Employment Outcomes IV: What The ABA Employment Outcomes Data Tell Us About The Prevalence and Distribution Of School-Funded “Bridge” Positions

Before the ABA Section on Legal Education disclosed the employment outcomes data for the Class of 2010 it had collected from accredited law schools, our knowledge regarding the prevalence and distribution of school-funded “bridge” positions was fairly limited. Regular readers of this space (and blessings in abundance on each and every one of you) will recall that only 22 of the top 50 US News-ranked schools publicly disclose whether they fund bridge positions, with 20 (or 40%) disclosing how many (see here), An inquiry into the second 50 US News-ranked schools that we began before the ABA stepped in (or out, as it were) showed that only nine of the second 50, or 18%, publicly disclose whether they fund bridge positions. (Heartfelt thanks for all this information is overdue to UNC Research Librarian Extraordinaire Leslie Street, and two of her tireless and meticulous research assistants, Emily Roscoe and Jonathan Rountree. Assistance with the ABA data has been provided with stamina and good cheer by my administrative assistant, Ashley Arthur.)

Now that the ABA has provided a more comprehensive dataset, we have a lot more to talk about. Let’s start with school-funded bridge positions. Of the 195 accredited law schools from which the ABA collected data, 82, or 42%, funded non-negligible numbers of bridge positions for the Class of 2010. (I have rather arbitrarily defined “negligible” as less than 2% of the graduating class, on the theory that this small a number of such positions is unlikely to reflect any real programmatic effort to assist students struggling to enter the workplace with a benefit of this kind. In counting bridge positions, I included school-funded positions that the schools characterized as “long-term” as well as “short-term,” on the theory that while “long-term” is defined as lasting a year or longer, any of these school-funded jobs is very likely to be limited in duration and temporary, and thus a “bridge” position of the kind we are discussing by any practical standard.)

 Bridge positions are not distributed evenly across all schools. If we divide the 195 schools into four groups by US News rank, some interesting trends emerge:



	Rank 1-50	Rank 51-100	Rank 101-145	Unranked
0%-2.0%	28%	50%	69%	86%
2.1%-5.0%	28%	22%	9%	8%
5.1%-10.0%	22%	20%	13%	0%
Over 10%	22%	8%	9%	6%
Mean	5.8%	3.6%	2.9%	1.5%
Median	4.8%	2.0%	0.7%	0.7%

 

The rows describe the portion of the class of 2010 occupying school-funded positions nine months after graduation; the columns divide all accredited law schools into four quartiles by US News rank.  (The author’s use of the US News rankings should not be viewed as his endorsement of their accuracy or fitness for any particular purpose other than as a coarse indication of relative prestige.  As regular readers know, he has leapt enthusiastically aboard the very crowded “US News, you lose” bandwagon.  Half-hearted apologies for the atrocious pun.)

What is striking about this breakdown is how strongly school-funded bridge positions are associated with greater school prestige.  Fully 72% of the US News top 50 fund non-negligible numbers of these positions, while only 50% of the next 50 do, and just 31% of the 46 after that.  86% of the least-prestigious, unranked schools fund no or negligible numbers of bridge positions for their unemployed graduates.

Why would less prestigious law schools offer far fewer of these positions than more prestigious ones?  It’s not because their graduates need them less.  To the contrary, as I hope to show in detail soon, a law school’s relative prestige appears to be well correlated with greater numbers of full-time legal jobs nine months after graduation, especially after factoring out the school-funded, short-term and nonlegal jobs as US News currently fails to do in calculating its rankings.  This is hardly surprising:  Legal employers widely recognize the prestige of the school that awarded a job candidate’s degree and the candidate’s class standing (grades) as the two most influential factors in their entry-level hiring decisions. 

So what is the reason?  The most plausible explanation for the association between greater numbers of school-funded bridge positions and school prestige is simply money—more prestigious schools likely have access to more funding for these positions than less prestigious ones.  In subsequent posts, I hope to explore when this might be a good use of school resources, and where such resources might come from.  Stay tuned.

--Bernie

Comments

[HH]

Well, they have more money and students who want to break into difficult job markets, like public interest outfits. You write as if all the fellowships represent a failure. Two years working at a place that gives the graduate actual skills may be better in the long term than working for two or three years in a law firm and gaining no marketable skill.

[Matt]

So, higher prestige correlates with a higher number of "bridge" positions after graduation, which makes a school's employment numbers in US News look better, which in turn supports their prestige..

Maybe I'm a little too suspicious, but it certainly is helpful to them to fund these bridge positions. I imagine the return on that investment is well worth it.

[Law Schooled]

A student author read your article and posted a response on Law Schooled (http://lawschooled.org/?p=1391) entitled "Looks like Fudge to Me: Law School Employment Data". The student shares concerns over how this kind of data may have influenced prospective law students to take out loans to attend law school and what kind of ethical questions this kind of employment data obscuration brings up for current law students.