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December 15, 2011

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Cheap Brochure Printing

I guess this is an unbiased review and an accurate one! Thanks for sharing this statistics. I agree with you, some Law graduates are just shy to admit that they are jobless. -Sarah-

Erik Girvan

The data fit a story that makes sense. Even so, the assumption that 100% of non-responses are unemployed seems rather strong without an estimate of the actual proportion. In particular, I worry that it might be systematically misleading (and burdensome) due to third variables like school resources and general alumni satisfaction, which may be more strongly related to non-response rate than unemployment. How predictive is the rate of unemployment calculated from alumni responses for a school of the school's non-response rate (ideally controlling for resources, e.g., student-faculty ratio, and alumni satisfaction, e.g., giving rates)? It is not entirely clear that the tendency not to respond because one is unemployed and embarrassed about it is unrelated to "elite status"--given that relative deprivation is often more influential than absolute deprivation, graduates of high status schools might be more embarrassed by unemployment and thus have a greater tendency to not respond or lie. Even so, it seems like a more direct test of the hypothesis that non-response is due to alumni unemployment.
-Erik

Scott Boone

Correlation is a dangerous game.

Other commonalities between "low-LSAT" schools, such as resources and satisfaction that EriK points out, can contribute to higher percentages of unknowns. I think many people familiar only with well funded elite schools overestimate the resources available at some or many "low-LSAT" schools. Keep in mind that any increased resources put to this will have to either come out of some other function of the school (career placement, teaching position, etc) or out of student pockets in the form of higher tuition. I also think some people underestimate the extent to which some alumni go to hide themselves from their schools (primarily out of a mistaken fear that they are going to be pestered for donations). Yes, this is real.

Another factor that contributes to a high level of unknowns is how dispersed the alumni are geographically. The more concentrated the alumni are geographically, the easier it is to discover employment status and contact information through tighter networks.

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