Visualizing legal employment outcomes in Pennsylvania in 2016
This is the seventh in a series of visualizations on legal employment outcomes for the Class of 2016. Following posts on outcomes in Texas, New York, Illinois, California, Florida, and Ohio, here is a visualization for legal employment outcomes of graduates of Pennsylvania law schools for the Class of 2016. (More about the methodology is available at the Texas post.)
Pennsylvania is new to my series of visualizations. Total jobs in these unfunded bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage positions declined somewhat, from 1077 to 1036. There were about 250 fewer graduates, from 1414 to 1260. As a result of the significant decline in enrollment, overall prospects for graduates improved: the overall employment rate was 82.7% (including all funded positions), up from 76.2% last year.
It's worth noting that some of these schools are quite small: Penn State Dickinson had just 34 graduates; Penn State Law (in State College) had 95; Widener had just 53. The visualization below can look somewhat deceiving. Ideally, the width of the bars would be variable based on the total number of graduates, (larger classes would have thicker bars to display the total grads they placed), but that apparently is not readily available in Excel. I'll look into improving the display for next year. Blogging is constantly a work in progress!
As always, please notify me of any corrections or errata.