Duke Law Consistently Near the Top with Regard to Job Placement

At the TaxProf blog, Paul Caron reports on two attempts to rank law schools in terms of how well their graduates fare in the job market:

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. … Here are the Top 25 … :

PENN 93%
DUKE 92%
KENTUCKY 92%
CORNELL 91%
HARVARD 91%
CHICAGO 91%
NYU 90%
COLUMBIA 90%
STANFORD 89%
NORTHWESTERN 89%
MICHIGAN 88%
VIRGINIA 87%
SETON HALL 87%
UC-BERKELEY 87%
BAYLOR 86%
OHIO STATE 86%
WASHINGTON UNIV. 86%
ARIZONA STATE 85%
IOWA 85%
YALE 85%
GEORGE MASON 84%
NEBRASKA 84%
ARKANSAS 84%
SMU 84%
BOSTON COLLEGE 83%
GEORGIA 83%
TULSA 83%
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. …

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 … :

CHICAGO
COLUMBIA
PENNSYLVANIA
NYU
DUKE
CORNELL
HARVARD
VIRGINIA
STANFORD
MICHIGAN
YALE
UC-BERKELEY
NORTHWESTERN
VANDERBILT
GEORGETOWN
UCLA
USC
UC-IRVINE
TEXAS
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
BOSTON COLLEGE
EMORY
NOTRE DAME
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
GEORGE WASHINGTON