agreed, but that pretty much applies only to Yale, don't you think?
how is salary a traditional way to measure career prospects? why wouldn't you just measure employment rate (at graduation and 6 months after)? people from yale take low paying jobs because they WANT to, not because they HAVE to. so salary is a bad way to measure one's career prospects.
i could see it applying to boalt too. i don't know about other schools. judicial clerkships also pay *&^% (in addition to the "i want to represent poor people" type jobs i was thinking about when i wrote my post earlier), which is probably why law schools report MEDIAN, not MEAN, starting salaries. at the top schools that have more clerkships, it might even make their mean lower than lower-ranked/less prestigious schools that don't send as great a percentage of students into clerkships. but i think most of us would agree that career prospects are greater at those higher ranked schools, since you CAN get clerkships if you want them (and work hard, etc.), or you can go into private practice if that's what you want, etc. just further reasoning for why they should use employment rates rather than starting salaries in their rankings, assuming that superiorlobe is correct that that's what they do.