What Wake Forest University costs, and what its graduates do

This divides the three year net cost of attendance by a fixed share of one year’s salary. At 15 percent of a $100K salary, $150K of cost takes ten years to repay.

It excludes interest entirely. Real student loans accrue interest, so an actual payoff takes longer than this figure shows, and the gap widens the longer the repayment runs. A true payoff model would have to account for how much is borrowed and at what rate, which is not something we can derive from published school data.

It also assumes a flat salary for the whole period, with no raises and no change of job. Treat it as a way to compare one school against another on the same terms, not as a forecast of your own finances.

Years = net cost ÷ (salary × share of income)

Net cost is three years of tuition, mandatory fees and the school’s published living cost allowance, less the average annual scholarship discount. The discount is an average across all students, including those who receive no aid at all, so an individual offer can land well above or well below it.

Where a school charges different rates by residency we use the non-resident line, which is the higher of the two, so the figure errs toward caution. The resident figure is shown alongside it when the two differ.

Net cost is not the same thing as debt. It is what attending costs after aid. What you would actually borrow depends on savings, family contribution, income during school and any other aid, none of which is in this figure.

The two halves of this estimate are not from the same year. Tuition and fees are the 2025 to 2026 figures; the grant percentiles behind the discount are the 2024 to 2025 awards, which is the most recent year the ABA reports. A school that raised tuition or changed its aid budget between the two will sit slightly off.

Across the career paths this model prices, the weighted average comes to $141,020, covering 88.6% of the class, and on the same basis as above it works out at 8.6 years. No graduate earns this figure. It is here because it is the number used to rank and compare schools elsewhere on the site, not because it describes anyone at Wake Forest University.

The rest of the class, including graduates in business or academia and those without a job, are outside the calculation rather than being given an assumed salary.

This is one average across every career path at once. It weights each employment category by this school’s own placement rate: firms of 501 or more attorneys at $225K, firms of 251 to 500 at $190K, 101 to 250 at $165K, 51 to 100 at $155K, small firms at $80K, solo practice at $60K, judicial clerkships at $70K, government at $80K and public interest at $72K.

It covers only the categories NALP publishes a median for. Graduates in business, academia, a role whose employer type the school did not report, or no job at all are left out of both sides of the average rather than being assigned a salary. Each school page states what share of its class the figure therefore speaks for.

It describes no actual graduate. A school where most of the class goes to small firms and a few go to large ones produces an average that neither group earns, so we show the individual career paths instead and keep this figure here as background.

The share of graduates in each category is reported by the school. The salary attached to each category is a national median we have assumed, not this school’s own salary data.