Employment Statistics by School - C/O 2019 rolling out + C/O 2012-2017 data

[UVA2B]

Great work Stranger. Since the majority of these schools are regional, it might be interesting to also group them by region/feeder markets to gauge pre-COVID market health. Knowing what the PNW or SE is doing (broadly) by approximation of how UW or UGA are doing might show some interesting trendlines.

Then again, COVID is going to drastically affect all future stats and outcomes, so that statistical analysis may be a relic at this point.

[Stranger]

Great work Stranger. Since the majority of these schools are regional, it might be interesting to also group them by region/feeder markets to gauge pre-COVID market health. Knowing what the PNW or SE is doing (broadly) by approximation of how UW or UGA are doing might show some interesting trendlines.

Then again, COVID is going to drastically affect all future stats and outcomes, so that statistical analysis may be a relic at this point.

Really getting a grasp of regional health would be an interesting project, though I might want raw numbers instead of percentages for that. It also takes some fine tuning. Duke doesn't place enough in the South to merit inclusion as a proxy for regional health. Vanderbilt's NALP reports show a wide spread with somewhat heavier placement in the South, so they're probably safer to include in an average if enough other schools go in. And do we even use the same categories? The 501+ firms will have big NY/DC/CA skew even in schools far from those places. Would aiming to capture midlaw and regional biglaw be a better metric (say, 51-500), at least outside of NY/DC/CA?

[MT Cicero]

Northwestern gets such a raw deal in these statistics. This year is -4.7%, but the great outcomes are actually probably UP. That 10% JD/MBA class really skews things, because the Kellogg MBA leads to some very nice gigs. Last year only 8 students went into JD advantage roles. This year it was 21. If you include JD advantage jobs, it go 79.0% (C/O 2018) to 80.0% (C/O 2019) (+1.0%).

In comparison, the other T13 placed far fewer grads in JD advantage gigs: Columbia (3), NYU (5), Chicago (2), Penn (7), Virginia (6), Stanford (9), Cornell (4), Harvard (24), Berkeley (5), Michigan (4), Yale (7). Harvard's number isn't even that good considering its class size is 2.5x as big as Northwestern.

This is a perennial Northwestern complaint - and we can use the numbers they provide to show the rate change between the full class and those not earning MBAs (feel free to do so - I may get to it later). But the JD Advantage category is also a black box that can contain amazing results and mediocrity in entirely unclear proportion. I get that for Northwestern JD-MBAs, its usually good, just like it is at Yale. But How good an outcome is it at USC? Notre Dame? Wake Forest? Villanova?

Unlike the four categories we combine in this thread, it's unclear whether JD Advantage represents jobs likely to set you up to pay off your loans in the bulk of cases across schools. It's kinda like "business" in that regard.

I agree with all this, and Northwestern helps folks out by separating out their JD-MBA stats, which usually post a couple weeks later. I keep track of them annually, and c/o 2019 had a particularly large spread between the numbers based on JD-MBAs only going into law jobs at 33% (9/27)--all biglaw jobs. They have kept the streak of 0 JD-MBAs going to clerkships going back at least 9 years, which is as long as I have data.

This year, removing JD-MBAs from both the numerator and the denominator and looking only at JDs, you get 76.1% BL + FC, which is 4.8% higher than when you include the JD-MBAs. Oddly, last year the JD-MBAs helped the overall number (only be 0.3% though), since over 75% of JD-MBAs went into biglaw. That was the only time there has been a "negative" spread with the JD-MBAs included going back to at least 2011.

So, no need to try and read tea leaves re JD Advantage at Northwestern when you can just look at the JD stats. Incidentally, for JD-only, Northwestern c/o 2019 had its highest BL, BL+FC, and FTLT Legal Employment numbers dating back to at least 2011. It also had its lowest FC number since 2012.