Visualizing legal employment outcomes in California in 2017

This is the eighth and last in a series of visualizations on legal employment outcomes for the Class of 2017. Following posts on outcomes in Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, Illinois, Ohio, and DC-Maryland-Virginia, here is a visualization for legal employment outcomes of graduates of California law schools for the Class of 2017. (More about the methodology is available at the Florida post.) Last year's California post is here.

While most markets remained fairly stagnant, California saw a marked rise year-over-year. total graduates dropped to 3910, a slight decline from 4081 in 2016 but a big decline from the 4403 in 2015 and 4731 in 2014. But the overall unfunded placement rate soared from 64.3% to 69.9%. That came from an increase in in bar passage-required jobs, from 2206 to 2397, as J.D.-advantage placement dropped.

Law school-funded positions also tapered off, from 118 positions (2.9% of graduates) last year to 82 (2.1%) this year. (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	2017	YoY%	BPR	JDA	LSF	2016	BPR	JDA	LSF
4.4	University of California-Berkeley	94.8%	0.2	269	6	14	94.5%	278	11	23
4.8	Stanford University	93.9%	-0.1	163	15	7	94.0%	164	4	4
3.9	University of California-Los Angeles	92.5%	1.6	283	17	31	90.8%	239	18	30
3.5	University of Southern California	90.0%	4.5	179	4	5	85.5%	140	9	22
3.3	University of California-Irvine	86.5%	0.9	72	4	7	85.6%	84	3	14
3.4	University of California-Davis	84.4%	3.3	119	10	12	81.2%	87	11	14
2.6	Loyola Law School-Los Angeles	79.6%	6.0	204	31	3	73.6%	221	36	5
2.6	Pepperdine University	75.8%	10.0	134	34	1	65.7%	98	19	2
1.9	Chapman University	68.2%	7.5	81	20	0	60.8%	78	18	0
2.6	University of San Diego	67.6%	9.8	121	17	0	57.8%	102	24	0
3.0	University of California-Hastings	67.5%	0.5	166	22	1	67.0%	154	46	1
1.6	California Western School of Law	64.5%	1.4	106	21	0	63.1%	82	29	0
2.4	Santa Clara University	64.0%	2.6	77	10	0	61.4%	102	30	0
2.0	University of San Francisco	60.8%	13.6	75	18	0	47.1%	46	20	0
1.9	McGeorge School of Law	59.1%	2.3	62	16	0	56.8%	56	23	0
1.8	Southwestern Law School	58.6%	4.1	124	43	0	54.5%	125	48	2
1.1	Western State College of Law	52.1%	7.0	32	6	0	45.1%	29	12	0
1.5	Golden Gate University	51.7%	10.7	33	11	1	41.1%	30	15	1
nr	Whittier Law School	39.6%	0.5	44	15	0	39.1%	38	12	0
1.2	University of La Verne	36.8%	5.5	12	2	0	31.4%	7	9	0
nr	Thomas Jefferson School of Law	32.2%	0.3	41	15	0	31.9%	46	21	0