So here’s my question for the Law school experts out there: Why should one invest 3 years and 150k for a Law degree where the only clear ROI is entering BIGLAW after graduation. Attending Law school with the goal of BIGLAW is a risky proposition given the 150k in tuition and opportunity cost of not working for 3 years. Only the top students from the top schools have a reasonable shot at BIGLAW and even some top students do not make it. If you don’t make BIGLAW then (from what I understand) the salaries drop off quite a bit to a more middle class 70 or 80k which isn’t so appealing if you’ve spend so much on a 3 year law degree.

To me, it seems like a lot of very bright students (although maybe not BIGLAW material) are going heavily in debt for law degrees with questionable ROI. I think these students would be much better served going into more traditional and less elitist industries such as engineering, business, or accounting.

I’m 27 and I’ve been in the software industry working as a software engineer (fancy term for computer programmer) since I was 22. I went to a solid state university, majored in Computer Science, got good grades and then started working in 2006 making a salary of ,000. At the time that was standard for Comp Sci grads. Now at 27 I make 90,000 a year which again is normal for my experience and I have more senior engineer friends making well over 100k. I work 40-50hrs a week in a comfortable office, my company even provides us snacks, coffee, fruit, etc. More importantly though us engineers get to work on interesting stuff. Literally product management comes to the software engineers and says "here build this" and it’s our job to investigate the request, determine if it indeed can be done, and then design and build it which to me seems infinitely more interesting than reviewing legal documents. The last thing I did at work was write a server for scalable delivery of streaming high definition video. What did you do at your legal job recently?

Seriously though where is the ROI?

My three years post graduation had salaries of:

73,000
77,000
81,150

which totals about 231k.

Then we look at the 150k of tuition. If we convert this to pre-tax dollars using a hypothetical total tax rate of 33% we get 227k. That’s how much salary you’d need assuming you saved all of it to pay the tuition in full.

Adding the two we get 458k. That means had I gone to law school my total lifetime pre-tax earnings would be effectively -227k once i graduated from law school. Since I didn’t go to law school my lifetime earnings were 231k at that same point.

Had I gone to law school I’d start off -458k behind in terms of life time pre-tax earnings. In order to catch up with my software engineer self it would require some serious extra money compared to a software engineer. 458/20 = 22.9 which means assuming my lawyer self made EXACTLY 22.9k more per year than my software engineer self each year post graduation, i’d finally break even with him after 20 years.

The problem with this is making exactly 22.9k more per year than a software engineer. SW engineer salaries tend to rise fast but top out early. Currently good software engineers typically make 60-100k in their 20’s and then 100-120k in their 30’s. After around 120 or 130k salaries start to top out but this is also the time period where many engineers transition into management where you can make even more money (140,150,160, etc).

To keep up with my engineering self i’d have to make over 100k at graduation with my JD. These days 100k is pretty tough outside of BIGLAW.

So basically i’ve concluded that if I wanted to get a JD the only way i’d get any ROI relative to a software engineering career is to get into BIGLAW which (to me) is gambling because so few make it there.

Assuming someone is not BIGLAW material, please tell me where the ROI is?