The American Bar Association has released the new 2016 employment data for law schools. Every year, this release prompts significant commentary about how the data should be interpreted. The disclosures contain over 100 categories of employment information, making it difficult to determine whether a particular school has performed well in placing its graduates or not. Although some outcomes (such as unemployment) are relatively uncontroversial, others are not. In particular, the perennial debate is whether to include "JD Advantage" jobs alongside "Bar Passage Required" jobs.
As I did last year, I decided to break the numbers down to determine which categories are associated with better or worse employment outcomes, and then to rank the schools using this information. The technique used here, a principal components analysis, essentially determines which of the more than 100 categories of employment best distinguish the "good" outcome schools from the "bad" outcome schools. It gives a weight to each category based on how well that category distinguishes good from bad outcome schools, allowing us to show the relative importance of the categories and then to rank the schools themselves using these weights. I excluded categories that are mere summations of other categories, as well as the data on the most common states of employment for each school.
Turning to the results, the vast majority of the categories have little significance, either because so few graduates fall into them or because they don't distinguish between good and bad outcome schools. Here are the primary categories associated with better employment outcomes:
|
Category |
Weight |
|
Bar Passage Required FTLT |
.74 |
|
501+ Attorney Law Firm FTLT |
.53 |
|
Federal Clerkships FTLT |
.14 |
|
251-500 Attorney Firm FTLT |
.09 |
|
Public Interest FTLT |
.05 |
|
101-250 Attorney Firm FTLT |
.05 |
|
Law School FTLT |
.05 |
|
State & Local Clerkships FTLT |
.04 |
|
School Funded Bar Passage Required FTLT |
.04 |
As one might expect, Bar Passage Required FTLT ("Full Time Long Term") is the strongest indicator of positive employment outcomes, followed by 501+ Attorney Law Firms FTLT. Of course, the second category is a subset of the first, but it still contributes strongly to distinguishing better and worse employment outcomes because some Bar Passage Required jobs are more coveted than others. The same applies to Federal Clerkships, which are also associated with better employment outcomes.
Below are the primary categories associated with worse employment outcomes.
|
Category |
Weight |
|
Unemployed Seeking |
-.22 |
|
2-10 Attorney Firm FTLT |
-.19 |
|
JD Advantage |
-.14 |
|
Professional Position FTLT |
-.09 |
|
Business and Industry FTLT |
-.09 |
|
Employment Status Unknown |
-.06 |
|
Government FTLT |
-.04 |
|
Unemployed Not Seeking |
-.03 |
|
JD Advantage FTST |
-.03 |
|
Solo FTLT |
-.03 |
The table shows that "Unemployed Seeking" is the strongest indicator of worse employment outcomes, as one might expect. JD Advantage jobs are clearly associated with worse outcomes, just behind "Unemployed Seeking" and "2-10 Attorney Firms FTLT." This does not mean that every JD Advantage job is bad (or for that matter that every 2-10 Attorney Firms FTLT job is bad). It simply means that these are the categories associated with the schools with worse overall outcomes, along with "Unemployed Seeking."
The data suggest that JD Advantage jobs generally should not be included as a positive factor in rankings of law school employment outcomes, or at least should be weighted lower. Although some JD Advantage jobs might include investment banking, consulting, and the like, the vast majority are probably low-quality employment outcomes.
The approach used in this post has advantages over other methods of ranking schools. It does not "include" or "exclude" any categories of employment completely. The approach weights various categories to produce an overall ranking that takes into account not only whether graduates are employed but also the type of employment they received.
The ranking produced by this weighting system correlates closely with the median LSATs of the schools, as illustrated in the chart below with a few notable schools identified. (You may need to make your browser window wider to see the full chart).
This analysis allows a ranking of schools in terms of employment outcomes without deciding whether "include" or "exclude" different categories of employment, but rather weighting all of them. The table below presents a ranking of the top 50 law schools for employment, using the weights identified in this post. As noted by the tables above, the categories of "Bar Passage Required FTLT," "501+ Attorney Law Firms," and "Federal Clerkships" drive most of the rankings on the positive side, and "Unemployed Seeking", "2-10 Attorney Firms" and "JD Advantage" drive most of the rankings on the negative side. This type of methodology would be an improvement on the ad hoc weights apparently used by US News, as it takes into account all of the data categories in a more rigorous way.
|
Rank |
Law School |
Score |
|
1 |
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY |
1.035097 |
|
2 |
CHICAGO, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.986705 |
|
3 |
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY |
0.974544 |
|
4 |
DUKE UNIVERSITY |
0.971337 |
|
5 |
CORNELL UNIVERSITY |
0.971261 |
|
6 |
VIRGINIA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.957087 |
|
7 |
PENNSYLVANIA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.951457 |
|
8 |
HARVARD UNIVERSITY |
0.928205 |
|
9 |
STANFORD UNIVERSITY |
0.912326 |
|
10 |
MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.897232 |
|
11 |
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY |
0.891551 |
|
12 |
CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.85495 |
|
13 |
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY |
0.804072 |
|
14 |
YALE UNIVERSITY |
0.793048 |
|
15 |
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY |
0.74606 |
|
16 |
TEXAS AT AUSTIN, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.704845 |
|
17 |
BOSTON COLLEGE |
0.698004 |
|
18 |
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY |
0.696622 |
|
19 |
CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES, UNIV OF |
0.692243 |
|
20 |
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY |
0.65919 |
|
21 |
ILLINOIS, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.652804 |
|
22 |
NOTRE DAME, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.646346 |
|
23 |
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.641217 |
|
24 |
SETON HALL UNIVERSITY |
0.630271 |
|
25 |
BOSTON UNIVERSITY |
0.614675 |
|
26 |
GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY |
0.578634 |
|
27 |
GEORGIA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.577115 |
|
28 |
PENNSYLVANIA STATE - DICKINSON |
0.575714 |
|
29 |
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY |
0.567535 |
|
30 |
MINNESOTA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.565931 |
|
31 |
WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY |
0.565375 |
|
32 |
CALIFORNIA-IRVINE, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.563407 |
|
33 |
EMORY UNIVERSITY |
0.56018 |
|
34 |
WILLIAM AND MARY LAW SCHOOL |
0.547662 |
|
35 |
CARDOZO SCHOOL OF LAW |
0.542913 |
|
36 |
IOWA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.538035 |
|
37 |
SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY |
0.537387 |
|
38 |
DREXEL UNIVERSITY |
0.53647 |
|
39 |
ALABAMA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.530492 |
|
40 |
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY |
0.529337 |
|
41 |
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY |
0.522855 |
|
42 |
NORTH CAROLINA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.5169 |
|
43 |
ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY |
0.515229 |
|
44 |
BAYLOR UNIVERSITY |
0.513893 |
|
45 |
INDIANA UNIVERSITY - BLOOMINGTON |
0.509782 |
|
46 |
VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY |
0.508385 |
|
47 |
HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY |
0.506712 |
|
48 |
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY |
0.500552 |
|
49 |
CINCINNATI, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.499772 |
|
50 |
CONNECTICUT, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.497796 |
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