The Case for Law School, Part 2

Data v. Anecdote

Last December, I wrote about some of the reasons that it may be a good idea to go to law school. Law school — where I teach — has gotten a bad reputation as a career choice in the past few years, some of it deserved, but some of it based on a series of anecdotal (and occasionally silly) articles published by The New York Times.

Fortune magazine, the journal of the capitalist class, recently published a quantitative analysis of graduate degrees, rating them by a combination of long-term job growth, median salary, and job satisfaction. The J.D. — the thing you get at the end of law school — came in sixth. There are probably a host of problems with that analysis, but for it to be completely wrong, you’d have to have a theory about why those problems would be biased in favor of law schools. The legal job growth projections look optimistic, but they come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median salary of people ten years into their careers obviously excludes people who failed to get jobs in their field, but, again, you’d have to believe that’s more true of law school grads than others (which may be true).

(On a related note, the financial crisis-induced legal job slump has had the most impact at the top of the corporate law hierarchy. But a recent survey shows that the lawyers with the highest job satisfaction are those in public service jobs, which tend to be the lowest paid.)

Leaving aside the specifics, you also have to compare law school to the plausible options. The other degrees in the top ten were in: statistics (Ph.D.), computer science, human computer interaction, physics, telecom engineering, applied math, statistics (M.A.), and engineering. I don’t think my students will be insulted if I say that most of them were not going to get into any of those programs. As Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre have said, it’s only meaningful to say that law school is a good or bad choice compared to your other options.

I would never recommend that someone I don’t know personally (that’s probably you) go to law school, because at the end of the day the individual factors overwhelm the aggregate ones. And, as I said before, having more students doesn’t make my life any better. But if you are seriously interested in being a lawyer, now is not a terrible time to think about going.

James Kwak is, among other things, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Find more at Twitter, Medium, The Baseline Scenario,The Atlantic, or jameskwak.net.