Missouri is the eighth state in which a law degree is worth the most, according to a new study.
New York ranked first followed by Illinois and Florida where the study determined that it’s easiest for the typical lawyer to recover from law school expenses.
“If Missouri had higher pay and more employment opportunities, it would certainly increase its ranking,” said Jared Stern,managing member of Uplift Legal Funding in California.
The Uplift Legal Funding report is based on factors such as degree affordability, financial aid, academic expenses, emotional health, loan debt, annual salary, disposable income, job opportunities and hourly fees.
“Emotional health, degree affordability and job prospects were the factors that most clearly separated the highest ranked states from the lower ranked states,” Stern told the St. Louis Record. “That was one of the most interesting takeaways for me.”
Overall, Missouri ranked at No. 30 out of the 51 states.
"It looks like under job prospects, Missouri rank's fairly low at 4.8 on our rating scale whereas the top couple of states are in the six to 10 range," Stern said. "On degree affordability, it's more or less in line. There's not a ton of variance in our data set."
The typical lawyer earns an average salary of $158,030 a year compared to $138,000 in Missouri, which Stern blames on supply and demand in any given state.
“You wonder if there's more concentration of focus on different types of law in different states aside from the supply and demand issue,” he said. “In New York and California, there’s a heavy focus on transactional law, which would likely boost that substantially.”
Washington University in St. Louis is the top law school statewide, according to the study, and that’s based on Princeton Review data sources.
“We were able to find data on some universities and not the others so that may have been one of the select universities that we could find in Missouri specifically,” Stern said in an interview.
The study further found that Missouri landed at No. 15 for degree affordability and for academic success rate, the Show Me state ranked above many of the states that are at the top of the list.
When it comes to college experience, however, Missouri ranks 10% below the top states and under the health and wellbeing category, Missouri scored 4.8 compared to 7.5 to 7.7 for the top states, according to the ranking.
"I'm not sure there's any one thing that a state could do to improve these types of things other than a governmental subsidy," Stern added.