Some progress on transparency

The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has approved a new questionnaire which will require law schools to report more employment information than they're currently required to divulge.  Key points:

• Graduate employment information will be made available to the public faster. Instead of being published two years after a particular class graduates, the data will be collected earlier in the year and will be made public approximately one year after graduation.

• Law schools will have to report whether graduates are in jobs funded by the schools, themselves. They will have to stipulate whether graduates are in jobs requiring bar passage; positions for which J.D.s are an advantage; professional positions that do not require a J.D., non-professional positions; and whether jobs are long-term or short-term.

• Employment and salary information must be reported for each individual graduate rather than in the aggregate, giving the ABA the ability to audit the figures.

The Section's decision comes in the wake of the widespread criticism it received for an earlier decision to actually reduce the amount of data law schools would be required to divulge in regard to the Class of 2010.  However: "As with the old questionnaire, job and salary data will not be reported together and school-specific salary data will not be released publicly. . . School-specific salary data may yet be made available to the public under a different proposal being considered by the ABA's Standards Review Committee, which is evaluating all of the ABA's law school accreditation standards."

It's important to keep political pressure on the ABA in regard to this topic (calling the offices of Senators Boxer, Grassley, and Coburn to voice your support of their proposed hearings would be a good idea). 

It's also important to keep in mind that there's nothing stopping individual schools from releasing more information than the ABA requires them to report, and some schools are beginning to do so.  Consider this pdf, which can, in the wake of the litigation filed against it, be found on New York Law School's web page.

This represents an improvement over the reigning (extremely low) industry standard when it comes to disclosure of employment and salary data, although it's still falls quite a bit short of genuine transparency.

First, what’s good about this:

(1) It reveals that salary information is available for only 21.8% of the graduating class.  For instance a sophisticated reader would notice from this breakdown that around 5% of the class reports having a salary of 100K or above.   

    (2) It reveals that NYLS was funding 23 law school created “jobs” (although it would have been better if the school had revealed how long these positions lasted and what they paid – at most schools they last three to six months and are always timed, as at NYLS, to fall within the crucial nine-month post-graduation employment window).   

         

         (3) It reveals that most NYLS who are in private practice nine months after graduation are working for very small (10 lawyers or fewer) firms for salaries --less than $50K -- that hardly justify the $250K or so in tuition and living expenses that students must incur to get a degree from NYLS.

What’s not good:

(1) The stats make no distinction between temporary and long-term jobs.    Nationally, 27% of 2010 law graduates who had legal jobs nine months after graduation were in temporary as opposed to long-term positions. I suspect the comparable figure for NYLS is higher than the average.

(2) The stats don’t distinguish between full-time and part-time positions.

(3)  The stats don’t distinguish between JD-required and JD-preferred positions.  “JD preferred” is a slippery category that can include things that in fact have almost nothing to do with legal work.   

(4)  The breakdowns by category are still quite potentially misleading, in that NYLS reports an “average” salary for graduates in private practice of $107K, when that “average” is actually based on the salaries of 11% of the class, since only two out of five grads were in private practice, and most of these people were with small, low-paying firms – and very few people in this subcategory (16 out of 95) reported their salaries.

The most basic stats schools should be required to provide to the public are these:

(1) How many of your graduates are in permanent -- aka long-term, benefit-providing -- full-time positions that require a law degree? (As BL1Y mentions in comments this information would be much more useful if it were provided for graduates several years after graduation, not merely nine months afterwards).

(2)  What percentage of those people reported salaries, and what was the mean and median of those salaries?

NYLS has all this information, and provides some of it here, but does not disaggregate it adequately for prospective students.  Even so, as inadequate as this breakdown is, it’s still much better than what most law schools are currently disclosing to prospective students.  

So it's fair to say that, whatever it's fate may end up being in the courts, the litigation being brought against law schools for publishing misleading employment and salary data is already having some good effects.