Visualizing legal employment outcomes in California in 2016

This is the fourth in a series of visualizations on legal employment outcomes for the Class of 2016. Following posts on outcomes in Texas, New York, and Illinois, here is a visualization for legal employment outcomes of graduates of California law schools for the Class of 2016. (More about the methodology is available at the Texas post.)

Outcomes generally improved with some important caveats. Total graduates declined nearly 10% year over year, from 4403 in the Class of 2015 to 4081 in the Class of 2016. That resulted in marginal improvements in employment outcomes: 64.3% in unfunded full-time, long-term, bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage positions, up from 63.8%. But total jobs in these positions declined, from 2807 to 2624, likely attributable in part to challenging bar passage rates (and perhaps because of conditions relating to California's job market).

Law school-funded positions experienced a small resurgence, from 107 positions last year (2.4% of graduates) to 118 positions (2.9% of graduates). (Please recall from the methodology that the bar chart is sorted by full-weight positions, which excludes school-funded positions, while the table below that is sorted by total employment as USNWR prints, which includes school-funded positions.)

As always, please notify me of any corrections or errata.

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Peer Score	School	2016	YoY%	BPR	JDA	LSF	2015	BPR	JDA	LSF
4.4	University of California-Berkeley	94.5%	3.5	278	11	23	91.0%	237	5	11
4.8	Stanford University	94.0%	1.7	164	4	4	92.3%	166	8	6
3.9	University of California-Los Angeles	90.8%	-0.5	239	18	30	91.3%	247	25	34
3.3	University of California-Irvine	85.6%	1.0	84	3	14	84.5%	71	2	20
3.5	University of Southern California	85.5%	5.2	140	9	22	80.3%	155	9	7
3.4	University of California-Davis	81.2%	3.9	87	11	14	77.3%	125	9	9
2.6	Loyola Law School-Los Angeles	73.6%	-0.7	221	36	5	74.3%	227	42	3
3.1	University of California-Hastings	67.0%	0.1	154	46	1	66.9%	174	28	4
2.6	Pepperdine University	65.7%	1.8	98	19	2	64.0%	104	21	1
1.6	California Western School of Law	63.1%	4.6	82	29	0	58.5%	90	41	0
2.4	Santa Clara University	61.4%	7.5	102	30	0	53.9%	86	32	0
1.9	Chapman University	60.8%	-3.6	78	18	0	64.4%	62	23	0
2.7	University of San Diego	57.8%	-4.6	102	24	0	62.3%	138	16	0
1.9	McGeorge School of Law	56.8%	-2.8	56	23	0	59.6%	105	31	0
1.9	Southwestern Law School	54.5%	6.3	125	48	2	48.2%	115	35	0
2.0	University of San Francisco	47.1%	-4.1	46	20	0	51.2%	60	22	3
1.1	Western State College of Law	45.1%	-5.9	29	12	0	50.9%	46	10	0
1.6	Golden Gate University	41.1%	-0.1	30	15	1	41.1%	58	7	0
1.4	Whittier Law School	39.1%	-9.9	38	12	0	48.9%	30	30	9
1.3	Thomas Jefferson School of Law	31.9%	-7.5	46	21	0	39.4%	59	36	0
1.2	University of La Verne	31.4%	-19.9	7	9	0	51.3%	16	4	0