Law schools dominate list of grad schools with highest-earning alumni; Santa Clara makes top 10
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Updated: Harvard Law School graduates earned the highest median salaries among graduate-school alumni at the midpoint of their careers, according to a website that asks users to reveal their pay in return for seeing how they compare to others.
At the midpoint of their careers, Harvard law grads earned $201,000, according to the results, summarized by the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.). The survey by online salary-information company PayScale looked at pay data for alumni of more than 600 graduate schools with enough online results to be statistically valid.
Law schools dominated the top 10 for midcareer salaries, with seven of the top 10 spots. But business schools led for highest salaries less than five years after graduation, earning eight of the top 10 spots, the Wall Street Journal says.
The top 10 grad schools for midcareer salary are:
1) Harvard Law School
2) Emory University School of Law
3) Santa Clara University School of Law
4) Stanford University Graduate School of Business
5) UCLA College of Law
6) Pepperdine University School of Law
7) Harvard Business School
8) Georgetown University Law Center
9) University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business
10) Columbia University Law School
Most of the law schools on the high-earning list didn’t make the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the top 10 law schools. Law schools that are on both top 10 lists are Harvard (ranked second by U.S. News) and Columbia (ranked fourth by U.S. News). U.S. News ranks the other law schools on the PayScale list this way: Emory as No. 19, Santa Clara as No. 107, UCLA as No. 16, Pepperdine as No. 54, and Georgetown as No. 13.
Above the Law points out that PayScale only has data on 55 law schools, and just four of those schools (Harvard, Columbia, UCLA Berkeley, Georgetown) are ranked in the top 14 by U.S. News. The complete salary ranking of PayScale law schools is here.
Updated on Oct. 23 to include information from Above the Law.
