2010 Law School Grad Debt at $3.6 Billion

A reader recommended I calculate total law school debt for 2010 grads. How? By taking the number of grads from each law school in the Official Guide and then multiplying them against the average debt levels and the percentage of students taking on debt in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings. Why this isn’t in the Official Guide is beyond me. These data can tell us quite a bit, and it’s only part of some research I’ve been doing.

First, a caveat: U.S. News isn’t complete. It excludes the Puerto Rican law schools, which as I’ve written before are their own unique disaster. It’s also missing a few points. So, for University of Phoenix, Harvard University, and Appalachian School of Law I used the average percent of graduates with debt (85.1%). For Florida International, I duplicated Florida State’s debt numbers and percent with debt, same for Indiana-Indianapolis from Indiana-Bloomington, and Widener-Harrisburg from Widener-Delaware. I also found La Verne’s and Widener-Harrisburg’s number of graduates from their websites as the Official Guide misprinted Widener-Delaware’s data for Harrisburg’s (shows how no one reads the Official Guide), and it excludes La Verne because it had lost its accreditation.

After slapping this into a spreadsheet, here’re a few factoids.

(1)  The average 2010 public law school graduate had $53,661 of debt at graduation; for private school grads it was $79,699. The average overall law student took on $97,306 (yes, the overall average is greater than the public/private ones).

(2)  2010 public law school grads incurred $951.8 million in debt; private graduates $2.669 billion. Total law school graduate debt was $3.621 billion in 2010.

(3)  The average public law school gained $12 million in debt from 2010 grads (median 10 million, standard deviation $7,710,185); that’s $22.8 million for private law schools (median $19.6 million, standard deviation $13,699,205). Here’re the dispersals.

And here’re the top 20 law schools by total graduate debt. For public schools the list isn’t too surprising. For private schools, though, it’s an interesting mix of prestigious and not-so-prestigious law schools. Some of it is high cost and some of it is large enrollments. However, I can’t ignore how much of an outlier Cooley is, so I included the z-score’s on the right of the table. The z-score measures a data point’s distance from the mean, and it’s measured in standard deviations. Cooley’s 4.72 tells us it is way out there.

#	PUBLIC SCHOOL	TOTAL PUBLIC GRADS’ DEBT (2010)	Z-SCORE
1	California-Hastings	35,570,896	3.05
2	Michigan	35,510,278	3.04
3	Virginia	34,631,340	2.93
4	Indiana (Indianapolis) (Est.)	31,571,512	2.53
5	California-Los Angeles	28,055,645	2.08
6	Baltimore	26,128,664	1.83
7	Texas	23,974,030	1.55
8	California-Berkeley	22,810,122	1.40
9	Temple	20,771,127	1.13
10	Indiana (Bloomington)	20,695,707	1.12
11	Minnesota	20,487,209	1.09
12	Penn State	19,684,105	0.99
13	Maryland	19,049,364	0.91
14	George Mason	18,726,770	0.87
15	Florida	18,699,633	0.86
16	Rutgers (Newark)	17,373,648	0.69
17	Wisconsin	16,589,299	0.59
18	North Carolina Central	15,495,257	0.45
19	Oregon	15,462,409	0.44
20	Houston	15,323,970	0.42

**********

#	PRIVATE SCHOOL	TOTAL PRIVATE GRADS’ DEBT (2010)	Z-SCORE
1	Cooley	87,410,308	4.72
2	Georgetown	68,060,738	3.30
3	Harvard (Est.)	58,024,861	2.57
4	American	53,397,546	2.23
5	New York University	49,767,194	1.97
6	New York Law School	48,762,544	1.89
7	Florida Coastal	47,445,152	1.80
8	Suffolk	47,203,984	1.78
9	George Washington	45,084,600	1.63
10	Fordham	43,865,940	1.54
11	Loyola Marymount (CA)	43,621,657	1.52
12	Columbia	42,031,490	1.40
13	Brooklyn	37,970,649	1.11
14	Pacific (McGeorge)	36,806,108	1.02
15	Stetson	36,236,370	0.98
16	John Marshall (IL)	35,749,033	0.94
17	Miami	35,670,595	0.94
18	South Texas	35,593,309	0.93
19	Catholic	34,665,333	0.87
20	Cardozo	34,165,228	0.83

I have more to say on aggregate law school debt growth, but that’s for a separate post.

[UPDATE: Here’s the post, “THE LAW SCHOOL DEBT BUBBLE: $53 Billion in New Law School Debt by 2020.”]