Visualizing legal employment outcomes in Texas in 2016

Following up on a series of posts last year, this is the first in a series visualizing employment outcomes of law school graduates from the Class of 2016. The U.S. News & World Report ("USNWR") rankings recently released, which include data for the Class of 2015, are already obsolete. The ABA will release the information soon, but individualized employment reports are available on schools' websites.

The USNWR prints the "employed" rate as "the percentage of all graduates who had a full-time job lasting at least a year for which bar passage was required or a J.D. degree was an advantage." But it does not give "full weight" in its internal ranking metric to jobs that were funded by the law school. USNWR gives other positions lower weight, but these positions are not included in the ranking tables. And while it includes J.D. advantage positions, there remain disputes about whether those positions are actually as valuable. (Some have further critiqued solo practitioners being included in the bar passage required statistics.)

The top chart is sorted by non-school-funded jobs (or "full weight" positions). The visualization breaks out full-time, long-term, bar passage required positions (not funded by the school); full-time, long term, J.D.-advantage positions (not funded by the school); school funded positions (full-time, long-term, bar passage required or J.D.-advantage positions); and all other outcomes. I included a breakdown in the visualization slightly distinguishing bar passage required positions from J.D.-advantage positions, even though both are included in "full weight" for USNWR purposes (and I still sort the chart by "full weight" positions).

The table below the chart breaks down the raw data values for the Classes of 2015 and 2016, with relative overall changes year-over-year, and is sorted by total placement (as USNWR prints). The columns beside each year break out the three categories in the total placement: FTLT unfunded bar passage required ("BPR"), FTLT unfunded J.D. advantage ("JDA"), and FTLT law school funded BPR & JDA positions ("LSF").

The first state is Texas (last year's visualization here). Total jobs in these unfunded bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage positions improved, from 1445 in 2015 to 1551 in 2016, even as the total graduates actually increased slightly in the state. The overall employment rate was 74.1% (including a few funded positions), up from 70.5% last year. (More granular data is available at each school's website.) Some of the improvement may be attributable to improved bar passage rates last July.

As always, if I made a mistake, please feel free to email me or comment; I confess there are always risks in data translation, and I am happy to make corrections.

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Peer Score	School	2016	YoY%	BPR	JDA	LSF	2015	BPR	JDA	LSF
4.1	University of Texas-Austin	85.6%	1.2	289	18	3	84.5%	268	20	11
2.6	Southern Methodist University	81.6%	-2.1	176	15	0	83.7%	183	17	0
2.4	Baylor University	80.4%	-7.6	122	4	1	88.0%	88	5	2
2.7	University of Houston	79.6%	1.4	162	29	0	78.2%	129	42	1
1.9	Texas Tech University	76.4%	2.9	125	14	0	73.5%	138	17	0
1.6	St. Mary's University	68.9%	7.3	144	18	2	61.6%	113	19	1
2.2	Texas A&M University	68.3%	0.5	121	19	0	67.8%	137	17	0
1.6	South Texas College of Law Houston	62.2%	8.0	175	31	0	54.2%	164	25	1
1.5	Texas Southern University	58.9%	16.0	79	10	0	42.9%	52	11	0