The ever-valuable LSSSE data recently noted that women tend to graduate from law school with higher debt loads than men. The ABA has tracked this, too. On the heels of recent Department of Education data disclosures, however, we can drill down on law school-specific figures.

I looked at mean debt data for males and non-males. (That’s how the DOE codes the data—I assume the vast majority of non-males are females, but it could include non-binary individuals, and I’ll formally use the DOE coding.) Unsurprisingly (given the aggregate figures from LSSSE & ABA, among others), there are more schools where the mean debt loads for non-males are greater than the mean debt loads for males. At about half the schools, the debt ratios are close to parity—of the 208 schools in my data set, about 100 have a mean debt load of less than a $5000 difference between the sexes.

But I found 72 schools where average debt incurred was at least $5000 more among non-males than males. That gap was at least $10,000 at 34 schools. And it was at least $20,000 among four.

On the other side, there were 35 schools where average debt incurred was at least $5000 more among males than non-males. The gap was at least $10,000 at 14 schools, and at least $20,000 at one school.

I looked at schools on mean non-male debt, less mean male debt. A positive figure (+$10,000) means that the average non-male debt was that much larger than male debt. A negative figure (-$5000) means that the average male debt was that much larger than non-male debt.

Below is a table, then a visualization. These are 2018-2019 figures.