I'm glad 3Ls took the initiative to informally survey the class. I hope this causes many considering law school to take a long, harder look at the situation. I'm not saying don't go. I'm saying just really, really consider it. That's three years of lost income and potential for six figure debt with little to no employment prospects.
I bring you the truth:
Hey fellow 3L classmates,
In response to the recent U.S. News events, the administration claims that, as compared to other law schools, we are too accurate with our reporting for post-grad employment. Since there is no compilation of employment statistics for our class, a few of us decided that we would like to gather that information.
In an effort to satisfy our curiosity and improve transparency, we are trying to gather accurate information. We are asking that you take two minutes to anonymously respond to a five question survey about your employment prospects. Our ONLY motive is to gather information. The ONLY thing that we are going to do with the responses is send them back to 3L class so that we all can get an accurate sense of our class’s employment prospects. Please encourage everyone to fill this out!
This survey is purely a product of student effort and in no way reflects or is affiliated with Emory University School of Law.
We received 184 responses from our class of 217 people, which is an 84.8% response rate. For the first question, whether you have a job lined up after graduation, there is a 7.2% margin of error accounting for the people who didn't respond. For the third and fourth questions its important to note that people were given the opportunity to select more than one response, which definitely occurred.
Just FYI, your margin of error is actually a very impressive 2.81% (at a confidence level of 95%, and assuming perfect random sampling).
7.2% is the maximum margin of error, for an infinite population. Since you guys sampled a large portion of the total population, it needs to be multiplied by a finite population correction factor. FPC = sqrt( (N - n ) / (N - 1)) where N=total population size and n=sample size. Here, FPC=0.39, so the real margin of error is 7.2 * .39 = 2.81%
Feel free to send this data to Above the Law.
If you think any peer schools are sitting in completely different boats, you have another thing coming. GW, Fordham, BC, BU, ND, WUSTL -- Things are not as the schools would like you to believe. Don't take on massive debt. YS(H) are the only guarantees.
