Law School is a Cash Cow

In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy � they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.

[...]

IT is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey�s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as �employed after nine months� even if he or she has a job that doesn�t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee�s? You�re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You�re working, too.

[...]

Tuition at even mediocre law schools can cost up to $43,000 a year. Those huge lecture-hall classes � remember �The Paper Chase�? � keep teaching costs down. There are no labs or expensive equipment to maintain. So much money flows into law schools that law professors are among the highest paid in academia, and law schools that are part of universities often subsidize the money-losing fields of higher education.

�If you�re a law school and you add 25 kids to your class, that�s a million dollars, and you don�t even have to hire another teacher,� says Allen Tanenbaum, a lawyer in Atlanta who led the American Bar Association�s commission on the impact of the economic crisis on the profession and legal needs. �That additional income goes straight to the bottom line.�

Notes:

Folksonomies: academia debt tuition

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Is Law School a Losing Game?

Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Segal, David (01/08/2011), Is Law School a Losing Game?, Retrieved on 2015-03-08

Source Material [www.nytimes.com]

Folksonomies: academia tuition cost

Schemas

08 MAR 2015

Is College Worth It?

Are PhDs a pyramid scheme? Are college returns worth the risk of failure and massive debt?

Folksonomies: economics academia debt student loans