Visualizing legal employment outcomes in California in 2019

This is the eighth and last in a series of visualizations on legal employment outcomes for the Class of 2019. Following posts on outcomes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Illinois, Florida, DC-Virginia-Maryland, and New York, here is a visualization for legal employment outcomes of graduates of California law schools for the Class of 2019. (More about the methodology is available at the Pennsylvania post.) Last year's California post is here.

Please note, of course, that “J.D.-advantage” jobs may differ significantly from school to school, which may alter how one views the “overall” rate. (USNWR treats them as equivalent, but there are good reasons to think they may not be equivalent; and here, there are significant disparities among some schools and their J.D.-advantage placement.) And recall that I sort the table below to include school-funded positions, while the chart only includes unfunded positions. (It’s a reason I try to display the information in different ways!)

In some ways, California’s gains have come as three law schools have closed or been removed from ABA-accredited status. The removal of two schools from last year alone would have bumped the overall employment rate up in 2018 from 74.9% to 77.3%. But overall, bar passage-required jobs increased by about 100 among California’s 18 law schools reported below. J.D.-advantage jobs increased slightly, unlike most other regions of the country, and law school-funded positions fell overall. Total employment stood at 79.4%, another improvement.

I think this will be my last year doing these visualizations. They are a fair amount of work. And this year in particular there has been essentially no interest in the employment outcomes of these regions. If that’s the case, I’ll move on to other areas for blogging.

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

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Peer Score	School	2019	YoY%	BPR	JDA	LSF	Grads	2018	BPR	JDA	LSF	Grads
4.5	University of California-Berkeley	97.0%	1.2	296	6	16	328	95.8%	276	4	16	309
4.1	University of California-Los Angeles	95.6%	3.1	279	11	13	317	92.5%	257	19	20	320
4.8	Stanford University	95.1%	-1.8	156	9	8	182	96.9%	165	12	10	193
3.6	University of Southern California	90.6%	3.3	191	11	1	224	87.3%	162	11	6	205
3.4	University of California-Davis	88.3%	1.9	121	7	8	154	86.4%	135	8	10	177
3.5	University of California-Irvine	86.5%	-0.3	110	5	7	141	86.8%	85	3	11	114
2.7	Pepperdine University	83.7%	5.1	135	14	0	178	78.6%	114	18	0	168
2.7	Loyola Law School-Los Angeles	81.6%	-4.1	216	41	5	321	85.7%	213	24	3	280
3.1	University of California-Hastings	79.6%	0.9	209	25	12	309	78.7%	178	28	12	277
1.9	McGeorge School of Law	76.5%	12.6	94	23	0	153	63.9%	66	19	0	133
1.9	Chapman University	74.9%	1.0	92	36	0	171	73.9%	75	24	0	134
2.7	University of San Diego	74.3%	2.0	123	13	0	183	72.3%	172	19	0	264
2.5	Santa Clara University	67.8%	-0.9	128	15	0	211	68.7%	127	22	0	217
1.9	Southwestern Law School	64.5%	1.3	92	37	0	200	63.2%	128	39	1	266
1.5	California Western School of Law	61.8%	0.7	95	36	0	212	61.1%	86	32	0	193
1.1	Western State College of Law	57.5%	0.5	41	20	0	106	57.0%	49	8	0	100
1.5	Golden Gate University	50.5%	2.3	37	15	2	107	48.2%	27	11	2	83
1.9	University of San Francisco	49.6%	4.6	47	12	0	119	45.0%	49	26	1	169