A jesuitical interlude
By The ABA just published employment statistics for the class of 2013, based on reporting by law schools of the status of their graduates as of February 15, 2014, i.e., approximately nine months after graduation, and four to five months after bar results. On a national level, this year’s stats are pretty much identical to last year’s, with only 53% of graduates obtaining full-time long-term employment requiring bar admission (excluding law school funded “jobs” and putative sole practitioners).
Needless to say even these numbers ought to be treated with some skepticism, as schools are under tremendous pressure to gild the lily in all sorts of ways. (For example, by using favorable default assumptions regarding conditions of employment when, as is often the case, it’s not actually known if a position is full-time and/or long-term).
An amusing example of how “flexible” reporting standards can be is provided by Santa Clara University’s law school, home to Prof. Steve “People Who Criticize the Law School Status Quo Are Actually Trying to Bring Back Jim Crow” Diamond (see also). A little background: Until the spring of 2011, the US News rankings excluded graduates who schools listed as “Unemployed Not Seeking” from the denominator, when calculating graduate employment rates. This seemed like a reasonable choice, given that very occasionally graduates don’t happen to be seeking employment nine months after graduation. And most schools listed very few if any graduates in this category: the median percentage was below 2%, and the mode was zero, with nearly a quarter of schools not listing even one graduate as unemployed not seeking.
But in the spring of 2011, after schools had submitted their reports, US News decided that it would start including graduates listed as unemployed not seeking as unemployed, in part because of (well-warranted) suspicions that a few schools were manipulating the category, by for example using perverse default criteria, such as assuming that unemployed graduates who didn’t affirmatively indicate to their Career Services Office that they were looking for work weren’t actually looking for work (Many law students and graduates have very negative views of their CSOs, so assuming that an unemployed graduate who didn’t use the CSO’s services wasn’t looking for a job was a conveniently disingenuous way of radically understating a school’s true unemployment rate to US News, which at that time was the only entity publishing that information).
Which brings us back to Santa Clara. Behold Santa Clara’s unemployment statistics before and after US News started counting students categorized as “unemployed not seeking” as simply unemployed:
2010
Total graduates: 305
Unemployed Not Seeking: 55
Unemployed Seeking: 6
Reported unemployment rate to US News: 2.4%
True unemployment rate: 20%
2011
Total graduates: 297
Unemployed Not Seeking: 47
Unemployed Seeking: 24
Reported unemployment rate: 9.6%
True unemployment rate: 23.9%
2012
Total graduates: 298
Unemployed Not Seeking: 28 (9.4%)
Unemployed Seeking: 24
True unemployment rate: 17.5%
2013
Total graduates: 322
Unemployed Not Seeking: 1 (0.3%)
Unemployed Seeking: 57
True unemployment rate: 18%
Santa Clara experienced a 98.3% decline in the percentage of its graduating class that was unemployed but not seeking work, relative to the percentage of unemployed graduates seeking work, after the former category was no longer useful for disguising the school’s true unemployment rate.
I suppose it’s possible to deploy some legal academic casuistry — perhaps the doctrine of mental reservation as applied to the Public Good of the Rule of Law — to produce a benign explanation for this series of events.