A Tip for Students Interested in Law School

A new study looks at the average LSAT scores of students with different undergraduate majors, sometimes grouping related fields together to gather a statistically significant sample. (Via.) And the best scores were attained by students studying:

  1. Physics/Math (160.0)
  2. Economics (157.4)
  3. Philosophy/Theology (157.4)
  4. International Relations (156.5)
  5. Engineering (156.2)

At the bottom of the list? Prelaw (148.3) and Criminal Justice (146.0).

I’m not one to crow about the superiority of physics with respect to other fields, so I found this more amusing than anything else. Still, that’s a pretty substantial gap between #1 and #2, if you compare to the differences between the lower scores. The obvious explanation: physics and math students get to be really good at taking tests like the LSAT. I don’t imagine this correlates very strongly with “being a good lawyer.” Then again, I don’t think that good scores on the physics GRE correlate very strongly with “being a good physicist,” over and above a certain useful aptitude at being quick-minded.

57 Comments

57 thoughts on “A Tip for Students Interested in Law School”

  1. “Taipei, Melbourne, Porto, Toronto, Brisbane, rural central Texas (20-30 minute drive to UT), any national laboratory, NASA, UC Davis, the Research Triangle, Ithaca, Iowa City, quite a lot of liberal arts colleges, large state schools, etc.? (Ohio State, UIUC, ad nauseum).”

    Neither UT, nor UC Davis, nor certainly Iowa City, qualify as world class institutions. Even though you have to fight tooth and nail to get a tenure track job in any of those. As for Melbourne and Taipei, not only will you compete with locals for any tenure track jobs, but there are certainly worker permit / visa issues involved.

    “salary that already puts you in the upper percentiles of incomes in the world”

    100k family income puts you around 75th percentile nationwide. Which wouldn’t be so bad if high-income jobs weren’t concentrated in a few high cost places. In Santa Clara County (heart of Silicon Valley), 100k is barely above median. Even though that median includes retirees and illegal immigrants in ghettos.

    “I grew up in a single parent home with an annual salary of less than $20k”

    I’m actually a foreigner. Back in high school I almost made the cut for an International Olympiad. I lived on $100/month for a few years while in college. I have a M.S. degree in physics from a top 40 U.S. university, which I consider practically worthless. And, as much as I like physics, I don’t see any prospects for myself in the area. My current job as a programmer pays more than I’d get as a tenured professor if – IF – I could become one, which I can’t, because I don’t have a Ph.D. degree and I can’t afford to waste 5 years getting one. I’ve been considering a law career if I can get into a good law school on a merit scholarship…

  2. – 100K puts you at 84%-ile in the U.S. $200K: 97%; $250K: 98.5%;
    – UT and UC Davis are most certainly world-class institutions, unless your definition only admits the likes of Harvard and Oxford or is tied in with such measures as US News top 10. In my field, UC Davis is preferable to all Ivies save Cornell combined, though Berkeley and Cornell are on par with Davis. I’m sure similar dynamics are at work for other specialties at other “unworthy” institutions;
    – I specifically picked Melbourne and Taipei because through personal experience, I know both are inexpensive, good cities with great institutions that actively hire foreign talent.

    In the end, if your world is biased towards the U.S.’s upwardly-mobile class as a model, you are exactly right. And it does so happen to overlap quite often with professional science. This is quite a happy circumstance for many professional scientists who get to have their cake and eat it too. But if your world is biased towards building a career as a professional scientist, the landscape is quite different indeed, and is much richer than you are representing it.

  3. http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-qr_name=ACS_2007_3YR_G00_DP3YR3&-ds_name=&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false&-format=

    Nationwide, 100K is 76’th, 200K is 95’th. In San Diego county, which is where I am, 100K is 67’th, 200 is 93’rd. In Silicon Valley, it’s worse.

    Personally I’d define “world class” as top 40, which includes UCSD but certainly excludes Davis.

    Again, “world class”ness is irrelevant, because of an absurdly high ratio of tenure track positions to Ph.D.s, which makes it very difficult for a fresh Ph.D. to get a tenured job ANYWHERE, not just in a world class institution. If U.S. universities would just cut their Ph.D. output to a third of what it is today, all problems would be solved.

  4. Well, with the obvious caveats involving Wiki, they differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

    Your definition of world class is clearly not widely shared by faculty members looking for jobs. I know faculty who turned down a “better” university (University of Chicago) for UC Davis (with both offers in hand) because they considered them to be equally world class and liked mountains and wine better than the city.

    I don’t know what to do with the last bit, though. I’d love to discuss it, but I’m in a hurry and it is tangential (albeit interesting to me). But when it is all said and done, wanting to be a lawyer is a fine goal, wanting upward mobility is a fine goal, but I very seriously doubt that many formerly aspiring academics forced into law out of economic NECESSITY. Out of economic desire, out of disillusionment with academia, out of failure to find a job, certainly. But I doubt that going into debt to the tune of 5 figures for 3 years of law school immediately after 3-6 years of advanced graduate education because it is necessary to maintain a lifestyle in the Bay Area or Silicone Valley is a common path.

  5. “But I doubt that going into debt to the tune of 5 figures for 3 years of law school immediately after 3-6 years of advanced graduate education because it is necessary to maintain a lifestyle in the Bay Area or Silicone Valley is a common path.”

    I’m suggesting to forego advanced graduate education altogether, because 1 in 4 Ph.D.’s will get a job that, while attractive and secure, does not pay all that well compared to industry, and the other 3 will get exactly the same jobs and exactly the same salaries they could have gotten if they went looking for jobs after getting their B.S. degrees, without wasting 5 years of their youth on Ph.D’s, followed by 3 more years working as post-docs. If you don’t have the confidence that you’ll become a good professor, or you don’t have the drive to be one, it may be better to go to law school when you’re 22 than to wait till all your job applications are declined when you’re 30.

    Also, I’m suggesting to try and get scholarships whenever possible. Many law students get scholarships. If you’re smart enough to get a Ph.D., you may be smart enough to get 175 on your LSAT and, if you have a good GPA, that may be sufficient to get you a free ride in a decent law school.

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  7. if you’re lucky enough to get a tenure track job at NYU or Stanford, you’ll have to live in a condo or commute 1-1.5 hours one way from Holmdel or Livermore, because all decent places closer to your job are occupied by doctors, lawyers, venture capitalists, you name it.

    Because no one can live in New York on less than $100k! Oh wait, what’s that, median household income in Manhattan is $47k? That can’t be right! It would contradict a blog comment. Every NYU professor lives outside the city, I’m sure.

    And those rumors about how schools like NYU offer housing assistance to their faculty? Clearly lies spread to try to convince more people to get academic jobs.

  8. Pingback: Ted Bunn’s Blog » Blog Archive » Want to be a lawyer? Study physics.

  9. This is very misleading as a “tip” for getting into law school.

    #1 – There’s no proof it isn’t self-selection. Those who already would score highly on the LSAT choose physics more often than criminal justice – this is a plausible theory.

    #2 – Law schools generally don’t care what major you took in college other than avoiding things like pre-law, french horn, basket weaving, etc.

    #3 – Your GPA weighs heavily into a law school’s decision on admission.

    #4 – It is substantially easier to receive a high GPA in criminal justice, poli sci, etc than it is in physics.

    Given the above – telling pre-law students to become physics majors, especially if they have no driven interest, is very bad advice.

  10. Another tip: some lawyers don’t have much of a sense of humor. Also some physicists, for that matter. Probably best to stick with chemistry.

  11. Because no one can live in New York on less than $100k! Oh wait, what’s that, median household income in Manhattan is $47k? That can’t be right! It would contradict a blog comment. Every NYU professor lives outside the city, I’m sure.

    Far more telling than the median household income in Manhattan is the median condo price. I’ll let you look that up with your mad Google skillz. Also look up median house prices in Rye and Greenwich (both popular locations from which people commute to Manhattan, 45 min – 1 hr one way).

    For now, an anecdote. Paul Krugman recently bought a 3 bedroom condo within walking distance of Columbia University, using his Nobel money. Price paid: 1.7 million. What kind of housing assistance would I need to afford a place like that on a starting professor salary at Columbia (80k)?

  12. For what it is worth (and he was an intelligent man as well as an exceptionally kind and interested professor of English), see Wayne Booth’s book The Vocation of a Teacher. On page 264 he confesses that “the most startling debasements of character I have ever observed … have taken place during the three years of law school… On average, when our English majors graduate, you can count on their feeling and expressing some response to human suffering, whether in literature or in what we call life. On average, three years later, those who transfer to law school have had all that trained out of them. Of course they may be just putting on a show, at both ends of those three years — the show they think their superiors expect of them. But even as a show, the change distresses me.”

  13. “Then again, I don’t think that good scores on the physics GRE correlate very strongly with “being a good physicist,””

    Spoken like someone who scored lower than he would like to admit on the physics GRE.

    While I can imagine someone doing well on the physics GRE and not being a successful physicist, it’s hard to imagine the other way around. Well, come to think of it I do know of a example, but he’s an experimentalist.

  14. Far more telling than the median household income in Manhattan is the median condo price.

    What’s telling is that you seem to think that the median condo price, or the amount Krugman paid for a 3-bedroom condo, is telling. Millions of people manage to live their lives in New York without owning condos. You aren’t complaining that coastal areas are too expensive to live in; you’re complaining that you can’t live in dense and expensive coastal areas while owning any significant amount of real estate. If living a particular, property-ownership-centric variation of the upper-middle-class lifestyle is that important to you, then yes, academia is probably a bad choice. But there are other viable ways to live.

  15. Millions of people manage to live their lives in New York without owning condos.

    These millions of people include meth-heads, single people, and people living in $300/month rent controlled aparments continuously since 1970.

    You aren’t complaining that coastal areas are too expensive to live in; you’re complaining that you can’t live in dense and expensive coastal areas while owning any significant amount of real estate. If living a particular, property-ownership-centric variation of the upper-middle-class lifestyle is that important to you, then yes, academia is probably a bad choice. But there are other viable ways to live.

    My expectation of lifestyle is fairly simple. I’d like to have two kids, I’d like to live in a safe place with enough bedrooms and bathrooms for everyone (so, at least 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms), I’d like to keep my commute under 30 minutes, and I’d like to send my kids to a good school. For the purposes of this discussion, define “good” as <20% free/reduced lunches. Not property-ownership-centric (although I'd prefer to own than to rent) and not even particularly upper-middle-class.

    This can't be done on 100k in Manhattan and it's very difficult, bordering on impossible, to do on 100k in Silicon Valley. This can be done on 100k in Boise, but, like I said previously, there are no jobs for people with physics/math degrees paying 100k there. There are only enough tenure track jobs and national lab jobs and NASA jobs in such backwater places to accommodate a small fraction of people with physics/math degrees.

    Which brings us back to my original point. If you get a physics or math degree, and you're not lucky enough to get one of those "good" jobs", you'll end up in industry, in Manhattan or in Silicon Valley. And, if your expectations are similar to mine, you'll suffer. If you don't want to suffer, go and take LSAT, that may be the best move of your life.

  16. Seems that Nameless might want to readjust his expectations about what’s realistic. Considering a 3BR/3bath house in a neighborhood where few poor people send children to school as a god-given right necessary for happiness just makes him sound like a tool.

    -King Cynic, who makes ~$100K as a professor at a major university in a major West coast city, supports a family exclusively on said salary, owns a home, commutes less than 30 minutes, and in no way ever worries that he doesn’t have enough money because he’s not a lawyer

  17. DW says:

    “I’m talking about legal assistant jobs in the middle of Saskatchewan with some extremely obscure federal agency”

    Ahem. I live in Saskatchewan thank you very much;). Flaaaaaaaaaaaat.

  18. Saw a study once to that documented that undergrad physics majors did than biology majors when moving into biophysics. They also found it easier to learn the bio side than the biologits did to learn the physics side.
    Suspect math/physics requires more rigorous habits of thought Biology.
    (Yes, any biologists out there are welcome to be offended – but it’s a fact).

  19. Just to add a little spin to your arguments of physics student superiority (not that I genuinely care, but I’m playing devil’s advocate like any good law student / fresh lawyer should), what do you make of this?

    “Average LSAT scores have been highest for Caucasian and Asian American test takers. African American test takers and Puerto Rican test takers have had the lowest mean LSAT scores.”

    From: http://www.lsacnet.org/research/tr/LSAT-performance-regional-gender-racial-ethnic-breakdowns-1993-1994-through-1999-2000.htm

    So, if physicists maintain “more rigorous habits of thought”, can we extend the analogy to the example above? Or is there some reason you would be less comfortable with that one? If so, why?

  20. @DW

    Before you ask Sean to answer that one, let me pose a few questions of you.

    1) Do African Americans and Peurto Rican test takers on average have equal access to financial and educational resources as Asian American and Caucasian test takers?;
    2) Does access to financial and educational resources influence performance on standardized tests?

    But please take my questions seriously. I’m not trying to challenge your devil’s advocacy, but like any good scientist, I’m trying to look at this from all angles and consequently must perform my own devil’s advocacy. Oh, and ignore the apparent disingenuousness of my disclaimer. It is illusory. </snark>

    Anyway, I imagine the influence of various factors such as income, class, and major could be untangled with multiple regression analysis. I imagine that most of the effect Sean sees is from having extensive experience with problem solving tasks more difficult than present in the relatively easy LSAT tests. If you’ve done enough of the particular problem-solving tasks to be a good physicist or philosopher, you probably only need to practice test taking skills and get familiar with the format. You probably don’t need to spend much time honing those skills actually tested. But for someone who spends more time on memory intensive majors (biology, criminal justice), you’ve probably been training other aspects of the brain that aren’t as relevant to the LSAT.

  21. A Physics Grad Student

    I’m following this discussion with some interest because I’m a physics grad student who has decided to take the LSAT and transition to law school after graduating. I’m not particularly interested in the money argument that Nameless is putting forth; I just don’t have enough information to know if it’s good or not. What I do agree with in his posts is that the prospects for a tenure track position anywhere are pretty dim. Basically, you have to have graduated with lots of publications from a prestigious institution to even have a shot at a tenure track position, and even then you’re basically going to be moving to wherever that position is; that place is more likely to be Sticksville, Kansas than New York City, and some of us want to live in New York City (or at least another urban area). Even if the money angle were irrelevant, this alone would be enough to seriously consider switching.

    In my view, the prospects for a physics Ph.D. to actually do the kind of thing you get a Ph.D. for are not particularly good. So why kill myself pretending I want to live in undesirable places and slave away for the dubious honor of possibly getting tenure at 40 when I can do something that will give me many more options?

    Also, I’d like to disagree with a point made by Casey at #35 above. I’ve been told by people in the know that both major and institution are considered for law school applications.

  22. Manhattan may be a bit pricey, but real New Yorkers quickly learn about the other four boroughs. I grew up in Queens where you could get a two bedroom apartment not far from the Flushing line for less than $250K, and that was at the peak of the boom.

    If you are going into law for the money, be warned that starting salaries are bi-modal. Most lawyers cluster around $35K. Others cluster around $135K, but the air gets very thin very quickly up there. I’m not sure how many make the jump from one cluster to another other their careers. (For a reference http://www.adamsmithesq.com/archives/2008/07/the-bimodal-starting-sala.html)

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