This Tuesday was a disaster for me, because I stayed in the classroom and listened to different things for nearly 10 HOURS! But I shouldn't complain anything, anyway it was my own choice.
At that busy and painful day, I listened to a seminar. As usual, here is related information.
Title: The Returns to Attending a Prestigious Law School
Author: Paul Oyer (Stanford University)
Ok, I should admit that I was too tired to follow and focus on all points of the presentation. Anyway, it was a typical empirical work from labor economists, or education. However, the paper is available online here: http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/seminars/oyer.pdf
Copy some conclusions from his paper:
- In 2002 and 2007, those lawyers that went to top 10 law schools made, on average, 25% more than those that went to schools ranked 11-20 and over 50% more than those that went to schools ranked 21-100.
- Graduates of Top 10 schools were also much more likely to work in large law firms in leading law markets.
- We find that at least a third of the large returns to law school reputation are due to selection, but this selection is almost entirely on a single variable - quality of the undergraduate institution attended.
- Our results are consistent with a reasonably large causal effect of attending an elite law school, but the exact size of the premium depends varies with assumptions about the role of unobservables.
For anyone interested, please download the paper and read. I was just interested in the topic, and it indicated it is true that "selection" is the main factor, which means those who attend top law schools are expected better than the rest peers. In the other word, they may be also successful even they are in other areas...