Class of 2011 Employment Statistics Forum

[manofjustice]

Anyone else noticing how hard Mich got hammered? They officially had the worst biglawl placement in the T14, even GULC performed higher.

It doesn't really make sense to look big law placement by itself. Nearly everyone who does a federal clerkship does a 2L SA, or at least had the option to do one. The statistics just show GULC is bad at placing clerks relative to Michigan.

But even taking that into account, it still looks like Mich only outperformed GULC and was handily trounced in overall placement relative to the rest of the T14, minus Cornell

Is it possible to find out what percentage of students participate in OCI at a particular school?

Why would we assume it is meaningfully less than 100%?

[de5igual]

Why do law students always feel the need to defend their school??

[rayiner]

Why would we assume it is meaningfully less than 100%?

It's meaningfully less than 100% everywhere. E.g. in my 2L section for C/O 2012, I'd put it at around 80% if you don't count the PI people who did 1-2 interviews just to get some interview practice. Aside from the dedicated PI folks, you have the people who are already employed and the MBA's who don't want to do law. I think my section had an unusually large number of these folks, but even at a big-law heavy school like NU, and I'd imagine Penn or Columbia, I doubt OCI participation is over 90%. For a place like NYU that gives a bunch of PI scholarships, I can imagine as low as 80%.

[bbalcrzy23]

Why would we assume it is meaningfully less than 100%?

It's meaningfully less than 100% everywhere. E.g. in my 2L section for C/O 2012, I'd put it at around 80% if you don't count the PI people who did 1-2 interviews just to get some interview practice. Aside from the dedicated PI folks, you have the people who are already employed and the MBA's who don't want to do law. I think my section had an unusually large number of these folks, but even at a big-law heavy school like NU, and I'd imagine Penn or Columbia, I doubt OCI participation is over 90%. For a place like NYU that gives a bunch of PI scholarships, I can imagine as low as 80%.

Do PI organizations and Gov't agencies participate at OCI, or is it only private firms? If it's all private, I'd like to see if there are any large discrepancies between top schools. I would expect Georgetown to have lower participation relative to its peers due to self selection into PI and Gov't, but it's difficult to gauge without some valuable data.

[dingbat]

Why would we assume it is meaningfully less than 100%?

It's meaningfully less than 100% everywhere. E.g. in my 2L section for C/O 2012, I'd put it at around 80% if you don't count the PI people who did 1-2 interviews just to get some interview practice. Aside from the dedicated PI folks, you have the people who are already employed and the MBA's who don't want to do law. I think my section had an unusually large number of these folks, but even at a big-law heavy school like NU, and I'd imagine Penn or Columbia, I doubt OCI participation is over 90%. For a place like NYU that gives a bunch of PI scholarships, I can imagine as low as 80%.

Do PI organizations and Gov't agencies participate at OCI, or is it only private firms? If it's all private, I'd like to see if there are any large discrepancies between top schools. I would expect Georgetown to have lower participation relative to its peers due to self selection into PI and Gov't, but it's difficult to gauge without some valuable data.

Many schools list all the OCI participants. For the schools I've looked at, it is predominantly, but not exclusively, law firms. There are plenty of PI and govt agencies too
Check the OCI participant list for your (target) school

[shock259]

Really interesting discrepancies between rankings and employment #'s. I think we all knew that this was true to some extent, but some of these are huge. GW in particular.

I'm trying to discern a pattern for T1s and T2s. All of the ones in a big legal market seem to do bad (Chi, NY, DC). No surprises there. Some of the ones in a smaller regional market do great (Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Baylor, etc). Some do just as bad as the ones in the bigger markets (University of Washington, Idaho, etc).

The T14 is still marginally cushy. Maybe I'm just jaded from all of the scamblogs, and it certainly isn't great data, but I'd probably take my chances on it as a prospective student if I could keep my debtload down somewhat. But that marginally cushy part does seem to be shrinking. Anywhere but T14 varies from "meh" to "bloodbath."

[manofjustice]

Really interesting discrepancies between rankings and employment #'s. I think we all knew that this was true to some extent, but some of these are huge. GW in particular.

I'm trying to discern a pattern for T1s and T2s. All of the ones in a big legal market seem to do bad (Chi, NY, DC). No surprises there. Some of the ones in a smaller regional market do great (Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Baylor, etc). Some do just as bad as the ones in the bigger markets (University of Washington, Idaho, etc).

The T14 is still marginally cushy. Maybe I'm just jaded from all of the scamblogs, and it certainly isn't great data, but I'd probably take my chances on it as a prospective student if I could keep my debtload down somewhat. But that marginally cushy part does seem to be shrinking. Anywhere but T14 varies from "meh" to "bloodbath."

See, this is the problem!!!

GW is already benefiting from its borderline fraud. People are NOT clicking over to ABA format and making the inference.

Shock259, tell all your friends: as has been previously discussed, the reason GWs employment score is so high is because they include all their school-funded jobs in the "long term, full time, bar-required" category on their ABA form. These jobs literally last one year and no longer, so they are "long term" only technically. They pay $15/hour. And they may or may not actually require the bar: they look to be internship positions within Public Interest organizations.

So, when you see GW's employment score, discount it by the full amount of their school-funded percentage. Their actual employment score is only 65.1%.

[manofjustice]

LST called on the admissions dean of Rutgers Camden to resign because she reported factually and technically correct employment statistics in an email that in a presumably intended effect were misleading. I would call on LST to call on the dean of GW to resign, should GW in any way advertise their employment score, or report their employment score to the USNWR knowing it will be in essence "advertised" through an inflated ranking.

We can't simply let GW recline back and think "well, the numbers are correct, who cares if someone is mislead." The dean of Rutgers essentially said "it is not our job to help people make proper sense of the data we advertise." Should a similar principle excuse the dean of GW? In both cases, the presumptive intention is to mislead.

edit: now that we have the email shedding light on the actual nature of these jobs, a call for resignation should be in the discussion.

[Renne Walker]

I've got most of the data in the database and am testing.

Tag it. Great thread. Thanks for the insight and hard work.

[rayiner]

Why would we assume it is meaningfully less than 100%?

It's meaningfully less than 100% everywhere. E.g. in my 2L section for C/O 2012, I'd put it at around 80% if you don't count the PI people who did 1-2 interviews just to get some interview practice. Aside from the dedicated PI folks, you have the people who are already employed and the MBA's who don't want to do law. I think my section had an unusually large number of these folks, but even at a big-law heavy school like NU, and I'd imagine Penn or Columbia, I doubt OCI participation is over 90%. For a place like NYU that gives a bunch of PI scholarships, I can imagine as low as 80%.

Do PI organizations and Gov't agencies participate at OCI, or is it only private firms? If it's all private, I'd like to see if there are any large discrepancies between top schools. I would expect Georgetown to have lower participation relative to its peers due to self selection into PI and Gov't, but it's difficult to gauge without some valuable data.

At least at NU, there are maybe like 2-3 government agencies (IRC, etc) who do OCI, and no PI organizations.

[Yossarian79]

"So, when you see GW's employment score, discount it by the full amount of their school-funded percentage. Their actual employment score is only 65.1%."

And that's not even the scariest thing. The truly terrifying part is that 65 percent is, in the overall context of American law schools, pretty damn good.

Think about it: we're talking about a system in which taking on nearly 300K of debt per person with only two-thirds of graduates getting anything resembling a decent long-term job represents relative success.

[rayiner]

"So, when you see GW's employment score, discount it by the full amount of their school-funded percentage. Their actual employment score is only 65.1%."

And that's not even the scariest thing. The truly terrifying part is that 65 percent is, in the overall context of American law schools, pretty damn good.

Think about it: we're talking about a system in which taking on nearly 300K of debt per person with only two-thirds of graduates getting anything resembling a decent long-term job represents relative success.

Not even that, the 65% is just people getting real jobs. Only a small percentage of those folks will get jobs that allow them to reasonably pay off their $300k of debt.

[Pate]

I keep hearing (in my non TLS life) that the ABA (and/or schools) are fudging the numbers. However, if the numbers are close to truthful, I would think the T-14 is in pretty good shape (compared to all the TLS doom n’ gloom). I am somewhat surprised, that the T-14 unemployment percentages are mostly in single digits. Especially good news if I were in the top third, but I am not, so I have to look at these numbers through median-ish eyes (perhaps a tad lower than the center of middle third. . .nothing lower than a few Bs).

Given what I am seeing, I am feeling fairly good. Am I missing something? Perhaps not enough despair, or. . . .

[jenesaislaw]

--LinkRemoved-- looks good to you? or that 4 of 5 Penn/Boalt/Michigan grads could find a real legal job within 9 months of graduation?

For a 250k+ loan obligation and 3 years of opportunity cost, the odds are discomforting.

Using LST's Employment Scores:

Yale University 87.8%
Stanford University 91.1%
Harvard University 89.9%
Columbia University 94.1%
University of Chicago 88.2%
New York University 89.3%
University of California (Berkeley) 80.0%
University of Pennsylvania 83.9%
University of Virginia 94.7%
University of Michigan 75.5%
Duke University 82.1%
Northwestern University 76.3%
Georgetown University 62.4%
Cornell University 76.1%

[Pate]

http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/cl ... chool=gulc looks good to you? or that 4 of 5 Penn/Boalt/Michigan grads couldn't find a real legal job within 9 months of graduation?

Where are you seeing that? The charts/data I see say 83.9% have secured fulltime work 8% have not. Granted those #s do not add up to 100%, but no where do I see anything that even slightly suggests 4 of 5 grads could not secure work after 9 months.

[manofjustice]

http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/cl ... chool=gulc looks good to you? or that 4 of 5 Penn/Boalt/Michigan grads couldn't find a real legal job within 9 months of graduation?

Where are you seeing that? The charts/data I see say 83.9% have secured fulltime work 8% have not. Granted those #s do not add up to 100%, but no where do I see anything that even slightly suggests 4 of 5 grads could not secure work after 9 months.

As has been said time and time again (but newbies like you are coming to the forums and showing us that the schools' number fudgery is apparently succeeding at large-scale deceit), most of the T14s employment numbers include (and their underemployment numbers exclude) large percentages of school-funded positions which will end in the next few months and which pay poorly.

[Pate]

http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/cl ... chool=gulc looks good to you? or that 4 of 5 Penn/Boalt/Michigan grads couldn't find a real legal job within 9 months of graduation?

Where are you seeing that? The charts/data I see say 83.9% have secured fulltime work 8% have not. Granted those #s do not add up to 100%, but no where do I see anything that even slightly suggests 4 of 5 grads could not secure work after 9 months.

As has been said time and time again (but newbies like you are coming to the forums and showing us that the schools' number fudgery is apparently succeeding at large-scale deceit), most of the T14s employment numbers include (and their underemployment numbers exclude) large percentages of school-funded positions which will end in the next few months and which pay poorly.

Show me what the heck you are talking about. Thx.
--LinkRemoved--

[dingbat]

http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/cl ... chool=gulc looks good to you? or that 4 of 5 Penn/Boalt/Michigan grads couldn't find a real legal job within 9 months of graduation?

Where are you seeing that? The charts/data I see say 83.9% have secured fulltime work 8% have not. Granted those #s do not add up to 100%, but no where do I see anything that even slightly suggests 4 of 5 grads could not secure work after 9 months.

As has been said time and time again (but newbies like you are coming to the forums and showing us that the schools' number fudgery is apparently succeeding at large-scale deceit), most of the T14s employment numbers include (and their underemployment numbers exclude) large percentages of school-funded positions which will end in the next few months and which pay poorly.

I think you might have meant to say only 4 out of 5 secured work, not that 4 out of 5 could not secure work.
I know you're an alarmist, but generally you are more or less correct.
Saying 4/5 can't secure work, for the top ranking school on the NLJ250 list must be a typo

[jenesaislaw]

Yup that was a typo, I fixed it before the first post that noticed it, though that poster clearly hadn't reloaded the page to see the update (not that they should have).

[rayiner]

http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/cl ... chool=gulc looks good to you? or that 4 of 5 Penn/Boalt/Michigan grads couldn't find a real legal job within 9 months of graduation?

Where are you seeing that? The charts/data I see say 83.9% have secured fulltime work 8% have not. Granted those #s do not add up to 100%, but no where do I see anything that even slightly suggests 4 of 5 grads could not secure work after 9 months.

As has been said time and time again (but newbies like you are coming to the forums and showing us that the schools' number fudgery is apparently succeeding at large-scale deceit), most of the T14s employment numbers include (and their underemployment numbers exclude) large percentages of school-funded positions which will end in the next few months and which pay poorly.

Show me what the heck you are talking about. Thx.
--LinkRemoved--

--LinkRemoved--

The law schools, even the top ones, are funding their grads in 1-year positions (this is sufficient to meet the ABA's definition for "long-term"). These positions are IMHO a good thing, because it gives grads a year to continue their job hunt, but at many schools has the effect of inflating the employment stat computed by LSAT. For UVA, the stat is 94.7% long-term, full-time bar required jobs. 17% of those are graduates in school-funded jobs, which should not be considered the same as real full-time, permanent employment.

Now, the reason LST displays it like this is that it can't be sure whether UVA is counting those school-funded jobs as bar-required. So they can't just subtract the school-funded jobs from the long-term, full-time, bar-required figure because they can't be sure whether the school is counting them all in that category.

In UVA's case they must be counting at least some (and probably are counting all) the school-funded jobs as bar-required, because at most 83% (100% - 17%) of the class had a non-school funded job, yet UVA is saying 94.7% of the class has a bar-required job. So in reality probably only 77.7% (94.7% - 17%) of the class has a long-term, full-time, bar-required job that isn't being paid for by the law school.

In reality, none of the top schools had above a 90% real full-time employment rate, when you remove school-funded jobs.

See my data analysis for a more conservative (and IMHO more realistic) look at the employment situation at the T14: http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 3&t=181723. LST is constrained by the need to present the ABA data in an objective, unprocessed, neutral way. I labor under no such constraints.

My analysis has a few features based on my observations as a graduate from a T14 in the class of 2012:
1) school funded jobs are almost all taken by people who would otherwise be unemployed;
2) the "business" category is highly suspect, because it includes people with long-term temp agency contracts;
3) the "academia" category is highly suspect, because outside of HYS nobody does academia without doing a clerkship first;
4) the "small firms" category includes a lot of legitimate permanent employment, but at salaries that are insufficient to deal with the $250k of debt most graduates have ($60-$70k).

As a recent graduate, I can tell you that there are basically only three types of good jobs out of law school, considering peoples' debt:
1) a job at a large firm paying six figures;
2) a full-time, long-term public interest or government job that qualifies for loan forgiveness;
3) a federal judicial clerkship, which after a year allows the graduate to move into (1) or (2).

The data shows that in the T14, anywhere from 20% (Columbia) to 35% (Virginia) are ending up with a job not in one of these categories. And it is very likely that these outcomes are not by choice, and that these graduates are in a very tough position considering all of the loan debt they have.

[Pate]

http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/cl ... chool=gulc looks good to you? or that 4 of 5 Penn/Boalt/Michigan grads couldn't find a real legal job within 9 months of graduation?

Typo aside, I believe your sentiment was that since only 4 of 5 grads could find work, this was terribly disappointing news. Hard to disagree, however, when one is jaded by both TLS and alarmist friends, I thought the [T14] numbers looked surprising encouraging. Keep in mind, this comes from someone traumatized by median-ish exam scores excepting to see some stout double digit unemployment numbers.

I feel a bit encourage by these stats, although not exactly blinded by a big green light pointing to the future, nevertheless.

[rayiner]

http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/cl ... chool=gulc looks good to you? or that 4 of 5 Penn/Boalt/Michigan grads couldn't find a real legal job within 9 months of graduation?

Typo aside, I believe your sentiment was that since only 4 of 5 grads could find work, this was terribly disappointing news. Hard to disagree, however, when one is jaded by both TLS and alarmist friends, I thought the [T14] numbers looked surprising encouraging. Keep in mind, this comes from someone traumatized by median-ish exam scores excepting to see some stout double digit unemployment numbers.

I feel a bit encourage by these stats, although not exactly blinded by a big green light pointing to the future, nevertheless.

To be fair, 1 out of 5 unemployed 9 months after graduation at Penn and Columbia is terrible. Think about your friends, then imagine that 1 out of every 5 has nothing lined up and faces the real possibility of never being a lawyer after paying $200k+ for a JD.

[jenesaislaw]

http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/cl ... chool=gulc looks good to you? or that 4 of 5 Penn/Boalt/Michigan grads could find a real legal job within 9 months of graduation?

Typo aside, I believe your sentiment was that since only 4 of 5 grads could find work, this was terribly disappointing news. Hard to disagree, however, when one is jaded by both TLS and alarmist friends, I thought the [T14] numbers looked surprising encouraging. Keep in mind, this comes from someone traumatized by median-ish exam scores excepting to see some stout double digit unemployment numbers.

I feel a bit encourage by these stats, although not exactly blinded by a big green light pointing to the future, nevertheless.

To be fair, 1 out of 5 unemployed 9 months after graduation at Penn and Columbia is terrible. Think about your friends, then imagine that 1 out of every 5 has nothing lined up and faces the real possibility of never being a lawyer after paying $200k+ for a JD.

Not only that, but imagine that 1 out of every 5 of your smartest and most capable friends were in this situation. The 20% is not full of bums.

[jenesaislaw]

Also, not double digit unemployment for all, but approaching double digit underemployment at many of them and into the double digits for some:

Yale University 6.3%
Stanford University 3.6%
Harvard University 5.5%
Columbia University 3.1%
University of Chicago 3.9%
New York University 3.9%
University of California (Berkeley) 12.3%
University of Pennsylvania 8.0%
University of Virginia 3.2%
University of Michigan 9.8%
Duke University 9.7%
Northwestern University 12.5%
Georgetown University 22.7%
Cornell University 19.9%

And as rayiner said, some of these schools have full-time, long-term school-funded jobs that could also credibly be considered underemployed, though we have not elected to count them this way.

We define underemployed as one of the following (1) short-term jobs, (2) part-time job, (3) non-professional job, (4) pursuing another degree, or (5) unemployed -- not seeking. This does not include those who stopped looking for work ("unemployed -- not seeking"), those who have been deferred ("unemployed -- deferred"), and those with an unknown employment status.

[Pate]

To be fair, 1 out of 5 unemployed 9 months after graduation at Penn and Columbia is terrible. Think about your friends, then imagine that 1 out of every 5 has nothing lined up and faces the real possibility of never being a lawyer after paying $200k+ for a JD.

+1. Welcome to my life. I live it every day. At the courthouse the non-T14 interns are mortified. Their school unemployment is +40% (counting school jobs, etc.).

A minute ago I just noticed that my school’s employment rate dropped 10% since last year, but the unemployment % did not hardly move — Odd. I just saw the stats of the school I almost attended. . . 31% unemployed and 9% school funded (=40%. . .gulp).

Worse yet, there is nothing I know of indicating things are getting better. I expect OCI to parallel an Indiana Jones adventure.