ND, BU, UCLA, UVA top list of schools employing own grads Forum

[jenesaislaw]

Also interested to hear thoughts on peer schools- why UVA and not P/B, why UCLA and not USC? Or are those grads just unemployed and the school's not helping at all?

I actually think the bolded part is more correct. Which is why I'm not necessarily against these "fellowships."

I am against them being counted as full-time, long-term jobs, though.

UVA really isn't worse than its peers. It's just that their employment score looks better than their peers with these "fellowships" added in (which is why their LST employment score is like 94% or something, when it should be closer to 77%).

Agree with this post entirely.

One thing that we're considering is giving schools like UVA, GW, and others with LT, FT S-F jobs a range employment score instead. So using your numbers, UVA's score would be 77%-94%, with an asterisk explaining why it's a range.

Another solution is to deduce the minimum number of LT, FT S-F jobs we can exclude. My concern here, as it's always been, is getting messy...but I may see how this looks for the 2012 data.

The best solution is a year away, and we're getting some (but not enough yet) traction on it. This would be excluding the school-funded jobs entirely from the data. Therefore, a job cannot count as both S-F and bar required, or S-F and public interest. The biggest problem is that some of the LT, FT school-funded jobs are jobs we would not want to exclude -- but I think this is a matter of changing the data schools report to the ABA instead of how the ABA (and schools) present them. That is, NALP already distinguishes between two types of long-term: definite duration and indefinite duration. LT (indefinite), FT school-funded jobs are natural to include, whereas the definite-term ones (i.e. GW's 1 year program) are not.

[Rahviveh]

Also interested to hear thoughts on peer schools- why UVA and not P/B, why UCLA and not USC? Or are those grads just unemployed and the school's not helping at all?

I actually think the bolded part is more correct. Which is why I'm not necessarily against these "fellowships."

I am against them being counted as full-time, long-term jobs, though.

UVA really isn't worse than its peers. It's just that their employment score looks better than their peers with these "fellowships" added in (which is why their LST employment score is like 94% or something, when it should be closer to 77%).

Agree with this post entirely.

One thing that we're considering is giving schools like UVA, GW, and others with LT, FT S-F jobs a range employment score instead. So using your numbers, UVA's score would be 77%-94%, with an asterisk explaining why it's a range.

Another solution is to deduce the minimum number of LT, FT S-F jobs we can exclude. My concern here, as it's always been, is getting messy...but I may see how this looks for the 2012 data.

The best solution is a year away, and we're getting some (but not enough yet) traction on it. This would be excluding the school-funded jobs entirely from the data. Therefore, a job cannot count as both S-F and bar required, or S-F and public interest. The biggest problem is that some of the LT, FT school-funded jobs are jobs we would not want to exclude -- but I think this is a matter of changing the data schools report to the ABA instead of how the ABA (and schools) present them. That is, NALP already distinguishes between two types of long-term: definite duration and indefinite duration. LT (indefinite), FT school-funded jobs are natural to include, whereas the definite-term ones (i.e. GW's 1 year program) are not.

Is this data available to the public in any form?

[jenesaislaw]

Not really. The best is page 6 of a school's NALP Report: --LinkRemoved--

But as you can see, the breakdown is only by employer type.

[JCougar]

Agree with this post entirely.

One thing that we're considering is giving schools like UVA, GW, and others with LT, FT S-F jobs a range employment score instead. So using your numbers, UVA's score would be 77%-94%, with an asterisk explaining why it's a range.

Another solution is to deduce the minimum number of LT, FT S-F jobs we can exclude. My concern here, as it's always been, is getting messy...but I may see how this looks for the 2012 data.

The best solution is a year away, and we're getting some (but not enough yet) traction on it. This would be excluding the school-funded jobs entirely from the data. Therefore, a job cannot count as both S-F and bar required, or S-F and public interest. The biggest problem is that some of the LT, FT school-funded jobs are jobs we would not want to exclude -- but I think this is a matter of changing the data schools report to the ABA instead of how the ABA (and schools) present them. That is, NALP already distinguishes between two types of long-term: definite duration and indefinite duration. LT (indefinite), FT school-funded jobs are natural to include, whereas the definite-term ones (i.e. GW's 1 year program) are not.

The more I think about this, the more I actually warm up to these programs.

In some ways, I do think schools should be incentivized to use these "fellowships." The main thing these schools care about is the perception of prestige to incoming students, so if whichever rankings (US News, LST, etc.) can be increased by doing something, they're going to end up doing it. The fact that they benefit in the LST rankings from this means they will continue to offer more fellowships instead of just throwing grads out on the street.

The rankings are just such a driver of school behavior, that I think 75% of law schools' problems could be solved simply by a better ranking system. US News incentivizes "expenditures per student" and doesn't punish higher tuition. So the more inefficient the school is, the higher they rank. So much could be solved just by changing that "expenditures per student" category to something like "average debt at graduation."

Another improvement could be a better way to measure employment (rather than simply the "employed at graduation" statistic. Maybe a combination of NLJ 350 placement (minus staff attorneys) + art III clerkships, and a smaller weighting on simply getting law firm/government jobs at all. Maybe a little extra weighting if the NLJ 350 jobs are also V100 jobs. Not this "employed in any job at all at graduation" malarkey. Maybe these "fellowship" positions should be counted as half of a job so it still incentivizes schools to place their students in real jobs, and yet encourages them to use the fellowships as a last resort (which is better than people being completely unemployed or bartending). Whatever this stat is based on, it needs to be based on a third party measuring the job outcomes, and not simply the school's own reports.

The US News rankings aren't that terrible. I don't have issues with the peer/practitioner rankings, nor do I have a problem with the incoming class stats factoring in. They just need to be changed at the margins. The employment measure is too easy to game, and the library size/expenditures per student encourage waste.

The National Jurist magazine was trying too hard to reinvent the wheel, and fell flat on their face. Those rankings are a joke.

[JCougar]

In summary, any new ranking system has to see itself both as an informational source for prospective students and a behavioral driver for law schools.

[RPK34]

People instead should look at these lists and take from it how bad the legal field is, not how scummy these schools are (even if they are scummy).

[SaintsTheMetal]

Giving grads low $ fellowships is GREAT! I'd much rather be job-hunting, working for free, but getting a liveable wage for a year than unemployed from a school that doesn't have the program and be forced to work a shit job to pay the bills, therefore torpedoing my legal career. This would really be a major selling point for me if I were trying to differentiate between similar T1s... Imagine if UCD offered it but UCH didn't; well then that would be a HUGE plus for UCD

BUT the ABA should recognize it happens and force the schools to separate them out in the employment statistics...

[somewhatwayward]

I still don't understand why UVA is struggling to place people. What is it about UVA that makes it struggle? Why are some of the other lower T-14's not having this problem?

It's not doing worse than its peers. It's just more open about its stats and "fellowships".

If by peers you mean Mich and Berk, okay, but Penn is placing a step above, and if you have admission to Penn and UVA, I would take that into consideration. There are also some things unique to UVA that I think are pushing its employment numbers down bc they basically favor the top students getting tons of offers over the bottom students getting any offers from OCI. These are their grading system and their partial preselect OCI. AFAIK UVA is the only schools in the T14 that has either of these things (I'm positive nowhere else uses preselect). The problem with their grading system is they dictate a mean/median for each class (around a 3.3) but don't dictate what percentage of each grade a professor must give (5% As, 15% A-s, etc). The result of this is that professors are allowed to give, like, 40-50% of the class As/A-s and balance it out with lots of Bs and deadly B-s. During my 1L year at CLS (here they do prescribe the percentages of each grade to be given), when I went to talk to profs about exams, they all told me they wished they could have given more As. A class of smart neurotic law students will produce a large number of excellent exams, and if you don't limit the number of As that can be given out, profs will give into the temptation to award As to all the excellent ones and balance those out with Bs/B-s given to students who did only a good job. (As a side note, I am curious about the impact of this on URMs at UVA bc they are more likely to get lower grades, and it seems that at UVA they would be especially likely to end up with at least one B- under this system, which is very bad for job-hunting purposes. Perhaps this explains BW's perception that URMs suffer disproportionately at T14s....except they don't at other T14s.)

The partial preselect system allows employers to choose who they want to interview at OCI. I *think* employers get to pick 70% of who they interview, and lottery fills in the other 30% of slots although it could be vice versa. Well, you can see where this is going. The people with high grades who were already benefitted by a grading system designed to maximize the number of As they could earn will now receive a slew of preselects while bottom of the class won't get much. UVA does cap the number of interviews you can have but allows special requests, which is when you ask a firm to put you into an empty interview slot. Of course, firms will accommodate the SRs from the high-grade students as well, probably netting them another CB that might've gone to a person with lower grades. I will say that the number of interviews you have is not totally determinative since, for example, at CLS, we only get 30 bids, and I only had 20 interviews while my sibling at NYU got 50 bids and had 30 interviews, and we were both fine. But every year there is hysteria on the UVA OCI thread while the people with 0-3 preselects freak out....and I can't blame them. I would be freaking out, too.

Basically the grading system + the preselect system spells disaster for the bottom half of the class from an OCI perspective. At Penn, in comparison, you probably have a 50% chance of getting a job from OCI if you are in the bottom half.

ETA: earlier I was not saying that I think the fellowships are a bad idea. But I also object to the obfuscation of the truth going on in that person's explanation of the fellowships. They are better than nothing (although SaintstheMetal....they don't pay a living wage when you owe more than 100K, LOL), but let's be clear: they are people's last resort. It is kind of annoying to see a fellow student, who the writer of that message claimed to be, being willfully blind to the fact that about a quarter of his class is struggling....they aren't taking a short-term fellowship until bar results come out: they are still being paid by the school nine months after graduation. While it is better than being totally cut off, it still sucks.

[Lasers]

I still don't understand why UVA is struggling to place people. What is it about UVA that makes it struggle? Why are some of the other lower T-14's not having this problem?

You finish at the bottom of the class at a T14, you're in the same boat as everyone else.

This terrifies me.

Also interested to hear thoughts on peer schools- why UVA and not P/B, why UCLA and not USC? Or are those grads just unemployed and the school's not helping at all?

i would venture to guess class size has a huge impact. the smaller, the better. i believe UVA/UCLA have notably larger class sizes than P/B/USC.