Is UVA the Worst/Riskiest T14 School? Forum

[20141023]

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[dingbat]

^they publicize their methodology. I'd link, but I'm on my phone

[20141023]

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[scifiguy]

Any speculation on why Georgetown stinks on employment?

I know their class is huge: 600 or so.

And they are the bottom of the T14 ranking-wise. But is there some other thing about their reputation that employers don't like?

[20141023]

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[dingbat]

No. UVA is a great school with great opportunities. Probably about equal to the rest of MVPB.

People on here don't really get that employment is about the person and not just the school + rank. All T-14s give you a solid shot at big law, its up to you to get it. If you couldnt get it from Cornell, you probably couldnt have gotten it from NYU. (disclaimer: of course their is some small advantage from going to NYU over Cornell, but not really all that much. Most students that want biglaw get it from all t14s, except maybe GULC - not sure about how true the gloom on them is. Of course, no one is guaranteed anything short of YS.)

Not entirely true, not entirely wrong. Schools have estanloshed ties with firms/markets, which make certain transitions easier. For example, Columbia is very well connected to NYC biglaw and has a strong advantage there compared to eg berkeley, which will have an advantage in San Francisco. Cornell has an advantage over UVA in NT. vConsidering the topography of the legal world, this translates to an advantage iro biglaw.

How big an advantage is debatable, but to deny it is a fallacy

[Dmini7]

Any speculation on why Georgetown stinks on employment?

I know their class is huge: 600 or so.

And they are the bottom of the T14 ranking-wise. But is there some other thing about their reputation that employers don't like?

It is really hard to say whether or not employers do not like them. I know people on this website view it as a diploma mill, but I can't say for sure if employers do too. I will say Georgetown has more prestige out west than schools like UVA from the ones I have spoken too (which I do not really find surprising).

[dingbat]

Any speculation on why Georgetown stinks on employment?

I know their class is huge: 600 or so.

And they are the bottom of the T14 ranking-wise. But is there some other thing about their reputation that employers don't like?

Part of it is that their home market is incredibly competitive and they'll lose out to HYS more often than not. There's also the big class size. Additionally, I think that DC has more good JD-Preferred jobs than anywhere else, and that those attract a fair number of Georgetown grads. The problem is that there's no way for us to parse the JD-preferred jobs, to know which ones are desirable and which ones are a last-resort.

[curious66]

Yes – it will hurt them, but the thing is that everyone will be hurting under the new method… it just depends on how much. Also, because US News doesn’t release how they calculate the data, I am not sure how to apply their methodology. By this I mean that I do not know if, in order to achieve a full 18% (4% for employment right after graduation, 14% for employment after 9 months after graduation) score for the “employment” category, whether they are using a curve or if they are simply just going off of 100%. (For example, does a school need to have a 100% employment rate to get the full 18%, or do they just need to have the highest employment rate to get the full 18%?)

If we assume that it is based off of 100% employment rate and not on a curve, (and if we use the current LST numbers as data for 2014), the T14 will all be affected in the following way. (This example is only for the 14% because this is looking at employment after 9 months):

Yale --- 2013: 91.8% (12.85%), 2014: 87.8% (12.29%), Difference: -0.56%
Stanford --- 2013: 97.1% (13.59%), 2014: 91.1% (12.75%), Difference: -0.84%
Harvard --- 2013: 94.6% (13.24%), 2014: 89.9% (12.59%), Difference: -0.66%
Columbia --- 2013: 96.5% (13.51%), 2014: 94.1% (13.17%), Difference: -0.34%
Chicago --- 2013: 97.9% (13.71%), 2014: 88.2% (12.35%), Difference: -1.36%
NYU --- 2013: 96.6% (13.52%), 2014: 89.3% (12.5%), Difference: -1.02%
Berkeley --- 2013: 93.6% (13.1%), 2014: 80% (11.2%), Difference: -1.9%
Penn --- 2013: 96% (13.44%), 2014: 83.9% (11.75%), Difference: -1.69%
Virginia --- 2013: 98.1% (13.73%), 2014: 94.7% (13.26%), Difference: -0.48%
Michigan --- 2013: 92.2% (12.91%), 2014: 75.5% (10.57%), Difference: -2.34%
Duke --- 2013: 94.8% (13.27%), 2014: 82.1% (11.49%), Difference: -1.78%
Northwestern --- 2013: 94% (13.16%), 2014: 76.3% (10.68%), Difference: -2.48%
Georgetown --- 2013: 96% (13.44%), 2014: 62.4% (8.74%), Difference: -4.7%
Cornell --- 2013: 96.9% (13.57%), 2014: 76.1% (10.65%), Difference: -2.91%

The difference is big enough at Georgetown that I predict that they will drop to (at least) the 14th spot in the 2014 rankings.

THANKS

[Chaucer1343]

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[jenesaislaw]

Harvard might be a bit riskier. Check out the salary 75th percentile data from LST Score Reports.

Fixed

Thanks for catching that.