By Don Knox, LAW WEEK COLORADO
A week ago, Law Week Colorado published a story that took the legal blogosphere by storm.
We actually published two stories. One noted the University of Colorado School of Law’s stellar July 2009 bar-passage rate (94 percent) and the University of Denver Sturm College of Law’s improving rate (89 percent for first-time takers).
Hardly anyone noticed that story.
The second story, which included interviews with placement directors about the currently tough job market, mentioned that 35 percent of CU School of Law students had jobs at graduation and that DU didn’t release numbers.
That story drew immediate attention.
First came a darkly worded mention on the Wall Street Journal’s law blog, with subsequent citations on Above The Law and the ABA Journal’s blog.
Today, a week after the blogosphere weighed in, CU says that the jobs-at-graduation rate reported by Law Week is too low. But it doesn’t have the correct number, and it won’t have final numbers until they are reported to NALP, The Association for Legal Career Professionals, in February 2010.
Why not?
According to Associate Dean Dayna Matthew, all numbers are considered preliminary until the NALP reporting date. And any data already gathered by the school can — and will — be misconstrued, as she’s painfully found out over the past eight days.
Law Week, she says, misconstrued the number when it reported, accurately, using data CU provided in June and re-confirmed in October, the 35 percent jobs-at-graduation number. That percentage considered all CU law graduates — those who’ve reported to the placement office, and those who haven’t. But NALP considers only the students who’ve reported. That would have elevated the 35 percent rate. But how high?
Matthew declined to say.
“The fact is, we shouldn’t be giving out numbers at all,” she said.
(And, as I’d like to emphasize, DU didn’t provide any data to Law Week initially. And it’s still not sharing the numbers.)
CU Associate Professor of Law Scott Moss muddled the situation further in the blogosphere by declaring that Law Week transposed the numbers and that the unemployed rate is actually the employed rate.
But Matthew isn’t going there. She’s hewing to her position that any numbers released now are premature and almost certainly different than the numbers that will be released in February.
For the record, Law Week sticks to its math: The initial 35 percent number given is accurate when using the data CU provided and considering the entire law class of ’09. We also acknowledge that NALP has a different standard that would elevate the school’s jobs-at-graduation number. And we agree with Dean Matthew that the February data will almost surely be different.
So for now, we are waiting for the February data from both schools, CU and DU. And we encourage everyone else to wait, too.
And P.S. — To our colleagues at Above the Law: Please get our name right. It’s Law Week Colorado.