New Salary Data: Arkansas Law Schools

July 15th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt

I wrote last week about a group of states that are using a “linked-records” method to collect detailed salary information for graduates of higher education. The method has some flaws, but it is improving rapidly. The databases, meanwhile, already contain information about graduates of fifteen law schools spread over five states. Let’s take a look, starting alphabetically with Arkansas.

Arkansas has two ABA-accredited law schools: the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Both schools place a substantial majority of their graduates with employers in Arkansas, making them excellent candidates for the linked-records system. For the class of 2012, according to ABA data, 81 of Fayetteville’s 119 employed graduates (68.1%) took their first jobs in Arkansas. For the Little Rock campus, the figure was 85.3% (93 out of 109 employed graduates).

Average Salaries in Law

What salaries did those graduates earn? The College Measures database doesn’t have figures yet for 2012 graduates–or even for 2011 ones in Arkansas. But it does report the average first-year earnings of graduates from the classes of 2006 through 2010 who stayed in-state to work. For the Fayetteville campus, the average was $45,745, and for the Little Rock campus it was $47,060.

Those averages come with all of the caveats I mentioned in my earlier post: They exclude graduates working out of state, graduates holding federal jobs, and self-employed graduates. Perhaps most important, those averages include the legal market’s boom years of 2006 through 2009, along with just one down year. When the database incorporates salaries for the classes of 2011 through 2013, the averages may be lower.

Comparisons with Other Programs

Even including those boom years, however, the salaries of Arkansas law graduates suffer in comparison to starting salaries in other advanced degree programs. The Little Rock campus collected sufficient salary data from three different PhD programs: higher education administration, educational leadership, and physical sciences. The average starting salary in each of those programs was higher than in law, ranging from $52,726 in physical sciences to $72,134 in educational leadership.

To be fair, doctoral candidates in educational leadership or higher education administration often have significant workplace experience; they’re less likely than law students to move directly from college to graduate school. The salaries for these PhD’s, therefore, may partly reflect their workplace experience–not just the value of the degree. Still, eight of Little Rock’s undergraduate programs produced higher starting salaries than its law school did, topping out at $65,978 for registered nurses.

The story is similar at the Fayetteville main campus. There, five of seven doctoral programs produced higher starting salaries than law–and a sixth came within $500 of of law. I was surprised to see that the starting salaries of Arkansas law graduates compare unfavorably with those of graduates holding doctorates in adult and continuing education (average starting salary of $58,013), educational leadership ($85,245), and public policy analysis ($68,425). Even a master’s degree in political science produced an average starting salary ($44,202), within shouting distance of a law salary.

Equally depressing comparisons come from the University of Arkansas’s medical sciences campus. Dental hygienists with just an associate’s degree averaged higher starting salaries ($49,644) than law graduates from either Arkansas campus. A master’s in public health garnered, on average, $56,074. And doctors of pharmacy out-earned almost everyone with an average starting salary of $104,977.

Some of these careers, of course, may reach salary plateaus; it’s possible that Arkansas’s law graduates will earn more as their experience mounts. Even at the entry level, an Arkansas law degree continues to produce higher earnings than most undergraduate degrees. College graduates from the Fayetteville campus averaged just $33,956 during their first year in the workforce.

NALP Data

How do the linked-records salaries compare to ones reported to NALP? I couldn’t find salary information on either Arkansas law school’s website, but NALP’s Jobs and JDs book, available in hard cover, offers some interesting data. In 2007, law graduates working full-time in Arkansas reported an average salary of $49,966. That’s higher than the rolling averages compiled through the linked-records method, but not too far off. (Note that the NALP figures refer to all law graduates working in Arkansas, while the linked-records data include all Arkansas law graduates working in Arkansas. The salary pools, however, should be comparable.)

For 2011, on the other hand, NALP’s reported salaries seem quite high for Arkansas jobs. The reported mean is $52,806–more than six thousand dollars higher than the linked-records average for the boom years. It’s possible that the highest paying legal jobs in Arkansas are going to graduates of out-of-state schools. But it’s also quite likely, as NALP and law schools acknowledge, that the NALP-reported salaries skew high. That’s a good reason to support continued development of other methods for tracking salaries.

Below Minimum Wage

The last piece of information from the Arkansas linked-records database is particularly interesting. When calculating average salaries, Arkansas excluded any graduates who earned less than $13,195 per year, which is the state’s minimum wage threshold. Most employees earning less than that threshold are part-time or temporary workers. Including those salaries in a calculation of average full-time earnings would unfairly depress the average, so the researchers excluded these “below minimum wage” workers from the calculations.

Arkansas, however, does report the number of these “below minimum wage” workers for each degree program. Those numbers are depressingly high for the two law schools. Fifty-two of Little Rock’s graduates, 8.4% of all students who graduated between 2006 and 2010, earned less than $13,195 for the year that started six months after their graduation date. The percentage was the same for the Fayetteville campus: fifty-five graduates, or 8.4% of those who graduated between 2006 and 2010, earned less than minimum wage once they entered the workforce. That’s one in every twelve law graduates.

A few of these graduates may have worked in Arkansas for a few months and then moved to another state; that would produce a small amount of earnings in the Arkansas database. Others may have worked part-time for employers to supplement a solo practice or freelance work. The one in twelve figure, on the other hand, doesn’t include graduates who subsisted entirely on freelance wages or who found no paying work at all; those graduates don’t appear at all in the linked-records database.

Observations

What do we make of these data? The linked-records databases, like other sources of employment information, are incomplete. It is particularly difficult to distinguish unemployed graduates from those who have moved to other states–or to determine salary levels for the latter group of graduates. If researchers ultimately link databases across states, those connections would greatly improve the available information.

This brief examination of Arkansas data, meanwhile, illustrates the kind of comparisons facilitated by linked-records databases. Starting salaries for law graduates exceed those for most (although not all) college majors, but they lag behind salaries for many other advanced-degree holders. As we continue to debate reforms in legal education, we have to remember the options available to prospective students. Starting salaries are an important element in that calculus, one that students will be able to track more easily with databases like the ones available through College Measures.