Why Is Is So Hard To Report On Law Schools?

That's what I wondered when I read the last Wall Street Journal Law Blog post on law schools.  In Law School Job Data Shows Wide Gulf Between Elite and the Rest, Jacob Gershman and Joe Palazzolo make two choices that somewhat undermine the value of the post.  First, their primary focus was on total employment rate - the one that includes every job,  from Skadden to Starbucks.  Second,  and arguably more problematically, they selected the U.S. News Top 50 as a relevant category to help define "elite" schools.  Thus we get a paragraph like this:

About 5% of class of 2013 graduates from a top 50 school were still looking for work in February, about nine months after spring 2013 graduation. Meanwhile, 14% of graduates of schools below the top 50 were searching for a job.

There is a wide gulf between the "elite" law schools and the rest.  But most of the US News Top 50 are not in that elite group.  The post notes that roughly 75% of graduates from US News Top 50 schools snagged long-term, full-time, JD required jobs.  But if you exclude law school funded jobs, only 15 schools placed 75% of their grads in those jobs. 

In fact, 17 of the US News Top 50 - or over a third of that cohort - were not among the top 50 schools for placement in that category.  So not only did only 15 of the US News Top 50 place at the level the article describes as "average" for the Top 50, but a third of them actually placed fewer than 63.3% of their grads in long-term, full-time, JD-required, market-provided positions.

None of this is news for our readers, and I'm frustrated that it would be for the WSJ Law Blog.  Maybe its just the nature of news reporting today.  Reminds me of the New York Times' recent report about the five law schools that have shut down in the last two years. 

Update 5/6/14: Joe Palazzolo correctly points out that his article did not expressly discuss total employment rates, but rather focused on the "unemployed" number.  He now adds that when he referred to "unemployed", he meant "unemployed-seeking."  First off, those are two very different categories - several schools seem to have suprising numbers of graduates who have no interest in a job.  It would be worth the WSJ clarifying that point.  In any case, I see the "unemployed seeking" number as a primarily a  proxy for total employment rate - though to be fully accurate, a law school may have some number of students who are categorized as  "employment status unknown", "unemployed-not seeking", "unemployed-start date deferred", or "pursuing graduate degree".  All that said, he is right in that I was imprecise when saying that their "primary focus was on total employment rate."

Comments

[anon]

Dan:

Good post.

Reminds us again of the adage oft repeated by Twain.

There is a distinction between the use (misuse) of an accurate stat and a false claim, however. The "five law schools have shut down in the past two years" claim was, if I recall correctly, either not true, or true only if one included some non accredited Cal law schools.

The use of arguably accurate stats to mislead (intentionally or negligently) is a bit different, IMHO. The use of carefully selected "true" facts to create false impressions is the stock in trade of some legal blogs. The WSJ's is not the one that first comes to mind.

BTW, I don't have in mind this site, which generally airs all points of view and thus comes closer to accuracy than those that don't.

[Terri S]

"Why is is"? Pot meet kettle.

[Former Editor]

I suspect that part of the reason we get inaccurate reports from non-legally specialized media sources is the way that the ABA data is reported. There are no particularly useful summaries once you get past the "all law schools" statistics, so the reporter or blogger has to do much of that number crunching themselves. I can say from personal experience that digging into the ABA data in a meaningful way can be pretty time consuming, even before you start getting into the kinds of employment outcomes each category can cover (e.g., the debate about just what JD Advantage means and whether it generally reflects positive employment outcomes). And someone like me has a background in this issue and a pretty solid idea of what sorts of things are important (or we think are important) in the data. My understanding is that reporters tend to be working on pretty tight publication deadlines. It's not really surprising that combining a somewhat difficult to use data set with a rushed analysis yields somewhat off ways of presenting the data.

[terry malloy]

David Simon's analysis and commentary on the decline of journalism explains part of this.

Monopoly -> Corpratization -> Internet -> Decline

The farm-teams and proving grounds that produced great journalism are gone, replaced with the journalistic equivalent of 'fast fashion.'

Sad really.

[Barry]

First, if there's any group less competent at arithmetic than lawyers, it's reporters :)

Second, one thing which the MSM has a big problem with is questioning the perceived mythos of society, such as about law school.

Combine those two, and you have a story tailor-made for press failure.

[PaulB]

When there's a subject that you know a great deal about and wonder how a journalist could miss so much of the nuance on that topic, just remember that they're probably not doing any better on subjects for which you're completely dependent upon their coverage for knowledge.