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UVA Law's Employment Numbers Are Less Than Impressive

The University of Virginia School of Law hasn't been doing so hot this year in terms of finding jobs for its graduates. Almost three months after graduation, we have some more bad news from Charlottesville, thanks to the Virginia Law Weekly. Just how many Class of 2011 graduates are unemployed? Read on to find out....

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At number nine in the latest U.S. News law school rankings, it comes as a surprise that the University of Virginia School of Law hasn’t been doing so hot this year in terms of finding jobs for its graduates.

In March, we reported that UVA Law students donned venomous t-shirts in protest during an admitted students’ weekend. In April, we saw the artistic and architectural work of yet another unemployed UVA Law student.

And now, almost three months after graduation, we have some more bad news from Charlottesville, thanks to the Virginia Law Weekly. Someone from UVA Law Career Services forgot how to blind carbon copy, and we now have an idea as to many Class of 2011 graduates are unemployed.

Unfortunately, not everyone can be HARVARD LAW SECURE….

The Virginia Law Weekly stated yesterday that it had “an interesting tidbit on the jobs front.” And if by “interesting” the editors meant “super duper depressing,” then they were spot on. This is what the student paper had to report:

Emails to large numbers of students or alums are normally BCCed to protect the recipients’ anonymity. This email, sent by Assistant Career Services Dean Steve Hopson on August 1, was inadvertently addressed without BCC to 100 addressees — purportedly all those members of the Class of 2011 who are still seeking permanent employment. According to a post-graduation press release from the Law School (http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2011_spr/holder.htm), 372 students graduated with JDs and 21 graduated with LLMs in 2011. If the list includes only JD students, this means that almost 27 percent of the Class of 2011 remains unemployed. If the list also includes LLM students, the number is over 25 percent.

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The article noted that there are several caveats at play here. First, the number of email recipients may not reflect the true number of unemployed graduates. The editors suggest that maybe some had gotten jobs, but forgot to ask to be removed from the List That Shall Not Be Named.

A more likely scenario, to my mind, is that some UVA Law graduates were too proud to admit to the school administration that they were still unemployed, and names that should be on the list just aren’t. In other words, it’s possible that the unemployed percentage could be higher.

UVA Law also recently announced a fellowship program that provides funding for six months of work in an unpaid public interest position. This is a nice way to game the school’s employment numbers help out struggling graduates. But for the purposes of the Bad List, these folks could still be counted as unemployed, because the fellowships aren’t permanent.

We reached out to UVA Law for comment on these employment allegations, but have not yet received a response. We will be sure to update you if we hear back from the school administration.

This Virginia Law Weekly piece comes in the wake of an email from Career Services that warned students about controlling their web presence. Apparently students who had targeted the Big Apple for OCI this year struck out, and the only advice Career Services had to offer was to “preserve [the] Virginia mystique” by not “going crazy in the blogosphere.”

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Wait… you think your students will have better chances at getting jobs if their adventures in interior decorating and raising awareness about racial profiling aren’t covered on Above the Law? That’s some killer advice right there.

I guess this is a case of caveat emptor. These days, even if you go to a top-tier law school like the University of Virginia, you can still fail at getting a job. But at least you’ll look prestigious in the unemployment line with your UVA Law sweatshirt.

More than a Quarter of the Class of 2011 Remains Unemployed [Facebook / Virginia Law Weekly]

Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of UVA Law

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