The placement outcomes achieved by law schools is an important component of an applicant's decision where to attend law school. In particular, "Placement Success" constitutes 18% of the influential US News & World Report rankings, one of the largest categories in those rankings.
The three most common "employment status" outcomes (as defined by the ABA) are Bar Passage Required Full-Time Long-Term (FTLT), JD Advantage FTLT, and Unemployed Seeking (in that order). As a result, evaluating a law school's placement quality depends significantly on evaluating JD Advantage jobs.
US News treats JD Advantage jobs as being equal to Bar Passage Required Jobs. Specifically, the US News "Placement Success" category counts JD Advantage FTLT the same as Bar Passage Required FTLT, sometimes collectively and cynically called "full credit" jobs. Why are JD Advantage jobs counted the same as Bar Passage Required Jobs? Because according to the US News methodology page, "Many experts in legal education consider these real law jobs."
The JD Advantage issue is one of the most significant distortions in the US News methodology, both because it's a significant portion of the ranking and because it's so easily manipulable. I have written in the past about the fact that JD Advantage jobs tend to go along with poorer employment outcomes. As I showed in that post, schools that have higher proportions of JD Advantage jobs tend to have higher unemployment and other negative employment outcomes. Yet JD Advantage jobs are counted as "full credit" in the US News methodology, meaning that the "JD Advantage" issue is actually a pretty significant problem, at least to the extent that US News rankings on employment are considered important by prospective law students.
To put a finer point on the JD Advantage topic, I decided to "rank" law schools by the proportion of JD Advantage jobs relative to all employed graduates. The purpose of this post isn't to embarrass or "call out" any particular school, but to make the broader point about JD Advantage jobs. As a result, I decided to rank the "bottom" 30 schools in terms of JD Advantage percentage (those that have the lowest proportion of JD Advantage jobs), which I really think tend to be "better" and more transparent schools in terms of their outcomes.
The ranking below is a "reverse ranking," in a sense. The schools toward the top are those with the lowest percentage of JD Advantage jobs as a proportion of all employed graduates. This table shows that the schools with the best employment outcomes tend to have the lowest JD Advantage employment.
|
RANK |
LAW SCHOOL |
JD Advantage % |
|
201 |
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY |
0.006742 |
|
200 |
VIRGINIA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.010135 |
|
199 |
DUKE UNIVERSITY |
0.014019 |
|
198 |
WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY |
0.019048 |
|
197 |
CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.019737 |
|
196 |
CHICAGO, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.019802 |
|
195 |
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY |
0.020455 |
|
194 |
WIDENER-COMMONWEALTH |
0.022222 |
|
193 |
CORNELL UNIVERSITY |
0.026316 |
|
192 |
CALIFORNIA-IRVINE, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.028571 |
|
191 |
MONTANA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.031746 |
|
190 |
MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.034965 |
|
189 |
BELMONT UNIVERSITY |
0.04 |
|
188 |
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY |
0.040936 |
|
187 |
BOSTON UNIVERSITY |
0.042453 |
|
186 |
BAYLOR UNIVERSITY |
0.044643 |
|
185 |
SETON HALL UNIVERSITY |
0.045161 |
|
184 |
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY |
0.04902 |
|
183 |
PENNSYLVANIA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.049587 |
|
182 |
HARVARD UNIVERSITY |
0.05 |
|
181 |
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY |
0.052548 |
|
180 |
DETROIT MERCY, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.05298 |
|
179 |
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY |
0.053571 |
|
178 |
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY |
0.056604 |
|
177 |
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.056701 |
|
176 |
GEORGIA, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.06044 |
|
175 |
CALIFORNIA-DAVIS, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.060976 |
|
174 |
YALE UNIVERSITY |
0.061905 |
|
173 |
TEXAS AT AUSTIN, UNIVERSITY OF |
0.062271 |
|
172 |
STANFORD UNIVERSITY |
0.0625 |
NYU, an elite law school with tremendous placement success, comes out dead last in the proportion of JD Advantage jobs. In fact, this table of the "bottom" 30 schools in JD Advantage (15% of all ABA law schools) includes all of the traditional "Top-14" law schools, as well as most of those just outside the Top-14. JD Advantage jobs do not constitute more than 6.3% of the jobs at any of the Top-14 schools, whereas they constitute 30-40% of the jobs at some law schools with very poor placement outcomes. If graduates were regularly voluntarily choosing JD Advantage jobs over bar passage required jobs, it would be surprising that elite schools have so few of them. I hope this helps to make the JD Advantage issue clearer for those still unpersuaded.
Yes, it is true that some of these JD Advantage jobs are investment banking, hedge fund, venture capital fund, and the like. Graduates landing those types of jobs generally could have easily landed a job as an attorney. At elite schools, the majority of JD Advantage jobs (if not all) probably fall in these categories. But the vast majority of JD Advantage jobs, however, do not fall in these categories, making the US News Placement Success ranking misleading and manipulable.
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