Assessing Experiential Legal Education: A Response to Professor Yackee
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ASSESSING EXPERIENTIAL LEGAL EDUCATION: A
RESPONSE TO PROFESSOR YACKEE
KEITH A. FINDLEY*
Introduction ................................................................... 627
I. What's Driving the Push for Experiential Learning? ................. 629
II. What's Driving the Data, or, Why Does It Appear that
Employers Aren't Influenced by Clinical Education? ........... 636
A. The Disconnect Between Hiring Metrics and Hiring
N eeds ............................................................. 636
B. Factors Masked by the Clinical Opportunities/Hiring
R ates D ata ........................................................ 639
C onclusion ..................................................................... 643
INTRODUCTION
My colleague Jason Yackee offers some interesting data on
comparative rates of law-related job placement for graduates of the top
100 U.S. law schools.' In the end, his analysis in part reaches the
entirely unsurprising conclusion that higher-ranked law schools are
more successful at placing their graduates in full-time law-related jobs
than are lower-ranked schools (although it turns out that holds true only
for those in the top 50).2 More interestingly, and less obviously, his
data also suggest that schools that offer more experiential learning
opportunities (as measured by the school's number of clinical offerings,
both in the aggregate and per student), do not have any greater success
in placing their students in full-time law-related jobs than do schools
* Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin Law School. I am grateful
for helpful comments on drafts of this article from Margaret Reuter, Kate Kruse,
Jeffrey Selbin, Mitch, Steven Wright, Michele LaVigne, Ben Kempinen, and Walter
Dickey. I am also grateful to Laura Davis for excellent research assistance.
1. Jason Webb Yackee, Does Experiential Learning Improve JD Employment
Outcomes?, 2015 Wis. L. REv. 601.
2. In his article in this issue of the Wisconsin Law Review, Robert Kuehn
shows that the statistical correlation between class rank and employment outcomes does
not hold for schools ranked below the top 50. Robert R. Kuehn, Measuring Clinical
Legal Education's Employment Outcomes, 2015 Wis. L. REV. 645, 659. From this,
Kuehn concludes that many schools ranked [51-100] would gain very little, and
perhaps no, measureable employment advantage for their students were they to invest
heavily in improving their U.S. News ranking. Id.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/wlr2015&div=42&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Assessing Experiential Legal Education: A Response to Professor Yackee
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