Competition for seats in elite U.S. graduate school programs has intensified
dramatically over the past 40 years. In this paper, we study the market for
young attorneys to illuminate the role that elite graduate programs play in
human capital development. We find that attorneys who graduate from law
schools ranked in the top ten nationally earn considerably more than those
without such a qualification, even compared to attorneys who graduate from
schools ranked 11-20. The premium to an elite education carries over to an
attorney’s undergraduate institution as well, and we find that elite
bachelors and elite law degrees appear to be close substitutes in terms of
their effects on salaries. We compare our findings to the broader literature
on the returns to attending a selective college, and find that the
elite-law-school premium is more robust to various methods for correcting
for selection on ability than the broader premium to attending a selective
college. We discuss several potential reasons for why an elite school
premium may exist in this labor market.