Reforming the Employment Reporting Standard at Law Schools Forum

[observationalist]

I have not read the other posts in this thread aside from the original post.

(So if this has been covered, I apologize in advance)

When you request journal status, distinguish between law review and other journals.

My school has roughly 50% of all students on a journal of some form and it would make employment outcomes more clear by distinguishing between graduates that were on law review and graduates on all of the other journals (Maritime, Sports Lawyers, International and Comparative, European & Civil Law, Law and Sexuality, Environmental, Technology and IP, etc.). My school in particular would benefit from distinguishing between the outcomes of non-journal students vs. journal students since 50% of the entire school is on a journal.

I would also recommend adding moot court as another variable to add to the list (this should probably be split into two for all of the top schools - they have one national team and one international team). I realize having to distinguish between the two teams would be a pain - and over the top - but it help with clarity.

However your two existing lists are pretty comprehensive. But this additional variable would be very beneficial.

Thanks for the suggestion about moot court, and glad you agree with us about separating out journal status. In the article we break it down according to the following for journal membership:

Yes- Primary (e.g. Law Review for just about everywhere)
Yes- Secondary (everything else, including my beloved ELPAR even though I think it's the best publication Vanderbilt offers)
No

We are updating our website today and will be sure to make this more clear than it has been so far. A lot of the comments we've been seeing indicate that people don't actually know what the lists look like, so we need to do a better job of explaining that for people who don't have the time to read a 90-page paper.

Keep 'em coming.

[Borhas]

I sent this email to UC Davis Career Services


I am a current undergraduate student and law school applicant researching employment outcomes for some California law schools. I would greatly appreciate some of your time to resolve some questions I have about the employment numbers of the class of 2008. I noticed that the listed categories included 167 individuals out of a 178 had a job listed under "Private Practice" "Judicial Clerkships" "Government" "Military" "Public Interest" "Business/Industry" "Academic" and only one was "job type unknown" type. My first question is what sort of employment did the 11 students who did not fit under any of these categories have? If they weren't included in the job type unknown category, then are their jobs known. Secondly, I noticed that the law school places heavily into California, but I was wondering what sort of proportions are sent to the different cities of CA. Furthermore, I noticed that only salaries of full time employees were included. How many Davis graduates had part-time employment?

I understand that you may be too busy to work through all the statistics, so is there anyway you can provide a list of the employment outcomes of your 2008 class including name of employer and number of students working there?

Thank you for your time,

Borhas

[observationalist]

I sent this email to UC Davis Career Services


I am a current undergraduate student and law school applicant researching employment outcomes for some California law schools. I would greatly appreciate some of your time to resolve some questions I have about the employment numbers of the class of 2008. I noticed that the listed categories included 167 individuals out of a 178 had a job listed under "Private Practice" "Judicial Clerkships" "Government" "Military" "Public Interest" "Business/Industry" "Academic" and only one was "job type unknown" type. My first question is what sort of employment did the 11 students who did not fit under any of these categories have? If they weren't included in the job type unknown category, then are their jobs known. Secondly, I noticed that the law school places heavily into California, but I was wondering what sort of proportions are sent to the different cities of CA. Furthermore, I noticed that only salaries of full time employees were included. How many Davis graduates had part-time employment?

I understand that you may be too busy to work through all the statistics, so is there anyway you can provide a list of the employment outcomes of your 2008 class including name of employer and number of students working there?

Thank you for your time,

Borhas

This. Nice work. You are not the only one who has responded by taking initiative and seeking information, but this one is worded very well and shows you took in the time to really make sense of the employment information they provide. I would be surprised if they refuse to respond with more information, even if it does take career services some time to consult with admissions about what to disclose. (Part of our initiative is to reveal what goes on in between those two departments at different schools, since the relationship between adcomms and counselors can vary, and (we think) often be a major reason why the employment information gets so skewed).

Let us know how your request goes and how they frame the response. At some point we want to start posting requests to different schools on the website, particularly when they garner responses that shed some light into how the schools handle requests. Now is a great time for schools to jump on board and start disclosing information, even before we officially ask them for it. It's worked so far for Vandy and Duke (and presumably Chicago this cycle) in their recruiting efforts, and we want to reward the schools that also believe there's value to be had in being open about this stuff. G'luck.

[legalese_retard]

I actually did not see that article or the comment, glad more people are making that connection though.

On a side note, are you guys hoping to expand this issue beyond your website? In my opinion, the only way to legitimize the employment numbers produced is to take that reporting process away from the law schools. The ABA is huge on the professional responsibility of its members and mandating several rules to minimize "conflicts of interest" (i.e. ownership of law firms, advertising restrictions, disclosure requirements, imputation of law firm/attorney conflicts, etc.). Law schools self-reporting employment numbers is a CLEAR example of a conflict of interest - these numbers dictate rankings, enrollment, tuition, donations, professor recruitment, etc.

I think the bar of each state should be the repository of employment surveys and statistics for all schools in their respective states. Before an attorney can be licensed (and to keep that license), he/she has pay member dues, taxes, and provide other info (like CLE hours). As another prereq for their license, new attorneys should be required to fillout a standardized survey that will request detailed employment information, require "follow-up" responses beyond 9 months, and opinion-type questions (what were your expectations before going to school ABC, what was the result after graduation, and did it meet your initial expectations, etc.). While attorneys are self-reporting this info, require them to swear to its veracity under possible sanction violation for lying.

Since graduates will move out of state, there would need to be some way of sharing stats (similar to how states maintain the files of attorneys licensed in more than one state, like CLE credits). I would recommend a “test run” where one or a couple of states do the surveys and see how they can handle it (as well as the results). State bars conduct attorney studies a lot – in 2000, Texas did a demographic study on the passage rate of applicants based on race and gender.

My biggest annoyance is how the ABA, NALP, and other groups claim they see a problem with rising tuition costs, enrollment increases, and applicant reliance on false data, but don’t do anything about it. Likewise, law schools tell its applicants that “You should not go to law school only for the money because not all lawyers are rich,” but still publish misleading info about $100K+ salaries for its grads. It’s disingenuous to tell applicants that the law profession does not guarantee wealth and yet publish data in a manner to indicate the opposite. All parties agree that applicants should do through research before going to law school, but they need to stop impeding that research process with false and misleading information.

[legalese_retard]

While this issue may be not as prevalent today as it was last year, it would be nice to know how many of its "employed" grads were deferred and/or had offers revoked. If someone had an offer at graduation but the offer was revoked before the "9 months after graduation" mark, the school should not report that person as employed AND earning a six-figure salary. Either have an extra column for "deferred" or simply don't include them in your numbers.

This info may have "negligible" affects on the results of a top tier school, but may demonstrate significant change at a lower tier school.

[observationalist]

The ABA Journal Podcast took place today and is now available for listening: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/ ... he_stakes/

Great discussion between Donald Polden (Santa Clara; ABA Standards Review Committee), David Van Zandt (Northwestern), and Kyle McEntee (LST).

[Borhas]

Let us know how your request goes and how they frame the response.

There was no response. I think you guys are going to have get people with more clout than simple folks like me to get any sort of answer. Frankly, I don't think they care.

[observationalist]

Let us know how your request goes and how they frame the response.

There was no response. I think you guys are going to have get people with more clout than simple folks like me to get any sort of answer. Frankly, I don't think they care.

That's too bad. We're making our official request sometime in the next month, and we're going to work on sufficiently publicizing the effort so that every school will at least be sure to respond. We're also only going to ask for commitments to produce lists for the Class of 2010, which means schools won't actually have to report until Feb 2011. So we'll have data for prospectives to use in next year's admissions cycle, but not in time for all of you.

Borhas, just re-read your post and saw you aren't a prospective yet. When do you expect to be/Are you applying? I wouldn't give up hopes of getting responses, but I could see why the school might not respond to someone who isn't necessarily thinking about applying. We have seen instances where accepted students have leveraged their offers to get better information, even if it's only specific to their own concerns and even if the additional information is itself prone to being misleading in some way or another).

Either way, good work at least trying. Were you able to get information from any schools other than Davis?

[Borhas]

Not quiet, I was a prospective student. I applied to Davis, was waitlisted and then I withdrew. So admittedly, I have no leverage with them. I'm enrolling at UC Hastings this fall.

[observationalist]

Not quiet, I was a prospective student. I applied to Davis, was waitlisted and then I withdrew. So admittedly, I have no leverage with them. I'm enrolling at UC Hastings this fall.

Gotcha... we had another poster on TLS who was a current student at Hastings and had contacted career services at some point to ask them to start producing employment lists, and that was over a year ago (I think). Hastings is by now most likely on notice, but not sure about Davis. Either way g'luck at Hastings, and if you want to get involved with LST next year we will be looking for current students who are in a position to work with their schools in getting the information out by next year.

More press covering the ABA Journal Podcast:
http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com/2010 ... takes.html
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog ... cast-.html
http://lawschooltuitionbubble.wordpress ... -in-links/

[tru]

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[observationalist]

Bumping an old thread to include a link to The Economist which has picked up the story this week: http://www.economist.com/node/17461573? ... 3&fsrc=rss

Also, we just posted a summary of the ABA's different initiatives and the people involved in potentially making something happen. Check it out: --LinkRemoved--

-obs