In a two-part series, my MoneyLaw co-blogger Tom Bell (Chapman) reports on how law schools can game the new U.S. News Employed at Nine Months measure:
Academic Employment of Law School Graduates:
Which law schools do you think reported the highest percentages of employed grads working in academia? Not Yale. Not Chicago. Not any of the law schools you would probably expect. The ABA data tells this story (number of students/percentage of employed students):
- McGeorge (24/7.9%)
- Franklin Pierce (7/7.6%)
- Regent (9/7.3%)
- Boston University (16/5.9%)
- Ohio State (12/5.6%)
What explains these results? First off, note that "academic employment" does not here equate to teaching the law. It refers simply to working at an educational institution. Second, note that it does not equate to full-time work. Working part-time as a professor’s research assistant or even as an envelope-stuffer in a law school’s development office would thus qualify as "academic employment." Third, note that a school’s Emp9 score counts for 14% of its score for purposes of U.S. News & World Report’s law school rankings. Together, those observations suggest a possible cause of the relatively high "academic employment" figures reported above: law schools hiring their own grads.
Hacking the New "Employment at Nine Months" Formula:
[S]ome law schools might improve their Emp9 scores next year by remaining willfully ignorant of whether alums likely to be studying full time for the Bar nine months after graduation have found paying work. That strategy would allow a school to classify those graduates as "Employment Status Unknown." Why do that? Because USN&WR counts each such grad as 25% employed. …
How could a law school implement the hack? An outright lie would suffice, of course. Importantly, however, law school administrators need not resort to anything so crude as that. They might instead remain deliberately ignorant of whether alums who failed the summer Bar exam had found work nine months after graduation. That strategy would, however, put at risk the opportunity to claim as "Employed" grads who’d found jobs that don’t require Bar membership. An especially daring and clever administrator might thus devise mechanisms to carefully control how much she learns about graduates who failed the summer Bar exam, keeping close tabs on those who find work while ignoring those who don’t. Suffice it to say that a subtle mind could find that "Unknown" includes many shades.
