For the last year or so, I’ve been tinkering with a book manuscript about law school, and more specifically, about law school debt. This experience has generally reinforced the perfectly reasonable assumption I came into it with that this noble legal profession of ours maintains a lot of statistics.
I could give you many examples. Thanks to U.S. News and World Report, for instance, I now know that for full-time law programs for the 2018-2019 academic year, the average annual tuition at private law schools was $49,095, at public schools for out-of-state students it was $40,725, and it was a comparative bargain at public schools for in-state students at $27,591. Sadly, I also know that the median private sector starting salary for 2017 law grads was only $72,500, and that the median public sector starting salary for new lawyers was only $54,550. Keep in mind that these median salary figures are only from the 180 or so law schools that U.S. News actually ranks, and if you included ABA-accredited schools which are not ranked and the non-ABA accredited law schools, there would be almost 60 more law schools, many of which, presumably, would be producing graduates with lower average salaries than the accredited and ranked law schools. So, while the U.S. News salary data is far from perfect, it’s a start, at least.
It is not just U.S. News that compiles statistics on the legal profession. The American Bar Association, our very own national representative of the legal profession, curates a lot of helpful stats, including info that, when combined with data from individual schools, tells us that the average sticker price for private law school tuition jumped 273 percent from 1985 to 2018, while public law school tuition over the same time period, also adjusted for inflation, skyrocketed by 582 percent. Very helpful.
But, go to the ABA statistics page on their website, and click on the link for “Average Amount Borrowed,” and you get this: a crappy one-page spreadsheet with the most recently available data from the 2012-2013 academic year.
Not only is the presentation crappy, and the data stale, the gathering method is pretty suspect. For the 2011-2012 year, the average reported amount borrowed to attend a public law school was $84,600, a historic high at that point, while the average reported amount borrowed to attend a private law school was $122,158, second only to the $124,950 incurred for the preceding 2010-2011 academic year, when I myself was still attending a private law school in the doldrums of the Great Recession.
With tuition rates rapidly outpacing inflation, people incurring more and more law school debt is what you’d expect. But then, the following academic year, 2012-2013, the supposed amounts being borrowed dropped by nearly two-thirds, to $32,289 for public schools and $44,094 for private schools. The difference wasn’t a change in reality, but a change in how the questions were asked. Prior to the 2012-2013 academic year, the ABA asked for “The average amount borrowed in law school by J.D. graduates who borrowed at least one education loan in law school.” But for the 2012-2013 academic year, the ABA switched to asking for “The average amount borrowed in law school by J.D. students who borrowed at least one education loan in any amount in the previous academic year.” See the difference? It’s subtle, but obviously pretty meaningful, especially when you realize as someone who actually went to law school that it becomes much easier the second and third years not to take out more student loans because you’re probably actually able to work, and have probably already taken out enough loans to fill the gaps. But isn’t the total amount of debt incurred to go to law school what actually matters, not when exactly you took it out?
Apparently, after the 2012-2013 academic year, the ABA stopped collecting even crappy data on the average amount borrowed by law students to become lawyers, or at least stopped publishing it. Now, it’s nearly impossible to find out how much the average law student has to borrow to become a lawyer. Go ahead and Google “average law school student debt” sometime and see what you come up with.
Right now at least, all you’ll find is marginally helpful information on debt loads at individual schools from U.S. News (with some of the inherent flaws of U.S. News data, including that it misses a quarter of the law schools in existence), an Above the Law piece by Staci Zaretsky (who is a talented and fabulous human being, not to mention my own editor, but was writing back in 2017 and only citing to the best data available at that time), and a couple pieces from student loan debt companies citing back to Above the Law (one of which I think actually does a pretty swell job of calling out the decrepitude of ABA data on the subject).
This, my friends, is pathetic. This data should not be that hard to collect. Law schools have to report all kinds of other data that is ultimately presented in a digestible fashion. People are not being allowed to make an informed decision about something that will affect them, and their families, for the rest of their lives.
It’s almost as if powerful people stand to benefit from not being forthright about how much debt one has to incur to become a lawyer.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.