Originally Posted by impalaballa187
JD's:
Wayyyyyyyyy to many of them on the market. If it's a top-5 school then great, but below that it's increasingly turning into a very expensive sheet of paper. The payoff compared to other industries isn't that great either.
That's false.
Let's go mid-market first (Sacramentos, Seattles, Denvers, etc.): If you're a top law student at the best law school in town--even if that law school is ranked below 50 in the nation--you will place well locally, and earn up to 145K-160K starting. See nalpdirectory.com. Your degree might not be portable outside of your locale, but you'll have a comparable base salary to an MBA grad from a top MBA school, just without the fancy bonuses. But are you really complaining if you're starting at 145K-160K without going to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford? I don't think so. Just look at top law firms' websites in middle market cities and see where their lawyers graduated from. It's not the schools you would think given what the firms pay.
Now let's go big market (NY's, LA's, DC's, SF's, etc.): Again, although good students at the top 14 schools--not top 5--can get into any of these cities, firms in these cities also recruit heavily from the top students at local schools, almost regardless of national rank. Median starting salary at Fordham for example is 160K. Top students at George Washington have spots at elite DC firms. Etc.
So if you're pursuing law, you don't lose all hope at seeing major dollar signs just because you don't get into a t-14. Firms care a lot about grades, and use a sliding scale when hiring associates, balancing school rank against transcript and previous work experience/degrees. So if you're the top student at say, Hastings, you will get a better job in the Bay Area than a student in the bottom 1/3 of his class at Stanford.
The above quote is just wrong. Don't listen to it. Yes, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale are your golden ticket in the field--I know because I go to one of them--but students at schools you've never heard, even in this market, are coming out making 160K+ starting.That doesn't sound like a worthless piece of paper to me. You just have to do well.
And the payoff in a JD is definitely much greater than advanced degrees in other fields. A law degree is significantly more flexible than most advanced degrees, which usually type-cast you into one industry. A JD can prosecute people in Detroit, negotiate a merger on Wall St, save the environment in DC, get a tabloid to retract statements about a celebrity in LA, run the NBA and quell its labor unrest, and put terrorists away overseas. I don't see many JD's complaining about their degree limiting what they want to do with their lives.