Visualizing legal employment outcomes in Pennsylvania in 2019

Following up on a series of posts last year (and previous years), this is the first in a series visualizing employment outcomes of law school graduates from the Class of 2019. The U.S. News & World Report ("USNWR") rankings recently released include data for the Class of 2018, which 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 "all jobs, excluding positions funded by the law school or university that are full-time and long-term and for which a J.D. and bar passage are necessary or advantageous." It does not give "full weight" in its metrics 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 as bar passage required jobs. (Some have also critiqued sole practitioners being included in the bar passage required statistics.) Nonetheless, as a top-level category, I looked at these “full weight” positions.

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 thoug 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 2018 and 2019, with relative overall changes year-over-year. Here, I used the employment rate including school-funded positions, which USNWR used to print but no longer does; nevertheless, because there are good-faith disputes, I think, about the value of school-funded positions, I split the difference—I excluded them in the sorting of the bar graphs, and included them comparatively in the tables. 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"). This year, I also added the total graduates. (My visualization is limited because the bar widths for each school are the same, even though schools vary greatly in size, and that means raw placement might be more impressive considering class size.)

Let me finally add that there are many other, and probably better, ways of looking at this data, including qualitative assessment of the types of jobs in each category. This is only a high-level look at eight select regions and the state of the entry-level legal employment market.

The first state is Pennsylvania (last year's visualization here). There were 1316 statewide graduates, a 6% increase over last year's class. The total placement rate among the graduates was over 90% (including a few school-funded jobs), a big jump over last year’s 82% despite a larger graduating class. Placement in bar passage required jobs jumped from 939 to 1082.

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.

UPDATE: Some figures incorrectly included both bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage jobs when they should have been separate categories. Those figures and the table below have been updated.

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Peer Score	School	2019	YoY%	BPR	JDA	LSF	Grads	2018	BPR	JDA	LSF	Grads
4.4	University of Pennsylvania	97.6%	-0.3	229	8	7	250	97.9%	216	12	10	243
2.5	Villanova University	93.8%	5.6	181	17	0	211	88.2%	127	15	0	161
2.2	Pennsylvania State - Dickinson Law	91.2%	3.9	45	7	0	57	87.3%	51	4	0	63
2.7	Temple University	90.7%	7.5	174	22	0	216	83.3%	161	13	0	209
2.2	Drexel University	88.8%	5.1	119	11	0	134	83.7%	95	13	0	129
1.8	Duquesne University	86.2%	6.2	78	16	0	109	80.0%	86	13	0	120
2.7	University of Pittsburgh	85.8%	14.0	89	14	0	120	71.9%	85	12	0	135
1.5	Widener Commonwealth	85.5%	23.3	60	5	0	76	62.3%	32	1	0	53
2.4	Penn State Law	80.4%	0.4	107	8	0	143	80.0%	86	13	1	125