Forbes, The Best Law Schools For Getting Rich:
Starting pay is important at law schools, but many grads at elite schools choose prestigious clerkships right out of school that pay peanuts. More important is mid-career compensation when many lawyers are typically on a more lucrative career path. With this in mind we turned to the experts at PayScale who track the compensation of their 24 million unique users. …
To determine the schools with the highest-pay, PayScale culled its database for 98 popular law schools. There is a massive range in pay for law school grads, but our compensation figures are all medians where half of a school’s grads make more and half less. The ranking is based on mid-career median total compensation for those in the private sector, while public sector salaries were excluded. We included private sector employees now working in both law and non-law professions. The median years of work experience for the data set is 16, with a median age of 45.
Here are the Top 10 law schools based on mid-career compensation, along with each school’s U.S. News ranking:
- Stanford – $236,000 (#3 in U.S. News)
- Duke – $221,000 (#11)
- Columbia – $217,000 (#4)
- Virginia – $212,000 (#10)
- Boston University – $206,000 (#22)
- NYU – $204,000 (#6)
- Harvard – $203,000 (#2)
- Pennsylvania. – $201,000 (#7)
- UCLA – $200,000 (#15)
- UC-Berkeley (#7) and Notre Dame (#22) – $191,000
Yale, ranked #1 by U.S. News, ranks only 33rd in mid-career compensation ($159,000).
- Above the Law, Best Law Schools — For Getting Rich
