I recently looked at median debt loads and median earnings for law degree recipients. But the Department of Education data has far more than that.

Non-JD legal education has seen extraordinary growth in the last few years—and it has minimal oversight from the American Bar Association. I’ve wondered about the value proposition of such programs, given what little information we have about them.

The DOE data gives us a few tools to start looking at it. It codes several Classification of Instructional Programs Codes (CIP Codes)—2201 is “Law,” 2202 is “Legal Research & Advanced Professional Studies,” 2203 is “Legal Support Services,” 2299 is “Legal Professions & Studies, Others.” There are other codes that might be law-related (3028 “Dispute Resolution” and 5216 “Taxation” among others), but these CIP Codes include subfields like “Intellectual Property Law” and “Comparative Law.” These map onto the hundreds of non-JD degrees that law schools now offer.

Now, this is all imperfect. Schools may code some of these degrees differently. Some students may pursue these degrees at the same time they pursue a JD, which may skew debt/earnings figures.

But I decided to look at all these CIP Codes for (1) Undergraduate Certificates or Diplomas (specifically, not Bachelor’s Degrees), (2) Post-baccalaureate Certificates, (3) Master’s Degrees, (4) Doctoral Degrees, (5) First Professional Degrees, and (6) Graduate/Professional Certificates. I excluded all 2201 “Law” codes from those in the “Doctoral Degree” or “First Professional Degree” categories, which I included in the recent post and took to be overwhelmingly JDs. From there, I looked at median debt, mean debt, and mean earnings among schools that reported data (a lot did not have reported data). And I included only schools that had a law school. Admittedly, some of these law-related degrees could be run out of the undergraduate or another professional school (particularly 2203 codes). But I still think it’s worth considering non-JD legal education generally at institutions with a law school, even if it’s not all housed within the law school.

Whew. With all those caveats (ed.: so will this even tell us anything?), here we go. The CIPCode is on the left if you want to refer back to it. (Due to size of chart, results may be best viewed on a desktop or on a phone turned sideways.)