Versus how many graduates?

My last post examined the number of entry-level lawyering jobs available during each year of the last decade. How many graduates of ABA law schools competed for those jobs? And how many law students lost out in the job lottery? Answering those questions takes two steps, because NALP does not gather job information about every graduate of an accredited law school. Before 2010, some schools did not report data to NALP. And, both before and after that date, participating schools fail to obtain information about some graduates.

With those caveats in mind, let's look first at the number of graduates who reported full-time jobs requiring bar admission compared to the number of graduates who reported any job information to NALP. Here is that information, with the percentage calculated in the last column. I've added 2001, so you can compare the current situation with the impact of the last general recession. [Unfortunately, I can't readily add figures for 2000, because NALP adopted the "bar admission required" category only in 2001.]

Year	Jobs Requiring Bar Admission	Employment Status Reported	Percent of Grads with FT Jobs Requiring Bar Admission
2001	26,279	34,602	75.9%
2002	26,564	35,295	75.3%
2003	26,387	35,787	73.7%
2004	26,939	36,834	73.1%
2005	28,932	38,951	74.2%
2006	30,273	40,186	75.3%
	Full-Time Bar Admission Jobs
2007	29,978	40,416	74.2%
2008	28,890	40,582	71.2%
2009	26,625	40,833	65.2%
2010	25,654	41,156	62.3%
2011	24,902	41,623	59.8%

[Note that for the years before 2007 I report all "jobs requiring bar admission," while starting in 2007 I report full-time jobs. The NALP information on the web does not distinguish full-time and part-time jobs before 2007 but, as explained in my previous post, the number of those jobs was quite small in 2007 (and probably in previous years). The best comparison, from the available information, seems to be all bar-admission jobs before 2006 and full-time jobs after that year.]

The table shows that the percentage of graduates obtaining full-time lawyering jobs dropped dramatically after 2007. The percentages weren't that hot in 2007 and earlier years; about a quarter of law school graduates consistently missed out on jobs practicing law.

What happens if we look at the number of actual graduates in those years? Those numbers, of course, are higher than the number of graduates reporting employment outcomes. In 2001, there were 38,157 graduates of 183 accredited schools. That number climbed fairly steadily to 44,258 in 2011. The percentage of graduates reporting jobs to NALP also rose during this period, from 90.7% in 2001 to 94.0% in 2011.

What should we assume about the graduates (or schools) who didn't report job information to NALP? During the early part of the decade, some of these non-reporters would have been more likely than the reporters to have full-time lawyering jobs. The Columbia graduates, for example, probably beat the NALP average in that category. But during more recent years, the non-reporters are much less likely to hold full-time lawyering jobs. All schools now belong to NALP, and schools aggressively track graduates--especially the ones with good jobs. At the extreme, it is possible that none of the 2011 grads missing from the NALP figures obtained full-time lawyering jobs.

There's no way to know exactly how many of the missing graduates obtained full-time jobs requiring bar admission. But we can estimate a pretty secure range of numbers. It is very unlikely that non-reporters during the last few years obtained proportionately more lawyering jobs than their reporting classmates. So, if we apply the percentage of full-time lawyering jobs to the missing grads from the last five classes, and then add those totals to the reported jobs, we can generate a best-case prediction of the number of grads who obtained full-time lawyering jobs. Conversely, if we assume that none of the missing grads obtained full-time lawyering jobs, we produce a worst-case scenario. Here are the resulting numbers, all limited to just ABA-accredited law schools:

Year	Total Grads	Number w/o Full-Time Lawyering Jobs (Best Case)	Number w/o Full-Time Lawyering Jobs (Worst Case)
2007	43,518	11,238	13,534
2008	43,587	12,557	14,689
2009	44,000	15,310	17,380
2010	44,258	16,671	18,588
2011	44,495	17,876	19,578
Total	219,858	73,652	83,769

Over the last five years, ABA accredited schools have graduated at least 73,652 students who did not obtain jobs practicing law within nine months of graduation--and that includes the best year on record for law graduates. Sure, some of those graduates didn't want to practice law. But most of them went to law school because they wanted to be lawyers--and all of them paid for a degree priced by the potential to practice law.

Over the last five years, between 33.5% and 38.1% of our total graduates failed to obtain the jobs most suited to their degrees. In the most recent year, 2011, the percentage was 40.2% (best case) to 44.0% (worst case). From a labor market perspective, that's a huge mismatch of educational investment and career outcomes. From the human perspective, this is a tragic waste of talent and life opportunities.