Should you go to law school? Where to find the numbers instead of the opinions

Almost everything written about this is somebody's experience generalized into advice. That is not useless, but it is not evidence, and there is real evidence available for free that most people never open.

Read the disclosures

Every ABA-approved school must report what happened to its graduates. Not what it hopes, not a testimonial — the actual distribution of outcomes, in a standardized form, published annually. For a decision of this size that is an unusually good dataset, and it costs nothing.

What to look at, for each school you are considering:

• The share of graduates in full-time, long-term jobs that require bar passage. This is the number that means employed as a lawyer, and it is the one to compare across schools.
• School-funded positions, reported separately. A job the school itself is paying for is a different thing from one the market provided.
• Bar passage rates, first-time and ultimate.
• The tuition and the discount rate — what people actually pay after scholarships, not the sticker.
• Where graduates work geographically. Most schools place overwhelmingly in their own region, which quietly decides where you will live.

The questions the data cannot answer

• Have you spent time around the actual work? Not a courtroom drama — a day with a practicing lawyer doing what they do most days, which is reading and writing.
• Are you going because you want this, or because you are good at school and this is the next school? That is a real and common reason, and it is worth naming rather than discovering in year two.
• What debt would you be taking, and against which outcome? The honest version compares your realistic scholarship to the realistic employment distribution at that school, not to the best case at a different one.
• What else would three years and that money buy? If you cannot answer this, the comparison has not actually been made.

A note on the LSAT's role

The score changes which of those distributions you are choosing among, and how much of the tuition you pay. Someone unsure about law school is often better served by taking the LSAT seriously first — a strong score widens the set of options enough that the decision gets easier, and it costs far less than a year of tuition to find out.

It is also a reasonable proxy test of the day-to-day. If months of close argumentative reading are miserable rather than absorbing, that is information worth having before you commit three years to a great deal more of it.