LST Reports Updated

May 11th, 2017 / By Kyle McEntee

As Debby pointed out, the ABA just released the latest employment statistics. Each school’s report is on the ABA website and their own website, but it’s not easy to compare schools in a giant spreadsheet, either with each other or year over year. I just updated the LST Reports with all the new data. These comparisons are easy using our tools.

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2016 Employment Outcomes

May 11th, 2017 / By Deborah J. Merritt

The ABA has posted its report on employment outcomes for the Class of 2016, along with two school-by-school spreadsheets. One of the spreadsheets tracks law school funded jobs that require bar passage; the other details other employment outcomes. My initial take-aways are:

• Nationwide, the size of the graduating class fell 7.15%.
• That decline allowed schools to register a slight increase in the percentage of graduates employed in the key category of full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar admission. That percentage rose from 59.2% to 61.8%.
• The number of graduates employed in those job categories, however, fell from 23,687 for the Class of 2015 to 22,930 for the Class of 2016. That decline (3.1%) continues a trend noted last year, although the decline is smaller this year.
• The number of students taking part-time JD Advantage jobs rose markedly–by 16.3% in the long-term category and 72.8% in the short-term one. The overall numbers are small compared to other job categories, but the jumps are noticeable.
• The percentage of graduates known to be unemployed and seeking jobs declined from 9.7% to 8.8%. Those figures, however, must be read in connection with an increase in the percentage of graduates for whom employment status was unknown. If we assume that just a third of the latter graduates were unemployed and seeking work (a conservative estimate), then 10.04% of the Class of 2016 was still unemployed and seeking work ten months after graduation.

Overall, the report suggests continued weakness in the entry-level job market for law graduates. The decline in the absolute number of graduates holding full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar admission is worrisome–especially since we take that measure a full 10 months after graduation. Even more troubling is the fact that 10% of the nation’s law graduates are unemployed and seeking work a full ten months after graduation.

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The Crisis That Wouldn’t End

May 14th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

The crisis in legal education was supposed to be over by now. The recession, after all, ended in June 2009. Even allowing for a slow recovery, legal educators predicted that JD hiring would be robust by this point. When applications fell and schools cut class sizes, educators hoped for a recovery bonus: An improved job market, combined with smaller graduating classes, would boost placement rates and attract applicants back to law school. Meanwhile, some projected, the economy would suffer a lawyer shortage.

Things haven’t worked out that way. As the ABA employment report for the Class of 2015 shows, JD employment remains depressed–and there is some evidence of a downward trend. In this post, I explain why law schools need to take this news very seriously.

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» Read the full text for The Crisis That Wouldn’t End

2015 Employment: Fixing the Fruit Salad

May 6th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

As promised, I explain here a quirk in the ABA’s employment report for the Class of 2015. That report shows that 62.4% of the 2015 graduates obtained jobs that require bar admission (“lawyering” jobs), while just 59.2% of the graduates secured lawyering jobs that were also full-time and long-term (i.e., expected to last at least one year).

Those percentages are sobering in themselves, but they are even more worrisome when compared to percentages for the Class of 2014. For the latter class, the ABA reports that 64.1% of graduates obtained lawyering jobs, with 59.9% of the graduates landing full-time, long-term jobs in that category. The percentage of graduates securing lawyering jobs, in other words, seems to have declined.

Things are bad, but not quite that bad. Here’s where the data quirk comes in.

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» Read the full text for 2015 Employment: Fixing the Fruit Salad

Class of 2015 Employment: How Bad Is It?

May 3rd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

After a few data glitches, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has released its report on employment outcomes for the Class of 2015. The Section’s scorecard, comparing the Class of 2015 to the Class of 2014, appears here.

The numbers are pretty sobering: Absolute numbers declined in every employment category. Law firms, for example, hired 1,574 fewer graduates than they did in 2014. That’s a dismaying decrease of 8.8%. Government employers showed similar retrenchment: They too hired 8.8% fewer graduates in 2015.

Graduating class size also fell 8.8% between 2014 and 2015, which shored up the percentage of 2015 graduates obtaining jobs. Law schools, however, did not gain much ground in placing a higher percentage of their graduates. Smaller classes merely kept pace with a contracting job market.

I will have more details tomorrow, including an explanation for why the percentage declines in the top ten lines of the table are overstated. The news on those lines, which detail jobs requiring bar passage and those for which a JD is considered an advantage, is disheartening–but not quite as bad as the reported percentages suggest. The ABA changed its reporting methods between 2014 and 2015, so those comparisons match pineapples to prunes–a fruit salad you would never want to serve.

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Data Difficulties

May 3rd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

*Update: For those of you who can’t sleep until the data match, Jerry Organ has figured out the discrepancy described below. The spreadsheet on the ABA site is too comprehensive: It includes Hamline, William Mitchell, and Mitchell/Hamline as separate (and duplicative) entries. Eliminate the entries for the first two schools, while retaining the combined Mitchell/Hamline, and the figures on the spreadsheet match the scorecard. Data deliverance!

For the last several years, the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has collected increasingly helpful data about employment outcomes for law school graduates. Data about individual schools, as well as a spreadsheet combining all data, are displayed at this website. The Section also posts a “scorecard” summarizing key statistics for the graduating class; those scorecards appear here.

Data for the Class of 2015 are now available, and both bloggers and mainstream media have started to report on those numbers. Unfortunately, however, the data appear to be in flux. The ABA posted several versions of the spreadsheet yesterday, as it worked to include all schools. The current spreadsheet appears comprehensive, but the totals do not match those appearing on the scorecard.

So, if you see conflicting numbers in the press, don’t be confused. Several professors have been in touch with the ABA Section, and we will analyze the data further once we are sure that it is in final form. Meanwhile, no excuse for not grading exams….

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ABA Employment Stats: Class of 2015

May 2nd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

Updated at 8:30 p.m. to reflect several changes*

The ABA has just released employment statistics for the Class of 2015. As Jerry Organ speculated over the weekend, the report is decidedly mixed. The percentage of graduates holding full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage edged up slightly, from 59.9% in 2014 to 60.3% in 2015.

This small increase, however, resulted from the drop in the number of graduates–rather than from any increase in available jobs. Graduates fell 9.2% between the two years, from 43,832 in 2014 to 39,817 in 2015. The actual number of FTLT bar-required jobs also fell, from 26,248 in 2014 to 23,993 in 2015. That’s a hefty decline of 2,255 jobs or 8.6%.

These figures encompass all ABA-accredited law schools, including the three Puerto Rico schools. For this initial comparison, I also counted school-funded jobs. In later analyses, I will break those out.

I will have updates on these figures as I work more with the ABA spreadsheet. The results, however, are not the good news that law schools were hoping to hear. Nor are prospective students likely to greet these figures as heralding a surge in the legal employment market. This summer would be a good time to reflect further on challenges and opportunities for law schools; I hope to contribute to that discussion.

* This year’s ABA spreadsheet includes several hidden columns, which affected some of my earlier calculations. The gist hasn’t changed, but the numbers have shifted slightly.

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