On July 17, 2013, Inside Higher Ed published an article touting the findings of an ambitious research paper by Seton Hall University School of Law professor Michael Simkovic and Rutgers Business School professor Frank McIntyre titled "The Economic Value of a Law Degree" ("Economic Value").
In their paper, Simkovic and McIntyre compare Census Bureau and National Education Longitudinal Study income data for law degree holders to the incomes of mere college graduates for the time period spanning 1996 to 2011. They calculate that law degrees add a median $32,300 in annual earnings and a median $420,000 in after-federal-income-tax lifetime earnings over college degrees. The authors conclude that these figures justify enrolling in law school, contradicting critics warning that law school is an "irrational" investment. But what really grabbed people's attention was the paper's magic, seven-digit number: A law degree's mean pretax net earnings bonus is a cool million dollars.
The legal media promptly erupted.
At Above the Law, Elie Mystal characterized the paper as " Another Garbage Study Offering Misleading Statistics on the Value of a Law Degree" and criticized the paper's inability to include classes that graduated after 2008, its exclusion of tuition costs from its lifetime value calculations, and its failure to distinguish among graduates from different law schools. Comments posted in response to the ABA Journal's take were no more generous. (Am Law Daily sibling publication the New Jersey Law Journal also published an article on Simkovic and McIntyre's paper.)
Although the criticisms offered by Mystal and others are well-founded, they miss the even more troubling problems embedded within "Economic Value": The paper's causal theory for explaining the law degree's income bonus is nonsense because it assumes that law school pays off equally for nonlawyers, a notion that diminishes the relevance of the authors' findings. Even if its income calculations were applicable to the real world, they in no way call into question reformers' criticisms of legal education, so on that score the paper amounts to a non sequitur.
Causation and Composition
On page 4, "Economic Value" boldly stakes its theory for why law school graduates earn more than nongraduates: The degree by itself increases earnings because higher education increases earnings.
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