Yale Law School is sui generis. A full majority of its very small classes go on to clerk at the federal appellate level. While tenured law professor is still something of a long shot even for these top-of-the-top it's not the powerball lottery ticket that virtually all the rest of academia is (they average around 3-4 tenured professors per class of around 200), and there are other fulfilling career tracks uniquely open to people who went to Yale and then clerked at the appellate level.

For other schools on your list it's a different story. They certainly have a better chance, perhaps even a good chance, of getting the BigLaw job golden ring than most law graduates. But in my observation that's a bit of poisoned chalice. It pays well but the work is mostly tedious, the hours are very very long -- with no slowdown as your career advances -- and the atmosphere is extremely stressful.

There are some good public interest jobs for people who for whatever reason aren't money driven (usually because they have money already!) but the competition is fierce even for Harvard and Stanford grads because of all the burned out BigLaw associates looking to get out. Although the jobs are often interesting and sometimes fulfilling, they almost invariably require long hours. Almost all legal jobs do.

A bit less so, but still yes. Yale you're probably okay, but at Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia you're still going to have to be in at least the top half (maybe top third) of your class to have a good chance of getting a job that can cover your loan payments, and that job will be at biglaw and you will almost certainly hate your life. If you can get a full ride to a top 14 school, it's probably worth going (these exist, but are extremely uncommon). If you get into Yale, that's probably also worth it (the way smaller class size compared to Harvard or Stanford helps a lot). Other than that, law school is probably a bad idea.

>A master's degree is almost certainly worth less than than a year of full-time work experience on your resume.

For how long is this true? I mean, at this point, I have "more than a decade" of experience - and, considering, I think I'm likely to say 'more than a decade' even when I have two or three decades of experience; no reason to point out that you are old.

On the other hand, people leave their degree on their resume forever.

My point here is that years of experience seem to have, ah, a diminishing marginal return.

(that said, I'm almost certain that you are correct for the first five years of your career... /if/ you can get a good job without a degree and without experience, which in my very relevant experience, depends a whole lot on the shape of the job market at the time.)

Actually, as someone without a degree... the 'perishability' of my credentials is something I think about often. I mean, i wrote a book, [1] which is a pretty strong credential, but will one obsolete book mark me as 'middle class' 20 years from now? probably not. A masters degree would. (Now, would that masters, if it was fallow for a decade or two, get me a job? probably not by itself. But, my impression is that it keeps it's value as a credential longer than, say, my book, and certainly longer than work experience.)

[1]http://nostarch.com/xen.htm

> As for PhDs, I have never hired one. They seem to universally have an inability to think concretely or in a step-by-step manner.

Could you elaborate on why you think that "PhDs have an inability to think"? If anything, I would have thought that a PhD will be extremely methodology and think through every step (after all, that is what you are supposed to do in a PhD).