law related salaries but they note that this is consistent with historical trends and maintain that the premium for a legal education is still above that of other years. Even factoring in the cost of tuition, books and other costs of law school –such as being out of the job market for three years – Simkovic and McIntyre point out that the return on a law school education is about 13% for those at the lower 25th percentile; students graduating in the upper percentiles of course, receive a higher return. While the prospect of loans to finance a legal education seems daunting, the data indicates that graduates of law school are able to pay those loans back. Law school graduates rarely default on their loans and the default rate for law school graduates overall is about one sixth of the rate of students graduating with a bachelor’s degree
While a number of weaknesses of Simkovic and McIntyre’s study have been pointed out – including data from the most recent law school class’s graduates, overall the information supports the idea that going to law school is still a good, and lucrative idea.
