This chart summarizes the un/under-employment situation for C/O 2012 at the T17 schools. It is based on the C/O 2011 ABA statistics at: placementsummary.abaquestionnaire.org.

The following are counted as unemployment or underemployment:
1) Not working (unknown, unemployed, pursuing graduate degree)
2) Law school funded employment
3) Firms with less than 50 attorneys
4) State and local clerkships
5) One half of business/industry jobs
6) "Academic" jobs

Not every job in these categories is necessarily undesirable. However, there are good reasons to believe that most of the jobs in these categories are undesirable, given how much jobs in these categories have exploded from pre-recession figures. "Business" jobs and "academic" jobs, as well as school-funded jobs have increased dramatically.

Note Bene: I think Yale's fellowships might be legit. They show a large number of fellows in C/O 2010 data as well. U Chicago, meanwhile, shows a dramatic increase from just a few in previous years, to a couple of dozen last year.



In zoomable PDF here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B11ijy ... jE5OWdYUU0
Source spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B11ijy ... zU3U2tidEk

Curious how Michigan's employment data meshes with this. http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/03/michigans-real-employment-numbers.html I know it is LOLCampos, but looks like Michigan might be massaging the numbers a bit.

This is amazing. Thank you!

If that 70 person number were true for C/O 2011, that would change the above analysis quite a bit. I assumed that the 9 "academic" positions in the data were really law-school funded jobs (up from only 1 probably legit academic position for C/O 2009), but Campos's claim would cast doubt on the real status of the 20% of people employed in PI/government positions (up from only 10% in C/O 2009).

I personally don't think that law-school funded positions are a bad thing. People need to get some money to pursue unpaid internships that might lead to some work. But it is crucial to accurately report the status of such jobs. A number of other T14 schools do such reporting. E.g. NU lists law-school funded jobs in a separate category, and also lists the number of jobs in each category that are part-time or temporary. UVA mixes law school-funded jobs in with the other data, but notes how many school-funded jobs there were. Michigan doesn't specify any of these things in its data.

The 70 person number itself sounds high, but is not completely unbelievable. For C/O 2010, UVA had 40 law school-funded positions, in addition to 7 people who were unemployed, pursuing a graduate degree, etc. for a total of 13% unemployed or underemployed. For C/O 2011, NU had 11 law school funded positions, but 21 people who were unemployed, and another 7 people in part-time or temporary positions, for a total of 14% unemployed or underemployed. Michigan, meanwhile, only lists 24 people unemployed or pursuing a graduate degree, for a total of 6% unemployed. Adding 70 law-school funded positions would bring the total to 25% unemployed. That's pretty hard to believe, but not outside the realm of believability.

I think law school funded employment or fellowships or whatever the heck they call them isn't entirely a bad thing. Cynics are right to say that it's to help their numbers, but I think it's unfair to say that's the only reason they do it.

What's the alternative? CSO can't just make jobs magically appear. This is especially true for people who want to work at smaller firms, for PD's, for PI orgs that a) are having trouble hiring because of budgetary limitations and b) have to be more careful about hiring because they don't get to try out 40 people in a summer program. A law school grant to cover the costs of working a few months at one of these places will give the unemployed students a leg up on getting hired there if they start hiring again, hopefully secure some solid recs, hopefully teach them some practical skills, and prevent a gap in the resume.

The important thing here is disclosure, so people know how many people are getting these grants and what types of places they're working at. And, if they really wanted to show transparency, follow up and see how many of these grants actually lead to an offer of permanent employment somewhere.

What's really insidious is if the law school funded employment just puts kids on the payroll for a few weeks to massage the 9 months out stat and/or shunts them into a position not legally related at all so they can't develop references, contacts, and legal skills.

At the end of the day, it's a win-win for the student and the school. The school boosts its numbers, yes, but this type of thing is better for the student than just pure unemployment. It's not an ideal thing for the student, but it's better than doc review.

Added Penn: http://www.law.upenn.edu/cpp/prospectiv ... stics.html

Yay to them for breaking out short-term jobs.

I still would like to see all schools (including Penn) break it down between full-time long-term jobs, full-time short-term jobs, part time-long term jobs, and part-time short-term jobs, etc.

As shown here:
http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/ ... eckdam.pdf

Here is Michigan's full employer list for 2009-2011. I'd do a full count, but I don't have the time. The numbers are ugly, but people wanted detail, so here's detail.
http://www.law.umich.edu/careers/classs ... stats.aspx

Wow, kudos to Michigan for being so transparent. I really wish the other law schools did this too. Guess Mich deserved the most honest law school title on ATL.

Yeah, holy cow, this blows every other employment page I've seen out of the water.

Wow. Huge props to Michigan.

non-legal employment breakdown

*Actor, dentist's office, independent contractor, pharmacy, restaurant, sheep farmer, chief writer at Univision, startup, e-commerce consulting, Thomson Reuters, nonlaw university faculty position (2)

Dude has it right. My back up to law school is sheep farming in New Zealand.

The Michigan data is interesting, but it still doesn't note temporary positions or law school funded positions. E.g. it lists one job at the FCC, but the FCC attorney honors program was suspended for three years, resuming for class of 2012.

http://www.law.com/jsp/law/LawArticleFr ... slreturn=1

According to the FCC for the Fall 2012 cycle they were only accepting apps from current law students and clerks as of September 2011: http://www.fcc.gov/blog/fcc’s-attorney-honors-program-has-launched

Here's GW: http://www.law.gwu.edu/Careers/prospect ... stics.aspx

I wouldn't be surprised if a good portion of the gov't jobs were through some type of fellowship. Or maybe whoever got that job had a ton of telecommunications experience so got the job without the Honors Program. It's hard to say and it's only one person.

Sixigan. Top ranked school for big sheep farmer law.

Tyty.

My point is simply that we can't assume that all of those jobs are full-time, permanent positions. I was at the FCC the summer before C/O 2011 graduated, and it was on lock-down hiring wise, but was taking a lot of externs and unpaid interns in order to handle the work load. I'd imagine a lot of other federal and state agencies were in the same position. At NU, for example, one of the government jobs reported was part-time: http://www.law.northwestern.edu/career/statistics. I would like to be able to take out the part-time, short-term positions from all the schools' data, but it wouldn't be fair unless all the schools compared actually published that information, as in the sample matrix published by the ABA.

I might suggest that they add an asterix for PT/short-term positions to differentiate. That way they wouldn't need to re-run this project which looks like it took a ton of time (I don't work at Career Services, and haven't talked to anyone there since post-OCI, so I dunno if they'd take the suggestion). Though I'm guessing this is 9-months data so you would think short-term positions would have run out by then.

http://www.law.umich.edu/careers/Pages/ ... ships.aspx

You might have already seen this. It discusses the school funded program.

So yup, that explains that the employment numbers were nine months and only 8 were still part of school funded fellowships and the 13 unemployed were accounted for in the regular stats. Great find sunnyp .

Good find: "At the nine-month mark for accumulation of final NALP data, 8 of our graduates were still in their funded fellowship positions, which there is every reason to believe will result—as did the great majority of 2010 Fellowships—in long-term legal positions."

I've updated the Michigan data to include the law school funded fellowships. I've added the number of fellows to the "law school funded" category, which is counted in the "unemployed" column. Since the fellowship is only available for non-profit pubic interest and government positions, which are not counted in either the "unemployed" column or the "undesirable job" column, this should not double count anybody. This is consistent with the data reported by NU, which backs law-school funded positions out of the other employment categories. I'm not sure whether Penn's law school funded fellowships are limited to public interest or government--if some fellowships are reported in the "academic" category, then Penn's total might double-count those fellows as unemployed.

Also validates Campos' 70 grads in fellowships bit.

So it's safe to say that most schools had a much higher % of grads in post-grad positions at graduation.

I'm guessing that Virginia and NYU, who disclose the total # of people receiving postgrad fellowships in 2010, are not reporting the same thing as Penn and NU, who are reporting the number of people still in postgrad positions at the 9-month mark?