OneLisfun wrote:zacharus85 wrote:1) The difference, long-term, is not small enough such that GULC is clearly equal or even close to UMich.
2) The metric I'm using is the most commonly and most logically rigorous, for the reasons I already gave upthread.
Read literally any other thread where competent people are discussing how to analyze outcomes. Here, I found one for you:
http://top-law-schools.com/forums/viewt ... 2&t=245859
3) The people I know here who obtained government jobs had prior connections/experience (GULC's evening division skews this). This is irrelevant for general analysis because NO entry-level government jobs pay near enough to justify sticker-debt (which OP is taking on) and it's irrelevant here because OP isn't seeking government jobs anyway.
4) I did not say GULC is in a boom year. There is a big difference between 'boom year' and 'barely treading water,' the latter being a much more accurate characterization. There was a very moderate gain in percentages (less than 2%) - BUT this came from a reduction in class size (645 to 626) rather than a boost in Long-term BigLaw employment (300 up to 303 - WOW!). Also it's important to put this in the context of the market - GULC got a serious hit in the recession because of its history of shady practices that barely keep it in the t14. It's recovering but it is still consistently behind the rest of the pack.
5) I didn't address it because it is dumb. No one who has ever seriously been through OCI thinks students try for one market, fail, and then just don't get employed. People generally bid multiple markets, and will downgrade to secondary markets if they have to in order to get employed. In any case, we don't have the data to suggest whether more people who get into these big markets in either school are getting BigLaw jobs or something crappy just to keep on surviving, so it's kind of moot.
Regarding GULC problems: I've already said upthread a decent bit about this: Applications to law schools are down and the law economy isn't getting better. GULC has institutional issues that prevent it from meaningfully adapting to this: it can't cut class size because of a small endowment (they need the tuition money), and they can't reduce their reliance on transfers (like OP) for the same reason. OP will be one among many transfers at GULC (100! That is a criminal amount). As belts tighten, GULC is not going to be able to keep up. If we look, say, 3 years back at 2011 numbers, we see that UMich was rocking 44% BigLaw employment compared to GULC's 37%. Is that super huge? No - not enough to justify sticker debt vs. scholly. But $30K? I'd pay that for that little bit of extra security any day of the week.
One thing I would just like to separate here is the difference between a school being worse overall and worse for getting NY big law. I am not claiming that Michigan is not better for a person who is from Chicago who wants Chicago big law (I'm not sure about this, but it's probably true I guess).
Regardless of the students trying for one market and failing thing, it is a fact that if a student puts half his bids into DC and he has a 20% chance at each of those firms based on his gpa, and then puts in the other half of his bids into the market where he has a 40% chance at each firm, and at a separate school, that same student with the same prospects puts all 100% of his bids into the market with the 40% chance per firm, and this scenario happens numerous times (or other ones like it) on the whole, yes, I do believe that could account for around 5% or so of a difference that wouldn't be there otherwise.
We all know that Georgetown does not have a true home market, because while it is easier to get DC big law from there than other comparable schools, it is still harder to get than NY, so for purposes of this discussion, it could be said to have the equivalent of no home market.
Georgetown's three largest employers are DC, NY, and Cali, with DC being the largest by far. UMich, on the other hand, has as its top 3 as NY, Illinois, and Michigan. (about 14% are in Michigan) (Interestingly, they both have about the same exact percentage in NY, not that I believe that to be dispositive at all, just interesting.)
I understand that there's no piece of paper with an exact percentage on it like the stats you like, and which I also like and understand are the main thing to look at, but to discount everything that can't be known entirely when we see these clear pieces of evidence that conservatively would account for at least a 3% difference, when there's a 5% difference or in a certain type of year, a 7% difference between GULC and UMich, that is really not enough to choose UMich over GULC for NY if there's any other reason the person has to prefer GULC.
To take an exaggerated example of this, we can all look at UT's employment stats and in certain years decide that UT must be about the same for NY big law as GULC. The percentages show it, and you can't prove otherwise, but if you use your common sense, it is clear that UT has many students from Texas there who are trying for Texas and getting it and then making the school have large employment numbers that would not apply to a market like NY or DC, and furthermore, would not apply to any person going there who is not from Texas, and especially not to anyone from NY or DC. In this case, if you are at all reasonable, in a year where UT and GULC had the same placement, I think you'd agree that it almost certainly took far less for a person at GULC to have gotten NY big law that year than a similar person who was at UT that year.
UMich is a far lesser version of that. However, 14% in Michigan, a 14% that does not exist at GULC for any market, is a hard number that I think would be worth looking at when comparing the two schools, rather than simply adding up the big law plus fed clerk number at both schools and comparing them. 7% (being generous here in my opinion) doesn't look as good when you start looking at these things. That number starts to seem more like, at best, a 3 or 4% better chance at NY big law (and in a year where they are 5% apart like the most recent year, 1-2%)
