ABA's Legal Ed Section Approves Questionnaire Changes on Reporting of Graduates' Employment
It’s official: The ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has approved changes to its annual law school questionnaire to include more employment and placement information about graduates.
The changes, recommended last month by the council’s questionnaire committee, were announced in a press release by the section Wednesday.
The section said in a statement (PDF) that it believes the new information will bring additional transparency to the data reporting system it uses and provide useful information to assist prospective students and graduates in making career decisions.
Under the changes, law schools will be required to report how many graduates are employed in jobs requiring a law degree; how many are in jobs in which a law degree is preferred; how many are in another professional or nonprofessional job; and how many are in jobs whose type is unknown.
Law schools also must disclose how many graduates are working in full-time or part-time jobs, whether those jobs are short-term or long-term and how many of them are funded by the school from which the job-holder graduated.
Schools must report how many graduates are unemployed or pursuing a graduate degree, and how many of the unemployed are looking or not looking for a job. They also must identify the top three states in which their graduates are employed, the number of graduates working in each state and the number of graduates working overseas. These and other proposed changes were recommended in June.
Collection of the new data will begin next spring for the graduating class of 2011 and will be displayed on the section’s web site by late spring or early summer. The information will be published in the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools and on the Law School Admission Council’s website.
