Academic

A Plan for More Comprehensive Law School Graduate Employment Data

By Alfred Brophy

Kyle P. McEntee and Patrick J. Lynch of Vanderbilt Law School have a new paper up on ssrn, "A Way Forward: Improving Transparency in Employment Reporting at American Law Schools."  Their paper proposes  more comprehensive collection and reporting of data on law school graduates' employment than the aggregate data that's reported now.

Here is their abstract:

The decision to attend law school in the 21st century requires an increasingly significant financial investment, yet very little information about the value of a legal education is available for prospective law students. Prospectives use various tools provided by schools and third parties while seeking to make an informed decision about which law school to attend. This Article surveys the available information with respect to one important segment of the value analysis: post-graduation employment outcomes.

One of the most pressing issues with current access to information is the ability to hide outcomes in aggregate statistical forms. Just about every tool enables this behavior, which, while misleading, often complies with the current ABA and U.S. News reporting standards. In this Article, we propose a new standard for employment reporting grounded in compromise. Our hope is that this standard enables prospectives to take a detailed, holistic look at the diverse employment options from different law schools. In time, improved transparency at American law institutions can produce generations of lawyers who were better informed about the range of jobs obtainable with a law degree.

I recall filling out a detailed survey on employment and salary data as part of my final PhD paperwork -- and so my guess is that some schools already collect this sort of data for some of their graduates (maybe more so in arts and sciences than law).  Whether that data is released to anyone or is used more for internal study, I don't know.

As McEntree and Lynch's website, lawschooltransprancy.com, makes clear -- some schools already report some of this data in their alumni magazines (by listing who is employing graduates).

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 21, 2010 (boomark / email).