Class of 2009 Employment Data in Graphs (Last Update: T100) Forum

[aliarrow]

So I decided to put the new c/o 09 employment data into charts (similar to the 07 data from law.com).
This uses the data provided from US News, however it weighs down the employment breakdowns to account for anyone unemployed or in an unknown status.

So far I have data compiled for the T80 and the elite tier.

All data is 9 months from graduation

T15
Employment Sector Breakdown
--ImageRemoved--

Salary Breakdown



Full-Time/Part-Time Employment
--ImageRemoved--

T30
Employment Sector Breakdown
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*NLJ250 data not available for the class of 2009. It could be anywhere between 0 and 13.2%

Salaries


Full-Time/Part-Time Employment

** USC refused to provide part-time data. I extrapolated UCLA's ratios for the purpose of my graphs, however it's likely slightly worse.

T50
Sectors
--ImageRemoved--
*No NLJ 250 Data; could be between 0% and 13.2%.

Salaries


Full-Time/Part-Time
--ImageRemoved--

T70
Sectors


Salaries
--ImageRemoved--

Full-Time/Part-Time


T80
The sketchiest range of schools yet. The data they provide is sketchier than the data of the Elite Tier (see below).
Sectors

***Indiana-Indy did not provide any information aside from basic employment rate (not even the sectors).

Salary


Full-Time/Part-Time

**Denver just quit providing part-time/full-time rates after the section of data with the highest full-time rate. So their part-time statistics are a little off.

T100
Sectors



Salaries



Full-Time/Part-Time Employment

** Please note that VERY few graduates of the lower tier CA schools actually find full-time legal employment.
To verify:
U of San Francisco Breakdown

89.8% of Grads known to be employed
58% of which in a JD Required Job
50.5% of those in a JD Required Job are employed full time
.898 x .58 x .505 = .263
So that's 26.3% of the class thats employed full-time as a lawyer 9 months after graduation.
(The FullTime/PartTime graph reflects those employed in other capacities full-time, which is why the graph % is slightly larger - ie accountant, teacher, etc)
Elite Tier
Added for quick reference when someone starts asking if it could be worth it to attend a TTT. For the record, Ave Maria is officially the worst law school in the nation; not Barry, Nova Southeastern, Thomas Jefferson, or any of that other bs.

Sector Breakdown
--ImageRemoved--

Salaries


Full-Time/Part-Time
--ImageRemoved--
*Nova didn't provide part-time data, so they got Barry's rates.

[Mickey Quicknumbers]

This is amazing. Thanks. But some of those NLJ numbers aren't matching up?

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNL ... hbxlogin=1

I think you might have used this: http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNL ... hbxlogin=1
which was for c/o 2008

[sundance95]

This is really nitpicky, but the chart might be more useful if NLJ 250, A3 clerkships, and academia were all next to each other on the left hand side of the chart so we could easily see what percentage of each school is getting preftigious employment. Thanks for the data summary!

[aliarrow]

This is amazing. Thanks. But some of those NLJ numbers aren't matching up?

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNL ... hbxlogin=1

I think you might have used this: http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNL ... hbxlogin=1
which was for c/o 2008

I used raw #s for 2009 and divided by the total nmber of grads given by US news. The weird thing is that some of the numbers of grads didnt match up (ie the go to schools chart states there were 204 Yale grads, whereas US News says there were 200). So that should explain most discrepencies between the two %s.

Also, the new %s employed in NLJ 250 are for c/o 2010, which is what you linked to. Im only interested in 09 data though since thats the newest data available from US News (the data has to be from the same year for this to be useful)

[aliarrow]

This is really nitpicky, but the chart might be more useful if NLJ 250, A3 clerkships, and academia were all next to each other on the left hand side of the chart so we could easily see what percentage of each school is getting preftigious employment. Thanks for the data summary!

The only things you can really say for certain are semi-prestigious are A3 Clerks and NLJ 250 (see Academia in BU), and thats alrady been done quite a bit. This is just to give a clearer overall picture. Besides, even for T15 the highest % into academia was only around 3% (Cornell). Everywhere else had about .5%, which equates to one or two graduates.

[Lawlcat]

Outstanding! Does USNWR provide these other categories? If they list discrete number of graduates, I'm more confident in the accuracy. (And I suppose the biggest problem with USNWR data has always been not that it hides "unknown" students - this one seems to include them! - but that it doesn't explain that some students report employment but not their salary.)

I think you're absolutely right. In my experience, an academic's path generally looks like this:

(1) Go to Yale, do well.
(2) Clerk for the Supreme Court.
(3) Practice for a year or two and/or pick up a PhD.
(4) All the while, publish like mad and get cited.
(5) ???
(6) Profit

(5 and 6 are actually just: then get a professorial job.)

I think we really need to investigate these NLJ 250 salary distributions, or even just do spot checks ourselves on a Google Docs spreadsheet or something. Assuming that the NLJ 250 is slightly over-inclusive on good firm outcomes, I'd like to see the bars in descending order of clarity as to goodness of outcome:

(1) Article III
(2) NLJ 250
(3) Government
(4) Public Interest
(5) Other clerk
(6) Other firm
(7) Unknown
(8) Unemployed

Although I'm not sure on that ranking, come to think of it.

[aliarrow]

Outstanding! Does USNWR provide these other categories? If they list discrete number of graduates, I'm more confident in the accuracy. (And I suppose the biggest problem with USNWR data has always been not that it hides "unknown" students - this one seems to include them! - but that it doesn't explain that some students report employment but not their salary.)

I think you're absolutely right. In my experience, an academic's path generally looks like this:

(1) Go to Yale, do well.
(2) Clerk for the Supreme Court.
(3) Practice for a year or two and/or pick up a PhD.
(4) All the while, publish like mad and get cited.
(5) ???
(6) Profit

(5 and 6 are actually just: then get a professorial job.)

I think we really need to investigate these NLJ 250 salary distributions, or even just do spot checks ourselves on a Google Docs spreadsheet or something. Assuming that the NLJ 250 is slightly over-inclusive on good firm outcomes, I'd like to see the bars in descending order of clarity as to goodness of outcome:

(1) Article III
(2) NLJ 250
(3) Government
(4) Public Interest
(5) Other clerk
(6) Other firm
(7) Unknown
(8) Unemployed

Although I'm not sure on that ranking, come to think of it.

US News provides:
% Unknown
% Known to be employed
% known to be seeking other degree
% unemployed (seeking/not seeking employment)

They then provide of the % known to be employed, a break down of what % went into different sectors. So you just multiply that % by the % known to be employed and that will give you a weighted %, which is the % of all graduates employed in that sector (and if you do the math, at least for Yale which was my case study, you do get almost whole numbers [ie 79.02], so it looks legit).

They also provide a breakdown of the %s employed in Full Time/Part Time positions, and those employed in crap jobs (ie retail, contract work, etc). Later I'll be making a separate bar graph for each school to show:
% employed full time
% employed part time
% employed in crap job
% unemployed
% unknown.

This should really help provide a clear picture of whats happening.

There's almost nothing useful that can be done with the salary data at this point, the samples are just too low. Even for the decent schools (BU/Emory/etc) theres around a 60% reporting rate of salaries for private sector salaries, so if you multiply that by the % actually known to be employed in the private sector it's less than a quarter of all grads

[005618502]

This is great! thank you

[Lawlcat]

Thanks for the explanation! It does sound like they're providing pretty decent data.

There's almost nothing useful that can be done with the salary data at this point, the samples are just too low. Even for the decent schools (BU/Emory/etc) theres around a 60% reporting rate of salaries for private sector salaries, so if you multiply that by the % actually known to be employed in the private sector it's less than a quarter of all grads

If you mean my comment about NLJ 250 salary distributions: I was referring to the problem of figuring out if there's any part of the NLJ 250 which is comprised of 40K/year sweatshop-hours jobs. (Jobs on the left-hand side of the salary distribution.)

[aliarrow]

Thanks for the explanation! It does sound like they're providing pretty decent data.

There's almost nothing useful that can be done with the salary data at this point, the samples are just too low. Even for the decent schools (BU/Emory/etc) theres around a 60% reporting rate of salaries for private sector salaries, so if you multiply that by the % actually known to be employed in the private sector it's less than a quarter of all grads

If you mean my comment about NLJ 250 salary distributions: I was referring to the problem of figuring out if there's any part of the NLJ 250 which is comprised of 40K/year sweatshop-hours jobs. (Jobs on the left-hand side of the salary distribution.)

US News does provide % in Part Time positions and % in jobs that "Aren't considered part of a career path", so I'm hoping that will cover the doc review type jobs once I begin compiling that data into separate charts.

But if you mean crappy law firms in general that pay that low, they probably aren't a part of the NLJ 250. As a rule of thumb, all NLJ 250 jobs can be assumed to be at least 6 figures (unless its an office in an area with a very low cost of living)

[tgir]

Thanks! This is great. It's so much less misleading than all the other NLJ+A3 threads on TLS, which seem to routinely put together data from different years. Obviously grads who see one field of practice shrink but whose degrees are still highly desired are going to flock to another field of practice, whereas those with less desired degrees are left to pick up the scraps.

[aliarrow]

I started examining WUSTL as a case study to base my calculations off of for everything else for the next set of graphs. If anyone is curious:

Of all WUSTL 09 grads (9 mos after graduation):

79.4% of Graduates were employed in a full time career position
0.9% of Grads were employed in a temporary/non-career-path position
7.17% of Grads were employed Part-time
2.6% of Grads were unemployed
3.1% of Grads were seeking additional education
6.2% of Grads were unknown
(not equal to 100% exact due to rounding)

[FuManChusco]

Thanks for this. Really useful.

[aliarrow]

Updated for all of the T30, added a salary graph. T50 coming soon.

[aliarrow]

Updated again to be even more thorough for the T30. It's starting to get a little ugly.

[Sandro]

I need to show that graph to someone I know who said they were considering Ave Maria. I think it speaks for itself.

[pinkzeppelin]

Wow, this is awesome! Like Law School Transparency, but better. Thanks for putting so much time and effort into this!

[XxSpyKEx]

This is great. Thanks for the contribution

[Borhas]

excellent work, we need to have a tab somewhere on this website with links to info like this... you know, cause it's useful and relevant

[funkyturds]

should become part of TLS articles.

[mrwarre85]

salary figures for 50-70 as well as finishing out the top 100 and this becomes the most valuable thing I've ever found on TLS.

[aliarrow]

salary figures for 50-70 as well as finishing out the top 100 and this becomes the most valuable thing I've ever found on TLS.

1) Do you mean 25th,50th,75th salaries? I was thinking about doing that, I just didn't want to go into data-overload. But I'll play with it and see how the graphs come out.

2) I will, I'm working my way down. If I have time I'll try to do all the schools, even all the unranked ones.

[jenesaislaw]

Great work. Law School Transparency's should be up in a day or two. I have all of the 2009 data, and just need to put it into our database and reprogram a few things.

U.S. News's decision to share more of the data they collect from schools helps a ton, eh?

[aliarrow]

Great work. Law School Transparency's should be up in a day or two. I have all of the 2009 data, and just need to put it into our database and reprogram a few things.

U.S. News's decision to share more of the data they collect from schools helps a ton, eh?

It really is great, a giant step forward in transparency. Of course the data is still presented in a very sugar-coated manner for the most part (see: $160,000 median private sector starting salary for NYLS), but at least the data is available now for people like us to further transform into more useful data.

[Lasers]

this is terrific information to utilize! thanks a lot!