Law School Job Rankings

Law School Job Rankings in the United States

Law School Job Rankings Detailed Insight

By Lorelei Laird (2011)

The year 2012 may be remembered as the year that law schools were first required to air their dirty – and clean – laundry regarding graduates’ employment rates, offering detailed insight into the legal job market for new lawyers.

In August 2011, the American Bar Association (ABA) adopted rules that will drastically change the way law schools report their recent graduates’ work status and salaries.

The move answered a growing call for change from law graduates – who have recently filed lawsuits against three U.S. schools, including one in California – complaining that their alma maters inflated graduate employment numbers. Criticism of the old reporting requirements came from nearly all sides: students, the media, academics, and lawmakers, including Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California.

The American Bar Association attempted to address the criticisms by asking schools in future questionnaires to provide details about the number of hours worked and the duration of jobs; disclose the number of their own graduates that the schools employ; and distinguish between JD-preferred and bar-passage-required legal jobs, as well as between professional and nonprofessional jobs. The association will also collect salary information on a state-by-state basis, presenting the data for the three states where the greatest number of each school’s graduates work. Data will be posted on the ABA’s website and published in an ABA report.

Law School Transparency, a student group calling on schools to more thoroughly report their graduates’ employment status, criticized the American Bar Association’s decision to postpone some changes until 2012. The group’s executive director and cofounder, Kyle P. McEntee, says omitting questions from this fall’s questionnaire regarding how many 2010 graduates are holding nonlegal jobs will “help law schools hide essential information” during a particularly bad year for job placement. “[It] raises serious questions about whether there are powerful members within the American Bar Association committed to protecting law schools’ interests rather than those of consumers,” he says.

The changes also caused a brief controversy with the National Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP) when the American Bar Association announced it would begin collecting its own data rather than relying on NALP, as it has in the past. “We have duties as the accreditation agency, so we need to be collecting this data directly and holding schools accountable for that data,” says Hulett “Bucky” Askew, a consultant on legal education to the ABA.

U.S. News & World Report is expected to include the American Bar Association’s new data in the calculation of its gold-standard school rankings. Although some schools may worry that the new information will lower their ranking or result in fewer applicants, Steven Smith, dean of California Western School of Law and former chairman of the questionnaire committee for the American Bar Association’s Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, says he thinks any effect would be small.

It remains unclear how the rule changes will affect three class actions alleging that law schools duped students into taking out huge student loans they had no realistic chance of paying off. But Gerald Thain, a professor emeritus of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, was skeptical that the schools could use compliance with the American Bar Association’s old reporting requirements as a defense.

The changes are relevant to the cases, says Thain, “but the next question is, Are the American Bar Association rules sufficiently realistic in the consumer protection context?”

Fewer Jobs for Law School Graduates in 2010-2011

by Rachel Glas (2011)

The evidence continues to mount that prospective students may want to think twice before taking out hefty loans to obtain that once-coveted law degree. Not only did the mean salary of 2010 law school graduates fall 10 percent since the year before, their overall median starting salaries at private practice firms dropped an “astonishing” 20 percent, according to National Association for Law Placement’s (NALP) “Employment Report and Salary Survey for the Class of 2010.”

Meanwhile, fewer new graduates are finding a job at all. While almost 88 percent of those surveyed said they had secured a paid position by graduation, just 68.4 percent of them required applicants to have passed the bar; that’s down from 74.7 percent in 2008. And nearly 40 percent of the employed graduates settled for part-time or temporary work, NALP reports.

Law schools and public interest organizations may be picking up some of the slack, adding 900 new legal positions since 2008. But with roughly 41,000 graduates in 2010, that’s small potatoes. Also, when law schools encourage placement of their new alumni in these positions, students complain it artificially boosts the schools’ graduate employment rates.

Lawsuits against Law Schools for Misleading about Employment Opportunities

New York Supreme Court Judge Melvin L. Schweitzer dismissed, in April 2012, a lawsuit lodged by nine graduates of New York Law School who accused the latter of misleading them about their employment prospects after graduation. The judge ruled that the suit had no merit and the case was essentially one of caveat emptor.

The decision is a setback for several similar lawsuits filed across the country. For the second consecutive year the number of law school entrance examinees has sharply declined, reflecting a view that legal market is sluggish.

Most graduates of top law schools continued to get jobs in 2012, but those from less prestigious law schools had a tough time finding employment.

Law School Rankings by Biglaw Jobs

According to Paul L. Caron, from the Pepperdine University School of Law, in 2015 Law School Rankings by Biglaw Jobs is the following:

  • Columbia (Law School) 310 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 468 (2014 JDs) 66.24% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $60,274 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 4
  • Pennsylvania 177 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 278 (2014 JDs) 63.67% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $56,916 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 5
  • Chicago 129 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 211 (2014 JDs) 61.14% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $55,503 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 4
  • NYU 287 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 479 (2014 JDs) 59.92% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $56,838 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 6
  • Harvard 326 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 586 (2014 JDs) 55.63% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $55,842 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 2
  • Cornell 101 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 191 (2014 JDs) 52.88% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $59,360 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 13
  • Northwestern 144 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 291 (2014 JDs) 49.48% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $56,434 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 12
  • Duke 105 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 215 (2014 JDs) 48.84% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $55,588 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 10
  • Virginia 163 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 349 (2014 JDs) 46.70% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $51,800 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 8
  • Stanford 85 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 187 (2014 JDs) 45.45% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $54,366 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 3
  • UC-Berkeley 115 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 287 (2014 JDs) 40.07% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $48,166 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 9
  • Michigan 153 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 390 (2014 JDs) 39.23% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $51,398 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 10
  • Georgetown 239 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 625 (2014 JDs) 38.24% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $53,130 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 13
  • Yale 80 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 224 (2014 JDs) 35.71% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $56,200 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 1
  • USC 71 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 216 (2014 JDs) 32.87% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $57,507 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 20
  • Texas 113 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 351 (2014 JDs) 32.19% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $33,162 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 15
  • UCLA 102 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 336 (2014 JDs) 30.36% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $45,226 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 17
  • Vanderbilt 56 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 194 (2014 JDs) 28.87% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $49,722 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 16
  • Boston Univ. 71 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 246 (2014 JDs) 28.86% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $47,188 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 27
  • Fordham 119 (2014 Grads at NLJ 250) 462 (2014 JDs) 25.76% (% Grads at NLJ 250) $52,532 (Tuition Fees) The U.S. News Rank was: 36

Some news about Law School Rankings by Biglaw Jobs:

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