Entry-Level Hiring: Stats

As Dan mentioned in a previous post, our friends at Prawfsblawg are soliciting info on entry-level hires.  

Here are a few stats on the information reported at Prawfsblawg through mid-afternoon on April 5:

Schools reporting at least one entry-level hire:  48.

Schools reporting no entry-level hires:  2.

Total entry-level hires reported:  75.

Total female entry-level hires reported:  33 (or 44%).

Most entry-level hires reported (3):  Vermont, Iowa, Hastings, Case Western, Maryland, Michigan State, DePaul.

Entry-level hires who have earned degrees other than an undergraduate degree and a law degree:  33 (or 44%) --- fifteen have earned (or are expecting) a Ph.D. degree. 

Entry-level hires with VAP or fellowship:  44 (or 59%).

Most popular JD-granting law schools:  Harvard (12), Yale (8), Michigan (7), NYU (7), Columbia (5), Stanford (5).

Most popular subject areas mentioned:  Civil Procedure (9), Business / Corporate (7), Constitutional Law (7), International Law (5), Environmental Law (5), Intellectual Property (5).

I'll try to update these stats on a weekly basis for the next few weeks.

Comments

[anonprof]

Maybe I'm wrong, but these numbers look awfully low. I mean 75 entry level hires! I certainly would have expected more? Perhaps people just don't know that Prawfsblawg is compiling these numbers. How many hires have there been over the last three to five years? And how many FAR applications were submitted this year and in recent years?

[anon]

Thanks for this, Tim. FYI Dan's spreadsheet reflects 8, not 7, Michigan hires.

[Tim Zinnecker]

Anon -- I double-checked and you are correct. Michigan has issued JD degrees to eight (not seven) candidates. I'll also disclose that I'm relying on the info in the comments, not in the spreadsheet. I'm also limiting my stats to those candidates hired by a US law school.

Anonprof -- so far, we have data from about 50 law schools (so one might conclude that the actual number of new hires could be much higher).

[Matt]

I know of at least a few hires that are not reported on Prawfs. I strongly suspect that there are others as well, so it would be a mistake to assume these stats are final (and maybe even a mistake to assume they are representative, though I'm less sure about that.)

[Anne]

Perhaps the numbers are low because they are precisely the figures that the legal education machine SHOULD be reporting: fewer hires than retires at this point. Law school faculties are bloated with overpaid, underworked professors, and there is no reason to hire even more fat when a leaner education machine is what students are looking for these days. For law schools to shed their rapidly-growing reputation as money pits, they need to lose 25% of existing professors, cut tuition, and stop acting like an antiquated welfare system for the lucky few who manage to worm their way into this rotten system.

[Sarah Lawsky]

Tim, to follow up on some of the comments, please do rely on the spreadsheet going forward. I did not do a good job of making this clear in the post, but the information in the spreadsheet is more complete than the information in the comments (because I'm supplementing the comments with Googling in order to arrive at the spreadsheet data). Plus one of the reasons I'm putting this on a spreadsheet is so that people can automate analysis. (E.g., you can download the spreadsheet as an Excel file and run COUNTIF(), etc.)

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