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.
