Bimodal distributions really exist
The NALP has released data on starting salaries for US lawyers in 2011, and the distribution is really weird.
Usually we expect salary distributions to be skewed, with a long upper tail, but in this case there are two modes: a large group earning around $45k and a smaller group earning about $160k. The mean income is about $80k, the median is about $60k, and neither is a good summary of what someone is likely to make.
The distribution didn’t always look like this. Twenty years ago, starting salaries for lawyers had a more familiar skewed distribution, with a single mode around $30k.
Over the twenty-year period, the income at the lower mode has rised by about 50%, but US median household income has roughly doubled, and the CPI has increased by about 65%. Some law graduates are raking it in; most are not, and they nearly all have to pay off huge sums in student loans.
In reality the figures are probably worse than this for the majority: there’s a lot of missing data. As Paul Campos puts it “People without salaries are reluctant to report their salaries”
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »