Another thing worth noting is that the your class rank and alma mater essentially determines your earning potential. Unlike most other professional fields, the rank and prestige of your school matters
a lot. If you're a lawyer who attended one of the top schools in country (usually referred to as the
T14), you're generally set for a well-paying job (if you want it; some would prefer to do public lawyering, which by and large doesn't make much) as long as you didn't bottom out the curve. The lower you go on the
U.S. News Rankings, the less career opportunities you will have, the less transferable your J.D. will be to other parts of the country, and the better you have to perform in order to be competitive for most positions. Usually your career prospects are generally good if you're within the Top 50, decent if you're within the Top 75 and the school has good regional power, and really slim if you're outside that. If you're a low-ranking student at a low-ranked law school, without some serious networking skills, you're fucked and will basically be forced to take whatever work you can to scrounge by (see: The Douche). You're not going to be making the $180,000 BigLaw starting salary, you're probably not even going to be picked up by a firm, and unless you really hustle professionally, you probably never will.
There's a reason why there's a million different articles basically screaming at people not to become lawyers. Good jobs paying jobs are by no means guaranteed by a law degree, even at a "good" program, and the cost of tuition is astronomical ($27,591 on average per year at public schools, $49,095 at private). Going into $160,000 dollars' worth of debt to make $60,000 is by no means a sound financial decision.
