Kyle P. McEntee and Patrick J. Lynch of Vanderbilt Law School have a new paper up on ssrn, "A Way Forward: Improving Transparency in Employment Reporting at American Law Schools." Their paper proposes more comprehensive collection and reporting of data on law school graduates' employment than the aggregate data that's reported now.
Here is their abstract:
The decision to attend law school in the 21st century requires an increasingly significant financial investment, yet very little information about the value of a legal education is available for prospective law students. Prospectives use various tools provided by schools and third parties while seeking to make an informed decision about which law school to attend. This Article surveys the available information with respect to one important segment of the value analysis: post-graduation employment outcomes.
One of the most pressing issues with current access to information is the ability to hide outcomes in aggregate statistical forms. Just about every tool enables this behavior, which, while misleading, often complies with the current ABA and U.S. News reporting standards. In this Article, we propose a new standard for employment reporting grounded in compromise. Our hope is that this standard enables prospectives to take a detailed, holistic look at the diverse employment options from different law schools. In time, improved transparency at American law institutions can produce generations of lawyers who were better informed about the range of jobs obtainable with a law degree.
I suspect that it would be quite difficult to collect the level of data that they propose, but I certainly agree that if we could obtain such data that it would be of utility to prospective students, as well as US News.
I recall filling out a detailed survey on employment and salary data as part of my final PhD paperwork — and so my guess is that some schools already collect this sort of data for some of their graduates (maybe more so in arts and sciences than law). Whether that data is released to anyone or is used more for internal study, I don't know.
As McEntree and Lynch's website, lawschooltransprancy.com, makes clear — some schools already report some of this data in their alumni magazines (by listing who is employing graduates).
Thanks for the post, Alfred! I want to clarify one point.
Of the eight unique components across the two lists, schools already collect six directly from students (employer type, employer name, bar passage requirement, FT/PT, office location, salary). For position name, schools can satisfactorily describe many graduates by examining the graduates’ answers to the NALP survey. Journal status, on the other hand, will require entirely new efforts by law schools, but it is already publicly available on journal mastheads/websites/hard copies.
The schools use this data to fill out the U.S. News survey and ABA questionnaire. They also report this data to NALP, but NALP dumps it all together for industry-wide studies and statistics.