From my understanding the pay for newly minted law schools grads for 'big law' (i.e. Associate positions for big firms) are all approx. 160k (this includes bonus). There is one firm, as I understand it, that pays more (wachtell) which pays 160 base + 160 bonus, but on a yearly basis the number of spots for that firm is in the single digits, I think.
Yeah, it's becoming less and less of a good tradeoff for the $200k+ cost of attendance and 3 years of opportunity cost.
One funny thing about making the engineer-to-lawyer comparison regarding this salary fixing issue is that law actually has a much more obvious salary fixing problem, since almost every biglaw firm pays 160k and firms don't tend to compete for entry-level hires with compensation.
