Business

Student moans

It’s Columbia Law School, LLP.

After inquiries by The Post last month found that the post-graduate employment numbers presented by New York law schools appear to be inflated, the prestigious law school has changed how it reports job figures.

On April 19, the school disclosed that it had funded a hefty 38 out of the 445 jobs that make up its near-perfect post-graduate employment rate. The number is up from just 9 in 2009 and 10 in 2010, and represents a growing trend among law schools struggling to keep employment percentages high amidst hiring cutbacks.

“It is a fairly recent phenomenon: law schools funding a large number of positions for their graduates,” said a representative of the American Bar Association, which recently required law schools to share the number with the ABA, along with other information such as the number of short-term and non-legal-related jobs held by graduates.

The Post previously reported that NYU Law School funded 38 jobs for the class of 2010, while Fordham Law School funded 73.

Attending a prestigious law school used to be a ticket to a New York white-shoe law firm, where the rewards of a lucrative partnership were worth the $100,000-plus price tag.

But with those firms cutting back on hiring, mostly because of decreased billings, the road to riches has many potholes for these wannabe legal eagles.

Columbia says its fellowships provide a haven for graduates interested in government and public-interest work who haven’t found paying positions in the “challenging” and “tighter” market for such jobs.

But some are now asking whether the fellowships, which now make up 8.5 percent of the school’s “employed” number, represent an increase in the number of students who couldn’t get jobs at regular law firms, as the school’s percentage of law-firm placements has steadily declined since the class of 2009, while its public-sector placements have nearly tripled.

Even so, the fellowships provide networking opportunities and help students get started in the legal field. “The schools that provide those kinds of internships — to me that’s a very positive thing. It’s a second question how they report them,” said David Van Zandt, the former dean of Northwestern Law School and current president of The New School.

Van Zandt, who created a slide show chronicling the rising cost and declining value of a law degree, calculates that graduates need to earn a minimum starting salary of $66,076 in order to justify the cost of attendance, which can often top $150,000.

According to US News & World Report, which has come under fire for allowing schools to self-report their data, the average median starting salary for law graduates in the public sector is $49,831.

The magazine’s school-rankings site points out that graduates in public-interest positions have the option of applying for loan assistance and financial support from their schools, as students graduate with debt loads averaging between $93,000 and $100,000.

And at private schools, the average is closer to $125,000, the ABA reports.

While graduates earning $160,000 at a large law firm can pay that off easily, there are fewer of those jobs to go around. The number of Columbia graduates employed at firms with more than 100 went from 71.8 percent for the class of 2010 to 62.9 percent for the class of 2011.

Prospective students will soon be able to download year-to-year school data from the ABA’s website. The site now publishes individual reports for each law school, but does not include an overall employment percentage in its statistics, explaining that such numbers reported by schools are abstract and misleading.

“You can calculate percentages in any number of ways, depending on how you want to slice the data,” a spokesperson said. “Do you include [only jobs] that require JD degrees, do you take out law-school-funded jobs? What does that number mean, actually?”

“We provide the numbers, and the person looking at it can draw their own conclusion,” said a representative from the association.