NYU LLM employment statistics
mar...@earthlink.net
Well after a good deal of research into the LLM program at New
York University, I have been provided (and will now share with you)
employment statistics on NYU LLM students -- both Tax and LLM. Perhaps
such statistics will cause anyone who is considering attending NYU
(whether to enhance their resume, achieve better grades in a particular
specialty, or be able to brag that they went to a top law school) to
reconsider spending $40,000 and another year or two of school for
another piece of paper. Anyway, enough introduction -- the following
are excerpts from official documents provided by the placement office at
NYU, followed by my own analysis.
On the subject of academic performance:
"Academic performance in an LLM/MCJ program is still an integral
component of the hiring decision -- the NYU graduate degree alone will
not get you a job. For example, in the 1994, 1995, and 1996 Tax Classes,
no one received a law firm job in New York with a GPA less than a 3.4
(top 25%)...New York City firms prefer grades above a 3.3 GPA for the
Tax program and a 3.5 GPA for the non-tax specialties. Students who are
accepted to the LLM program are generally used to these grades and,
prior to starting classes, this GPA does not seem difficult to obtain.
However, one of the realities of graduate school is that students who
are accepted have usually been in the top 1/4 of their J.D. classes and
everyone is considered bright..."
(Essentially this means that you have taken a step up the intelligence
scale.
That is to say, if the typical LLM student at NYU has top 25%
credentials from his/her JD program, you will be competing against much
stronger people than you did in your JD program (and if you think about
it, if you did better than top 25% in your program, and you don't do
better than a 3.5 GPA at NYU, you are taking a step backward
academically, and would probably have been better off not getting the
LLM or just auditing the classes you wanted)
On the subject of when employed:
"Approximately 65% of the Tax students obtained positions by graduation
(May 1996), primarily in the Spring semester. This number is consistent
with the class of 1995...Approximately 25% of the U.S. trained law
graduates and approximately 50% of the foreign trained law graduates in
the corporate, international, trade regulation, general and MCJ programs
obtained their positions by graduation..."
(This means that for $40,000 you too can be unemployed for six months+
again after graduation...assuming the average law student is unemployed
for six months after graduating from his/her JD program)
On the subject of how students get their jobs:
"The number of employers visiting the NYU campus to meet with students
in the Corporate, International, General, Trade Regulation, and MCJ
programs is very small. Therefore, most students in these programs
conduct their job search by mail after completing a semester of
coursework or interview following graduation ... Graduate students in
the corporate, international, trade regulation, general and MCJ programs
usually apply for...positions as third year JD students and obtain them
via a direct mail campaign or jobs listed with the Office of Career
Counseling and Placement."
(This means that you get to depend on the Placement office (again) and
have to continue sending lots of letters out, same as during/after you
received your JD degree, and getting no more response than you received
previously)
On the subject of potential salary increase due to having an LLM:
"For tax graduates, employers in major cities will usually give one year
of credit for the LLM...Corporate, International, General and Trade
Regulation graduates usually begin as first year associates unless they
have prior work experience..The general rule of thumb regarding credit
for past experience is that you will get no more than 1/2 the credit for
what you have previously done, and in some cases, you may not get any
credit."
(Essentially, dreams of getting more money for having the LLM are pipe
dreams, and for $40,000 you too can work for a first year associate
salary -- assuming you get a job. Thus it will still take you 3+ years
to pay back your LLM loans on top of your JD payments...what a pleasant
thought)
Overall, I hope these quotations (and my lovely analysis) will help many
decide if they want to attend NYU, or any other LLM program for that
matter. It may be much better advice to attend an LLM-type of program in
Europe or Asia to make yourself more marketable to firms from the US
that are seeking to expand to those regions. If you have good grades
from your JD program, I would recommend checking out schools like
Cambridge in the UK or other top European schools. Like top U.S. law
schools, they typically have quotas for foreign students (which are
obvious if you look at the number of foreign students in
Harvard/NYU/Yale/Chicago/Columbia LLM programs).
The above research has helped me make a decision not to spend a great
deal of money (through more loans) and another year or two getting
another useless degree. Perhaps some day I will for my own edification,
but not today...
--David
Jonathan Mallin
David,
I read what you posted about the NYU LLM. How would you suggest
this should affect prospective students for the JD program? Are
the employment figures likely better for NYU JDs? Why would an
NYU JD be more valuable than an NYU LLM? Basically, what you
wrote and quoted doesn't correlate well with what I hear about
NYU's JD placement rates. I am considering NYU and am concerned
about my future ability to repay $100K+ of debt.
--- _ __ __ _ _ _
_ | |___ _ _ | \/ |__ _| | (_)_ _ <*> Jonathan Scott Mallin
| |_| / _ \ ' \ | |\/| / _` | | | | ' \ <*> <jma...@umich.edu>
\___/\___/_||_| |_| |_\__,_|_|_|_|_||_| <*> Email for PGP key
> (C) This entire message is copyright 1997 by Jonathan Mallin. <
> All rights reserved. URL: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jmallin <
Graham Robinson
jma...@umich.edu wrote:
>
>
> David,
>
> I read what you posted about the NYU LLM. How would you suggest this
should
> affect prospective students for the JD program? Are the employment
figures likely
> better for NYU JDs? Why would an NYU JD be more valuable than an NYU
LLM?
> Basically, what you wrote and quoted doesn't correlate well with what
I hear about
> NYU's JD placement rates. I am considering NYU and am concerned
about my
> future ability to repay $100K+ of debt.
They are very different things. NYU JDs do great in the job market.
It doesn't surprise me that their LLMs have trouble finding jobs. At
HLS there was a big to-do this year because the career placement office
essentially banned LLMs from on-campus interviewing. It was explained
that firms are, for the most part, simply not interested in LLMs and
don't want to waste their time.
I don't know anything about LLM programs, except that HLS' seems
filled with foreign students. Why it is that firms don't want them I
don't know (since I assume that they all have JDs), but for whatever
reason they appear not to. But don't worry -- your NYU JD will carry
you far.
Best,
Graham Robinson
----------
drob...@law.harvard.edu
Michael Kwun
In article <5j9523$c...@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>, jma...@umich.edu
wrote:
>I read what you posted about the NYU LLM. How would you suggest
>this should affect prospective students for the JD program? Are
>the employment figures likely better for NYU JDs? Why would an
>NYU JD be more valuable than an NYU LLM? Basically, what you
>wrote and quoted doesn't correlate well with what I hear about
>NYU's JD placement rates. I am considering NYU and am concerned
>about my future ability to repay $100K+ of debt.
I missed the original post, but it seems it said that NYU LLMs have lower
employment figures than NYU JDs. This isn't as odd as it may sound.
First, a lot of LLMs are people with law degrees from foreign countries.
This means their *basic* law training was all about a foreign (to the US)
law system--perhaps even a civil law (non-common law) system. Second, law
firms may view most LLMs and ivory tower academics rather than practically
minded lawyers.
None of this, BTW, is true for those who get LLMs in tax. A tax LLM
apparently makes you immenently employable as a tax attorney. There may
be other LLM specialties that are considered useful for practitioners, but
I'm not aware of them.
In general, an LLM is considered (in the US, anyway) to be an academic's
degree, not a practitioner's degree. If you want to be a
practitioner--and especially if you want to be a practitioner in an NYC
law firm--an NYU JD will serve you quite well.
--
Michael Kwun
Boalt Hall Class of 1998
http://www.igc.org/kwun
Jonathan Mallin
Graham,
Thanks again for the advice. You've been very helpful through
the admissions/decision season.
Graham Robinson <drob...@LAW.HARVARD.EDU> wrote:
>But don't worry -- your NYU JD will carry you far.
I haven't decided on NYU yet and I am hoping to also have HLS as
an option. :) This late in the game, my hopes may be misguided.
Yours, Jon
Misty Cavagnaro
I heard from a professor that you don't need a JD to get am LLM, is this
true?
On Sat, 19 Apr 1997, Graham Robinson wrote:
> jma...@umich.edu wrote:
> >
> >
> > David,
> >
> > I read what you posted about the NYU LLM. How would you suggest this
> should
> > affect prospective students for the JD program? Are the employment
> figures likely
> > better for NYU JDs? Why would an NYU JD be more valuable than an NYU
> LLM?
> > Basically, what you wrote and quoted doesn't correlate well with what
> I hear about
> > NYU's JD placement rates. I am considering NYU and am concerned
> about my
> > future ability to repay $100K+ of debt.
>
>
> They are very different things. NYU JDs do great in the job market.
> It doesn't surprise me that their LLMs have trouble finding jobs. At
> HLS there was a big to-do this year because the career placement office
> essentially banned LLMs from on-campus interviewing. It was explained
> that firms are, for the most part, simply not interested in LLMs and
> don't want to waste their time.
>
> I don't know anything about LLM programs, except that HLS' seems
> filled with foreign students. Why it is that firms don't want them I
> don't know (since I assume that they all have JDs), but for whatever
> reason they appear not to. But don't worry -- your NYU JD will carry
> you far.
>
Jake Minas
In article <kwun-19049...@kwun.hip.berkeley.edu>, Michael Kwun
<kw...@UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU> wrote:
> I missed the original post, but it seems it said that NYU LLMs have lower
> employment figures than NYU JDs. This isn't as odd as it may sound.
> First, a lot of LLMs are people with law degrees from foreign countries.
> This means their *basic* law training was all about a foreign (to the US)
> law system--perhaps even a civil law (non-common law) system. Second, law
> firms may view most LLMs and ivory tower academics rather than practically
> minded lawyers.
>
> None of this, BTW, is true for those who get LLMs in tax. A tax LLM
> apparently makes you immenently employable as a tax attorney. There may
> be other LLM specialties that are considered useful for practitioners, but
> I'm not aware of them.
This may not be obvious to most people, but I thought it was something
approaching common knowledge. An L.L.M. from a given institution is
usually going to be less prestigious than a J.D. This is because that, at
least according to conventional wisdom, if you're going to get an L.L.M.,
you should get one from a school that is quite a bit better than where you
got your J.D. from. At least flipping through the face-book, I've noticed
a lot of non-foreign L.L.M. students who got their J.D.s from second and
third tier law schools. This is notable because, checking admission
statistics, most Columbia J.D. admits come from undergrad in the Ivy League
or other equivalents (e.g. Stanford, Swarthmore, etc.).
It strikes me as rather like an M.A. in the liberal arts. Admissions
standards for M.A. programs are usually much lower than admissions
standards for Ph.D.s. In fact, in many programs, borderline Ph.D.
candidates are offered to enter the M.A. program, on a probationary basis
for the Ph.D. That being said, it wouldn't surprise me much if Harvard
M.A.s ended up not getting as much or as good jobs as Harvard B.A.s. For
an extreme case, Harvard offers and Extension Program, which is basically
open to anyone in the community. I would be really surprised if Harvard
B.A.s wouldn't outpace any degree from Extension, no matter which one.
I am a bit surprised, however, that L.L.M.s from NYU, in particular, don't
do as well, because of the tax program, which is something of a special
case in the above scenario. It is pretty much *the* place for a tax lawyer
to get advanced education (although I think the tradition of tax
practitioners going there may be dwindling).
--
Jake Minas
Columbia Law School
ja...@columbia.edu
Manny Rivera
I did not follow this whole thread, but from the point of view of a law
firm insider, I can tell you a couple of the practical reasons why
employment figures for LLM's are lower than for JD's. It's not so much of
a reflection of the prestige of the degree as of the practical significance
of the degree. At some schools, most LLM's are people who earned their
primary law degrees in foreign countries, worked for a few years as lawyers
there, then came to the U.S. for a one-year LLM. Law firms who hire these
foreign LLM's often put them in a category distinct from junior
associates--they are "foreign associates" or "foreign interns." The firms
hire them for two reasons: (1) because the foreign associate's knowledge
of his home nation's legal system is helpful in transactions that the firm
works on; or (2) the LLM appears to be well-connected in his/her country
and may help the firm to drum up business. Usually, these foreign
associate positions are short-term in nature--only for a year or two. The
foreign associate may not even take the bar exam. Foreign LLM's who want
to stay for a longer term present more of a problem for the firm, insofar
as their pass rates on the bar exam tend to be poor, and insofar as they
expect firms to give them credit for their prior legal experience in their
nations of origin, and thus to hire them as midlevel associates at high
salaries, even though their lack of training in U.S. law and legal practice
undermines their effectiveness to some degree.
For non-foreign students who obtain LLM's in a specific area like taxation
or corporate law, the LLM is going to confer an advantage if you have
experience practicing in the area in which you got your LLM. For instance,
an LLM in taxation helps the marketability of an experienced tax associate.
But it won't necessarily help an inexperienced associate get in on the
ground floor, unless the student could somehow show that what he learned in
the LLM program would be especially helpful to the firm--that the LLM
curriculum somehow endowed the student with skills that JD students would
not have. Otherwise, the firm would just look on the LLM as a slight plus,
but focus principally on the strength of the applicant's JD, which is the
main hiring criterion for junior associates.
Jake Minas wrote in article ...