Another Law Ranking Methodology Change
There is one change U.S. News will have to make to our law school ranking methodology because, for the second year in a row, the American Bar Association has changed the way it requires law schools to report their job-placement data. We will accordingly modify the way we compute the percentage of 2007 law school graduates employed at graduation (and nine months after).
All ABA-accredited law schools must fill out the 2008 ABA questionnaire, and—for our rankings—we ask these law schools to report those same data to us. On this year's questionnaire, when asking about the Feb. 15, 2008, job status of a law school's 2007 graduates, the ABA created two separate categories for those law school graduates who are not working: unemployed and seeking work or unemployed and not seeking work.
On last year's ABA questionnaire this distinction did not exist, so they were all counted as unemployed by U.S. News in the current (2009) law rankings. For the 2010 law rankings (to be published in the spring of '09), U.S. News will not count those graduates who are unemployed and not seeking work as part of our employment calculations. This is a return to how we did the employment rate calculations in the rankings from 1990 through 2008. This is also the same way the Department of Labor computes the national unemployment rate.
Will this make the employment statistics more accurate? We've talked to staffers at law school career offices who said it was unfair to count those who were unemployed and studying for their state bar as unemployed. Ditto for parents with young children or about to have a child. However, if law schools use this opportunity to include other students who truly don't belong in the unemployed and not seeking category as a way of boosting their employment rates, then it will make the data for the 2007 graduates less accurate than it was for the previous year's class when it was not possible to use that data manipulation.
In other words, the jury is still out.
Tags: employment | law school | rankings
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Reader Comments
More Refinement Needed
what about those schools that count law graduates working as baristas as "employed"? It is an absolute travesty that schools can get away with this. Hence, two things must happen:
1) "Employment" must specifically be defined as "law, law-related or corporate management/business in nature", i.e., for example, that even if a law grad decides to join the FBI, that job can count, but jobs taken at universities (except for teaching or serving as legal counsel in an area such as the athletic department) should not. If someone takes a job in the A & R Department at Arista Records, that job should count. If someone produces movies, that job (leaning more to the artistic side) should not count.
2) The ABA needs to lay down some stiff rules that prohibit the "gaming" of the rankings, with stiff consequences for doing so. The NCAA has a host of rules, some are ridiculous, but they have teeth in them and, for the most part, DO curb cheating. I believe the ABA needs to go that direction; it should dictate how certain questions regarding employment, LSAT scores, GPA's, etc, can and will be answered and what will and won't suffice for affirmative and negative answers.
This is a public interest issue, and what some schools are doing now borders on the same type of fraud committed on Wall Street when companies circumvent SEC rules and misreport quarterly earnings. As a prospective law student, I take my shopping very seriously (as an investor in a particular stock does), and I do not want to be lied to, as this affects the rest of my life.
Think this through...
Pardon me, I mean no disrespect - but this is an absolute mess. Prospective students need to know, especially in this terrible market, what percentage of all students in a graduating class are able to find employment.
Law schools are professional schools, and are attended *almost *exclusively for the purpose of obtaining some form employment after training - certainly within 9 months after training (whether it be practicing law, law teaching, or in business).
Sure - there can be a very small number of exceptions, but when you see a school that reports ridiculously high percentages of its graduates simply not seeking work, nine months after graduation and notwithstanding tens of thousands of dollars of debt - it can mean only one thing-that school's degree is not valued on the job market and its graduates are struggling.
This change will have the counterintuitive effect of rewarding those schools with dismal employment prospects by inflating their employment rates - thus improving their rank. Expect to see employed-percentages skyrocket all the way down to the fourth tier - this will make some awful law schools very happy. And how can there be any doubt at this point that schools will exploit this?
Take a look back at this post, and note the usual suspects: http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-who-and-why-of-strategic-emp9.html
Smaller than you think
Many students are employed before taking the bar, but they simply do not begin working until after taking it. It's only schools with miserable employment options in the first place that rely on a "passed the bar" line on the resume to make their students more palatable to prospective employers. Thus, schools incapable of employing students by graduation rely on an additional nine-month window of job hunting, plus the added incentive of "passed the bar" on the resume, to boost their employment data, but they're able to hide many students by defaulting them at graduation to "unemployed and studying for the bar."
As for parents or those with young children, again, the FMLA should protect them from being classified as "unemployed." Indeed, it is curious that one could spend three solid years in law school, working far more than 40 hours a week, but take "time off," indefinitely, apparently, for the temporary necessities of parenthood.
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