Your Job Score reflects how close a school's job outcomes are to your goals. Higher scores are better, all else equal, but consider cost, starting salaries, and other factors in deciding value.
If you change job preferences through the LST Wizard, Your Job Score will change.
Your Utility Score
Your Utility Score has three elements: job preferences, subjective excitement, and lower debt.
It sets the stage for you to confidently make a wise, strategic decision. It factors in your subjective experience and what you want out of your law school experience, as well as a post-graduate perspective that considers the impact of student debt repayment and job opportunities on your life. The score will also jump a school up a list that you might have overlooked despite being a good value.
Your Utility Score for a school will change if you update your LST Wizard job preferences, change the school's rating, or update your budget.
Law School Rating Requirement
To unlock Your Utility Score for a school you're interested in, you must first rate the school. Factor anything you want into this rating. The point is that there will always be a subjective element to your law school choice.
Law School Budget Requirement
To unlock Your Utility Score for a school you're interested in, you must first complete a budget for the school. The more accurate your budget, the more useful this score will be.
Admissions Chances
Based on your LSAT, GPA, and demographics, how likely are you to get admitted to the school? Note, this does not take into consideration individual aspects of your application such as character and fitness issues, work/life experience, interviews, or other factors. We use admissions data from previous years to provide your estimate. When schools change admissions standards, or the admissions market changes, these estimates will be less accurate. While it makes sense to use this as a guide to where to apply, it should not be a controlling factor.
LSAT
The Law School Admissions Test, or LSAT, is a standardized test administered by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) for prospective law school candidates. It's designed to assess reading comprehension, logical, and verbal reasoning proficiencies. The test is an integral part of the law school admission process in the United States.
GPA
You may have many GPAs to your name: undergraduate, degree, masters, PhD, etc. However, only your LSDAS GPA truly matters for law school admissions. That's the GPA that schools report to the ABA and other parties. The LSDAS GPA is calculated by LSAC using all college-level work, whether at your degree-granting institution or elsewhere, before your first undergraduate degree is granted.
Key Statistical Terms
A quartile is the result of spliting a populaion into four equal groups. The 50th percentile, or median, is the middle point between the smallest and highest value in a population. The 25th percentile is the middle point between the smallest value and the median value. The 75th percentile uses the same calculation, but with the highest value. The interquartile range is the range between the 25th and 75th percentile (inclusive). A median is a type of average; another common average is the mean.
LST Employment Score
Reflects graduates with a successful start to a legal career: long-term, full-time jobs that require a law license, other than solo practitioners
Tuition Discount
Sometimes referred to as scholarships. The discount is the amount of need-based or non-need-based discount a student receives to attend the law school. These often come with strings attached.
Percent Receiving Discount
The percentage of all enrolled students (not just 1Ls) in a given academic year that receives some tuition discount, whether need-based or not, or with strings or without.
Percent Paying Full Price
The percentage of all enrolled students (not just 1Ls) in a given academic year that receive no tuition discount, whether need-based or not, or with strings or without.
Median Salary (via the federal government)
The middle amount earned by graduates who borrowed for law school, regardless of the type or number of jobs worked. Earnings data come from the U.S. Department of Education, which obtains data from the Department of the Treasury. The underlying dataset reflects actual earnings in the first full calendar year after graduation, e.g. the earnings were from 2017 for 2016 graduates.
This measures something different from other salaries that appear on this site. Those salaries come from schools according to NALP's process, which measures the annual salary of a graduate 10 months after graduation (on March 15) and reports only on long-term, full-time jobs. A graduate who started their job on March 1, 2017 would report their starting salary (for example, $60,000) to NALP. If they held the job for the remainder of the calendar year, they would have earned $50,000 from that job in 2017. But if they made $4,000 from part-time work in January and February, they would report $54,000 of income to the IRS.
Debt Service
Measures your ability to manage your monthly payments, i.e. to repay the money you plan to borrow. Debt service is calculated by dividing your monthly payment into your monthly income. A payment of $1,000 and monthly income of $5,000 is a debt service rate of 20%. The amount you devote each month to loan payment impacts your quality of life, although your debt service will decrease over time if your income increases and you make you full loan payment each month.
Star a School to Add to Your List
To add a law school to your list, you may star it from this page. Add a school to your list when you're interested in attending or tracking their performance. You can do many things with this list and add schools to it from all over this site.