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Law School Transparency co-founder Kyle McEntee
The Law School Transparency project's push to collect better data about how well recent law school graduates are doing in the job market has gotten off to a slow start.
The nonprofit organization in July asked the 199 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association to provide more detailed job statistics than they now report to the ABA or U.S. News & World Report. Critics who contend that law schools overstate the career prospects and earning potential of their graduates hailed the move.
However, just 11 law schools met the Sept. 10 deadline for responses, and only three said they were considering providing the requested data -- American University Washington College of Law, University of Michigan Law School and Vanderbilt University Law School. Ave Maria School of Law indicated it would decide later this week whether to respond, according to the transparency project.
Kyle McEntee, a Vanderbilt law student who co-founded the project, insisted he's not discouraged.
"We see change about the reporting standards as an ongoing thing," he said. "We have different levels of expectations of what different stages will bring. We've started the dialogue, and the first step is getting schools to recognize that there is a huge problem."
The project grabbed headlines last month when a blogger under the pseudonym Ethan Haines -- who later revealed herself to be Zenovia Evans, a 2009 graduate of Thomas M. Cooley Law School -- announced that she was going on a hunger strike to prompt law schools to reveal the job information. She ended her hunger strike 24 days later, having received no responses from the 10 law schools she contacted.
The project hopes to collect information about individual law graduates, rather than the general class breakdowns required by the ABA and U.S. News. Under the project's model, participating schools would report employer type, employer name, position name, bar passage requirement, full-time or part-time status, office location, whether the student worked on a law journal and the salary paid each alumnus nine months after graduation. To protect the former students' privacy, the schools would not include the graduates' names in connection with their employment and salary information. Law schools already collect most of this information, although they generally release it in the aggregate and don't break it down by individual, McEntee said.
Some of the schools that responded to the project said that turning over the information would violate student privacy, McEntee said, although he refuted that claim.
"It think we'll have some data gathered by the end of this year," he said. "I'm not sure if it will be totally compliant with our model, but we should have something."
The organization plans to follow up with the 188 schools that did not respond to its request. In the meantime, the project has created a data clearinghouse on its website consisting of employment data available from U.S. News.
