Making sense of employment/bar passage percentages Forum

[En03l]

My question is are there any strong or weak correlations between Bar passage rates and JD required employment ? Can any reasonable conclusion be drawn from these two data points that could help in deciding which law school to attend? As an example, W&L reports had the 2017 class at 87.5% bar passage and 79.8% JD required employment. But GWU had 88.5% bar passage in 2017 and 69.8% in JD required employment. How do you make sense of this?

[cavalier1138]

You make sense of it by not creating a correlation where none exists.

Bar passage rate has nothing to do with a school's quality. It's only a measure of student competence. There's a stronger correlation between LSAT performance and bar passage than between LSAT performance and law school performance.

Employment rates have everything to do with the school's quality, because graduates' ability to secure employment after school is largely based on whether they went to a school that people hire from.

[The Lsat Airbender]

Bar passage rate has nothing to do with a school's quality. It's only a measure of student competence.

It's also a measure of how hard the local state's bar exam is -- not that has anything to do with school quality or employment either.

[En03l]

Employment rates have everything to do with the school's quality, because graduates' ability to secure employment after school is largely based on whether they went to a school that people hire from.

Thanks for your reply, but could you explain what you are meaning to say here?

What do you mean by "quality" and how does that relate to where people hire from? Or are you trying to say the quality is based on the fact that it's where people hire from?

[cavalier1138]

Employment rates have everything to do with the school's quality, because graduates' ability to secure employment after school is largely based on whether they went to a school that people hire from.

Thanks for your reply, but could you explain what you are meaning to say here?

What do you mean by "quality" and how does that relate to where people hire from? Or are you trying to say the quality is based on the fact that it's where people hire from?

The latter. All law schools teach the same stuff, and professors are basically the same everywhere. So "educational quality" isn't something that differs dramatically from school to school. Job placement, however, can be radically different.

[nixy]

Employment rates have everything to do with the school's quality, because graduates' ability to secure employment after school is largely based on whether they went to a school that people hire from.

Thanks for your reply, but could you explain what you are meaning to say here?

What do you mean by "quality" and how does that relate to where people hire from? Or are you trying to say the quality is based on the fact that it's where people hire from?

The idea is that when you’re picking a school, the best indicator of its value is its employment rates. A JD is a professional degree intended to allow entry into a specific profession (I know not everyone with a JD goes on to be a lawyer, but the degree is set up as if that’s the case). So a law school that gets more of its grads jobs is a better school than one that gets fewer of its grads jobs.

This tends to relate to employers’ perceptions of school quality - if an employer thinks school X is a better school than school Y, they will hire more people from school X, all things being equal.

Bar passage rate is only very loosely connected to employment. There’s a rough correlation, but that’s because the most highly-ranked schools that place people in the most jobs are also the most selective, so tend to admit people who aren’t going to struggle with the bar exam. The bar passage rate itself doesn’t say much about a school’s value (unless everything else is exactly equal, in which case, sure, higher passage rate is better).

[FND]

All law schools teach the same stuff

While it's not pertinent to the conversation at hand, I respectfully disagree with this.

Ignoring the fact that an unranked law school in the great plains is more likely to focus on rural issues, farming, and mining, whereas Columbia/NYU is a lot more focused on corporate work, the emphasis is also quite different.

The top schools predominantly teach appellate work. At my law school just about everything was about how things get overturned on appeals, how do we think of the greater issues. But a lot of attorneys I know who went to a - ahem - local school tell me they were mainly taught nuts & bolts type stuff. I'm friends with a professor at a local law school who teaches my specialty, and he's the first to say he teaches the basics.

Oh, and that's ignoring those handful of schools that spend 3 years teaching glorified bar-prep. (or the growing number of schools that offer BarBri or its equivalent to 3Ls)

[En03l]

When you look at the data outside the T14 and start going into T50 and below, the data is not so simple as to say, "well its obvious, the perception of employers dictates the quality". Look at UNTK vs. Belmont for example. Or Regent vs. University of Richmond. That is why I originally asked the question, because outside of the national schools, regionally the differences become a lot more nuanced. So I am trying to understand if there is any connection between bar passage and employment outcomes. As far as LSAT and Bar passage, that also does not seem to be so apparently correlated to LSAT performance. Again, in the mid range of schools the nuance becomes a little more pronounced it seems, with the LSAT maybe having a very marginal difference.

[we'rebothmenofthelaw]

Some schools also have bar prep courses or require students to take more subjects tested on the bar—generally the case for schools whose students don’t pass in high enough numbers. Because that probably does very little to help employment (at least in the short run) or lawyering quality, it seems like that factor would contribute to inverse correlation.
Which is all to say the numbers are pretty unrelated, as other posters have said.

[cavalier1138]

I'm not sure what "nuance" you're specifically referring to, but it has absolutely nothing to do with bar passage rates.

And yes, LSAT scores are correlated with bar passage: https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blo ... ssage.html.

[nixy]

When you look at the data outside the T14 and start going into T50 and below, the data is not so simple as to say, "well its obvious, the perception of employers dictates the quality". Look at UNTK vs. Belmont for example. Or Regent vs. University of Richmond. That is why I originally asked the question, because outside of the national schools, regionally the differences become a lot more nuanced. So I am trying to understand if there is any connection between bar passage and employment outcomes. As far as LSAT and Bar passage, that also does not seem to be so apparently correlated to LSAT performance. Again, in the mid range of schools the nuance becomes a little more pronounced it seems, with the LSAT maybe having a very marginal difference.

Law school rankings don’t match up neatly with employers’ perception of quality in a given market. There are going to be employers who favor a given school for all kinds of reasons (Regent is an especially obvious one - if you want to hire Regent students you probably lean a certain way politically and there’s a limited pool of such grads).

I feel like you’re overthinking some of this. When picking a school, you want to go to the school that best places graduates in the market and job you want to work in, at a price that you can afford or can be paid off with a job you are likely to get from that school (unless you have personal circumstances such that the money really doesn’t matter, which is rare)
So for instance, if your choice is between W&L and GWU in a vacuum, pick W&L for higher job placement. But if you’re dead set on DC, GWU might be better of the 2 if it places more people in DC (other schools would be even better than GWU but we’ll leave that to one side right now). Or if GWU gives you a lot of money it might be better than W&L even if you want to work in a non-DC regional Virginia firm. Their bar passage rates aren’t really worth worrying about.

[FND]

Just to add my 2 cents, making sense of statistics depends a lot on the market.

For an easy example, the only law school in Wyoming's employment statistics are completely unrelated to the quality of its teachings or the quality of the students. It's a regional school, and the employment statistics reflect the regional market. If (looking at 2018) there are only 60 jobs JD jobs available in the state, and there are 85 students, well, about a third are out of luck, no matter how smart they are or how good the education is. It's just a coincidence that 84 people took the bar that summer, and 59 passed. If they'd have 500 people, there would still only be 60 jobs.

On the other hand, if you take a place like New York, which has Columbia/NYU at the top end, Fordham as a respectable third choice, Cardozo/Brooklyn, St. John's/Hofstra/Pace, and at the bottom Touro and New York Law, well, you're always going to have a few people who graduated from Touro/NYLS, and think those are perfectly fine schools, and you're always going to have people who only care about class rank, or who only are about grit. But the vast majority of employers would prefer the bottom 10% of NYU over the top 10% of NYLS. Even more, the big law firms in Manhattan won't even look at a resume from someone who went to NYLS, it'll go straight in the trash.

Coupled with that, it matters on where you want to work. If you're looking for a job in Wyoming, Wyoming's law school is perfectly acceptable - just about everyone went there, and it's what everyone is familiar with. On the other hand, people in New York might not be able to find Wyoming on a map, and you're better off going to a local school. Now, leaving biglaw out of the equation, your typical employer in New York is quite familiar with the New York schools, but not so familiar with the relative quality of, say, the Washington D.C. schools. G.W.'s ranking is comparable to Fordham, and American University is comparable to Cardozo/Brooklyn, but, your average employer would probably pick a Cardozo graduate over G.W., whereas in D.C. they're more likely to value American over Fordham, just because they have more familiarity with the local schools and the alumni from the local schools.

School rank is not some magic thing that every employer knows and cares about. Employers tend to overvalue schools they've heard of (e.g. Notre Dame), and undervalue schools they've never heard of, but they are familiar with local schools, and are familiar with the lawyers those schools produce.

[decimalsanddollars]

With that said, of course there is nothing wrong with you taking a position in the matter. But to me, you made it appear as though it is gospel to hold that view. Nonetheless, all the debate about LSAT and Bar passage correlation is not what my original post sought to understand.

Just jumping in to defend the empirical point here: you *did* suggest a correlation between bar passage and employment outcomes, and Cav was making the point that there is no such correlation. As an alternative, he suggested that bar passage IS correlated with LSAT scores, both of which are "measure of a student's competence" rather than any indication of graduates' job-market performance. A point made by Cav and other posters is that measures of student competence should not be used to select a school, because there's no indication that going to school with smarter people will directly help you get a job---but the reputation and placement power of the school you attend will significantly affect your individual employment outcomes. Your arguments against inferring a correlation between LSAT and Bar passage miss the point, because you did infer a correlation (between bar passage and employment) where no such correlation exists.

[QContinuum]

I've moved the off-topic moderation complaint posts to the Moderation Complaints thread, which can be found in the Lounge - http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... tart=14250

I will say that, as others have stated ITT, it's objective fact, not "bias" or opinion, that LSAT scores materially correlate with bar passage rates.