Investigating the Economic Value of a Law School Education: A Regression Analysis Approach
Researching the real economic value of a law school education offers valuable insights into whether the prestige of a law school genuinely contributes to improved post-graduation outcomes or if these outcomes are primarily driven by the quality of incoming students. The heart of this project would be a regression analysis using employment rates as the dependent variable and characteristics such as LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA of the incoming class as independent variables.
Do any law schools consistently produce better than expected outcomes for their students? Or are the outcomes fully explained by the characteristics of their incoming classes? Obviously, you would have some law schools with positive or negative residuals looking at a cross section of data so you would really need to have multiple years of data to evaluate whether any schools consistently improve postgraduation results controlling for the quality of their incoming classes.
I would hypothesize that higher LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs lead to higher post-graduation employment rates, but there might not be substantial differences in outcomes attributable to law schools attended once these factors are controlled. If you include an independent variable like law school ranking into the regression analysis, that will be highly correlated to with incoming class LSAT and GPA, so I think one would need to treat the residual values as the law school effect. With multiple years of data for law schools, a multi-level model might be the way to go. The analysis could reveal whether the value of a top law school lies more in the selection of high-achieving students than in the educational experience itself.
Given the increased transparency about law school outcomes, including employment rates and bar passage rates, such a study is feasible. It could serve as a compelling undergraduate honors thesis for pre-law students interested in understanding the real value of law school education and its implications for prospective law students. There may be some law schools that consistently improve post-graduation prospects for their students based on their teaching methods and student services. If so, it would be great to let students know which schools will help them the most.
