Law schools are failing their students, and U.S. News is failing everyone. LSRP is to help prospective law students navigate this minefield and help everyone else understand what is going on.
American legal education is a never-ending horror show. Only 74% of law graduates get jobs that require bar passage1, and only 26% of graduates get jobs that pay over $90,000 a year2, despite law students investing three years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition to get degrees. While students are getting screwed, law school faculty are having the times of their lives: pay and benefits have never been better, and easy money from the federal government is keeping the whole racket lumbering along.
Most law schools aren’t focused on improving graduates’ debt-to-income ratios, but nearly all of them are fixated on the U.S. news rankings rat race. Law is an intensely hierarchical profession, and “prestige” – as measured by a high U.S. news ranking – is the coin of the realm. Everyone knows the U.S. news rankings are flawed, but everyone keeps using them because, historically, there hasn’t been a viable alternative. To make things worse, perverse incentives baked into the rankings have pushed law schools to adopt increasingly bad behavior, such as jacking tuition through the roof to raise professors’ salaries and diverting need-based aid money to merit aid awards.
LSRP aims to challenge the status quo by making accurate information on each law school available to all. In contrast to U.S. News, LSRP’s rankings are focused on how well schools help accomplish students’ three main goals: learning the law, getting a good job, and avoiding crushing debt. To begin, we suggest perusing the “rankings” and “methodology” tabs and downloading our full law school guide (coming soon). Happy reading!
1This includes all jobs the American Bar Association (ABA) designated as “bar passage required” for the graduating class of 2021.
2This statistic includes all new graduates who get federal/international clerkships or jobs at law firms with >100 attorneys. Good data on new graduate salaries and debt is not available, but law firm size is highly predictive of associates’ salaries, so we think our estimate is reasonably accurate and probably generous. The American Bar Association (ABA) and the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) have some data on these indicators and could easily collect and publish more of it; there is no good reason why they have not done so. In our view, both organizations are avoiding transparency because they care more about protecting their member law schools’ reputations than helping prospective law students make informed decisions and avoid crushing debt.