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How Many Lawyers?
March 20th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
A few years ago, I used employment projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to project the number of job openings for licensed lawyers during the current decade. At the time, BLS was the best available source for that type of projection; it remains a useful resource today. The BLS makes these predictions precisely to help workers, employers, and policymakers understand the likely demand for workers in particular occupations.
Why should law schools care about these predictions? As Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre show in two recent papers, a JD historically has conferred financial advantage (compared to entering the workforce with just a BA) even if graduates did not work as practicing lawyers. If law graduates reap financial returns from their degrees, regardless of the jobs they take, does it matter how many jobs they find as practicing lawyers?
Some scholars (including me) wonder whether financial returns to a law degree will remain as high as they have been. But let’s leave that debate aside for now. Let’s consider, instead, why law schools should care about the number of grads who will find jobs as licensed lawyers–and what that number might be.
Who Cares?
Law graduates, students, and prospective students seem to care. Several sources indicates that, although some graduates enjoy work that does not require bar admission, graduates overall prefer to practice law. Every year, for example, NALP publishes a table showing how many graduates are employed but still seeking work. These tables consistently show that grads in jobs that require bar admission are far less likely than other grads to be seeking new jobs. In 2010, for example, just 15.1% of the graduates in “bar required” work were seeking other employment, while 48.1% of those in “JD preferred” jobs and 49.0% of grads in “other professional positions” were doing so. [Sorry, source not available online]
Similar preferences emerge later in the career. The After the JD longitudinal study found that law grads working in non-lawyering jobs were less satisfied than those in lawyering positions. The distinction held both seven and twelve years after law school graduation. [No online link for that one either, I’m afraid, but check p. 70 of the AJD II and AJD III reports.]
If graduates care, I suspect that students and prospective students care as well. And if only out of self interest, law schools should care too. We can tell students that a law degree offers many options, and that historically those options have paid off financially compared to a BA alone, but the current crop of students isn’t buying that pitch. If they want to practice law, they’re still coming to law school. But if they’re looking for intellectual stimulation, a degree with diverse options, or other benefits, they seem to be going elsewhere.
This is partly why I think law schools should examine the way we package the education we offer. We’re good at teaching close reading, careful writing, and critical thinking–and we could teach those skills to undergraduates. Talented undergrads want those skills, and employers will pay a premium for them. At the same time, we’re good (and could be better) at teaching advanced legal doctrine and other intellectual skills essential for law practice. We can keep providing that education to a more focused group of JD students who primarily will become lawyers.
So How Many Lawyers?
This brings me back to the question I started with: If prospective law students care about whether they will get jobs as licensed attorneys, and if law schools should care about that question (if only to attract students), about how many law graduates are able to get jobs that require bar admission?
My recent study of law graduates in the State of Ohio gave me some numbers to work with. I tracked job outcomes for all 1,214 new lawyers who passed the Ohio bar exam in 2010. In December 2014, about 75% of them held jobs that required a law license. Most of the rest were employed, but in other types of work.
My population included only licensed lawyers, not law graduates who didn’t take or pass a bar exam. One thing we know about the latter group is that they can’t be practicing law. So, after performing some calculations to account for that group, I estimated that about two-thirds of 2010 graduates were practicing law four and a half years after graduation.
Will the same percentage hold for graduates from other years and in other states? I don’t know; we often have to deal with limited data and isolated points of reference in making real-world plans. I explain in the paper why I think Ohio offers a useful perspective, and why I think the annual number of new bar-required jobs will remain stable in coming years. I’ll write more about both of those issues here soon.
The Good News
The good news for both law schools and prospective students is that my estimate is higher than the BLS’s historic projections. I estimate that, four and a half years after graduation, about 29,250 members of the Class of 2010 are practicing law. Some of the jobs are dubious solo practices; some undoubtedly are part-time, temporary, and/or low paid. Some of them are jobs that a graduate secured only after failing and re-taking the bar exam. Prospective students need to take those factors into account, not simply consider whether they’ll be able to find a job practicing law.
When all is said and done, though, graduates are finding more “lawyering” jobs than BLS once predicted–although not as many as BLS predicts through a proposed revision to its forecasting method. I’ll comment on the latter in another post.
The other piece of good news is that, if my calculations are correct, and if law school attrition rates remain constant, then about 84.5% of the current 1L class will find lawyering jobs within a few years after graduation. That level of job placement may be sufficiently attractive to maintain enrollment at current rates.
The Bad News
I couched that last sentence carefully: “to maintain enrollment at current rates.” Better placement in lawyering jobs will reassure prospective law students, but I doubt it will draw them back to law school in droves. Law schools, meanwhile, will need to worry about bar passage rates as they enroll students with lower credentials. Declining bar passage rates will discourage potential applicants both directly and indirectly, as they depress the percentage of graduates working in jobs that require bar passage.
Schools will also vary in the percentage of graduates they place in jobs requiring bar admission. Some will place more than 85% in those positions; others will place much less. If I’m right that potential students care about getting jobs that require a law license, enrollment declines will continue at the latter schools.
Summing Up
In making predictions, both here and in my paper, I offer some very specific numbers. I do that to offer a point of reference for debate; I can’t say exactly how many members of the Class of 2017 will find lawyering jobs, or how many students will apply to law school in 2018. I do think, though, that JD students care about their odds of securing a job that requires a law license and that law schools need to account for that preference. To do that, it helps to know as much as we can about operation of the legal market.
What Happened to the Class of 2010?
March 14th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
It has been almost five years since the Class of 2010 walked across the stage to pick up their JDs. Since then, we’ve debated whether the weak job outcomes for that class stemmed solely from the recession or represented structural changes within the profession itself. We’ve also wondered whether the graduates would improve their employment status as they moved into the workforce and the economy picked up. I decided to find out.
1,214 New Lawyers
In a paper just posted to SSRN, I tracked job outcomes for all 1,214 new lawyers who passed the Ohio bar exam in 2010 and then joined the bar. The study doesn’t focus on the graduates of a particular school, as some analyses do. I included all bar-passers, regardless of the school they attended (although note that Ohio only allows graduates of ABA-accredited schools to take the exam). I also followed successful examinees even if they left Ohio.
My focus on bar admittees parallels the approach taken in several earlier studies of the legal profession, including the recent After the JD (AJD) surveys. As I note in the paper, that means I can’t say very much about the approximately 12% of law school graduates who never gain bar admission. It also means that I overstate the percentage of jobs that require bar admission, although I offer some corrections for this in the paper.
I also explain in the paper why Ohio offers a useful perspective on trends nationally. The state’s 9-month outcomes, as reported by NALP, are similar to national averages. Ohio is the ninth largest state for both number of practicing lawyers and number of jobs taken by new law graduates. It’s also home to the nation’s largest law firm and several other BigLaw shops. And the state has a healthy economy, with an overall unemployment rate (4.8% in December 2014) that is lower than in states with the largest legal markets. During the same month, New York’s unemployment rate was 5.8%; Illinois, 6.2%; California, 7.0%; and DC, 7.3%.
1,137 Jobs
For each of the 1,214 lawyers in my study, I searched for the job held in December 2014. I didn’t use surveys; I relied entirely on public online sources. This turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be–and produced a much more complete dataset than surveys do. With Ohio’s bar directory, employer websites, directories like LinkedIn, and other sources (e.g., alumni stories published online by law schools), I found a December 2014 job for 1,137 graduates or 93.7% of the population. I explain in the paper why the remaining 6.3% are most likely unemployed (for some, I found direct evidence of that) or serve as a proxy for the percentage unemployed.
Enough of the preliminaries. What did I find? First, it’s hard to read the job histories without feeling great sadness for the Class of 2010. Sure, many of them have ended up in decent jobs. Some may even hold their dream job. But they’ve had (and are still having) a very tough time. Almost a tenth bill themselves as “solo practitioners,” although I found no evidence of an active practice (such as a website) for half of them. At best, these solos are struggling to establish themselves at an early stage of their careers. At worst, they’re unemployed job seekers doing occasional legal work for friends.
Meanwhile, two-thirds of the graduates have switched jobs at least once in four years–that’s twice the rate of turnover that AJD reported for the Class of 2000 during their early careers. Among those who changed jobs, the average number of jobs was 2.7–almost three jobs in just four years. Before you shake your head over those peripatetic millennials, note that median job tenure for 25-34-year-olds nationally is 3.0 years; the millennials actually stick to their jobs somewhat longer than young adults did before 2010.
It’s easy to talk about the job market from the comfort of well paid, tenured positions. It’s a lot harder to be out there in the trenches. Before we talk more about numbers, let’s recognize the fortitude (and ongoing struggles) of the people in the Class of 2010 and other recent classes.
Structural Change
I will write a series of posts highlighting different parts of my findings, but here’s the bottom line: I found strong evidence of structural changes in the employment market. Here are the top indicators:
1. The Class of 2010 graduated almost five years ago, a year after the Great Recession officially ended. It has been a slow and jobless recovery, but there have been signs of growth for quite some time now. There are certainly clients hiring lawyers: the top-earning lawyers are doing very nicely, and a wide range of alternative-service providers are prospering. Yet recent grads are lagging in job outcomes when compared to earlier classes at a similar career point.
2. Only three-quarters of the licensed lawyers hold jobs that require a law license. After adjusting for graduates who never took or passed the bar, I estimate that no more than two-thirds of 2010 graduates work in jobs that require bar admission. We can argue about whether future students will be willing to invest in law school for early-career jobs that don’t use their full education and licensing (I don’t believe they will). It’s clear, however, that the percentage of recent law graduates practicing law has been declining for some time. Whether that makes you smile or weep, it’s a shift in the market.
3. Only 40.4% of the licensed graduates work in law firms, a barely perceptible increase over the 39.5% of the class who reported those jobs nine months after graduation. In fact, the 40.4% almost certainly masks a decrease in law firm employment, because I obtained data only on licensed lawyers; the 9-month figure includes all law school graduates. Even at 40.4%, this is a striking figure. Despite four years of experience and economic recovery, the Class of 2010 made no headway in securing law firm jobs.
4. The low level of law firm employment is even more remarkable when compared to outcomes for the Class of 2000, which was tracked by the AJD study. That class graduated into relatively good economic times, but weathered a recession and jobless recovery during their first years in the profession. When the class reported their three-year outcomes to AJD in late 2002 and 2003, national unemployment levels were actually higher than when I identified jobs held by the Class of 2010 in December 2014. Yet 62.1% of the Class of 2000 practiced law with a firm three years after graduation–compared to just 40.4% of the Class of 2010 four years out. That’s a phenomenal drop of almost twenty-two percentage points.
5. The shift in law firm employment was not due solely (or perhaps even primarily) to changes in BigLaw employment patterns. Ohio, like most states, is not home to a law school ranked among the US Not-News top twenty. Yet we have all of those tasty BigLaw offices and all types of other employers. After the crash, did elite law school graduates jump to Ohio, taking our best jobs and creating a market cascade? I once thought that might be the case, but the evidence says otherwise. The number of elite school graduates passing the Ohio bar actually peaked in 2007–and was low even then. The changes we are seeing in lawyer employment are systemic; they arise from shifts at many levels of the job market.
There’s More
Much more, but I’ll save those data for another day. Meanwhile, you’ll find the full paper here.
Timing Law School
March 10th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre have a new paper analyzing historic income data for law school graduates. In this article, a supplement to their earlier paper on the lifetime value of a law degree, Simkovic and McIntyre conclude that graduates reap most of the value of a JD whether they graduate in good economic times or poor ones. (Simkovic, by the way, just won an ALI Young Scholar Medal. Congratulations, Mike!)
Simkovic and McIntyre’s latest analyses, they hope, will reassure graduates who earned their degrees in recent years. If history repeats, then these JDs will reap as much financial benefit over their lifetimes as those in previous generations. Simkovic and McIntyre also warn prospective students against trying to “time” law school. It’s difficult to estimate business cycles several years in advance, when a 0L must decide whether to take the plunge. And, again according to historical data, timing won’t make much difference. Under most circumstances, delay will cost more financially than any reward that successful timing could confer.
But Is This Time Different?
History does repeat, at least in the sense of economic conditions that cycle from good to bad and back again. There’s no doubt that recent law school graduates have suffered poor job outcomes partly because of the Great Recession and slow recovery. It’s good to know that graduates may be able to recover financially from the business-cycle component of their post-graduation woes. Although even here, Simkovic and McIntyre acknowledge that past results cannot guarantee future performance. The Great Recession may produce aftershocks that differ from earlier recessions.
All of this, though, edges around the elephant in the room: Have shifts occurred in the legal profession that will make that work less remunerative or less satisfying to law graduates? And/or have changes occurred that will make remunerative, satisfying work available to a smaller percentage of law graduates?
Simkovic and McIntyre have limited data on those questions. Their primary dataset does not yet include anyone who earned a JD after 2008. A supplemental analysis seems to encompass some post-2008 degree holders, but the results are limited. Simkovic and McIntyre remain confident that any structural change will help, rather than hurt, law graduates–but their evidence speaks to that issue only in historical terms at best. What is actually happening in the workplace today?
The Class of 2010
Five years ago, the Class of 2010 was sitting in our classrooms, anticipating graduation, dreading the bar exam, and worrying about finding a job. Did they find jobs? What kind of work are they doing?
I decided to find out by tracking employment results for more than 1,200 graduates from that year. I’ll be releasing that paper later this week, but here’s a preview: the class’s employment pattern has not improved much from where it stood nine months after graduation. The results are strikingly low compared to the Class of 2000 (the one followed by the massive After the JD study). The decline in law firm employment is particularly marked: just 40% of the group I followed works in a law firm of any size, compared to 62.3% for the Class of 2000 at a similar point in their careers.
A change of that magnitude, in the primary sector (law firms) that hires new law graduates, smacks of structural change. I’m not talking just about BigLaw; these changes pervaded the employment landscape. Stay tuned.
Transparency Review in Advance of New Law School Jobs Data
April 4th, 2014 / By Kyle McEntee
Since 1974, the National Association for Law Placement has surveyed ABA-approved law school graduates with the help of roughly 200 schools and a nod from the ABA. NALP’s annual survey asks graduates to describe their jobs, their employers, how and when they obtained the positions, and their starting salaries. (More details here and here.)
NALP checks the data for discrepancies and produces statistical reports of post-graduation employment outcomes for each law school. NALP must keep these “NALP reports” confidential, but individual schools may publish their reports.
NALP Reports
Before the law school transparency movement, law schools did not publish NALP reports online for prospective students and others to see. Instead, these detailed, immensely useful reports occupied dusty filing cabinets. I recall when my organization first requested these reports from law schools, several career services deans told me they did not know where they were.
Though publishing a NALP report carries zero cost, skeptics doubted we’d succeed: “However worthy the effort, I doubt that this group will have much success ….” We obtained just 34 NALP reports from the initial request, but that number grew to 54 reports just a few months later after a handful of LST initiatives.
For the class of 2011, 68 schools published a NALP report until our annual Transparency Index, which grew the number of participating schools to 85. Prospective students and interested readers were even more fortunate for the class of 2012. To date, 108 schools—that’s 55% of possible schools—made their NALP reports public.
If you’re interested in viewing the data we gathered from these NALP reports, please head over to the LST Score Reports. We indicate on school profiles whether a school has decided to withhold information from the public. You can also view a list of the schools publishing NALP reports for the classes of 2010, 2011, and 2012 in our NALP Report Database. Note that we now have access to 60 2010 reports, 94 2011 reports, and 108 2012 reports.
Actual Law School Transparency
Law schools deserve a lot of credit for increasingly living up to proclamations in favor of transparency. So too do prospective students, current students, and alumni for demanding information. We accomplished actual transparency without formal legal requests, though we also believe it’s time that the non-participating schools subject to open record laws be ushered into the era of transparency.
Law school opacity harms not only the reputation of the schools who do not participate, but of the legal education system at large. Law schools are tasked with training the legal professionals of the future. They hold students to honor codes, require them to attend a class on professional responsibility and ethics, and send them into a profession where they must uphold the values of that profession on a daily basis. However, when it comes to their own conduct, too many schools take a position that the minimal level of integrity required to maintain ABA accreditation is good enough. Our hope is that schools who value their academic and social leadership roles will go beyond the bare minimum—and do so without sticks and carrots from LST.
Class of 2013 Employment Data and NALP Reports
Next week, the ABA will publish much of the class of 2013 employment data it collected from law schools in accordance with recently-refined accreditation requirements. Many law schools are already publishing information above and beyond the ABA requirements, and we hope these schools continue this positive practice later this summer when they receive their class of 2013 reports from NALP.
If your school does not yet publish what it has at its fingertips, ask why and explain how inaction is unprincipled, prevents informed decision-making by applicants, and harms the school and profession’s reputation. Our profession needs affordable, transparent, and fair entry. It starts with something as simple as law schools doing the obvious.
Contracting with the Feds
February 3rd, 2014 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Today’s National Law Journal has an interesting story about the federal government’s cuts to contracts with private lawyers. The story interested me for three reasons.
Who Knew?
First, I never realized that the federal government spent so much to purchase private legal services. In 2013, the feds spent more than half a billion dollars on outside legal services, with the money flowing to more than 1900 private contractors. That’s a small fraction of the total market for legal services, but it’s more than pocket change. I hadn’t realized that, in addition to hiring its own lawyers, the federal government spends significant money to hire private lawyers.
Shrinking Pie
Unfortunately, the feds–like so many other legal clients–are spending less for their outside legal services. In 2009, the federal government disbursed more than $682 million for legal services. The total climbed in 2010 to more than $714 million, but has fallen steadily since that peak. For 2013, the total was just over $542 million–a 24% decline. This is the second point that struck me: our graduates face, not only decreased hiring by federal agencies, but less outside spending by those agencies. This is a federal “counter-stimulus” to the legal market.
Lawyers Make Up a Small Part of Legal Services
Perhaps most daunting, government dollars for “legal services” go primarily to contractors that provide law-related services, not to law firms or individual lawyers. Of the $542 million that the government spent in 2013, only $54 million went to law firms or solo practitioners. More than 90% of the money spent on outside legal services went to “legal service” providers that assisted with asset forfeiture, e-discovery, and other law-related tasks.
Those companies undoubtedly employ some lawyers. The composition of services purchased by the federal government, however, is yet another reminder that a growing number of non-lawyers provide law-related services. I have no problem with that shift; three years of formal legal education are not necessary to perform many tasks related to interpretation, application, and enforcement of the law. The government’s contracting figures, however, are yet another reminder of that reality. This is the third, and perhaps most important, lesson we can draw from the National Law Journal‘s report.
How Many Lawyers?
January 7th, 2014 / By Deborah J. Merritt
How many lawyers will our economy support during the next decade? As legal educators, we are often bullish about our industry. We know our graduates’ talents, and we see vast unmet needs for legal services. We also know that legal rules are more complex than ever. From those perspectives, it seems logical that demand for lawyers will increase sharply–especially as the effects of the Great Recession fade.
But our perceptions can mislead us. Most of us lack economic training; we also know little about the macroeconomic data that inform labor market forecasts. As academics, we don’t even know much about the economics of law practice. Our very position in the industry, finally, tempts us to take a rosy view of the job market.
The best source of labor market predictions, in our industry and others, remains the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Every two years, the Bureau prepares a ten-year forecast of job openings in more than 800 occupations. The Bureau uses extensive data and complex macroeconomic models to prepare those predictions. Its economists analyze the economy as a whole, accounting for demographic shifts, technological change, complex interactions among industries, and consumer purchasing power. The final projections are much more reliable than anything that armchair experts might offer.
The Bureau recently released its projections for occupational job openings over the next decade. How will the legal profession fare? The news remains depressing.
Declining Projections
In 2008, at the height of our profession’s prosperity, the BLS projected that 240,400 job openings for “lawyers” would occur in the ten years between 2008 and 2018. That estimate encompassed all jobs practicing law, including work done by solo practitioners. It also counted both jobs generated by expansion and those required for replacement. The projection did not include jobs for judges and judicial law clerks, small categories that the BLS counts separately. I return to those categories below.
Note that even this 2008 projection fell far short of the number of students graduating from U.S. law schools at the time. ABA-accredited law schools conferred 43,588 JD’s in 2008. Even if just 80% of those graduates (34,870) sought jobs as lawyers, that number far exceeded the 24,040 new lawyer jobs per year that the BLS projected at that time.
The forecasts, however, got worse. In 2010, in the wake of the recession and rapid shifts in the legal profession, the Bureau adjusted its projection downward. It estimated that in the ten years between 2010 and 2020, the economy would support only 212,000 new lawyers. That number represented an 11.8% drop in the number of openings for new lawyers.
“Well, of course,” you might think, “the economy was in a serious recession. Of course the number of job openings would decline.” Remember, though, that this projection covered an entire decade. The Bureau assumed that, even if the economy returned to full strength by 2020 (an assumption built into its models), the number of job openings for lawyers would be substantially lower over the decade than previously predicted.
Now the news has gotten even worse. In its latest projections, the Bureau has again lowered the predicted number of openings for lawyers. It now estimates that the economy will support only 196,500 new lawyers between 2012 and 2022. That’s another loss of 7.3%. Put another way: Four years ago, BLS expected the economy to support about 24,040 new lawyers per year. Now it expects only about 19,650 new lawyers per year to find jobs. That’s a loss of 18.3%.
The Bureau expects the absolute number of lawyer jobs to increase between 2012 and 2022, but the increases will be considerably smaller than previously predicted. The available openings, furthermore, won’t come close to accommodating the number of law school graduates–even if those numbers decline as anticipated.
Graduates and Openings
I previously calculated that about 36,260 students will obtain JDs from ABA-accredited law schools in 2016. Those are the students who just finished their first semester of law school and are on track to graduate. Once again, let’s assume that only 80% of them will seek jobs as lawyers–a generous allowance for JD Advantage jobs. Even if one-fifth of our graduates take jobs outside the “lawyer” category, we will still graduate 29,008 eager new lawyers in 2016.
The BLS, however, predicts that the economy will support only about 19,650 new lawyers per year. If that prediction proves correct, then lawyer jobs will exist for only two-thirds (67.7%) of the graduates seeking them–or only 54.2% of the full graduating class. Those ratios are slightly worse than the ratios for the Class of 2008, when the job market was much stronger. Even with reduced class sizes, we are losing the placement race. Graduating classes will have to shrink substantially more to approach the number of lawyering jobs that the economy is predicted to support.
Other Job Categories
As mentioned above, the BLS counts some “lawyering” jobs in categories of their own. Judges, Magistrate Judges, and Magistrates, for example, constitute a separate category from lawyers. So do judicial law clerks. Neither of these categories, however, offers much comfort for law graduates: BLS has dramatically reduced projected openings in these categories. In 2010, the Bureau estimated that the economy would support 9,600 new judges/magistrates and 6,800 judicial law clerks between 2010 and 2020. The more recent predictions have cut those numbers to just 5,200 new judges/magistrates and 2,500 new judicial law clerks over the next decade. The latter reduction is particularly notable; it may represent cuts in government budgets as well as an increase in permanent law clerks.
Adding these small categories to the estimates offered above doesn’t alter the picture much. If we include job openings for judges, magistrates, and judicial law clerks, then the BLS predicts about 20,420 new openings per year for lawyers. That number will accommodate only 56.3% of the students projected to graduate from ABA-accredited schools in 2016. (To be clear, I think it’s appropriate to include judges, magistrates, and law clerks in these projections. I omitted them in my initial calculations because the numbers are small and the BLS has redrawn these small categories over the years. For clarity, it’s easier to focus first on the primary “lawyer” category.)
According to the BLS, only three categories of law-related professionals enjoy better prospects today than they did two years ago: paralegals, title examiners, and other legal support workers. The Bureau raised projected openings in each of those fields in its latest estimates, producing a combined total of 119,600 expected openings during the next decade.
Why Won’t the Economy Support More Lawyers?
The reasons for this decline are complex. They include lasting effects of the recession, technology, new efficiencies in the provision of legal services, and changing demographics. The last factor is particularly intriguing; it is one that we in the legal academy often overlook. My next post will explore these economic change-agents in more depth.
The Value of a Degree
December 18th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Are college graduates better off than non-graduates? If so, does value vary by the type of institution attended? How much value does a JD add to a BA? Does that value vary by institution?
Both critics and defenders of higher education have struggled with these questions. Most have recognized that we can’t measure a degree’s value solely by financial reward. We hope that higher education also improves health, autonomy, personal relationships, emotional well-being, community engagement, and other goods. But how can we measure all of those outcomes?
Now there’s an app for that.
The Gallup-Purdue Index
The Gallup Organization and Purdue University have just announced creation of the “Gallup-Purdue Index.” This index will attempt to measure both career and well-being outcomes for college graduates.
Gallup has decades of experience asking people about their financial status and well-being. The company plans to draw upon that knowledge to devise questions for the new index. Participants will answer questions about their jobs, income, educational debt, other debt, and financial management. They will also provide information on their workplace and community engagement, personal relationships, physical fitness, sense of purpose, happiness, and stress.
Gallup will start conducting its surveys in the new year, with the first results available in spring 2014. The polling company plans to survey 30,000 college graduates a year for at least five years, generating a database with responses from 150,000 individuals.
Benchmarks, Not Rankings
Notably, Gallup does not plan to release data about individual colleges or universities. Instead, it will aggregate data by category. The results, for example, could report how individuals of different races fare after graduation, how graduates of research universities compare to those of liberal arts colleges, or how outcomes vary by region of the country. These data, Gallup suggests, will create benchmarks that institutions can use to gauge their own graduates’ outcomes.
The results, however, undoubtedly will do their part to fuel competition among universities. Gallup, for example, has proposed releasing results by athletic conference. Do Big 10 graduates earn more than Pac-12 ones? Are they more happily married? If fans don’t like the BCS system, they can embrace Gallup-informed “well being” competitions among the conferences.
Although Gallup will not announce institution-specific results, colleges and universities can contract with the company for surveys of their own graduates. Each institution could then compare its results to the national benchmarks. Purdue has already asked Gallup to survey its graduates; other colleges may do the same.
What Will We Learn?
Like all social science research, the Gallup-Purdue Index will have significant limits. If Pac-12 graduates are happier than Big 10 ones, is that because of their college experiences or because they live in sunnier states? If Ivy League graduates earn more money than graduates of land-grant universities, is that because their college education was superior, their native talents were greater, their pre-college advantages were deeper, or their employers favored the Ivy League for outdated reputational reasons?
Even if we disentangle these strands and identify the colleges that produce the happiest, most successful graduates, how will we know which part of the educational experience paid off? Was it class size, particular majors, the campus environment, the football team’s success? In the social world, measurement often generates new questions rather than solid answers.
There’s also a dark side to surveys like the Gallup-Purdue Index. Users can interpret results to support their pre-existing notions: If my college fares well, I’ll tie the results to my pedagogy. If my graduates stumble, I’ll blame the weather.
There’s a danger, furthermore, that policymakers will seize upon data to construct superficial answers to complex questions. It’s unlikely that one, or even three, college attributes explain graduate well-being. Understanding the relationship between higher education and adult satisfaction will require considerable exploration. As the data generate new questions, we’ll have to commit to asking those questions–not simply settling for first-generation answers.
Indices, finally, seem to breed competition. Administrators, educators, students, and alumni will await the annual index as eagerly (and anxiously) as they anticipate the US News releases. In my worst nightmare, Gallup will update survey results weekly–just like the football rankings. We already spend far too much time on rankings and competition in higher education.
The Up Side
On the other hand, the Gallup-Purdue Index could teach us a lot about higher education. We spend a lot of time speculating about the benefits of higher education; more data could begin generating answers. Used responsibly, high-quality data could help us address essential issues: What type of education gives low-income students the best boost? How do liberal arts majors compare to STEM specialists? Are there educational innovations that will advance the progress of women and minorities in the professions?
Measurements also facilitate accountability. Now that a degree can cost more than a starter house, and now that we have the capacity to gather substantial data about outcomes, we should hold educational institutions accountable. If we can improve results for our graduates–in any facet of their lives–we should work towards that end.
What About Law Schools?
So far, the Gallup-Purdue Index will focus on college graduates. It seems, though, that law schools could get in on the act. Individual schools could commission surveys to determine whether their graduates obtain value from earning a JD. Are those law school graduates happier than college grads with no further education? Richer? More stressed? More or less involved in the community?
To make those comparisons, each law school could choose college benchmarks that match their feeder schools. Maybe a particular law school’s grads are happier and more successful than the graduates of research universities in the region, but not better off than the grads of local liberal arts colleges.
Equally intriguing, the ABA, NALP, or another national group could commission Gallup to conduct a survey of law school graduates nationally. How do those graduates compare to college grads without further education? Do the results depend on the type of law school, type of post-law job, or region of the country?
As legal educators, we pride ourselves on the fact that our degrees last a lifetime. Now that we have the tools to explore the extent of that impact, we should seek that knowledge.
Law School Applicants
December 11th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
LSAC has released its first report on the current crop of law school applicants. Paul Campos offers a trenchant analysis that I expand upon below. After reviewing the numbers, I explore the question that nags at so many of us: Where are all of those applicants going if not to law school?
Recent History
Paul first charts the number of applicants to ABA-accredited law schools during the last four years. Those numbers, drawn from LSAC sources, are:
Applicants for fall 2010: 87,900
Applicants for fall 2011: 78,500
Applicants for fall 2012: 67,900
Applicants for fall 2013: 59,426 (preliminary)
Many people assume that fall 2010 represents the high water mark for law school applicants, but that’s not true. As Paul noted in a similar post last year, the number of law school applicants peaked in 2004 when 100,600 individuals applied to ABA-accredited schools. Applicants fell significantly for several years after 2004, rose modestly in 2009-2010, and have plummeted for the last three years.
As noted above, we have only preliminary figures for the number of students who applied to join this year’s 1L class. In recent years, however, the final figure has not varied by more than 0.5% from the preliminary number. If the final figure for 2013 varies that much, the true number of applicants might have been as high as 59,724.
That’s a decline of 32.1% in the number of applicants between fall 2010 and fall 2013. From the 2004 peak, the decline has been a very substantial 40.6%.
Current Applicants
That brings us to this year’s applicants. LSAC reports that 14,171 individuals had submitted applications by December 6, 2013. That’s a 13.6% decrease compared to this point last year.
The admissions cycle, however, is still young. Last year, a noticeable number of students applied to law school in the late winter and early spring, perhaps responding to news reports that applicants were down and hopefuls might obtain more favorable spots or scholarships. If the same happens this year, late applicants might narrow the gap between this year and last. If so, 13.6% could overestimate the applicant drop for the current year.
Unfortunately, a more conservative method leads to an even higher projected drop in applicants. Let’s look, as Paul does, at the percentage of applicants who had submitted their applications by this point last year. According to LSAC, that figure was 28%: By December 7, 2012, 28% of the year’s eventual applicants had submitted at least one law school application.
If applicants follow the same pattern this year, then we can expect a total of 50,611 applicants by the time the admissions cycle ends in August. That’s 14.8% fewer applicants than the preliminary figure for this year (2013), and it’s 15.3% less than the final 2013 figure I projected above.
First-Year Enrollment
This is, of course, grim news for law schools. Some applicants are not qualified for admission, and others decide not to attend law school. 50,611 applicants will yield a much smaller class. I agree with Paul Campos that we may welcome no more than 35,000 first-year students to accredited law schools in Fall 2014. That’s one-third less than the number of students who enrolled in Fall 2010.
Where Are They Going?
What has happened to those law school applicants? What are they doing instead of attending law school? I can’t answer for all of them, but I can offer some suggestions. In doing that, it’s particularly important to note that interest in law school began declining in 2005–not 2011.
The last decade has witnessed the emergence of many new professional jobs, especially in computer science, health care, and engineering. Take a look at this list of new occupations that the Bureau of Labor Statistics added to its surveys in 2012.
Those brand-new occupations include several that would interest bright high school students: information security analyst, computer network architect, web developer, computer network support specialist, nurse anesthetist, nurse midwife, nurse practitioner, and genetic counselor. Those new occupations already employ more than 629,000 people–more than the number of judges, magistrates, lawyers, and judicial clerks (620,340 total) reported in the same occupational survey.
This survey includes only salaried workers, so it omits solo practitioners, law firm partners, and other self-employed lawyers. Even if we double the number of employed lawyers, however, the comparative number of jobs in these competing occupations is eye-opening.
Remember, too, that these eight categories are brand-new fields: graduates won’t face the entrenched interests, established workers, and long career ladders that new lawyers face. These jobs, moreover, only scratch the surface of alternative careers. The BLS recently added web developers to its occupation list, but it already (and separately) counts computer programmers, software developers (applications), and software developers (systems). Almost 1.3 million people hold salaried positions in one of those three categories.
Salaries for these new occupations range from comfortable to excellent. Nurse anesthetists, the highest paid category, average $154,390, well above the $130,880 average for lawyers or the $102,470 mean for judges and magistrates. The educational requirements for nurse anesthetists, notably, are similar to those for lawyers: They complete a BS in nursing as well as a 2-3 master’s program in anesthesia.
Employees in some other categories average lower salaries than lawyers, but need only a BA to enter their field. Most software developers possess only a BA. Yet the applications developers average $93,280 per year while the systems developers average $102,550. There were, by the way, more than 978,000 salaried employees in those two categories in 2012.
The lowest paying job among the ones I’ve cited is for genetic counselors. Those workers require a master’s degree and currently average only $55,820 per year. But genetics research and applications are exploding; this is one of the most intriguing, socially important, and potentially lucrative fields in the new economy. Today’s genetics counselor may advance with the field.
But That Requires Math!
We are conditioned to think of law students and STEM graduates as two different breeds. Law students notoriously dislike math, and some of them had unfortunate encounters with organic chemistry or other college science courses. This history feeds the notion that STEM careers can’t compete with law school. If students can’t do the math, they won’t qualify for these new occupations–leaving law school as their best option. Right?
The truth is, most of us did just fine in high school math and science. If we’d wanted to be software developers or nurse anesthetists–if those jobs had even existed when many of us graduated from high school–we could have pursued those paths in college and beyond. Today’s bright high school students are equally capable of pursuing those paths, and the paths have been beckoning.
Computers, genetics, and other technologies have made science cool for today’s smartest students–in the same way that Perry Mason was cool for us. If you’re a bright 17-year-old today, do you dream of drafting a killer discovery motion or designing a killer app? Would you rather be helping a client through a divorce or through life-saving surgery? Do you want to counsel clients on avoiding foreclosure or on avoiding genetically determined risks?
Don’t get me wrong: I love the law, and I know recent graduates with good legal careers. But I also know many unhappy law school graduates and many happy scientists. if we want to address the marked decline in law school applicants, we need to understand the full scope of the current workplace.
Assumptions About JD Advantage Jobs
December 5th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
In a recent post, Professor Paula Young writes that she “hate[s] to make too many assumptions about graduates holding JD Advantage jobs.”
I wholeheartedly agree.
Ironically, we don’t need to make assumptions about these jobs: Law schools already have considerable data about them. Schools, however, are not disclosing the information they possess. Neither is NALP, which aggregates data nationally. I have written about this information gap before, encouraging schools and NALP to disclose more of the data they collect.
Here is a brief summary of what we know and don’t know, as well as what we publish and don’t publish, about JD Advantage jobs. We could eliminate much of the debate and mystery surrounding these jobs–simply by disclosing the data we already have about them.
What Are JD Advantage Jobs?
Career Services Offices do not simply gather information about whether a graduate is employed and, if so, whether the job is “JD Advantage,” “Bar Admission Required,” or some other category. In most cases, the office obtains the specific job title. Law schools, in other words, know whether their JD Advantage grads are compliance officers, investment bankers, accountants, land men, research assistants, paralegals, etc. They do not report those titles to NALP, but schools know them.
It would be quite easy for a law school to post a list of the JD Advantage jobs taken by their graduates each year, together with the number of graduates in each category. Compiling this information would take very little time at most schools. According to the ABA’s spreadsheet of 2012 job outcomes, half of all law schools had 25 or fewer graduates in JD Advantage jobs. Extracting those titles from existing spreadsheets and symplicity reports is straightforward: I hereby offer to do the work for any school that wants to send me their redacted data! This offer applies even to Thomas M. Cooley, the school with the highest number of JD Advantage jobs (161) among the Class of 2012.
Given the amount of ink that has been spilled over JD Advantage jobs, I don’t know why schools haven’t already published this information. There are some excellent JD Advantage jobs, and some schools have very positive stories to tell. Where the stories aren’t as positive, applicants deserve to have that information–and faculty members should be aware of the full spectrum of jobs taken by their graduates.
I hope it goes without saying that these disclosures should cover all JD Advantage jobs secured by a school’s graduates. Highlighting just a few jobs tempts cherry-picking.
Salaries
When it comes to salaries, we have less information about JD Advantage jobs than some of our publications suggest. Law schools request salary information from all employed graduates, and they report those figures to NALP. Graduates in JD Advantage positions, however, are substantially less likely to report their salaries than are graduates with jobs that require bar admission.
NALP does not publish all of the relevant salary information on the web, so I rely here on NALP’s hard copy book, Jobs & JDs, for the Class of 2011. In that class, 27,224 graduates reported jobs that required bar passage, while 5,214 reported positions for which the JD was an advantage. Among the first group, 15,999 disclosed their salaries; among the latter, just 1,771 did. NALP, in other words, knows the salaries for 58.8% of graduates who took jobs that required bar admission–but it knows those salaries for just 34.0% of the graduates who secured JD Advantage positions.
That’s a very large difference, almost 25 percentage points. NALP acknowledges that reported salaries are “biased upwards.” This is a problem for all salaries reported by NALP, but it creates special difficulties when comparing salaries across categories with different reporting rates.
NALP, for example, reports that the median salary for JD Advantage jobs among the Class of 2011 was $59,000. The median salary that year for jobs requiring bar passage was $61,500–which seems quite close. The comparison, however, does not take into account the much greater underreporting for JD Advantage jobs. Some individual law schools make the same mistake, comparing salary information for JD Advantage and Bar Admission Required jobs without noting the very different response rates in those categories.
When it comes to salaries for JD Advantage jobs, we need to do two things: (a) disclose clearly that we have less information about this category than about jobs that require bar admission; and (b) try to collect more information. If this employment category is important to our schools and graduates, we should devote more resources to understanding it.
Still Seeking Other Work
NALP’s employment questionnaire, used by almost all ABA-accredited law schools, asks a little-publicized question. The survey asks each employed graduate to check one of two boxes:
__ I continue to seek a job other than that described here.
__ I am not seeking a job other than that describe here.
NALP tabulates these responses by job category, but it does not publish the information anywhere on its website. Instead, the data are available only in NALP’s $95 annual report on jobs.
For the Class of 2011, here are the percentages of graduates in different job categories who were still seeking other work:
Bar Admission Required: 16.5% still seeking
JD Advantage: 46.8% still seeking
Other Professional: 52.1% still seeking
Non-Professional: 85.9% still seeking
These figures, of course, only approximate job satisfaction. Some ambitious graduates may always be seeking a better position, no matter how attractive their current job. Others may be dissatisfied with their work, but not actively seeking a new position. The relative percentages, however, are striking: law school graduates who hold JD Advantage, Other Professional, and Non-Professional jobs nine months after graduation are much more likely to be seeking other work than are graduates who hold jobs requiring bar admission.
As I wrote in a previous post, this pattern holds over time. Yes, some graduates are very satisfied with JD Advantage jobs. But for as long as NALP has collected the information, graduates in that category (or its predecessor, JD Preferred) have shown significantly higher rates of job seeking than their colleagues who obtained work requiring bar admission.
This information, as noted above, does not appear anywhere on NALP’s website–even though NALP has created an extensive page related to JD Advantage jobs, accompanied by a “detailed research analysis” of those jobs. Nor, to my knowledge, does any law school share this information about their graduates–although they all collect it. We could, if we wanted, publish the percentage of our employed graduates who are still seeking other work nine months after graduation. We could also break that percentage down by job category, revealing how many of our graduates in JD Advantage, Other Professional, and Non-Professional positions are seeking other jobs.
The information we collect about job seeking is at least as reliable as much of the other employment data we collect and publish. I have asked NALP, both through posts on this blog and direct emails, to add the job-seeking data to their site. They have not, unfortunately, done so. This type of omission contributes to ongoing distrust of law schools: We and our national placement organization are still disclosing data selectively. Applicants need to trust us to inform them, not merely to market to them.
Conclusion
We already know quite a bit about JD Advantage jobs. If every law school published the information at its disposal, applicants would understand the kind of JD Advantage jobs taken by that school’s graduates. Faculty members would also gain insights into those jobs. With disclosures from individual schools, scholars could aggregate data to build a more complete national picture of JD Advantage positions. We don’t need to make assumptions about these jobs; we have data about them. Let’s commit to disclosing and analyzing that information.
Deliberations for a prospective law student
August 21st, 2013 / By Kyle McEntee
This piece was published in this month’s National Jurist PreLaw Magazine.
If you’re thinking about applying to law school, you likely have two main questions. Can I get in? and Should I go? Lately, the answers have shifted for many individuals. A higher percentage of applicants are getting into law school; fewer are deciding to attend.
Getting into law school remains an achievement. It signals intelligence and determination. But before deciding to attend, you need to examine your options and aspirations carefully. Don’t choose law school just because you just because you got in, you like to argue, you’ve always wanted to help people or you don’t know what else to do. Think more specifically about what you hope to achieve with a law degree.
You can find that clarity through more than your imagination. Law school is a professional school, so go see what the professionals do. Shadow a variety of lawyers, meet dozens more and do anything you can to peer into the career paths of those who came before you.
Once you’ve developed some ideas about the type of career you want, check out employment outcomes for specific schools. The American Bar Association has a website with recent employment information for every accredited law school. Nationwide, only 56 percent of 2012 law graduates found full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar admission within nine months of graduation. But employment rates and job patterns vary across schools, so look carefully.
Geography matters. In recent years, about two-thirds of employed law graduates obtained their first job in the state in which their school was located. Think not just about where you want to attend school, but where you want to build a career. My nonprofit organization, Law School Transparency, developed a tool that will help you find the schools that send graduates to the cities or states where you want to work, www.LSTScoreReports.com. Employment data from the ABA and other sources are available on LST school profiles too.
Understand your student loans. The federal government originates almost all law school loans these days. Research how these loans work, such as what amount you’ll have to pay and when you will have to begin repayment. Also look at the tax implications. Boston University and Georgetown law schools have developed user-friendly calculators to help you compute debt loads and repayment plans. Consider what life will be like with debt, from the impact it may have on your career choices to your family planning or psychological well-being.
Finally, ignore all U.S. News & World Report law school rankings. At best, these rankings proxy various traits — all of which are better measured through analyzing raw data on LST, the ABA, or in the ABA-LSAC Official Guide.
Helping You Deliberate
Even with all of the sources listed above, it’s hard to make good decisions about investing in law school. When you look at salary statistics or other information on a law school website, how can you be sure they’ve presented the data fairly?
Law School Transparency recently announced a law school certification program that builds on the resources provided by the ABA and individual schools. The program centers on assuring fair representations about financial education and job statistics. We’ll certify the inaugural group of law schools in the coming months. Certified law schools will partner with LST to help students make educated decisions about whether and where to begin their legal career.
As participants, these schools will use our certification mark to signal their compliance with best practices for publishing vital employment and financial information. “LST Certified” will also demonstrate the school’s commitment to enrolling an informed student body.
Two primary goals inspire our program. First, we want you to have access to the information you need to critically evaluate your life-changing decision. The ABA’s law school accreditation standards require some important information, but not all that you want to know. The new LST Best Practices fill the gaps.
Second, we want students like you to trust the law schools that deserve your trust. Prospective students typically struggle to distinguish between schools that claim a comprehensive picture of job outcomes and costs, and those schools that actually provide one. These days, all law schools put their best foot forward to convey their value and distinctive offerings. But fierce competition drives questionable marketing tactics.
Law school is a huge investment that requires you to balance complicated costs, potential job and educational outcomes, and intangible benefits. ABA data, law school websites, the LST website, and LST’s new certification can all help you make the best decision. None of these sources can tell you whether to attend law school — or which school to attend — but they will aid your decision-making.
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Law School Cafe is a resource for anyone interested in changes in legal education and the legal profession.
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