Top Law Schools

Your enrolled students for DU is off. It's over a thousand, which is reflected in your financial aid post but not your USNEWS post. I considered DU and the size of the school was a slight negative for me. You are also missing the peer assessment score-- CU - 3.1, DU - 2.6. I have no idea if this is relevant to you, but for some inexplicable reason this makes up a full quarter of the rankings.


Employment info on the two schools in 2009-- http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 1&t=150681
CU - 30% over 60k or Art. III clerks
DU - 6% over 55k or Art. III clerks


Both schools are struggling right now. CU just hired all new Career Services folks, with a few people dedicated to going around the region making contacts with new employers. No idea whether they are going to be successful, but at least they have a plan. Career service lady at morning coffee today said that 90%+ of class of 2011 has reported that they are employed, so at least the new office is committed to cooking the books.

How much debt are you going into? Maybe don't go to law school. FWIW I go to CU and have a great time here, but I'm not going into massive debt.

Both CU and DU are under relatively new Deans who are attempting to alleviate the perceived employment problems. That being said, CU's small class size and better connections make it always a better bet than DU for post LS employment prospects. Like I have said in past posts, the Denver economy is still in more turmoil than other cities, be cautious about coming here if you don't have a big scholly or connections.

McDuff what year are you? I am in UG at CU.

R86 wrote:McDuff,

I appreciate your take on this. I took the most recent USNEWs data, along with the most recent ABA data that showed up on LSAC.org. My apologies if things don't add up.

You're at CU, correct? Did you apply to DU?

The only situation I can see myself choosing DU over CU is if the aid package is simply out of this world. What was your experience?

Only have a sec lemme bang this out:
I had a full ride to DU last cycle, and I'll repeat online for the last time that I didn't attend because the career service guy wouldn't tell me their most recent employment statistics. I literally set up a phone conference with him, then asked/rephrased my question about the updated employment four or five times. He ran around and kept dodging the question, before saying something to the extent of " well it really wouldn't be in our or your best interest to release those numbers-- there are still a couple weeks before reporting is due and I wouldn't want to mislead you."

It was about the most misleading conversation of my life. I did visit DU and had a nice time, but several of us felt like the assistant deans and staff were trying to sell us on something.

I am now at CU and I do pay tuition here. I can say that I've had the opposite experience here. CU has historically taken a higher road with reporting and recruitment. For example, look at the schools ranked 44 on your list... All the employment is about at 80%. This is horrible, but probably accurate. Then look at GMU, ASU, UW, etc. You can figure it out. I'm not sure whether some of the GMU types are flat out lying like Nova and Illinois have, or if they are just employing tons of their own grads. Which brings me to what the new dean is doing at CU... As you might have guessed, many CU alums thought that their alma mater was taking the highroad to its own detriment. As I alluded to earlier, this may be changing to an extent. I don't want to make it more than it is-- I'm not talking about mis-reporting or hard-selling to fill the seats. What has changed is that CU has very recently started one of those "fellowship programs" that hire their own grads. This means that next year we are going to report 90%+ employment for the UNSEWS. This will probably mean that CU will make a big leap up the rankings, but obviously there is, and should be, a lot of negative criticism of this. The school says the same thing schools like Fordham say (infamously, Fordham was the school that employed 1 out of 7 of its own graduates and reported them as full-time employed). The line is " these people need to get practical legal experience and this is a safety net that helps our graduates. they can earn money working on real legal matters until they find more permanent employment. "

I don't want to get into it, but my take is that these programs are great in the sense that it's great for those who need it, but not great in the sense that I doubt that is why the law schools started them.

As far as CU or DU for employment, I think senorquick is correct. However, your statement about a potential "out of this world" package from DU is appreciated. I came from out of state and had frankly never heard of DU. However, is CU worth 100k more than DU? 80k more? The notion that CU is cheaper is flat out inaccurate nowadays. If you can manage to get in CU, you are going to have a nice package from DU which is going to make it cheaper. DU has done a great job with $$$ in the last few years. Employment is always going to be easier from CU, but it is not impossible from DU. However, I looked at the numbers for 2010 and only 43 full time JD required grads reported a private sector salary for DU. On their employment website, they are very sneaky-- it says they have 60 private sector salaries, but then above there is a statement in parenthesis with a * by it that explain that the medians are only taken using full time salaries. If you take the number of full time JD required reported, 43, and divide by two in order to get the median, then divide that into the total number of graduates from 2010, 347, you get 6%. 6% of their graduates made the median of just under 80k. Using quartiles you can further see that just over 9% cleared 50k, their 25th percentile. Public sector and clerkships don't pay more than 50k (with the exception of the denver area DA's offices, which pay 56k), so you can pretty much declaratively say that just over 90% of their 2010 class were unemployed, or made 50k or less working either full or part-time.

The sad part is that CU employment isn't really that much better. I haven't run the numbers for CU because I'm out of time-- going to nuggets game tonight and have to meet friends in Denver-- but I will later if you want. I can say that CU has one of the most transparent employment websites I've seen, which is hilarious in a putting a magnifying class to a pile of dogshit kinda way. Last year, when I was deciding on schools, they placed 10% in Art. III clerkships. I called and verified this number because it was so good. However, in 2009, what they only had 30% clear 60k or have a great clerkship??? Not exactly worth 32k a year for in-state tuition.... Lets not even get into opportunity costs and the fact that law school is very stressful at times.

Alright man that was my experience in a nutshell. Good luck dude and feel free to come to Boulder and hit me up. Come on Thursdays and meet some of the students here.

Take it easy.

As a current CU student, I would say that Lord McDuff has a somewhat glass half empty view of CU Law. I agree with a lot of the facts he presents, but I think that the real situation is a lot better than he makes it seem (i.e. everyone had shit employment stats for 2009 which was the worst year of the worst recession in modern history, I have friends that are beneficiaries of the fellowship program and it helped them even if there were shady purposes surrounding its inception, etc.). I would also defend our CSO from claims of "cooking the books" until you show me some proof that they are doing so. They are incredibly hardworking people who have done me so many favors and really helped me get where I am with my internships and 2L summer job (and hopefully where I'm going once I graduate as well).

Just to clarify, when I said cooking the books I was only referring to the fellowship program. I also agree that it can be really beneficial to those who need it. Also, from what I heard, most of the 20 or so fellowship recipients actually found permanent employment, usually in the office that the fellowship placed them at, before the nine months employment data were due. I'm not really sure how employment looks, of course. I just take a look at the published numbers and assume that is the absolute best case scenario.