Which law schools saw the biggest changes in employment placement after USNWR gave "full weight" to new categories of jobs?
Back in 2016, I noted how a lot of law school-funded positions “dried up” once USNWR stopped giving those jobs “full weight” in its law school rankings. Yes, correlation does not equal causation. And yes, there were other contributing causes (e.g., changes in how the ABA required reporting of such positions). But the trend was stark and the timing noteworthy.
The trend is likewise stark, at least in one category.
USNWR is now giving weight to full-time, long-term (1 year or longer) bar passage-required and J.D. advantage jobs funded by law schools. It is also giving weight to those enrolled full time in a graduate degree program.
In two categories, graduate degree and bar passage-required, there were not significant variances from previous years. For bar passage-required jobs, that is perhaps understandable. Such positions have hovered between 200 and 300 for several years (239 last year, 212 the year before), and they are really driven by a handful of schools that can sustain a kind of “bridge” program for students interest in public interest work.
For graduate degree, it actually hit an all-time low since reporting began—just 344, down from 375 last year, and down from the record 1231 for the Class of 2010. I had thought this might be a tempting position for schools to press students into to give them “full weight” positions for USNWR purposes. Not so.
But the one category that did stand out was J.D. advantage jobs funded by the school. Here, again, we are in an incredible small category of jobs—just 97 for the Class of 2023, only one quarter of one percent of all jobs. (And again, it’s worth noting, even though these three categories combine for less than 700 graduates among 35,000 graduates, it was one of the leading charges of the pro-”boycott” law schools.) But there is a marked uptick, returning to a pre-2015 high.
We also know that not all these jobs are randomly distributed. They can be concentrated at some schools. We can also try to identify if some schools saw a marked rise in these three categories of jobs last year. But of course, there can be volatility from year to year in any particular category.
I looked at the 2020, 2021, and 2022 average of law schools’ output into these three categories of previously-lesser weight employment outcomes. I then compared to see how the placement in the Class of 2023 compared to the previous three-year average in these combined categories. The top 15 schools are listed below.
| Employment placement in full time, long term, bar passage required or JD advantage jobs funded by the school or in graduate degree programs | |||
| SchoolName | 2020-2022 avg | 2023 | Delta |
| PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY | 2.2% | 8.2% | 6.0 |
| WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY | 0.6% | 4.8% | 4.2 |
| CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA | 0.0% | 3.7% | 3.7 |
| ARKANSAS, LITTLE ROCK, UNIVERSITY OF | 2.2% | 5.7% | 3.5 |
| YALE UNIVERSITY | 11.7% | 15.2% | 3.4 |
| WASHBURN UNIVERSITY | 0.0% | 3.3% | 3.3 |
| GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY | 1.2% | 4.3% | 3.1 |
| SOUTH DAKOTA, UNIVERSITY OF | 0.4% | 3.4% | 3.0 |
| CORNELL UNIVERSITY | 1.9% | 4.6% | 2.7 |
| DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY | 0.3% | 2.9% | 2.7 |
| ARKANSAS, FAYETTEVILLE, UNIVERSITY OF | 3.3% | 5.9% | 2.6 |
| MISSISSIPPI, UNIVERSITY OF | 2.5% | 5.0% | 2.4 |
| LIBERTY UNIVERSITY | 1.0% | 3.3% | 2.3 |
| UNIVERSITY OF BUFFALO-SUNY | 0.3% | 2.5% | 2.3 |
| WISCONSIN, UNIVERSITY OF | 1.2% | 3.5% | 2.3 |
As I wrote back in 2016, correlation is not causation, and there are of course confounding variables and factors in place at any given institution. But there’s no question the change in “full weight” categories by USNWR comes at a time when some schools are undergoing material changes to their typical employment outcomes in categories that previously did not receive “full weight” but now do. And while many of these figures appear to be small changes, we know that very small changes in the new methodology can yield big differences: “By shifting about 3 percentage points of a class from “unemployed” to a “full weight” job (in a school of 200, that’s 6 students), a school can move from being ranked about 100 in that category to 50.” (Note: this effect is somewhat diluted as it is a two-year employment average, but if the same thing happens year over year, the effects will remain the same.)
As the law firm hiring market slows down, I’ll be watching the overall trends and the individual trends for the Class of 2024 in particular.