Academic

There is one question that law school applicants ask themselves and law professors every year: ?do I attend a higher ranked law school or go to a less prestigious law school and have a better shot at being at the top of the class?? I?ve been fairly consistent in my response to this ?choosing the right pond? question, but a recent paper by Richard Sander (UCLA) and Jane Yakowitz (Brooklyn) ? The Secret of My Success: How Status, Prestige and School Performance Shape Legal Careers ? challenges the conventional wisdom that it?s better to be in the middle of a pack of a higher ranked school than to do well at a lower ranked school.

Using a series of data sets, Sander and Yakowitz conclude that grades matter much more than previously thought compared to the ?eliteness? of a school in predicting both post-law school placement and long term career success. Here is the abstract of the article:

Rewards are distributed more unevenly within the legal profession than in virtually any other occupation. Most of those who study the careers of lawyers would agree that law school eliteness, law school grades, and social status each play a role in determining which lawyers capture the greatest rewards. But remarkably little effort has been made to directly compare these inputs in explaining career outcomes, to see which of the three matters most, and how they interact. In this paper, we first examine general beliefs about the importance each of these three factors has upon lawyer careers ? beliefs among academics as well as beliefs among the actual participants in the sorting process. We next present some specific findings about each of the three factors. Finally, we directly compare the three factors in regression models of career outcomes. The consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school ? as measured by law school grades ? is the most important predictor of career success. It is decisively more important than law school ?eliteness.? Socioeconomic factors play a critical role in shaping the pool from which law students are drawn, but little or no discernible role in shaping post-graduate careers. Since the dominant conventional wisdom says that law school prestige is all-important, and since students who ?trade-up? in school prestige generally take a hit to their school performance, we think prospective students are getting the wrong message.

Sander and Yakowitz conclude that grades become even more important the more time elapses post-graduation, while the eliteness of a degree from a higher ranked school is a depreciating asset.

A few caveats are in order. First, the paper generally focuses on data from large private law firm employment. One of the consistent themes I?ve heard in advice given to law school applicants is that higher ranking can open up other career opportunities ? such as in the public, academic, and public interest sectors. Second, the authors admit that longitudinal datasets that measure the long-term career success of lawyers post-graduation are still works in progress. Third, the authors do caution that their analysis shouldn?t lead to a conclusion that one should turn down Harvard to go to a much lower-ranked school. Schools at the very top of the hierarchy may have unique advantages.  Similarly, law students may not be able to make up for significant differences in rankings with better grades.

Still, beyond the immediate impact on advising law school applicants, there are a few surprising conclusions here. First, socioeconomic status does not seem to be as good a predictor of post-law school success as grades. Second, despite all of the concerns in the legal academy about whether grades based on law school exams accurately measure lawyering skills, according to Sander and Yakowitz, they seem to be fairly good predictors after all.

I?m not sure whether this paper would provide succor or stress to a first year law student at this point in the semester. On the one hand, it may not matter if you don?t have connections or a fancy undergraduate degree. On the other hand, those grades really do determine a lot.