The anecdotes about the graduating class of 2009 are pretty scary -- eye-popping percentages of law review members from Tier 1 law schools without job offers. Deferrals galore. Offers rescinded. But the newly released employment figure from the National Association of Legal Career Professionals (NALP), although the worst since the mid-1990s, doesn't sound so bad -- 88.3% employment. What's going on? Above the Law thinks the answer is that law schools are propping up the numbers by offering types of employment to their grads that allow them to keep their percentages propped up and their U.S. News and World Report ranking intact:
The takeaway is that individual students have to put in the time and research to figure out just how inflated the employment figures are at the law schools they are interested in. Today’s NALP numbers show that law schools haven’t done a very good job mitigating the effects of the recession. Instead, schools have done their best to mask the effects of the recession from public view. And they haven’t done a very good job at that either.
Here's a summary of the NALP report. (PDF)
