Law School Rankings By Job Placement

Dan Filler (Drexel) has mined the ABA placement data to rank all 203 law schools by the percentage of graduates in the class of 2015 who found full-time non-law school funded long term J.D.-required or J.D.-advantage jobs within nine months after graduation, along with each school's U.S. News rank.  (He notes glitches in the data in a later post.) Here are the Top 25:

Job Rank	US News Rank	School	Percentage
1	7	PENN	93%
2	11	DUKE	92%
2	60	KENTUCKY	92%
4	13	CORNELL	91%
4	2	HARVARD	91%
4	4	CHICAGO	91%
7	6	NYU	90%
7	4	COLUMBIA	90%
9	2	STANFORD	89%
9	12	NORTHWESTERN	89%
11	8	MICHIGAN	88%
12	8	VIRGINIA	87%
12	65	SETON HALL	87%
12	8	UC-BERKELEY	87%
15	55	BAYLOR	86%
15	30	OHIO STATE	86%
15	18	WASHINGTON UNIV.	86%
18	25	ARIZONA STATE	85%
18	20	IOWA	85%
18	1	YALE	85%
21	45	GEORGE MASON	84%
21	57	NEBRASKA	84%
21	86	ARKANSAS	84%
21	45	SMU	84%
25	30	BOSTON COLLEGE	83%
25	33	GEORGIA	83%
25	86	TULSA	83%
25	16	VANDERBILT	83%

Dan notes "there are other ways to slice the data," and my Pepperdine colleague Rob Anderson does so in Law Schools Ranked by Employment.  Rob notes the many "oddities" in Dan's ranking, including Kentucky (2), Georgetown (78), and UC-Irvine (127):

I decided to use a technique have written about in the past to produce a better ranking of law schools by ABA employment data. Professor Filler's post really isn't fair to excellent schools like Georgetown, and is especially harsh to UC Irvine, which Professor Filler's approach ranks at #127. My technique takes into account all of the ABA data and uses a dimensionality reduction technique to squash the data into a single dimension. It counts some categories as negatives and some as positives, and uses information about "biglaw" versus "small law" jobs, etc. This ranking, which I denote A-Rank to distinguish it from Filler's F-Rank, is far from perfect, but it is clearly a significant improvement and I think readers will find it more informative.

Under Rob's methodology:

Schools with better employment outcomes tend to have more:

• Employment in full-time long-term in bar passage required jobs
• Employment full-time long-term in large law firm positions
• Employment in a different state from the school's home state
• Employment in the federal government or public interest

Schools with worse employment outcomes tend to have more:

• Unemployment (obviously)
• Employment in the same state as the school's home state
• Employment in small firms or solo practice
• Employment in "JD advantage" or "professional positions

Here are the Top 25:

A-RANK	US NEWS RANK	LAW SCHOOL
1	4	CHICAGO
2	4	COLUMBIA
3	7	PENNSYLVANIA
4	6	NYU
5	11	DUKE
6	13	CORNELL
7	2	HARVARD
8	8	VIRGINIA
9	2	STANFORD
10	8	MICHIGAN
11	1	YALE
12	8	UC-BERKELEY
13	12	NORTHWESTERN
14	16	VANDERBILT
15	14	GEORGETOWN
16	17	UCLA
17	19	USC
18	28	UC-IRVINE
19	15	TEXAS
20	20	BOSTON UNIVERSITY
21	30	BOSTON COLLEGE
22	22	EMORY
23	22	NOTRE DAME
24	18	WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
25	25	GEORGE WASHINGTON