Legal News

U.S. News Encourages Law Schools To ?Fess Up on Employment Rates

By Nathan Koppel

If you feel a certain buzz in the air it’s not because the world’s greatest sporting event — strike that, the world’s greatest event, period — is set to begin next week.

No, it’s the anticipation surrounding the 2012 Best Law Schools, which U.S. News is set to release next Tuesday.

It appears that the magazine is going to take a closer look at law schools’ real success at landing jobs for graduates in ranking schools. On Thursday, Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News, noted in this blog post that the magazine will alter how it calculates employment rates in its rankings to more accurately capture the “current state of legal employment.”

Morse did not spell out precisely what is afoot, but it could be that U.S. News will increasingly penalize law schools that fail to disclose “employed-at-graduation” data, according to this post in the Legal Profession Blog by law professors Bill Henderson and Andrew Morriss.

When a school fails to disclose its employed-at-graduation rate, the professors note, U.S. News is forced to impute the rate based on the number of graduates who have landed a job 9 months after graduation.  But that sort of back of the envelope math, critics contend, can present an inflate picture of a school’s true employment prowess.

Morse writes in his post that U.S. News agrees with efforts by the ABA and the group Law School Transparency to get law schools to provide more and better employment data. And he also provided the full text of a strongly-worded letter that U.S. News editor Brian Kelly sent to law school deans.

“There have been some serious questions raised about the reliability of employment data reported by some schools of law,” Kelly wrote. And here’s more from Kelly:

I think we can all agree that it is not in anyone’s interest-especially that of prospective students-to have less than accurate data being put out by law schools. It’s creating a crisis of confidence in the law school sector that is unnecessary and we think could be easily fixed.

Specifically, employment after graduation is relevant data that prospective students and other consumers should be entitled to. Many graduate business schools are meticulous about collecting such data, even having it audited. The entire law school sector is perceived to be less than candid because it does not pursue a similar, disciplined approach to data collection and reporting.

Step back! We leave it to professors Henderson and Morris to sum up this latest interesting development in the legal academy:

Here is the reality:  prospective students are not being given an accurate picture of their future employment prospects.  Why? Because we are all focused on filling next year’s class with as many high credential students as possible, thereby protecting our school’s place in the pecking order.  Our focus is so shockingly narrow that, from the outside looking in, it appears that our intent is to deceive incoming students. . . . At some point, all our lawyerly rationalizations will come to a bad end because a governmental agency or a court is going to challenge our right to self-regulation, thus ushering in a truly disgraceful chapter in the history of American legal education.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 11, 2011 (boomark / email).