Consumer information often appears simple and to the point, be it a 99% employment rate or a $160,000 median private sector salary. But what data underlie this information? What are the systemic challenges caused by how schools report and present data? Our clearinghouse aims to illustrate answers to these questions and more.
Because students enroll in law school with many different career goals, we believe the first important thing for all students to know is what the statistics they are reading mean.
A single statistic representing a school's "employment" rate will include attorney positions, but may also include non-professional jobs, part-time jobs, temporary jobs, and self employment. Be wary when schools refuse to disaggregate employment rates. As with any advertising, a skeptical eye is both appropriate and critical. Especially today, as law schools face immense critical pressure to be transparent, declining to disclose material information deserves zero deference.
When looking at salary information, pay close attention to how many students responded to the salary portion of the survey. Low response rates render salary information virtually useless.
Finally, consider how and when a school's graduates find work. All law schools collect data about whether jobs were obtained before graduation, after graduation, or after passing the bar. All schools also collect data about the source of jobs, such as Fall OCI or going back to a pre-law school employer.
Information overload can be a real problem. For this reason, we've tried to make the employment data we've collected accessible and useful. We've also demonstrated where holes in the data exist.
As you examine the employment data and information here, keep an eye on the quality of disclosure as well as the quality of outcomes. Some schools are very transparent, but will not meet your individual career objectives. Other schools are not transparent at all, but may meet your objectives. Regardless, law school is a serious investment of your time and money. Don't commit without knowing what you're getting into.
Although this is the most comprehensive employment information ever compiled and publicly shared, there remains a great deal of opacity in law school advertising. If your school (or a school you are considering attending) has not made the report it receives from NALP public, please contact its administration and ask them to do so. Publishing the NALP report requires no more than scanning the document, uploading it to the school website, and posting a link alongside the other employment data. (NALP is even willing to re-send the reports to schools electronically.) If you are not comfortable going straight to the dean of the law school, consider discussing this with your professors or SBA representatives who may be willing to advocate for more transparency.
It is irresponsible and unethical for law schools to exploit informational asymmetries. Withholding such valuable information from prospective students is an act more appropriate for an adversarial process—something that the law school application process is not. Rather, schools must treat students as partners in the academic community and provide them the tools and information necessary to making informed decisions.
Please contact us if you have any questions about obtaining more information, or if a law school does respond to your request for greater transparency.
Through lots of work. This is the most comprehensive collection of employment data ever compiled and published on a school-by-school basis. To create it, we collected and reconciled data from four sources: the ABA, U.S. News, school websites, and school NALP reports.
The reconciliation process was the most challenging part. Because the ABA, U.S. News, and NALP are all on different reporting deadlines, and schools have the ability to update their websites whenever they please, the data do not fit into one perfectly cohesive picture. We reconciled incompatible data as fairly as possible, resolving conflicts in favor of the more comprehensive dataset. (E.g., we usually give preference to the data provided by schools in NALP reports.) In no case were there more than a few percentage points difference, usually spread out across multiple data categories.
It is also worth noting that we didn't use school websites when data were incoherent or part of misleading categories, e.g., combining categories like bar passage required and J.D. Preferred.
Key Stats: The key statistics are those we believe to be most sought after by prospective students. It includes straight calculations, such as the full-time legal employment rate and federal clerkship rate, as well as proprietary scores, such as the Employment Score and Under-Employment Score.
The Employment Score is the percentage of students finding the type of jobs typically desired by law students. We count only jobs that require bar passage, while excluding short-term firm jobs and self-employed solo practitioners.
The Under-Employment Score is the percentage of students with employment outcomes typically considered highly undesirable or that demonstrate that the particular J.D. was not sufficient to gain the graduate's preferred employment. This figure includes all part-time jobs, all non-professional positions, graduates who are pursuing another degree, and the unemployed.
Job Characteristics: These statistics focus on what makes jobs differ, other than salary. The data available by school vary, but in the best case scenario there's information about the employer, location, job duration (long- or short-term), job hours (full- or part-time), job source, job offer timing, credentials required to get the job, as well as whether the school employed its own graduates through short- or long-term programs. Unfortunately, figures demonstrating the overlap between these categories are rare.
Salary: For many schools, we provide salary information (a) across the entire class and (b) by employment sector. For other schools, we provide salary data by credentials, region, and employer type. The key to understanding these (and any) salary statistics is knowing the response rate for a given statistical category. Not only does a higher response rate mean that the salary is more representative, but it also serves as a rough proxy for relatively desirable outcomes.
Report Reproductions: For each school, we reproduce the school's ABA placement summary and NALP report. When possible, we have used a school's actual NALP report. However, only about 1 in 4 schools has chosen to make their NALP reports public. For schools that do not publish their NALP reports we have created a report in the same format, containing as much data as we could fill in. Sections that are shown in dark gray represent data the school possesses in its NALP report but has not shared.