Visualizing legal employment outcomes in California in 2015

Following up on my posts about employment outcomes in New York and in DC-Maryland-Virginia, and as I did last year with California, here are the legal employment outcomes in California for the Class of 2015.

Graduating classes continue to shrink, from 5185 in the Class of 2013, to 4731 in the Class of 2014, to 4403 in the Class of 2015.

But total job placement remains flat. There were 2807 unfunded, "full-weight" positions (full-time, long-term, bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage) for the Class of 2015, essentially unchanged from the 2849 from last year. We've seen a few years in a row where total positions among California law schools hover between 2800 and 2900. The shrinking graduating class, however, helped to improve outcomes yet again--the placement rate in these full-weight rose from 60.2% to 63.8%.

There was a significant drop-off in school funded positions, from 145 to 107. The University of Southern California dropped from 33 to 7 such positions; UC-Davis from 19 to 9; and Loyola-Los Angeles from 10 to 3. Bucking the trend, UC-Irvine increased from 13 to 20 such positions, and Whittier from 0 to 9.

As usual, the chart is sorted by the "full-weight" positions, designating both full-time, long-term, bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage positions. There are additional designations for school-funded positions in these areas, and other outcomes. The table below is sorted by the combined bar passage-required, J.D.-advantage, and law school-funded positions (as printed in U.S. News & World Reports), with raw figures and a year-over-year comparison beside.

As usual, please notify me of any errors.

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Peer Score	School	2015	YoY%	BPR	JDA	LSF	2014	BPR	JDA	LSF
4.8	Stanford University	92.3%	-1.3	166	8	6	93.6%	159	5	10
3.9	University of California-Los Angeles	91.3%	3.8	247	25	34	87.5%	240	22	32
4.5	University of California-Berkeley	91.0%	-4.5	237	5	11	95.5%	245	9	20
3.2	University of California-Irvine	84.5%	-0.4	71	2	20	84.9%	59	10	13
3.4	University of Southern California	80.3%	-5.4	155	9	7	85.7%	141	12	33
3.3	University of California-Davis	77.3%	-4.4	125	9	9	81.7%	113	7	19
2.6	Loyola Law School-Los Angeles	74.3%	3.3	227	42	3	71.0%	231	41	10
3.1	University of California-Hastings	66.9%	9.2	174	28	4	57.7%	205	26	2
1.8	Chapman University	64.4%	9.3	62	23	0	55.1%	66	10	0
2.6	Pepperdine University	64.0%	4.4	104	21	1	59.6%	97	20	1
2.6	University of San Diego	62.3%	4.2	138	16	0	58.1%	128	27	1
1.8	McGeorge School of Law	59.6%	0.2	105	31	0	59.4%	84	26	1
1.5	California Western School of Law	58.5%	1.4	90	41	0	57.1%	106	18	0
2.4	Santa Clara University	53.9%	6.0	86	32	0	47.9%	93	32	0
nr	University of La Verne	51.3%	1.3	16	4	0	50.0%	20	2	0
2.0	University of San Francisco	51.2%	4.5	60	22	3	46.7%	65	27	0
1.1	Western State College of Law	50.9%	5.6	46	10	0	45.3%	49	18	0
1.3	Whittier Law School	48.9%	5.1	30	30	9	43.8%	53	32	0
1.8	Southwestern Law School	48.2%	-7.7	115	35	0	55.9%	121	53	1
1.6	Golden Gate University	41.1%	9.4	58	7	0	31.7%	45	11	2
1.2	Thomas Jefferson School of Law	39.4%	-1.6	59	36	0	41.0%	87	33	0