“There is a strong chance you have never heard of the Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law at Campbell University. The Raleigh, N.C., school is not prestigious enough to be ranked among U.S. News and World Report’s best law schools, and it enrolls only about 400 students at a time. Yet a new law school ranking suggests that most of us are probably underestimating Campbell.” …
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-most-underrated-law-schools-152451800.html
These schools aren’t underrated, they’re terrible. Attending one is a catastrophic mistake that can ruin decades of people’s lives. Yahoo should be ashamed of itself for posting this article and you should be ashamed of reposting it. Real people come here looking for advice and you do them no service by suggesting these bottom-ranked schools are anything but out to bleed them dry.
Yahoo’s journalistic standards are pretty much nonexistent, but I’ll admit that I’m floored that Mr. Berry-who ought to know better-posted this.
But I’ll let ATL do the heavy lifting:
So Yale is only slightly better than Campbell because only 70% of Yale graduates got permanent legal jobs, only slightly more than Campbell graduates got?
Um…Yale grads who didn’t get permanent legal jobs probably got things like Supreme Court clerkships, which aren’t permanent. So the 30% non-permanent job holders probably did extremely well.
That article was not well-thought.
An inane article by most any prudent standards of journalism. So, we are to believe Campbell graduates (with all due respect) are getting 4th circuit federal clerkships? Summering at Siley Austin? Becoming the deans of other law schools? Such utter poppycock…
Expanding on this: approximately 30-40% of Yale Law grads get clerkships, 100% of which are non-permanent legal jobs
http://www.law.yale.edu/studentlife/cdoprospectivestudentsjudicialclerkshipemploy.htm
The vast majority of those are federal judicial clerkships (http://www.law.yale.edu/studentlife/cdoprospectivestudents2014employstats.htm), which virtually guarantee a very prestigious, well-paying job after the clerkship. Alternatively, graduates with fellowships are not considered to have full-time, permanent legal jobs, but that’s hardly an indictment on Yale Law.
You can also find five-year post-graduation statistics in the links posted above.
We all know these things, but it bears repeating that not all “non-permanent” legal jobs are the same. Whenever you are talking about law school employment numbers, you really have to dig and figure out what types of jobs the kids are actually doing, what those jobs pay, and what their career prospects are.