Short, plain-English pieces from 509α on what the ABA Standard 509 data actually means for the "is law school worth it?" question. New writing lands here.
This section is just getting started. The posts below are our first drafts of the explainers we point people to most. More on the way, and if there is a question you want answered with the 509 data,
tell us.
509α · June 2026 · 4 min read
Is law school worth it? Ask three numbers, not one ranking
"Worth it" is not a school-wide verdict, it is a personal break-even. Three figures on every Exhibit 509 school page get you most of the way: the three-year net cost (sticker tuition minus the median grant, times three), the FTLT employment rate (full-time, long-term, JD-required jobs ten months out), and the local attorney wage where you will actually practice. Divide net cost by the odds of a real legal job and you have a cost-per-outcome that no ranking will sell you.
The trap is comparing a school's sticker price to a national "average lawyer salary." Both numbers lie to you: almost no one pays sticker, and almost no new graduate earns the average. Use the median grant and the median wage for your state, and the math gets honest fast.
509α · June 2026 · 5 min read
How to read a 509 disclosure without getting fooled
The ABA Standard 509 report is the single best public document on a law school, but it is built to be skimmed and mis-skimmed. A few habits help. First, separate first-time bar passage from two-year ultimate: they describe different cohorts and the ultimate figure is always kinder. Second, read employment by job type, not just the headline "employed" rate, a job is not a JD-required job. Third, treat any single-year tuition jump with suspicion; some are real resets, some are semester-versus-annual reporting quirks (we flag the ones still under review).
Most of all, watch the trajectory. One year is noise. A school whose bar pass and FTLT rates have climbed for five years is telling you something a ranking snapshot cannot.
509α · June 2026 · 3 min read
The bimodal salary trap
New-lawyer salaries do not form a bell curve. They form two humps: a large cluster around $70–90K and a separate spike near $225K at the biggest firms, with very little in between. An "average" starting salary lands in the empty valley between them, describing almost no one. When you read a pay figure, anchor to the median and to the realistic job type for your school's employment mix, not to a mean that a handful of BigLaw offers drags upward.