Law Schools, Student Loans

The Most Expensive Law Schools In The United States

How much does your law degree really cost? Is that terrifying amount actually worth it?

By  
on

For the majority of students, law school can be an extremely costly endeavor. It’s a well-known fact that most law students graduate with up to six figures of loan debt from their legal educations alone. If you aren’t able to get a job as a lawyer with a high salary soon after graduating, you’re going to have a very difficult time repaying all of that debt.

This couldn’t possibly happen to me, you might protest. Even though 32 percent of first-year law students will lose their scholarships or have them reduced, you’ve got a middle-of-the-road scholarship that you plan to keep. What would you do if we told you that you’d still graduate with unbelievable debt, despite that scholarship?

According to a recent study performed by Law School Transparency, we now know that thanks to absurdly high tuition costs, law students with median scholarships who debt finance their degrees may still have screwed the pooch when it comes to their debt loads.

That being said, what are the top 10 most expensive law schools in the country for out-of-state students, even when median tuition discounts are included?

  1. Columbia Law School: $263,694 total cost
  2. SUNY Buffalo Law: $253,482 total cost
  3. Fordham School of Law: $252,674 total cost
  4. Chicago Law School: $248,466 total cost
  5. Arizona Summit Law School: $247,186 total cost
  6. Cornell Law: $246,013 total cost
  7. NYU Law School: $245,780 total cost
  8. Harvard Law School: $245,019 total cost
  9. John Marshall Law-Chicago: $238,976 total cost
  10. USC Gould School of Law: $238,792 total cost

It will shock no one that half of the schools on this list come from the T14. It shouldn’t be this way, but a legal education from one of the best law schools in the country will cost you an arm, a leg, your soul, and your first-born child if you should ever get a break from billing hours to get it in. The debt loads law students acquire from the schools on the other half of this list, however, are especially offensive considering their employment statistics.

Susan Adams of Forbes agreed when she wrote about LST’s debt figures, and had this to say about Arizona Summit’s and John Marshall’s “struggling” graduates:

Sponsored

At Arizona Summit, which is owned by a private, for-profit company called InfiLaw that is a subsidiary of Chicago-based private equity firm Sterling Partners, only 45% of 2013 graduates had found full-time jobs requiring a J.D. within nine months of graduation, according to American Bar Association figures. An Arizona Summit spokesperson counters that 77% of the class of 2013 had found some kind of full-time work nine months after graduation, and that three years post-graduation, alumni made an average of $58,800. But that’s not an encouraging number given that the cost for Arizona Summit is $247,000, according to LST’s figures. At John Marshall Law School, No. 8 on LST’s list, a J.D. costs $238,976. But only a little more than half of 2013 grads, 51.8%, had found full-time legal jobs nine months after graduation. (A spokeswoman for John Marshall says, “We have a strong commitment to our students and their success. Our job placement numbers continue to improve, as does the outlook for the overall job market.”)

LST’s list may be viewed as “controversial” due to the methodology used to calculate cost (using “real costs” to students versus a law school’s “stated full-freight cost”), but we’d counter that it’s better for prospective and current law students to have a sense of what they’re getting into before they make the decision to shoulder a robust debt load in exchange for post-graduation employment prospects that are barely there.

If you’re interested, you can take a look at Law School Transparency’s eye-popping, jaw-dropping list of the costs of fully debt-financed law degrees over here. (For reference, Columbia Law’s full debt-financed cost of attendance is $317,429. Ouch!)

How much does your law degree really cost? Is that terrifying amount actually worth it?

America’s Most Expensive Law Schools [Forbes]
Debt-Financed Cost of Attendance [Law School Transparency]

Sponsored

Topics

, , , ,