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Salary Raises Dwarfed by Law School Tuition Hikes
Runaway costs for a legal education are threatening to trample any optimism among law school graduates created by recent associate salary increases at the nation's top law firms. Law school tuition is bounding far ahead of pay raises at firms of all sizes. Whether new lawyers land jobs at giant international firms, where salaries recently hit $135,000 plus bonuses, or at small practices in the Midwest and elsewhere, they are paying up to 267 percent more for their education, compared to costs in 1990. … But law students are partly to blame, says Joseph Harbaugh, dean of Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Would-be lawyers live too comfortably while in school and fail to make the necessary sacrifices, he says, adding that a quick look at any law school parking lot proves his point. "The students' cars are better than the faculty and staff's cars," says Harbaugh, who is also a board member of Access Group, a nonprofit provider of student loans for graduate and professional degrees. Law schools calculate the amount of money students need for tuition and for living expenses into their budgets, which helps determine how much federal loan money their students can borrow. Harbaugh says that many law schools do a disservice to students by raising their budgets to accommodate so-called cost-of-attendance fees, which are those expenses that law students have for attending school other than tuition and fees.
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