ATL hires hopeless unemployed 2012 law graduate as blogger Forum

[JCougar]

Regarding the Penn numbers, the bimodal nature of legal salaries makes this a non-story. DJM has no way of proving that things have really changed, again because salaries always fall off a cliff for entry-level grads who miss BigLaw. In Penn's case literally one more person missing BigLaw could lead to the drastic reduction we've seen in their 25th percentile placement. If in 2008 student 50 of 200 was making $142,500 and student 49 was making $60,000 but in 2012 only student 51 was making $142,500 and student 50 was making $60,000 she could have made the exact same claim--that the 25th percentile had dropped by a whole 60 percent!!!! It doesn't really tell us anything, and it only has any value if you don't know about or just want to ignore the bimodal distribution.

In this sense, though, wouldn't it be true that revealing the 25th percentile salary paints a much more accurate picture, since in previous years, up to 24% of graduates could have been making substantially less than what was reported at the 25th percentile?

[Tiago Splitter]

In this sense, though, wouldn't it be true that revealing the 25th percentile salary paints a much more accurate picture, since in previous years, up to 24% of graduates could have been making substantially less than what was reported at the 25th percentile?

If salaries weren't bimodal then a huge drop off like this would be really meaningful. It's just that even the subtlest of shifts in a bimodal world could lead to this outcome. Before it might have been 77% getting BigLaw, and now it could be 73%. We can infer that it's probably worse than this, but we really can't be sure of anything without more data (or a huge drop at the median too. If Penn's median salary was 100K when the 25th used to be $142,500 we could say things had really gotten bad.)