What is the difference between tiers of law schools

Some are now getting to be partners and making the big bucks. But those aren't good odds to play with if you're talking about taking on non-dischargeable debt and wrecking a previous career.

The problem is, the lemmings all think they'll be different. That's a sad story, Unfortunately, my experience older than you but a far better law school suggests that you probably would have had the same disastrous outcome even if you had gone to the U of Chicago. Old people just aren't wanted in the legal profession. Same deal here. Graduated in from a "Tier 1" ie, 4 law school in my early 30s after a 10 year career as a CS guy.

I also worked at the PTO and ended up going back to programming to pay the bills. The vast majority of my friends ended up hanging shingles or getting smallgov jobs. Great post! My school's a Tier 4 but should be jack-booted down the ladder. Is your suggestion that Tier 1 is fraught with unacceptable risk tongue-in-cheek? I hope not. Both Yale grads have some form of 'law school is a scam, do not go' in the advice portion of their profession-specific profiles.

I was genuinely surprised. I keep well up on the law school scam, but I was surprised. Given the bent of my undergrad, I imagine both were interested primarily in being law professors Both were not employed, or not employed in any capacity they cared to identify.

Imagine how quickly these schools would collapse if there were even the slightest reform to lending or debtor rights. The monopoly rent extraction causes market share decline which undermines and forces down price and busts up the cartel.

Is this not exactly what is happening? Nominal law school tuition keeps rising, but it's all discounted and scholar-shitted away. Revenues are way off, and most schools are up to their eyeballs in debt themselves. Of course, skools they have a bankruptcy right unlike their graduates because some pigs are more equal than other pigs.

All of higher education is going down. It was ruined with free money and strong incentives for fraud. Screw the politicians, economics will get you every time. Put 'em all in the 7th Tier, Old Guy.

Put the Department of Education in there too. I mean every word of it. Harvard and Yale too are fraught with high risk—risk that I certainly consider unacceptable.

Rich people should feel free to attend; after all, losing a third of a million dollars won't matter much to them. Everyone else should think twice. The only thing that's "high" about "higher" education is its price. The class of from a high school was probably ahead of the class of from an undergraduate program. New jobs report this morning. Great report but legal sector has only increased by 5, jobs in the last year.

Only a third of those are attorney jobs. Not a great report for the legal sector because there are so many unemployed lawyers. Legal jobs are super-unstable. I am over the age for biglaw and was offered 3 attorney jobs in the last 5 years. Two of those jobs have now disappeared or partly disappeared due to a decline in the volume of work.

The third paid about three quarters of the old going rate and may disappear in the near future. I unfortunately picked the wrong job. My doctor colleagues have mostly kept the same jobs for life. Not true of lawyers though where it may be necessary to keep changing jobs.

Law is an awful career today for many or most lawyers. Rich people should not feel free to attend most of these places unless you are rich enough that you will never need to depend on the income to have a decent living. Having said that, white males are more likely to be successful in law than anyone else. Most so called rich people are going to need a steady source of income from work to live comfortably for life.

Just because someone's parents are a doctor and a lawyer who foot the tuition and that person will ultimately get a 7 figure inheritance when the parents die, does not mean that the person can afford to go the NYU Law School and spend much of their career unemployed or underemployed.

A person who finds a gainfully employed partner may be able to afford that. A person with a stay at home partner with no money is going to have a tough go of that situation in a high cost area. I know people who inherited decent amounts of money not lawyers and had poor careers and basically used up the inheritances supporting their families. Some are badly off now.

So, being moderately wealthy is not a reason to go to one of these law schools. For women, a top law school is a good place to find a partner that may alleviate the financial pressures of life. It is a much more iffy place for a woman to have a lifetime and relatively lucrative career as a lawyer. People need to understand the up or out class year hiring nature of law and the erosion of the age discrimination laws as well as the age pyramidal full time permanent workforce for lawyers.

The age discrimination laws do not protect older lawyers. The Supreme Court allows an employer to use "fit" as a reason to fire any older employee. The fact that age is a factor is irrelevant. Fit governs and it is almost impossible for an employee to demonstrate successfully that fit is a pretext for age and to win an age case. So expect to be bounced out of that legal job on account of age in a workforce of severe attorney oversupply and to have great difficulty finding any work, let alone a full-time permanent job as a lawyer.

This also is common in pharmacy, particularly CVS. Why are old people discriminate against, is it that they are less eager to please, is it that they are less energetic, what gives?

I still find it difficult to believe that going to Harvard Law School can ever be a mistake. Sure, you may never practice law, but a Harvard Law Degree carries "gravitas" to it that can almost certainly help you find work somewhere. Can't it?? Anecdotally, my high school principal had a law degree from Harvard.

A Harvard Law degree or other top law degree is a mistake because you give up going to medical school. Many people who gain admission to a top law school could easily get accepted to medical school and then a residency. You need to tell the older woman or minority graduate of a top law school who is unemployable in any full-time, permanent job that Harvard Law is not a mistake.

Older women and older minority lawyers are at the bottom of the employment totem pole in law. Most of them are in low paying work, top law degree notwithstanding. The problem is that the value of a top law degree plummets with age for women and minorities because there is acute dual age-sex and dual age-race discrimination in the legal profession. The top law degree is not worth it except for white males. Since the vast majority of law graduates are male, and the vast majority of law grads are screwed, your whitey advantage meme is weak.

I agree with the following amendments: " This is one of those situations where non-white people see it as "white privilege" and it's actually sub-type privilege. If you are male, play golf, like the right sports, live in the right suburb, are confidently straight and have a pleasant wife, know so-and-so at the Big Deal, I'm not even sure "white" matters like it once did.

Good work on the lists and comments! The day is long past when the law could pull someone from a working-class family up into the middle class. I thought the Republicans would make short work of cutting off all the law schools from the Federal loan trough.

Especially since most of them are w-a-y left of center. Guess I was wrong. A compelling and persuasive list that highlights what a bad idea it is to go to law school. That's just flat wrong, but how many of the gullible see that and think-well, it's in USNWR, so it must be true. Good point. I think they may have confused the average law professor's salary with the average lawyer's salary.

I'm sure they will rectify that typo any day now. Old Guy, I think you are right about the risks of attending Harvard and some of the other elite schools.

That is a catastrophic outcome for those three grads. It is certainly plausible that Harvard law grads are getting hired to work on Wall Street. I trust that these kinds of jobs are far better than the kinds of JD advantage jobs toilet law school grads obtain toilet law schools count parole officer as a JD advantage job.

If these are Federal government jobs, this may be a better career path than big law. Working at the DOJ or as a U. Attorney provides a secure and prestigious job where you can never be laid off. You can also obtain a federal pension. This is far more secure than working for a big law firm with an up or out policy. Also, Harvard appears to have become less selective.

If I was advising my children, and the choice was between Harvard law or the local state medical school, at this point I would advise them to go to medical school. There is a shortage of primary care docs because the American med students go on to become specialists, where they can earn even more money. TITCR because it gets to the heart of the matter. The scam persists in large part because it makes incongruent comparisons and doesn't account for individual circumstance.

For instance, a scam prof or dean will point out that it's ridiculously competitive to get into medical school, but someone who gets into Harvard law can definitely work into a US based medical school. Similarly, 30k people take the NYC civil servant exams, but the majority of said people do not have a high school diploma, let alone a four year degree, strong motivation, etc.

Someone with a 3. As stated above, a cop or garbage man makes k plus with OT, and a prosecutor makes 55k with several hundred k in educational costs and a seven plus years of education.

If you get an ADA position you'd be lucky and you are leagues behind people that didn't finish high school. The net of it is that, when one accounts for individual circumstance, law is always a loss unless someone is rich and they are doing it for prestige. Pure and simple. Good comments, Federal clerkships do tend to bode well, but they certainly don't guarantee anything. Old Guy had a federal clerkship but never a job in Big Law. Some Harvard graduates probably do end up in "consulting" firms, on Wall Street, or in other highly paid positions outside the practice of law.

Very few other law schools see much of that. Fully financed with debt, Harvard will leave a graduate with a third of a million dollars in student loans. It takes a big salary to cover that much debt. And most of the jobs that pay enough to support those payments don't usually last more than a few years.

First of all My client sanitation worker could barely hang on to his rented small trailer. Second of all You do only have one life you know As for being a cop I tend to disagree that most lawyers can be doctors. People who go to medical school have an affinity for science and math. People who go to law school do not.

No matter what you all say That's not easy anymore even in the medical profession because of all of the admin headaches dealing with insurance companies, medicare, etc I've said this before and I will again. Anybody with drive and determination and intelligence can have a successful legal career. The more you do and the more you get known, the more chance of getting more clients. And if you are good at litigation, you can still make a very good living in this field.

AS for student loans.. Its a problem with all of higher education feeding off of the government teat So if you want to be a lawyer Or ask yourself what your alternatives are.

Liberal Arts grad? Nothing is easy out there these days. The economy is failing Sooner or later this market is going to crash given it is already in a huge bubble.

If you are looking to depend on anybody else to make a living If you have a law degree Good luck all. Any American child can grow up to be President So There's only one at a time. Many, many kids would grow up and make good Presidents Or to start buying hoodies with the Presidential Seal. Yeah, it's a cool dream. But come on. And the word "career" is wildly misleading. Most people hear it to mean 'able to support oneself by pursuing it. Not become Trump.

Not take vacations and have a boat. But simply able to afford to go to work, eat, have an apartment and buy clothes. Yet even this modest, common sense definition of the word 'career' cannot be truthfully used to describe most established solos or small firms today. And it certainly describes no new solos that I know. No, you will not be able to have a 'career' in the remunerative sense.

You will absolutely need another continuing income source. The great, talented litigators who have been at it a while are still earning livings using the common sense connotation I described above. They wouldn't say 'great', but whatever. Persons who have gone solo in the past 15 years. Which means you are going in the hole with office expenses. Persons starting out since the beginning of the great recession Most solo legal work is not mentally stimulating, and certainly not dealing with lofty constitutional issues, international law, or ripped-from-the-headlines legal issues.

And if you're looking to fee-shifting statutes to earn money, you are depending on others, big time. You just need to find a liable defendant, with the deep pockets from which to collect, and hope to hell the legislature does not bend to the rising public tide of anti-lawyerism. And please do remember that justice is being accessed when a non-injured person's exaggerated claim gets poured out of court. Be grateful they haven't yet enacted Loser Pays. But yeah, you have a point.

I've lived in Texas and Louisiana and in both states, a law student who graduates from UT or LSU respectively, would have much better opportunities through alum networks or connections made during school, than a Harvard grad who would always be viewed with suspicion. Really, Harvard just ain't all that. Another point is that for most older women, law is the first wives club revisited. Large law firms employ very few women over the age of The discrimination against older women in hiring is blatant, and many in house employers are not better in their legal departments.

Major legal headhunters - BCG Attorney Search in New York, for example - will not place women over age 52 at all, elite college and law school, big law experience, the works, even where BCG has 14 local jobs advertised in the lawyer's practice area and two or three of those jobs have no experience cap. Most legal jobs do have these experience caps, so only lawyers with up to 6 years of experience need apply. In medicine, you can find older women as patients, and these older women will visit older women doctors.

Not so hard to work. Jobs in medicine, unlike law, do not require purple squirrel experience, which means that most lawyers do not meet the advertised requirements for most advertised legal jobs. In medicine, you typically just need board certification in a specialty to get a job.

Very few women lawyers over age 52 have or can get full time permanent legal jobs. And the compensation, including benefits, if any, of women lawyers from elite law schools and colleges in this age group is at a median much lower than the compensation a school teacher of the same vintage would make in that area. For minorities the situation is worse than for women.

Even fields with great job markets have the purple squirrel problem. It's often just a method used by recruiters and HR types to control their workload. Rather than sift through 10k resumes for a position which would require real effort- you have to read the resume and then talk to the candidate , they make the requirements overly detailed and then use a bot to reject any that don't have the right key words. Schools that are in the top tier are the schools that rank the highest when evaluated on a number of different factors.

Then, these rankings are distributed by U. The criteria for ranking these law schools comes from "legal educators at peer institutions" who nominate the schools. There are 12 categories of measurement that are used to rank these law schools:.

Each piece of criteria holds a different weight when it comes to calculating the individual school's ranking. Out of all these, the criteria that holds the most weight and leverage in terms of ranking is the school's job placement success. According to U. Law school tiers aren't too important when it comes to applying for school, and most law schools do not use the word "tier" to refer to themselves.

What is important is the school's overall ranking. There is no doubt that even Tier 1 law school will offer significantly more opportunities after graduation than T3 or T4 school. Said that, not everyone from T1 becomes a lawyer.

And many people form T3 an dT4 also do not become lawyers. Of you can make then you face little less competition. Long time ago there were no law schools at all. And people became lawyers as apprentices. According to some legal scholars, ability to pass LSAT and bar exam doe snot necessarily correlate with ability to be a lawyers and make money as a lawyer. I have seen people go to Tier 4 law school and make millions because they treated legal work as a business.

They were excellent at making connections and getting clients. They learned their area of law very well. Law students in tiers 3 and 4 should not get discouraged. You still can make prety good legal career. Just your start will be much harder than if you went to T1 law school.

As a counterbalance against law school tiers hierarchy and pedigree, I suggest you balance law school costs and capitalize on local opportunities.

If you got into T3 or T4 then your job is to choose one with the lowest tuition possible. You will graduate, you have a decent chance of passing a bar exam, but the student debt is something that greatly limits your early career options. Let me repeat — most important for law student at T3 and T4 is to lower student debt as much as possible.

Go to law school which charges less tuition. In-state law school tuition is better than out-of-state one. And be careful with scholarships — they may vanish after your first semester or 1L year when you get inferior grades. And most law students in T3 and T4 do not get good grades. This is how curve and pedigree works. T1 and T2 schools grade their students easier and grades may be even inflated to keep law school rank. But T3 and T4 grade very hard. T3 and T4 law schools give student low grades.

Most students at low ranking law schools obtain average GPA of 2. Do not get discouraged. You may still have good law practice after low-tiered law school as long as boring and tedious law practice is something you really want to do every day. Based on my observation and research, the number one regret of people who went to lower-ranked law schools is student debt. On the opposite, I have met and read about many happy lawyers who went to tier 3 or 4 law school but for quite cheap.

And they usually never regret going to law school because they do not have student debt hanging over them. Also among lawyers who went to bad law schools in low tiers there are some very very successful and highly paid ones. Although, those are more of exceptions.

Therefore, the verdict for T2, T3, and T4 law schools is as follows:. Want to experience for yourself how is it to be a law student in law school? Check my micro law school experience page on this blog. Constitutional law, contracts, property law, torts, criminal law for free.

See how it feels to be a law student. Visit page with free micro-law school mock lesson tutorials. I would stay away from all those above and avoid them at all costs. I saw unaccredited law school go bust, leaving students in limbo, with student debt. The vast majority of states do not allow law students in unaccredited schools to sit for a bar exam after graduation. Opinions differ on whether or not acceptance into any school other than a tier 1 law school will impact your career's success.

Although acceptance into the schools ranked in the second, third and fourth tiers may not guarantee employment at the nation's top law firms acceptance into a tier 1 school doesn't necessarily guarantee this either , it does not rule out a successful career.

Many law schools, although ranked in the lower tiers, produce smart lawyers that enjoy local success. A prospective law student's options depend greatly on his grades and ambitions. However, it is recommended that law students apply to at least two "reach" schools, two "strong possibility" schools and three "safety" schools. In general, "reach" schools will likely be tier 1 schools, but not necessarily. Some students may be bound by geographical location.