Anderson: 2019 Law School Rankings By Employment Outcomes

Robert Anderson (Pepperdine), 2019 Law School Rankings by Employment Outcomes:

The new ABA employment outcomes data for law schools have been released, and that means it's time for a new WITNESSETH law school employment A-Rankings. As I have in the past, I've ranked law schools using all of the data in the ABA employment reports. The technique used incorporates each outcome with a unique weight, rather than simply counting "good" and "bad" outcomes. In fact, this technique does not rely at all on a subjective determination of what outcomes are good or bad. It's an unsupervised machine learning technique that determines the weight of each outcome based on its relationship to other outcomes among the 201 schools. Therefore, this is a truly objective ranking measure.

As in past years, the results differ slightly from typical US News rankings.

Here are the Top 25 in Rob's ranking:

A-Rank	Law School	Score
1	PENNSYLVANIA	0.460322
2	CHICAGO	0.453658
3	VIRGINIA	0.443592
4	COLUMBIA	0.418959
5	HARVARD	0.408021
6	DUKE	0.40102
7	NYU	0.396698
8	YALE	0.390213
9	CORNELL	0.388366
10	STANFORD	0.38659
11	NORTHWESTERN	0.384478
12	UC-BERKELEY	0.37934
13	MICHIGAN	0.365023
14	VANDERBILT	0.312403
15	GEORGETOWN	0.288056
16	FORDHAM	0.250512
17	TEXAS	0.247994
18	WASHINGTON U.	0.206468
19	BOSTON U.	0.199171
20	NOTRE DAME	0.185449
21	UCLA	0.167739
22	SETON HALL	0.166374
23	UC-IRVINE	0.162925
24	MINNESOTA	0.143225
25	IOWA	0.139478

Rob's full ranking of all 201 law schools is here.

Robert Anderson (Pepperdine), Law School Employment Outcomes by "Employment Status":

Yesterday I posted my new 2019 law school rankings based on employment outcomes. In this post, I explore how the different categories of "Employment Status" (as the ABA calls them) affect the rankings of the schools. Some of the Employment Status categories are unambiguously bad or good: "Unemployed" is bad and "Employed Bar Passage Required Full Time Long Term" is good. The analysis performed in my rankings confirms that these two polar opposite outcomes are on opposite ends of the continuum, as shown in the table below.  ...

Note that these numbers are not subjective determinations by me. They are generated based on which job categories tend to go together at which law schools. This means that law schools that tend to have a lot of unemployed graduates also tend to have a lot of "Non-Professional Position" placements and "JD Advantage" placements. Although the data does not directly observe the "quality" of any individual jobs, this should suggest that caution is warranted in interpreting JD Advantage jobs as representing desirable employment outcomes in most cases.

Employment outcomes are an important factor in choosing a law school. Applicants should be wary of schools with large number of JD Advantage jobs, at least outside the T-14. Those who rank law schools based on employment (hi, US News!) should discount JD Advantage jobs heavily, which currently they generally do not.

Robert Anderson (Pepperdine), Another Look at Law School Rankings by Employment Outcomes:

Yesterday I posed my (somewhat) annual ranking of law schools based on ABA employment data. There are many modeling choices that go into any such ranking, and after looking at some of the numbers I decided to present a different and arguably better version of the ranking. This version differs by centering and scaling the data prior to running the principal components analysis.