Aside from the general lack of jobs at the other end of a JD degree, with about half of those nine months out of a JD program even situated in a job at all, two other ugly tendencies have made the legal degree a bit frivolous along the lines of a degree in philosophy or art history: there has been a rise in how much the degree costs and a decrease in how much jobs will pay you after you get it. The correspondence of these two, the salary-to-debt ratio can be handled as a bit of data to assess what schools to attend, if you insist that lawyering is your calling in this life. And as for a chart that apprises schools across the nation upon the salary-to-debt ratio, U.S. News has compiled one.
What they’ve discovered isn’t all that surprising. Of the top ten schools that will give the most favorable salary to debt ratio, most of them are among the highest ranking schools in the nation anyway — which is a matter of course. The school wouldn’t be ranked high if nobody was hiring their grads.
What we see is that the University of Texas-Austin ranks highest, with a median salary offered at $155,000 and average debt (for 2012 grads) a $86,312. University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill came second, followed by Brigham Young University, Stanford University, Yale University, University of California-Berkeley, Boston College, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, and the University of Michigan following after.
The moral of the story is simple: if you want to be certain of money, get into a high-ranking university.