mrwarre85 wrote:Sorry to be a debbie downer but I was seriously considering Santa Clara because of how beautiful the campus was and how great a location that had near San Fran until I did my homework on their job placement, and now I feel obligated to share my findings with all of you--especially because employment has been talked about so much on this thread.
According to the info Santa Clara sent to USNEWS, only 60 graduates were working as full time attorneys nine months out. 60 TOTAL GRADUATES. That is only 23% of the class!!!!! Therefor, 77% of the people who went to Santa Clara law and paid all that money didn't even end up working as an attorney. No, I don't just mean not working in a private firm, I mean all law jobs, only 60 grads. I think you will agree with me that this is shocking.
Self selection can only make up for a tiny bit of this-- lets face it, the majority of people who go to law school do want to be lawyers.
To add insult to injury, only a very low 36% of those 60 grads reported a private sector salary.
Santa Clara reports a median private sector salary of 160k. I did the math and that is only 10 STUDENTS! Of all the numbers I've crunched with all the different top 100 schools, Santa Clara is by far the most misleading of all them all.
I'm also considering DU and UTK. Along with SCU, these schools are T2 but they do not offer "roughly similar" job placement. DU sports an atrocious, although way better than SCU, 52% of graduates working full time as attorneys nine months out, while UTK sends a very respectable 86% of its graduates into full time employment as attorneys. I share this so you won't think-- yeah the job market sucks everywhere for kids outside T-14. No, it is virtually non existent in Cali and it sucks everywhere else.
I have a full scholarship to DU so I'm still thinking about it, which is really insane of my part because I have a coin flip chance to even be an attorney with a DU degree. Even though I haven't heard back from SCU I am going to withdraw today. My bet is that a giant junk of those 23% at SCU are going into IP, a field I (and most on this board I would guess) will not be going into. Again, sorry to be a debbie downer, but after reading all the posts earlier on this thread I felt I had to say something.
Feel free to PM me or re-post if you would like me to share the USNEWS full report (if you haven't paid the ten bucks for premium service) or walk you through the simple math I did to come up with these figures.
Wow... that is utterly depressing. I'm currently deciding between SCU and USD since it looks like UCD and UCH are not going to come through.
If i go to SCU i get to save a little money by living at home, but they've only offered me 4,500..
