The Last Gen X American

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By: The Last Gen X American

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Matt Leichter

Latest from The Last Gen X American

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On September 4, 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its employment projections for the next cycle, 2018-2028. For 2018, the BLS’s Employment Projections program (EP program) estimates that there were 823,900 lawyer positions (as opposed to discrete lawyers) in the United States. This figure includes self-employed attorneys. In 2016, the EP program found 792,500 lawyer positions, so there has been some growth between the two years. According to the BLS’s Current Population …
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Ahoy, readers! I bring good news: Now that we’ve endured a full year under the LSAC’s new regime of six LSAT administrations per year, I can now return to regular LSAT-tea-leaf-reading reporting! Woohoo! But wait, there’s more! Because the LSAC now regularly reports first-time test takers (and it graciously furnished me with data from previous years) I can now provide even more detailed tea-leaf reading! I’m especially pleased because for the first time in a…
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As an appendix to my employment report, here is a ranking of all the law schools that reported employment data by their percentages of graduates finding full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required jobs. (Taste all the those hyphens.) PERCENT GRADUATES EMPLOYED FULL-TIME/LONG-TERM IN BAR-PASSAGE-REQUIRED JOBS (EXCL. LAW-SCHOOL-FUNDED JOBS) RANK LAW SCHOOL ’17 ’18 CHANGE 1. Columbia 92.6% 93.5% 0.9% 2. Virginia 91.6% 92.6% 1.1% 3. Duke 93.8% 91.4% -2.4% 4. Chicago 92.1% 91.3% -0.8% 5. Cornell 92.1% 90.8%…
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Good morning, folks! Law-school-employment data are in, and before there’s a revision, this post will depict what they show. As with last year, I’m going to start with the headline information and save the law-school-level ranking of shame for later. To begin with, here’s the table of graduate underemployment. (Everything on this post excludes the three Puerto Rico law schools.) STATUS (EXCL. P.R.) 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Unemployed – Not…
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) usually completes its updates of its many measures of occupational employment for the previous year by April. Data for 2018 are now available, allowing a comprehensive summary of lawyer employment for that year. For detailed discussion of what the BLS datasets are and how they address lawyer employment, I recommend the lawyer overproduction page [updated!]. For context, according to the Current Population Survey (CPS), the number of people who…
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Each year U.S. News & World Report lists law schools by the average indebtedness of their graduates. Importantly, the figures exclude accrued interest, which can be quite considerable. However, these numbers are probably the best estimate of the cost of attendance at a particular law school presented in a comparable form. The ABA does not publicize graduate debt in the 509 information reports, making U.S. News an unfortunately necessary source. Here’s the debt table, ranked…
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Discussions of law-school costs are incomplete if they do not account for discounts some students receive, usually merit scholarships paid for by their full-tuition-paying classmates. To analyze the phenomenon of discounting, I focus on the ABA’s 509 information reports’ scholarship data. This information lags the academic year by one year, so as of the 2018-19 academic year, we now have data on 2017-18. At the average law school not in Puerto Rico in 2017, the…
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Despite arbitrary data meddling by the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and significant misreporting by law schools, I will estimate changes in annual (as in what people care about and what the ABA no longer collects) full-time law-school tuition for 2018. The appendix at the end of the post will summarize how I arrived at my tuition figures. However, I’m still disgusted by how the law schools and the ABA…
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[The following post first appeared on this site on January 1, 2012. What it said then still applies today, mutatis mutandis. Thanks for reading the blog and have a prosperous 2019!] Behold, the curse of a long memory. Last January [2011], Google Alerts sent me an e-mail informing me that the National Inflation Association (“Preparing Americans for Hyperinflation”) issued a press release predicting that the higher ed bubble was “set to burst beginning in mid-2011.…
It’s been two weeks since the ABA released its 509 information reports and accompanying spreadsheets. Lazy as I am I didn’t get to the tuition figures until last night, when to my astonishment I found that the tuition data were an excrementitious string of Arabic numerals. Seriously, the ABA has been doing this for five years, and while one or two law schools always fail to report their costs (because it’s, so, so hard to…