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Hello,

I'm a 3L working on the newly formed King Hall Student Budget Committee. We have been publishing information about UC Davis tuition, budget, and financial aid. I thought some of you may be interested in our latest post, talking about the actual cost of attending King Hall and scholarships available for admitted students.

kinghallbudget.blogspot.com

Thank you for sharing the results of this survey. This thread should be receiving more attention on TLS.

To summarize:

49% (98 students) responded to the survey. Of those, 38 reported having secure employment after graduation (or 19% of the class as a whole). Of those 38, 25 reported jobs paying $70k+. If you extrapolate to the whole class and assume an equal proportion of students did not respond to the survey, then about 25% are making 70k or more. At least half of the respondents have six-figure debt.

My main problem with the survey is the conclusion:

Having an accurate picture of the debt to income ratio of each class is the only way to seriously analyze if a law school is a good investment; if the students are able the manage their debt after graduation.

The debt-to-income ratio for each class is not useful to an applicant assessing schools. Students will all have different circumstances and come from different backgrounds. A low debt-to-income ratio at Davis (perhaps due to a large proportion of students coming from wealthy families) doesn't do any good for someone who has no savings, no family help, and is facing sticker at that school. He may be misled into underestimating the financial burden of attending UCD. And vice-versa - someone with a lot of savings shouldn't be affected by school's overall high debt-to-income ratio.

The best way to judge a school is using the financial calculators available and LST