US News to Disclose More Detailed Jobs Info for Law Grads
U.S. News & World Report has agreed to post more employment data collected from law schools as part of its annual law school rankings.
The magazine’s director of data and research, Robert Morse, tells the National Law Journal that the data “will make a far richer amount of information available about the employment prospects of recent graduates.”
U.S. News currently reports the overall percentage of graduates employed at graduation and nine months after graduation. But it collects more information for those two periods, including the number of grads enrolled in full-time degree programs, the number of unemployed graduates looking for work, the number of grads whose employment status is unknown, and the number clerking for Article III judges.
Now all of the information will be posted in next year’s report on the class of 2009, the NLJ says. The magazine also hopes to retroactively post the same information for the class of 2008 that was collected for its 2010 survey.
Morse said the magazine acted partly because of pressure from Law School Transparency, a nonprofit formed by two Vanderbilt law students to push for disclosure of more information on job statistics for law grads.
Law School Transparency applauded the changes on its blog. “While the additional information will not change how U.S. News computes their rankings, it will help make things much clearer for prospectives trying to take apart the employment statistics that U.S. News currently collects,” the group says.
