Job Searches, Law Schools

An Inside Look At A T14 Law School's Unemployment Rate

Can you guess which law school we're talking about?

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During a time when law school graduates are plentiful but entry-level attorney jobs are seemingly few and far between, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at the employment situation (or lack thereof, for some) at one of the best law school’s in the nation, per U.S. News.

Ten months after graduation, 94.6 percent of the class of 2014 at this Ivy League law school was employed in full-time, long-term jobs where bar passage was required. In fact, this law school was recently awarded with a first-place finish in the Princeton Review’s “Best Career Prospects” ranking. Can you guess which law school we’re talking about?

The institution in question is the University of Pennsylvania Law School (ranked as #7 by U.S. News, and ranked as #4 by Above the Law). You wouldn’t expect that graduates of an elite law school like this would be unemployed after graduation, but that seems to be exactly what happened to several members of the Penn Law class of 2015.

Here’s an interesting tip we received from an unemployed graduate of U. Penn Law:

Starting the last few months of 3L, Penn Law’s career services assigned one of their employees to help us unemployed 3Ls find jobs. Mostly this just consisted of emailing us whenever something new popped up on Symplicity. Usually the emails would be addressed to ourselves and someone else in career services, or to [the general career services email] (guessing they BCC’d everyone without a job), presumably so that we wouldn’t be able to see who else was graduating jobless. One time they messed up however, and just CC’d all of us jobless students.

We managed to obtain a copy of that email. It’s dated August 7, 2015, and as you can see, about a week after the administration of the July 2015 bar exam, and despite their best efforts to get a job, nine graduates of Penn Law remained unemployed (click to enlarge):

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Assuming a class size of about 250, that means that only 3.6 percent of Penn Law graduates were jobless after the bar exam. Readers may be inclined to cackle at these unemployed graduates’ misfortune, but please take a moment to realize how lucky they may be. At some other less prestigious law schools, this percentage might represent the students who were able to find jobs just a few months after graduation.

We’d wish the best of luck to Penn Law’s unemployed graduates, but several months have passed since this career services email was sent, so we’re sure that most, if not all of them, have found jobs by now. For graduates of other law schools who are still looking, but have been unable to find employment, please know that you’re not alone — you might be in the company of some of the most elite law school graduates in the country.

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