If there are two things that we love here at Above the Law, they’re prestige and money. Finally, we have something that combines both of those passions.
Loan refinancing company SoFi has released a new report that ranks law schools based on the amount of money graduates make three years after graduation. There’s some truly interesting information in the data.
For example, Yale might be number 1 in U.S. News & World Report’s heart, but they plummet to No. 8 based on the bank grads take home. Cornell lingers at the bottom of the T14 in most rankings, but shoots to the top spot when it comes to the big bucks. Fordham, which lands all the way down at 36 in the most recent USNWR rankings, places 15th by graduate compensation. And Georgetown Law may have fallen from the vaunted T14, but that hasn’t stopped alumni from cashing in.
As reported by Big Law Business, their methodology pulls data from more than 60,000 refinancing applications and averages the salary three years post graduation to compile this ranking:
[SoFi] analyzed more than 60,000 student loan refinancing applications submitted to SoFi between January 2014 and December 2016. From that pool, it looked at the average salary and debt of graduates three years out of law school, in order to make inferences about the schools’ job placement track record.
But enough of all that — let’s get down to the rankings!
| Law Schools Ranked By Compensation | |||
| Rank | School | Avg Salary | 2018 USNWR Rank |
| 1 | Cornell | $183,377 | 13 |
| 2 | Columbia | $177,962 | 5 |
| 3 | NYU | $177,203 | 6 |
| 4 | University of Chicago | $174,238 | 4 |
| 5 | Harvard | $173,578 | 3 |
| 6 | Georgetown | $173,464 | 15 |
| 7 | Northwestern | $173,204 | 10 (tie) |
| 8 | Yale | $171,779 | 1 |
| 9 | Penn | $170,954 | 7 |
| 10 | Duke | $169,096 | 10 (tie) |
| 11 | University of Virginia | $166,396 | 8 (tie) |
| 12 | Michigan | $164,713 | 8 (tie) |
| 13 | Berkeley | $163,940 | 12 |
| 14 | USC | $161,823 | 19 |
| 15 | Fordham | $160,590 | 36 |
| 16 | Stanford | $158,088 | 2 |
| 17 | George Washington | $153,302 | 30 |
| 18 | UCLA | $152,469 | 15 |
| 19 | Vanderbilt | $149,475 | 17 |
| 20 | University of Texas | $147,444 | 14 |
Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).