Guess Who’s Coming To Graduation?

Job Data Shows Gulf Between Elite and Everyone Else

These days, you’ll hear plenty of allusions to the “two Americas,” a gap between rich and poor, educated and unskilled, and red and blue. According to analysis by the Wall Street Journal’s “Law Blog,” this gap also exists between top tier law schools and everyone else.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal analyzed the ABA’s 2013 law graduate employment data and cross-referenced it against the data from the 2015 U.S. News and World Report law school rankings. Sure enough, some trends emerged about the haves and the have-nots:

• “The unemployment rate for graduates from the top 50 is more than 60% lower than the unemployment rate for everybody else.”
• “About 5% of class of 2013 graduates from a top 50 school were still looking for work in February, about nine months after spring 2013 graduation. Meanwhile, 14% of graduates of schools below the top 50 were searching for a job.” “(The unemployment rate for all 201 ABA-approved law schools, which includes the top 50 U.S. News schools, is 11.2%, according to the ABA figures released last month.)”
• “Roughly 75% of graduates from top 50 schools landed [long-term, full-time jobs for which passage of the bar exam was required]. For all other graduates, the rate was 50%. The overall ABA figure in that category was 57%.”

Mind you, the numbers are skewed toward schools below the top 50, which comprised 30% of all 2013 graduates. Still, it is a reminder of why rankings, fair or not, matter (and how vulnerable law schools below the top 50 really are to scaling back or closing). Despite rosy predictions for the future, Quartz noted this week that business trends could curtail any real jobs recovery: “Law schools aren’t just facing a momentary downturn. The industry has to deal with the fact that the world simply needs far fewer lawyers…Technology, a shift to flat-fee contracts from billing for time, and globalization have shifted the salary and employment math for students considering law school forever. And the impact has trickled down to law schools, particularly those schools without premier brands or support from large universities, according to an analyst note from Moody’s.”
While the drop in jobs has begun to correct itself, it can’t fight facts: Tuition is rising, as is student debt, and applications are still way down from 2010. (See graph below.) The worst might be over, but the coming years might simply reflect a new normal of fewer opportunities and lower expectations.
Sources: Wall Street Journal, Quartz