T14 School-funded jobs Forum

[Typhoon24]

When using lawschooltransparency.com, I know that it is common practice to subtract a school's school-funded job percentage from its total score. Are T14 schools are insulated at all from this (perhaps due to them being able to provided favorable/decent jobs to their grads)? The reason I ask is because I noticed that NYU and UVA for example have a significant amount of grads in school-funded jobs and wanted to know if their employment scores were perhaps inflated.

[Dafaq]

That school funded category is a school’s way of upping their stats by dealing from the bottom of the deck. For the student it is a short glorified time out. I’d be okay with it if it were categorized as underemployment

[aboutmydaylight]

That school funded category is a school’s way of upping their stats by dealing from the bottom of the deck. For the student it is a short glorified time out. I’d be okay with it if it were categorized as underemployment

From what I understand, that largely depends on the school.

[First Offense]

That school funded category is a school’s way of upping their stats by dealing from the bottom of the deck. For the student it is a short glorified time out. I’d be okay with it if it were categorized as underemployment

Source: none.

Basically, it depends. At UVA the fellowship is like 31k for a year to work at a non-profit, hoping for that to turn into long-term work. There was an article about a year back that looked at the success rate of the program and found that a significant portion (over 70%) of the people that received the fellowship from the class of 2011 turned that into a long-term gig.

The fact is, TLS is incredibly short sighted in how they view law school employment. Generally, TLS only considers "good outcomes" to be AIII clerkships or 101+ firms, and everything else as less so. However, a not-insignificant number of students want to do PI, or want to work in state supreme courts and then go that way, want to do PD, or any number of other things. Many come to law school with dreams of saving the world and see their first directloans statement and change their mind and target Biglaw - and that's fine - while others decide to push on with their "dream". Viewing the stats as black and white is as foolish as not questioning things like school-funded employment.

Instead of writing off school-funded employment as a shit outcome every time, why not push the schools into releasing more data on their programs? Some might be a good way to break into the irregular hiring of PI (versus the incredibly regular hiring of Biglaw/Clerkships), some might be paying people 12 dollars an hour to sit at the circulation desk.

[dresden doll]

Instead of writing off school-funded employment as a shit outcome every time, why not push the schools into releasing more data on their programs? Some might be a good way to break into the irregular hiring of PI (versus the incredibly regular hiring of Biglaw/Clerkships), some might be paying people 12 dollars an hour to sit at the circulation desk.

I agree. Not all school-funded employment is created equal, and more data would be useful.

Also, to the extent that this type of employment does fall into the former category, I don't see it as meaningfully distinct from any externally funded fellowship such as Equal Justice Works, Skadden or Kirkland.

[Tiago Splitter]

The fact is, TLS is incredibly short sighted in how they view law school employment. Generally, TLS only considers "good outcomes" to be AIII clerkships or 101+ firms, and everything else as less so. However, a not-insignificant number of students want to do PI, or want to work in state supreme courts and then go that way, want to do PD, or any number of other things. Many come to law school with dreams of saving the world and see their first directloans statement and change their mind and target Biglaw - and that's fine - while others decide to push on with their "dream". Viewing the stats as black and white is as foolish as not questioning things like school-funded employment.

Oh come on. TLS is conservative, and the only jobs we can be sure are good outcomes are Biglaw and federal clerkships. You're right that if schools released more information we'd have an easier time including some jobs in the "good" bucket that aren't biglaw/Art.III. Getting every school to release its NALP report would be a good start. But that's not "short sighted," it's prudent given the absurd cost of law school. And on top of that, we can generally agree that the schools with the best biglaw/Fed clerk placement have the best non-biglaw/non-Fed clerk placement, so using Biglaw + Article III clerkships works as a pretty good proxy for everything.

[Dafaq]

School funded (so called) jobs are where 3Ls without real employment are shipped off to so the school can claim a higher employment percent, thus a higher USNWR ranking. Take W&L for instance. Had they upped their school funded jobs from 1.5% to 15.1% (like UVA) chances are they would have gone up the rankings and not down. Hell, who knows, if UT had jumped its school funded jobs from 5% to 15%, UT might have again cracked the T14 since its employment percent would have increased from 75% to 85%.

I am not saying school funded jobs are always a bad thing, just that some schools use it to make their employment picture look better than it is. As long as it works in the rankings you can bet those schools will continue making lemonade out of lemons.