KU Law Blog

Let’s address some questions about employment raised by prospective students over the last few weeks.

When will employment statistics be available for KU Law’s most recent class?
For each graduating class, KU Law measures employment at graduation and nine months after graduation. Each February, every law school in the country submits final employment data to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP). In June, law schools receive a detailed report from NALP of national and school-specific trends.

We will submit our class of 2010 report to NALP on February 22, 2011. At that time, we will update our website with the “employed at graduation” and “employed nine months after graduation” data using the US News formula (which differs slightly from the NALP formula).

Here are the US News numbers from the 2006-09 graduating classes:

What’s the geographic dispersion of recent KU Law grads?

For the class of 2009, the last class for which we have complete information, 51.2 percent of the class was employed in Kansas, 21.7 percent in Missouri and 27.1 percent in other states and countries.

Most students reporting employment in Missouri were employed in the greater Kansas City area.

Outside of Kansas and Missouri, the most traveled-to states by the Class of 2009 were: Washington, D.C. (7), Arizona (3), Oklahoma (3), Colorado (2), Illinois (2) Maryland (2), New York (2), Texas (2), Virginia (2) and Washington (2).

Historically, between 65 percent and 75 percent of our students remain in the West North Central Region, as defined by NALP to include Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. The bulk of these students find employment in Kansas and Kansas City, Mo.

Other popular regions for our grads are South Atlantic (on the strength of D.C.), West South Central (mainly in Texas) and Mountain (primarily in Arizona, Colorado and Utah).

How has the recession impacted on-campus recruiting?

Nationally, the most dramatic impact of the current economic situation was on fall 2009 recruiting of 2Ls for summer 2010 positions. At the largest national law firms, the median number of summer offers dropped from 30 in fall 2007 to 18.5 in 2008 to just 8 in 2009. The percentage of callback interviews resulting in summer jobs fell from 60 percent to 46.6 percent to 36.4 percent over that three-year period. The acceptance rate of 42.8 percent was an all-time high.Our on-campus interview (OCI) numbers serve as a rough barometer of the overall health of the legal economy, especially regionally. By tracking the last three academic years, it becomes clear that the recession was in full bloom in late summer/early fall 2009, the same time period in which employers were deciding whether to participate in the fall 2009 OCI program to recruit 2L law students for the summer of 2010.

Over half of law schools surveyed reported a decrease of 30 percent or more in the number of employers on campus in fall 2009 compared with fall 2008. Our drop was 40 percent, from 72 to 43 employers; 38.2 percent of schools in the Midwest reported a decrease of more than 40 percent.

Some good news: In the fall of 2010, 50 employers from 7 states conducted 670 interviews on campus, as compared to 562 on-campus interviews in the fall of 2009.  An increased number of call-back (second) interviews, offers and acceptances were also reported by our students.

What did last year’s 1Ls do over their summer break?

Eighty percent of the Class of 2012 reported summer employment and/or participation in summer school, a law school clinic or a study abroad program.

• 45 enrolled in a summer school class.
• 40 enrolled in a clinic in which they received course credit for completing practical legal work.
• 15 participated in a KU Law-sponsored study abroad program.
• 10 received a Bremyer Summer Clerk Scholarship for summer work with a legal employer in a less populous Kansas community.
• 15 received a KU Law Summer Stipend for volunteer legal work with a public interest organization. Stipend recipients worked in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, California, New York, Texas and Washington.
• Finally, 25 students secured a legal internship with an employer outside of the Bremyer or KU Law Summer Stipend Programs.

Todd Rogers, Assistant Dean for Career Services

On Jan. 8 the New York Times published a much-discussed article called “Is Law School a Losing Game?” The article’s author, David Segal, is critical of a law school system that he alleges overstates employment prospects to prospective students, all in the name of packing classrooms with students who pay high tuitions.

The Lawrence Journal-World linked to the article on Jan. 13 and asked about the employment picture at KU Law.

Let me partially answer that query by referring to two specific criticisms leveled by the article and then explaining how KU Law does business.

• Segal refers to the “Wonderland” of law school employment statistics and states that many schools — even some outside the top 40 — list the median starting salary of their graduates in the private sector at $160,000.

  As a prospective law student, it’s imperative to carefully scrutinize employment stats. For example, there’s a significant difference between private practice and public sector salaries. Statistics that blend private practice and public interest salaries together are relatively meaningless.

  So are private practice salary stats based on only a small percentage of graduates. It’s likely that schools outside the top 40 listing a median starting salary of $160,000 for grads in the private sector have not accounted for even a majority of those graduates when calculating the average.

  For the class of 2009, 79 KU Law students reported a private practice salary. This represented 80.6 percent of 2009 graduates employed in private practice. The average salary was $72,660.

• Segal also alleges that schools massage employment data to produce numbers that are inciting to prospective students and palatable to current student and alumni. In doing so, he notes that “a school with the guts to report, say, a 4 percent drop in postgraduate employment would plunge in the rankings, leaving the dean to explain a lot of convoluted math, and the case for unvarnished truth, to a bunch of angry students and alums.”

  The decision to come to law school is an important one that ultimately involves three years of intense study and, in some cases, significant borrowing. Prospective law students should be afforded every opportunity to review accurate employment data. The following information for graduation years 2006-09 is available on the KU Law website.

  Graduation Year	% Employed at Graduation	% Employed Nine Months after Graduation	US News Ranking
  2009	63.2	89.0	TBD (April 2011)
  2008	69.4	93.6	67 (April 2010)
  2007	67.1	95.5	65 (April 2009)
  2006	65.9	94.7	73 (April 2008)

  In the midst of the recession, our numbers took a hit, but we were upfront about reporting the losses accurately.

• One statistic not touched upon in the article, and not often discussed by prospective students, is the percentage of students employed in “bar admission required” positions.

  Most law students enroll with the goal of practicing law after graduation. By graduation, some have decided to pursue less traditional, “J.D.-preferred” or other professional positions that do not require the passage of a bar exam.

  During the recession, we’ve seen the percentage of recent grads employed in “bar admission required” positions decline as an increased number of graduates who do want to practice law have been unable to secure traditional legal positions and have been forced to look elsewhere.

  Here’s the percentage of KU Law graduates from the last eight classes who were employed in “bar admission required” positions nine months after graduation:

  KU Law Class	Ratio	Percentage
  2002	117/162	72.2%
  2003	96/146	65.8%
  2004	133/184	72.3%
  2005	124/179	69.3%
  2006	117/170	68.8%
  2007	115/157	73.2%
  2008	120/161	74.5%
  2009	97/156	62.2%

  (Note: Other categories are J.D. Preferred, Other Professional, Non-Professional, Pursuing Degree FT, Unemployed-Seeking and Unemployed-Not Seeking.)

The recession has certainly put a damper on graduates securing traditional legal positions, and prospective students deserve access to this information from all schools they’re considering.

Todd Rogers, Assistant Dean for Career Services