Introducing a Law School Outcomes Tool

Explore the tool: https://bgi-law-school-rankings.netlify.app/

By Gad Levanon, Joe Winkelmann and Mels de Zeeuw

This brief introduces some of the data available in the BGI Law School Outcomes Tool and presents charts that show some of the interesting results. The data come from the Burning Glass Institute Career History Dataset, which includes where each individual attended undergraduate and law school, their employment history, and an estimated salary for each employment experience.

Some law school rankings answer one question: which schools produce graduates with the highest salaries. That question mixes several forces together: who the school admits, where graduates work, whether they enter public service or private practice, and what local labor markets pay. The BGI Law School Outcomes Tool lets users pull those forces apart. This report walks through eight patterns that emerge when we do.

The tool is built around four salary rankings of graduates ten years out of law school: a raw mean (R1); a residualized mean controlling for race and gender (R2); a residualized mean controlling for race, gender, and the school’s median undergraduate GPA and LSAT (R3); and a residualized mean adding state of school (R4). Each ranking answers a slightly different question. The tool lets users switch between them, filter schools, and see how the picture changes. This report focuses on R1 and R3 because the gap between them is where most of the interesting variation lives.

Different assumptions about what to measure produce different answers. This report and the tool that accompanies it are an attempt to show the size of that effect, not to publish a single new hierarchy that supersedes the existing ones.

These adjusted rankings should not be read as pure causal estimates of what a school adds. They are descriptive measures that show how salary outcomes change after accounting for observable student credentials and demographics.

The eight patterns are organized in five sections.

• A. Why raw salary rankings look the way they do. (Chart 1)

• B. What the picture looks like after adjusting for incoming-student credentials. (Charts 2, 3)

• C. Where the highest-credential-adjusted schools are concentrated. (Chart 4)

• D. How career choice shifts the picture. (Chart 5)

• E. What graduates actually do. (Charts 6, 7, 8)

A. Why raw salary rankings look the way they do

1. Student credentials are strongly correlated with salary

Across the 165 schools in our sample, median LSAT score is correlated with mean salary at r ≈ +0.79. Each LSAT point is associated with roughly $2,600 in additional salary ten years out. Most of the school-to-school variation in raw salary moves with student credentials, so a raw salary ranking is largely a ranking of who each school admits. The chart highlights the T17 — the T14 schools plus Vanderbilt, UCLA, and UT Austin — a grouping used throughout this report.

What differs across schools after adjusting for incoming-student credentials is the question the rest of this report and the tool address.

B. What the picture looks like after adjusting for incoming-student credentials

2. Top 30 schools shift sharply between raw and credential-adjusted rank

Bold blue = R3 rank substantially worse than R1 rank (selection-explained). Bold orange = R3 rank substantially better than R1 rank (over-performs credentials).

All five top schools by raw salary are T14. After adjusting for race, gender, and school-median undergraduate GPA and LSAT, the top ten includes USC (#2), Santa Clara (#5), UC San Francisco (#7), and Vanderbilt (#8). Yale moves from #16 to #122, Michigan from #19 to #127, Berkeley from #13 to #110. The residual captures everything the model omits — geography, career choice, unmeasured student characteristics — not only what a school adds.

3. Most top-30 public university law schools rank lower once credentials are removed

For most top-30 public university law schools, the credential-adjusted rank is lower than the raw rank, with Michigan, Berkeley, and UT Austin showing the largest drops. A minority — Alabama, Arizona State, Indiana, Arizona, and UC Davis — rank higher after the adjustment. The public-school tier is internally heterogeneous, but the dominant pattern is downward.

C. Where the highest-credential-adjusted schools are concentrated

4. Top 50 credential-adjusted schools concentrate in five metros

Half of the top 50 sit in five metros: New York City (10 schools), Los Angeles (5), Chicago (4), the San Francisco Bay Area (3), and Washington DC (3). Location is associated with higher credential-adjusted salary ranks. The cross-sectional data do not identify a single mechanism for that association; the pattern is consistent with employer concentration, with self-selection of graduates into geography, with cost-of-living differences in salary, or with all three operating together. Whether the California schools’ adjusted ranks reflect the schools or state wage levels is what R4 — which adds state of school as a control — is designed to probe.

D. How career choice shifts the picture

A lower salary rank is not necessarily a worse outcome. In some cases it reflects graduates choosing lower-paid public-interest or government work.

5. Within the T17, public-service share is strongly negatively correlated with adjusted rank

Within the T17, the share of graduates in public-sector or non-profit work is negatively correlated with credential-adjusted salary rank (r ≈ −0.67). Yale sends the most graduates to public-service work — roughly 26% — with Georgetown, Stanford, and Berkeley next. Vanderbilt and Northwestern send the fewest and post the highest credential-adjusted ranks. Michigan and UT Austin have low adjusted ranks paired with only middling public-service shares, so career choice does not account for the full T17 picture.

The pattern is specific to the T17 sample. It does not generalize across the broader set of law schools.

E. What graduates actually do

6. T17 graduates: employer mix plus partner and public-interest flags

Employer mix on the left sums to 100% for each school. Partner and public-interest-role flags on the right come from job titles and SOC codes; they use a different denominator and are shown separately so they are not read as slices of the bar. Yale sends roughly a quarter of its graduates to public or non-profit work, the highest share in the T17. Northwestern and Vanderbilt have the highest private-sector shares. Chicago and Northwestern have the highest partner rates, both near 20%.

7. Top 30 public schools: the partner-rate ordering is different

Two things differ from the T17 picture. First, the public-sector share at the top of the list is larger and is dominated by a few schools near the federal government: Maryland sends roughly a quarter of graduates to public-sector work, comparable to Yale’s public-plus-non-profit share. Second, the partner-rate ordering does not track salary rank; even in the T17 that link is loose (r ≈ +0.21; see Chart 8). Georgia has one of the highest partner rates (~19%) but a middling salary rank, consistent with partnership at smaller regional firms rather than at the national firms that drive the T17 partner numbers.

8. T17 salary rank vs. partner rate

Chicago and Northwestern lead on both salary rank and partner rate (~20%). Columbia has the highest salary rank in the T17 but a moderate partner rate. This is consistent with Columbia’s salary premium being driven by high-paying associate and counsel roles rather than by partnership tenure, although the ten-year-out cross-section cannot distinguish a trajectory effect from a composition effect. UT Austin sits at the bottom of the T17 on salary rank; Yale, despite its large fall in the credential-adjusted ranking, sits mid-pack here on both measures.

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Methodology

Sample

ABA-approved law schools in the 50 states and DC. Graduates from the 2000–2013 JD cohorts, outcomes measured ten years post-graduation. 165 schools after restricting to schools with at least 100 graduates observed in the data.

Rankings

Four salary rankings are computed for each school. Each takes the school-level residuals from a regression of individual outcomes on the listed controls, then percentile-ranks schools by their residual mean.

• R1. Percentile rank of mean salary. No controls.

• R2. Percentile rank of residualized mean salary. Controls: race, gender.

• R3. Percentile rank of residualized mean salary. Controls: race, gender, school-median undergraduate GPA and LSAT.

• R4. Percentile rank of residualized mean salary. Controls: race, gender, school-median undergraduate GPA and LSAT, state of school.

Demographic controls are individual-level (race, gender). Credential controls are school-level summaries (median LSAT, median UGPA of the 2024 incoming class). These are measured for a later class than the 2000–2013 outcome cohorts; school-level credential rankings are highly persistent over time, but the adjustment should be treated as approximate for schools whose selectivity shifted sharply over that period. The tool exposes all four rankings; this report focuses on R1 and R3.

Variable definitions

Public sector: NAICS code starts with 92 (Public Administration) or employer name contains one of: city of, county of, state of, department of, U.S., united states, federal, court, public defender, attorney general, district attorney, prosecutor.

Non-profit sector: NAICS code starts with 813 (Membership Organizations) or employer name contains foundation, association, society, charity, nonprofit, non-profit, united way, red cross, habitat, ACLU, legal defense fund. Excludes employers already classified as public sector.

Private sector: all employers not classified above. Public, non-profit, and private are mutually exclusive and exhaustive; they sum to 100% per school.

Partner: job title contains “partner”. Public-interest role: job title contains public defender, legal aid, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, pro bono, immigration law, legal services, public interest, legal defense, advocacy; or SOC code 23-1023 (judges), 21-1021 (child, family, school social workers), 21-1093 (social and human service assistants). Partner and public-interest-role are occupation-based flags. They are not mutually exclusive with the employer categories and they do not sum to 100%.

Rank stability

Ranks shown in this report are point estimates. Small differences between adjacent schools should not be over-read; a gap of a few positions is unlikely to be statistically meaningful.

Explore the tool: https://bgi-law-school-rankings.netlify.app/