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Class of 2015 Employment: How Bad Is It?
May 3rd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
After a few data glitches, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has released its report on employment outcomes for the Class of 2015. The Section’s scorecard, comparing the Class of 2015 to the Class of 2014, appears here.
The numbers are pretty sobering: Absolute numbers declined in every employment category. Law firms, for example, hired 1,574 fewer graduates than they did in 2014. That’s a dismaying decrease of 8.8%. Government employers showed similar retrenchment: They too hired 8.8% fewer graduates in 2015.
Graduating class size also fell 8.8% between 2014 and 2015, which shored up the percentage of 2015 graduates obtaining jobs. Law schools, however, did not gain much ground in placing a higher percentage of their graduates. Smaller classes merely kept pace with a contracting job market.
I will have more details tomorrow, including an explanation for why the percentage declines in the top ten lines of the table are overstated. The news on those lines, which detail jobs requiring bar passage and those for which a JD is considered an advantage, is disheartening–but not quite as bad as the reported percentages suggest. The ABA changed its reporting methods between 2014 and 2015, so those comparisons match pineapples to prunes–a fruit salad you would never want to serve.
Data Difficulties
May 3rd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
*Update: For those of you who can’t sleep until the data match, Jerry Organ has figured out the discrepancy described below. The spreadsheet on the ABA site is too comprehensive: It includes Hamline, William Mitchell, and Mitchell/Hamline as separate (and duplicative) entries. Eliminate the entries for the first two schools, while retaining the combined Mitchell/Hamline, and the figures on the spreadsheet match the scorecard. Data deliverance!
For the last several years, the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has collected increasingly helpful data about employment outcomes for law school graduates. Data about individual schools, as well as a spreadsheet combining all data, are displayed at this website. The Section also posts a “scorecard” summarizing key statistics for the graduating class; those scorecards appear here.
Data for the Class of 2015 are now available, and both bloggers and mainstream media have started to report on those numbers. Unfortunately, however, the data appear to be in flux. The ABA posted several versions of the spreadsheet yesterday, as it worked to include all schools. The current spreadsheet appears comprehensive, but the totals do not match those appearing on the scorecard.
So, if you see conflicting numbers in the press, don’t be confused. Several professors have been in touch with the ABA Section, and we will analyze the data further once we are sure that it is in final form. Meanwhile, no excuse for not grading exams….
ABA Employment Stats: Class of 2015
May 2nd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Updated at 8:30 p.m. to reflect several changes*
The ABA has just released employment statistics for the Class of 2015. As Jerry Organ speculated over the weekend, the report is decidedly mixed. The percentage of graduates holding full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage edged up slightly, from 59.9% in 2014 to 60.3% in 2015.
This small increase, however, resulted from the drop in the number of graduates–rather than from any increase in available jobs. Graduates fell 9.2% between the two years, from 43,832 in 2014 to 39,817 in 2015. The actual number of FTLT bar-required jobs also fell, from 26,248 in 2014 to 23,993 in 2015. That’s a hefty decline of 2,255 jobs or 8.6%.
These figures encompass all ABA-accredited law schools, including the three Puerto Rico schools. For this initial comparison, I also counted school-funded jobs. In later analyses, I will break those out.
I will have updates on these figures as I work more with the ABA spreadsheet. The results, however, are not the good news that law schools were hoping to hear. Nor are prospective students likely to greet these figures as heralding a surge in the legal employment market. This summer would be a good time to reflect further on challenges and opportunities for law schools; I hope to contribute to that discussion.
* This year’s ABA spreadsheet includes several hidden columns, which affected some of my earlier calculations. The gist hasn’t changed, but the numbers have shifted slightly.
More Evidence of the White Bias in Legal Education
May 1st, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
I wrote last summer about an important paper showing that non-white law students earn lower law school grades than their white classmates, even after controlling for LSAT score, undergraduate grades, and a host of other variables. That paper, written by Alexia Brunet Marks and Scott Moss, analyzed students enrolled at the University of Colorado and Case Western University schools of law.
A new study, authored by Daniel Schwarcz and Dion Farganis, documents the same effect among students at the University of Minnesota Law School. Schwarcz and Farganis’s primary research interest focuses on the educational impact of individualized feedback given to first-year law students. Paul Caron, Michael Simkovic, and Lawrence Solum have already discussed those parts of the paper; I hope to add some of my thoughts soon.
While analyzing the impact of feedback, however, Schwarcz and Farganis produced even more striking results related to race. The researchers, in fact, document a race effect that is almost twice as large as the feedback one. Receiving individualized feedback from a first-year professor, they found, was associated with a .108 rise in the student’s grade in the target class. That difference emerged after controlling for LSAT score, UGPA, and several other factors.
Being a U.S. born minority student, on the other hand, was associated with a .209 fall in the student’s grade. Once again, that association emerged after controlling for LSAT score, UGPA, and several other factors. The negative association for race was almost twice as large as the positive association for feedback.
As Schwarcz and Farganis acknowledge, statistical association does not prove causation; other variables might explain the positive relationship they found between individualized feedback and grades. It is hard, however, to imagine what those other variables might be in the case of the negative relationship between minority race and grades. And now we have two well controlled studies documenting that negative relationship. (A third study, by John Fordyce et al., is in press and I am working to obtain a copy of it.)
I look forward to discussing the pedagogic implications of the Schwarcz and Farganis feedback study; their paper offers a lot of food for thought. But I also hope colleagues will discuss their finding about the association between race and law school grades. Why are law schools failing their minority students in this way?
Legal Education and the Justice Gap
April 29th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
I read recently about an organization that provides efficient, effective legal services to low- and middle-income clients. The organization, Chicago’s Coordinated Advice and Referral Program for Legal Services (“CARPLS“), has been serving clients for almost a quarter century. They currently help about 28,000 clients a year at an average cost of just $33 per consultation. How do they do it? And what can legal educators learn from CARPLS’s success? Read on.
» Read the full text for Legal Education and the Justice Gap
Engines of Anxiety
April 29th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Two sociologists, Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder, have published a book that examines the impact of US News rankings on legal education. The book, titled Engines of Anxiety, is available as an e-book through Project Muse. If your university subscribes to Project Muse (as mine does), you can download the book and read it for free on your laptop or tablet. If you don’t have access to a university library, some public libraries also subscribe to books through Project Muse. It’s a great way to read academic books and journals. H/t to TaxProf for noting publication of this book.
Harvard Goes Hollywood
April 22nd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Hollywood Public Relations is promoting a new program at Harvard Business School (HBS) called the Credential of Readiness (CORe). One of Hollywood PR’s account executives sent me an email, asking if I would like to blog about the program. Why not? I’ll discuss here the program’s suitability for law students. In a second post, I’ll explore what law schools themselves might learn from CORe.
And, of course, I’ll reflect on the curious marriage of the words “Hollywood” and “Harvard.”
Hippocrates
April 17th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
In a forthcoming article, I discuss the ethical duty that professionals have to educate new members of their profession. The ancient Hippocratic oath recognized this duty, commanding all physicians “to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning . . . to pupils who have signed the covenant.” Contemporary versions of the oath enforce a similar obligation, while moral and economic principles support the existence of this duty.
Surprisingly, the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct do not recognize this duty among lawyers. This is a worrisome flaw. Without an established duty to educate new lawyers, our profession cannot effectively serve clients. Nor can we justify our status as professionals. Professions are communities rather than mere occupations–and an essential feature of those communities is their commitment to ongoing education.
Scholarship Advice
April 5th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
My talented colleague Chris Walker is blogging this month at PrawfsBlawg with a series of posts about how junior scholars can maximize the impact of their scholarship. As Chris explains in his initial post, he hopes to crowdsource answers to questions that junior scholars frequently ask.
I hope Chris’s discussion will attract both junior scholars and more senior ones. A lot has changed in the world of legal scholarship over the last thirty-five years:
- Junior professors begin their tenure-track work with more substantial scholarly experience.
- Technology and reduced teaching loads allow tenure-track faculty to produce more scholarship–which, in turn, raises expectations for that production.
- Law reviews, conferences, and online forums have multiplied, making scholarship more interactive.
- Interdisciplinary work has increased and become more sophisticated.
- Concerns about insularity have revived interest (at least among some faculty) in scholarship that directly addresses student or practitioner needs.
Given these changes, how do we choose to use the time given us for scholarship? The opportunity to engage in unfettered scholarship is a great privilege–one that we should execute in the public interest. That doesn’t mean that the public should dictate our scholarship; great discoveries sometimes come from meandering, seemingly “irrelevant” explorations. But we, the scholars, should regularly reflect on the ways we use our privilege.
Job Growth
March 26th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
How many lawyering jobs does our economy support? Is that number still growing? Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shed light on these questions. Every other year, BLS counts the number of existing “lawyer” jobs as part of its Employment Projections program. This count is particularly useful because, unlike some other BLS reports, it includes both salaried and self employed workers. These biennial counts thus include solo practitioners, law firm partners, and practicing lawyers who earn a salary from any source.
By examining these counts, which are available online since 1978, we can chart growth trends for lawyering jobs. (For a full description of the jobs included in these figures, see the note at the end of this post.)
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