Perhaps the most valuable legal education job in the new USNWR rankings landscape? Career development
After the USNWR law school rankings shakeup earlier this year, I pointed out that spending money on law professors would have less influence than in years past. So, where might there be incentives to spend more money?
Undoubtedly, career services and career development offices.
Now, I haven’t followed this, so I cannot possibly even know anecdotally whether this is the case, but it would be worth considering whether there are more career development personnel being hired at schools (to improve the counselor:student ratio), whether different strategies are being employed (e.g., relationship between “placement” and “development,” targeting particular types of jobs for graduates, reconsidering categories of jobs for reporting purposes, reexamination of school-funded positions, etc.), or whether those personnel are being paid more to retain successful career counselors.
But as the methodology has changed, tiny changes in employment outcomes can yield dramatically different law school rankings. Employment outcomes overwhelm every other category. Indeed, admissions is less important and outcomes like employment are dramatically more important, so much so that one might rethink admissions in light of employment more than median LSAT and UPGA scores (with lots of promise and lots of peril).
So let’s take a look at what to expect in the next USNWR law school rankings as it relates to employment outcomes.
Here are the ten schools (in alphabetical order) I project to be in or near the top 10 in employment outcomes. I show three categories of jobs: “full weight jobs,” all other jobs, and unemployed/unknown. (As an aside, some law school advertise their “full weight” employment of graduates, which is a meaningless term in the real world and refers exclusively to categories that USNWR gives “full weight” in its rankings methodology.)
This is what USNWR sees. Full weight, a variety of categories of jobs it gives lesser weight to, and unemployed. Among the top ten, you’ll see the profiles look very similar. “Full weight” jobs are between 97.8% (SMU) to 99.4% (Texas A&M). Unemployed ranges from 0% (Washington University in St. Louis) to 1.1% (Northwestern). These are highly efficient outputs for law schools.
But let’s look under the hood. Not all of these law schools get to what USNWR sees the same way. To start, USNWR includes five categories in its “full weight” jobs: full-time, long-term bar passage required jobs; BPR jobs funded by law schools; full-time, long-term, JD advantage jobs; JDA jobs funded by law schools; and students pursuing an advanced degree. Schools get there in different ways.
Schools took varying routes to get where USNWR sees them. Yale, for instance, has 6% of its grads in school-funded bar passage-required jobs, and another 6% in school-funded JD advantage jobs. The rest of the schools put between 0% and 3% of grads in school-funded bar passage-required jobs; school-funded JD advantage jobs are negligible at these other schools. Likewise, JD advantage jobs vary dramatically, from nearly zero (Virginia) to 11% (Texas A&M). Career development offices take different paths to get to “full weight” employment. (Relatively few were pursuing an advanced degree anywhere.)
One more. ABA data reveals rich classifications of jobs by several employment categories. I created six cohorts of jobs. The first are “biglaw” jobs, those at firms with 101 or more attorneys. Then, “federal clerks.” Next, “mid law” jobs, firms with 26 to 100 attorneys. Then “state clerks.” Next, “small law,” sole practitioners or those at firms with 25 or fewer attorneys. Finally, “public interest” jobs. All other job categories (regardless of duration or funding) were in a final bucket. Again, we can see that schools get to “full weight” in different ways.
Not just different ways, but pretty dramatically different ways. Placement into “Biglaw” ranged from 12% (Texas A&M) to 71% (Northwestern). Federal clerkship placement ranged from 4% (Columbia) to 24% (Yale). ”Midlaw” was a significant category for Texas A&M (12%), SMU (9%), and Washington University (8%). State clerkships were most significant at Duke (5%). “Small law” was a major category for Texas A&M (33%) and SMU (30%). Yale dominates public interest placement here (20%). Jobs that don’t fit any of these six cohorts (e.g., business, government, education, etc.) were significant at Texas A&M (30%), Washington University (22%), SMU (19%), and Yale (15%).
In short, to get to the “top ten” of “full weight” jobs, schools have taken wildly divergent approaches in achieving results. Career development offices have significantly different strategies for the school, the region, the student body, whatever one wants to think about it.
This isn’t to say that some categories of jobs are or are not better or worse, although I’m sure readers have their own thoughts. But it’s to say that USNWR rankings do not distinguish among them. And if they do not, the route to get there can be flexible and varied. This is just one snapshot into how varied those outcomes can be that get to the same USNWR end.