Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State), Versus How Many Graduates?:

My last post examined the number of entry-level lawyering jobs available during each year of
the last decade. How many graduates of ABA law schools competed for those jobs? And how many law students lost out in the job lottery?

[L]et’s look first at the number of graduates who reported full-time jobs requiring bar admission compared to the number of graduates who reported any job information to NALP. Here is that information, with the percentage calculated in the last column. I’ve added 2001, so you can compare the current situation with the impact of the last general recession. …

Year	Jobs Requiring Bar Admission	Employment Status Reported	Percent of Grads with FT Jobs Requiring Bar Admission
2001	26,279	34,602	75.9%
2002	26,564	35,295	75.3%
2003	26,387	35,787	73.7%
2004	26,939	36,834	73.1%
2005	28,932	38,951	74.2%
2006	30,273	40,186	75.3%
	Full-Time Bar Admission Jobs
2007	29,978	40,416	74.2%
2008	28,890	40,582	71.2%
2009	26,625	40,833	65.2%
2010	25,654	41,156	62.3%
2011	24,902	41,623	59.8%

… Over the last five years, ABA accredited schools have graduated at least 73,652 students who did not obtain jobs practicing law within nine months of graduation–and that includes the best year on record for law graduates. Sure, some of those graduates didn’t want to practice law. But most of them went to law school because they wanted to be lawyers–and all of them paid for a degree priced by the potential to practice law.

Over the last five years, between 33.5% and 38.1% of our total graduates failed to obtain the jobs most suited to their degrees. In the most recent year, 2011, the percentage was 40.2% (best case) to 44.0% (worst case). From a labor market perspective, that’s a huge mismatch of educational investment and career outcomes. From the human perspective, this is a tragic waste of talent and life opportunities.