But let’s be clear. Only the lucky 17 percent of graduates earn salaries this high. To be in this group, you needed to go to a top 10 school or graduate in the higher ranks of the top quartile of law schools.

Things are harder for every other law graduate. Law firm starting salaries are bimodal — meaning that while 17 percent of graduates earned a median salary of $160,000 in 2014, about half had a median starting salary of $40,000 to $65,000.

It is the fate of these graduates that drives the criticism of law school as a “scam.” They dream of big jobs but are often the lawyers who become solo practitioners, district attorneys, public defenders and other lower-paying jobs outside the big firms.

The employment market has softened even for the big jobs, but for new lawyers on the lower end of the starting scale, it is worse. In 2014, graduates faced a 86.7 percent employment rate, according to the National Association for Law Placement.

But this figure is for all jobs taken by law graduates, including jobs outside of law. Law school critics focus on the number of law graduates who secured jobs as lawyers or got jobs that preferred a law degree. According to American Bar Association figures analyzed by the Legal Whiteboard, for the 2015 class, this figure was 70 percent, up from 69 percent in 2013, though 4,000 fewer people graduated from law school. In comparison, law job placement from the top 20 schools was 80 percent to 100 percent. These sobering figures imply that approximately 30 percent of law school graduates are either unemployed or cannot find a law job. Some question this notion though, asserting that the figure may have been adversely affected by the fact that in 2015, the bar passage rate nationally declined to about 75 percent, and so many law graduates could not practice law even if the jobs were there.

Either way, it is clear that it is harder out there for the lower-tier law schools and their graduates.

Indeed, it is easy to visit a regional law school in the fourth tier of the U.S. News & World Report rankings and find a graduate who has not found a job or is struggling. This is often extrapolated into an argument that law schools are about to close wholesale (so far, not one has closed) or that law school is not worth it for 90 percent of those who attend and cannot be guaranteed a job at a big law firm. One pundit goes so far as to criticize anyone who goes to law school outside the top five or six schools.