The first audits of the employment data that law schools report about their recent graduates have generated concern among watchdogs, with a series of reviews finding several deficiencies that raise questions about the class of 2015’s reported outcomes.
Most notably, a review of 10 randomly selected schools found that half had missed a compliance benchmark for the documentation they are supposed to keep on file when reporting key metrics like whether their students are employed 10 months after graduation and whether they are working in a position that required them to pass the bar. Schools were flagged for not being able to show documentation to support important parts of reported employment data, or if investigators found evidence key pieces of employment data were incomplete, inaccurate or misleading.Other reviews found issues at a substantially smaller percentage of schools related to handling documentation or posting required information online.
The audits, performed at the behest of the arm of the American Bar Association that accredits law schools, are not final. ABA leaders say they do not have a hard timeline for when the reviews will be completed, but indicated that the issues uncovered tend to be clerical in nature and were not instances of “gross misreporting” or “attempts to manipulate.”