Bachelor’s degree · earnings 4 years after completing
Highest-Paying Colleges for Legal Studies (Bachelor's)
Graduates who complete a bachelor's degree in Legal Studies earn a median of $61,959 four years after finishing, and the middle half earn between $42,689 and $82,578. We rank the 25 U.S. colleges whose Legal Studies programs have at least 25 graduates in the Scorecard earnings sample, 1,692 graduates in all. That puts Legal Studies at #58 of 131 bachelor's degree fields we rank by national median earnings.
University of Miami, in Florida, leads at $99,836, 53% above the median ranked school ($65,316). The gap between schools is moderate: the middle half of ranked schools earn between $57,073 and $70,429, and the lowest earns $40,990. 14 of the 25 ranked schools (56%) match or beat the national median.
The top 20 mix sectors: 12 public, 7 private nonprofit and 1 for-profit. The top 20 are spread across 15 states, with New York the most common (3).
The top 20 schools cost about the same as the rest of the list: a median net price of $18,785 a year, against $17,890 across all 25 ranked schools. Their graduates who borrowed carry a median of $22,262 in federal loans, about 33% of one year of earnings. Measured against a typical high-school graduate in the same state, the median top-20 school recovers its net cost in about 2.4 years.
Showing the top 25 of 25 ranked schools. Select a column heading to re-sort the table. † = fewer than 40 graduates in the earnings sample.
| 1 | University of Miami Coral Gables, FL Private nonprofit · 4-year | $99,836 | 30 † | $15,565 | $37,244 | 2.3 |
| 2 | American University Washington, DC Private nonprofit · 4-year | $72,792 | 35 † | $24,375 | $41,943 | 5.1 |
| 3 | Michigan State University East Lansing, MI Public · 4-year | $72,414 | 98 | $24,753 | $19,680 | 2.1 |
| 4 | University of Washington-Seattle Campus Seattle, WA Public · 4-year | $71,042 | 73 | $14,512 | $14,091 | 1.9 |
| 5 | University of Maryland Global Campus Adelphi, MD Public · 4-year | $70,845 | 71 | $26,701 | $22,063 | 2.7 |
| 6 | University of California-Berkeley Berkeley, CA Public · 4-year | $70,636 | 122 | $13,000 | $13,481 | 1.6 |
| 7 | Ohio State University-Main Campus Columbus, OH Public · 4-year | $70,429 | 40 | $19,342 | $17,339 | 2.0 |
| 8 | Suffolk University Boston, MA Private nonprofit · 4-year | $70,274 | 46 | $27,000 | $29,618 | 4.1 |
| 9 | University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI Public · 4-year | $70,123 | 75 | $20,000 | $17,354 | 2.1 |
| 10 | University of Massachusetts-Amherst Amherst, MA Public · 4-year | $69,269 | 28 † | $21,500 | $22,383 | 3.2 |
| 11 | University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA Public · 4-year | $66,244 | 104 | $17,883 | $17,890 | 2.4 |
| 12 | Hamline University Saint Paul, MN Private nonprofit · 4-year | $65,460 | 39 † | $22,000 | $20,744 | 3.0 |
| 13 | St. John's University-New York Queens, NY Private nonprofit · 4-year | $65,316 | 104 | $25,520 | $29,999 | 4.1 |
| 14 | Siena University Loudonville, NY Private nonprofit · 4-year | $63,487 | 46 | $27,000 | $33,733 | 4.9 |
| 15 | American Public University System Charles Town, WV For-profit · 4-year | $61,532 | 70 | $30,518 | $9,597 | 1.4 |
| 16 | Arizona State University Campus Immersion Tempe, AZ Public · 4-year | $61,356 | 153 | $22,523 | $14,967 | 2.4 |
| 17 | Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus University Park, PA Public · 4-year | $60,745 | 33 † | $31,750 | $32,875 | 5.4 |
| 18 | University of Central Florida Orlando, FL Public · 4-year | $59,715 | 107 | $17,956 | $10,411 | 1.6 |
| 19 | CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice New York, NY Public · 4-year | $57,073 | 165 | $7,500 | $3,203 | 0.6 |
| 20 | Bellevue University Bellevue, NE Private nonprofit · 4-year | $54,320 | 51 | $25,000 | $17,550 | 4.0 |
| 21 | Keiser University-Ft Lauderdale Fort Lauderdale, FL Private nonprofit · 4-year | $53,101 | 35 † | $48,000 | $30,498 | 6.5 |
| 22 | Post University Waterbury, CT For-profit · 4-year | $51,731 | 40 | $35,456 | $21,634 | 6.2 |
| 23 | Mercy University Dobbs Ferry, NY Private nonprofit · 4-year | $51,161 | 32 † | $25,000 | $14,072 | 3.7 |
| 24 | Crestpoint University Phoenix, AZ For-profit · 4-year | $46,114 | 68 | $36,879 | $15,670 | 6.5 |
| 25 | Morehead State University Morehead, KY Public · 4-year | $40,990 | 27 † | $24,383 | $9,793 | 7.0 |
How this ranking is built
A school appears here only if it meets every condition below.
- Which programs count
- Main campuses only, one entry per institution. Scorecard reports program outcomes for the whole six-digit federal ID (OPEID6), so branch campuses share their parent’s numbers and are not listed twice.
- Only bachelor's degree programs in Legal Studies (CIP 2200, the four-digit code Scorecard uses to group related programs).
- At least 25 graduates in the earnings sample. Smaller samples are left out because their medians swing too much and the counts carry a little privacy noise.
- A major gets a page only when at least 20 schools qualify. This one has 25.
- Ranked by median earnings 4 years after completing, highest first. Ties go to the larger sample, then to the school name.
- Schools missing earnings or a sample size are left out rather than estimated.
- What the numbers mean
- Earnings: median annual earnings of graduates four years after completing. The cohort completed in academic years 2017-18 and 2018-19 and was measured in calendar years 2022 and 2023, in 2024 dollars.
- Who is counted: graduates who received federal student aid (Title IV grants or loans), and only those who were working and not enrolled in more school that year. Graduates without federal aid, those who went on to further study and those with no earnings are not in the median.
- Scorecard adds privacy noise to counts and medians and hides values it cannot protect, so a gap of a few percent between two schools is not meaningful.
- Graduates: the number of graduates in that earnings sample. A † marks fewer than 40, where the figure is less precise.
- Debt: median federal loan debt (Stafford and Grad PLUS loans disbursed at that school) of graduates who borrowed, from the 2018-19 and 2019-20 completers. Parent PLUS and private loans are not included.
- Net price: average yearly cost after grants and scholarships for the whole institution, not this major, academic year 2023-24.
- Payback: 4 years of net price divided by how much these earnings exceed a high-school graduate’s in the school’s state. Shown only when that gap is at least $2,000, the same formula as the rest of the site.
- Source: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard field-of-study data, June 2026 release.
Top states for Legal Studies earnings
Median of the school medians for states with at least 3 ranked schools. The best school in each state is shown.
| State | Median earnings | Ranked schools | Top school |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York | $60,280 | 4 | St. John's University-New York |
| Florida | $59,715 | 3 | University of Miami |
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