Best Law Schools for Job Accessibility – 2017

Summary: Princeton Review has ranked the top 10 law schools based on job accessibility.

Fact: The law school world is overrun with lists and rankings. There’s a list for the Best Law Schools for Animal Lovers, the Best Law Schools by Salary Potential, the Best Law Schools with the Strongest Networks for Students, etc., and now we’ve added to the canon with the Best Schools for Getting Jobs.

Related: Business Insider’s List of the Best Law Schools

The Princeton Review recently surveyed almost 20,000 students from 172 law schools and asked them what they thought of their law schools in regards to helping them get jobs. PR then took that data and created a list of the top 10 schools with the best career aspects. According to Forbes, 9 out of 10 students who graduate from the top 10 programs land full-time employment after graduating. Not bad considering that other schools also put their students in $180,000 to $200,000 worth of debt but don’t lead to jobs.

The rankings for 2017 are similar to last year’s list. According to Forbes, “The top three schools remained the same, with the University of Pennsylvania ranked number one. Other schools shuffled within the top ten since last year, but didn’t move much. Stanford was an exception: it slipped three spots this year and landed at number seven.”

THE BEST LAW SCHOOLS FOR CAREER PROSPECTS – 2017

10. University of California-Berkeley

9. University of Michigan

8. Northwestern University

7. Stanford University

6. Harvard University

5. University of Virginia

4. Columbia University

3. University of Chicago

2. New York University

1. University of Pennsylvania

Princeton Review said that although 90% of the top 10’s graduates went on to work full-time, those jobs were not just at law firms. The positions varied from clerkships to business positions, and the salaries also varied. According to Forbes, “For each of the top five, 97% to 98% of graduates are employed within a year with a median salary of $160,000, a number that has remained the same for the last three years. At Berkeley, which holds the 10th slot on the Princeton Review’s list, 93% of graduates were employed within a year, and the median salary is $145,000.”

It is noted that Yale did not make the list, even though it is consistently ranked as a top school. This is because 39% of Yale graduates take judicial clerkships, which brought the median salary down and thus knocked them off this money-focused list.