By Law Weekly Staff

The stare conveyed a sense of despair and frustration with more volume than the simple words that accompanied it. “I just want a job,” the second-year student said.

Sadly, this student is not alone. While On-Grounds Interviews (OGIs) yet again proved productive for many, the tenor of this academic year has resonated with concern regarding prospects for employment. As they attempt to surmount market-wide obstacles, students have turned to the Law School’s primary resources for assistance: the Office of Career Services and the Public Service Center. In both of these offices, however, the staff is being asked to respond to a demand for help that mounts with each passing day in a worsening economy, while those same economic constraints limit the resources available to provide such services. This prompts the question: Is enough being done? More importantly: What is enough?

As the first round of OGIs approached in August, many students anticipated that this year would be just as they had hoped when they enrolled at the Law School. Said one second-year student, “My expectations were to have 10-to-11 callbacks and three-to-four offers.” Perhaps there was good reason for such positive sentiment; for the last three years, 96 percent of each class has graduated from the Law School with a job, the highest rate occuring between the years 1990 to 1996 and 2000 to 2008.

But between the two rounds of OGIs this year, the economy tanked. As Assistant Dean for Career Services Polly Lawson ’01 put it, “We went into the recruiting season without knowing the extent things would be changing.” As Lawson said, the effect was that “more of the big firms that interview second- and third-year students were more conservative in their hiring, so it was more difficult for students to get callbacks and offers as a whole.”

To a degree, the Law School has been here before, both in the early 1990s and the early 2000s. For example, only 86 percent of the class of 1992 graduated with a job, compared to a 92 percent employment rate the year before. But as Senior Assistant Dean for Career Services, W. Stevenson Hopson, IV, ’69, indicated, “The main difference in this current recession is the extraordinary number of law-firm layoffs we have seen.”

After fall OGIs failed to produce the expected number of callbacks—or in some cases, any callbacks—many students still in pursuit of law firm jobs turned to Career Services for help. Following advice to send mass mail, one student “sent 135 e-mails and received no callbacks or interviews.” According to Lawson, the typical strategies that worked in years past, such as mass mailings, did not work this year, although “we didn’t know until after the fact.”

As a result, the number of second- and third-year students still in need of jobs is higher than in previous years. But, as Hopson noted, 89 percent of the Class of 2009 has now secured full time employment. He said that it would not be surprising for the class to reach a 92 percent employment rate by graduation, which would put this year on par with previous classes.

Nevertheless, the difficult hiring market has revealed some student frustration with Career Services. One third-year student was disappointed with the office even before the economy began sinking. “After OGIs turned up no job [in 2007], I was even more disappointed with the help I received from Career Services. All Career Services did was feel sorry for me. I could have told you that e-mailing the same top-ranked firms that had already visited campus during OGIs on my behalf was not going to result in my employment. They were finished hiring.”

In these conversations, genuine anxiety also became apparent. Said one second-year, “I’ve got all this debt. It’s non-dischargrable.” The student, perhaps unwittingly, touched on yet another significant difference from earlier downturns: student finances.

On the cost side, tuition is much higher now than during previous recessions. Figures provided by Associate Dean for Management and Finance Stephen Parr highlight the differences. For example, for the 2000-2001 academic year, Virginia residents paid $15,803 in tuition and fees and non-residents paid $23,684. This year, those numbers are $36,800 and $41,800, respectively. Students facing the prospect of joblessness after graduation thus must contend with loan balances two-and-a-third times larger than similarly situation students earlier this decade.

Even graduating students who have secured jobs at large law firms will feel the pinch of rising tuition, however. According to the National Association for Law Placement, salaries at large law firms have risen approximately 25 percent from 2000 to 2008 in markets like Chicago and New York. Half of that increase is attributable to the rising cost of living, as measured by the Consumer Price Index provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the U.S. Department of Labor. Moreover, those salaries—often reviled in the news media—offer only so much reassurance to third-year students who read seemingly daily reports of attorney layoffs at those very firms.

But the rates charged on North Grounds, while understandably angst-inducing, are a much lighter financial burden than they otherwise could be. The Law School’s tuition and fees rank as the second-lowest among its peer group. Dean Parr noted that strong alumni support allows the Law School to keep tuition relatively low while offering strong financial aid, loan forgiveness, and public service programs. While a relative bargain in terms of the quality of legal education offered, comments made by several students suggest that the Law School’s value is perhaps diminished by the looming prospect of unemployment and the overall burden of the bottom-line cost of attendance.

A third-year student also highlighted the overriding fear faced by older students during OGIs, saying, “When you’re a 2L, firms don’t know anything about you. If you’re a 3L, they assume that you’re a malcontent, a screw-up, or an underperformer. This assumption was particularly inaccurate this year, since lots of perfectly good summer associates ended up in classes that were too large . . . but the stigma of being a 3L without an offer remained. Why hire someone permanently, especially when the economy is uncertain, if you can get a trial run with a 2L who has no black marks on the record?”

Such distress, driven by the drastically altered hiring environment, has ushered in changes that reach beyond second-year students for whom OGIs were unsuccessful. The effects extend from third-year students all the way down to prospective students.

Dean Paul Mahoney implemented one of the first changes, tasking Diddy Morris to help Career Services and the Public Service Center. Morris, who worked in the Career Services office during the late 1990s, is officially the Special Assistant to the Dean. She was hired last summer when the office’s former occupant, Jason Wu Trujillo ’01, became Senior Assistant Dean for Admissions and Financial Aid. While Morris will take on a broader portfolio of responsibilities over the long term, Dean Mahoney requested that she “help the Career Services Office on a temporary basis” in order to aid second- and third-year students that still have not received job offers.

Moreover, Lawson, Hopson, Getachew, and Director of Career Services for Clerkships and Programs Ruth Payne ’02, have all worked much more closely than they would have in previous years. The group formed a committee that has divided second- and third-year students still looking for jobs among themselves, all in an effort to provide students with more specialized attention. (Morris is not officially part of the committee but works closely with all the members.) Students were ‘assigned’ to each counselor based on the committee’s determination of who could best help each student’s search, said Getachew.

Students have changed their own approach as well. They are increasingly turning towards clerkships and the public sector. According to Payne, there are “more students coming in later who said, ‘I didn’t get an offer in the fall, I want to try a clerkship.’” At the Public Service Center, Getachew has similarly observed that student interest has been unprecedented.

Many students turn to the Public Service Center almost out of a sense of necessity but have walked away pleased with the help provided by Getachew and Office Manager Andrew Broaddus. Said one student, “From our first meeting, Yared was instrumental in helping me to develop a focused plan for conducting a public interest job search.” A second-year student who had received help from Career Services but ultimately landed a public interest job said, “I actually credit my success in finding this job to Yared Getachew in the Public Service Center. He absolutely went out of his way to help me. He spent a lot of time with me talking about various opportunities, helped me revamp my resume, and turned me on to numerous resources and job search databases. I really thought he went above and beyond the call of duty.”

First-year students especially have reached out to the Public Service Center for guidance, but also, on the whole, have been much more proactive in their search for employment than in prior years. For example, Lawson noted that after adding open office hours, all of the Law School’s career services professionals noticed a marked increase in foot traffic.

A student similarly highlighted just how aware this year’s first-year students are of the hiring environment, stating that “any residual thoughts I had about applying to for-profit firms were extinguished at the 1L meeting in the Caplin Auditorium when Career Services kicked things off by saying something to the effect of, ‘When you arrived at UVA, you probably thought that you were guaranteed a job, and you were probably right. Well, things have changed.’ That’s the point at which I really figured out that I needed to be on top of my game and also that I needed to be the first in line if I wanted to have a decent shot at getting an offer. Immediately after that meeting I e-mailed [Getachew] to set up an appointment.”

The concern about employment has even carried over to prospective students. Dean Trujillo noted that, despite steady applicant volumes at law schools nationwide, the Law School has already received record applications—over 7,000—for the class of 2012. He surmised that either the Law School is becoming more popular, thanks to its great reputation, or that students are making a flight to quality, favoring schools where they feel their job prospects are highest. While prospective students are not openly asking about hiring rates, they are increasingly focused on financial aid, suggesting a desire to minimize their debt burdens in the face of an uncertain job market.

Although the changes that have already manifested themselves have reached far and wide, students also have their own thoughts on what progress is left to be made. Some have noted that Career Services should focus outside of the large firms in the mega-markets of New York and Washington, D.C. One student noted that Career Services focuses heavily on general skills, such as how to write a resume or cover letter, and suggested that the office’s efforts might be better expended if they were concentrated on job hunting techniques and interview skills.

But affecting these changes requires resources. In speaking with Lawson, one gets the sense that there is a need to strike a balance between providing information to the general student body while attempting to provide individualized strategy sessions. Lawson admitted that “our office needs to do more proactive outreach” and that “meeting all 1Ls is important.”

However, individualized attention becomes a difficult task when Hopson, Lawson, Payne, and Getachew are responsible for an average of nearly 300 students each. This is the highest student-to-counselor ratio among the top 15 law schools (as ranked by U.S. News & World Report). Only Georgetown, the largest school on the list, has a ratio near that of the Law School; even then, counselors see on average 30 fewer students at the Washington, D.C. school. At most schools on the list, the ratio approaches 200-to-1, with some such as Stanford below 150-to-1. Lawson conceded, “We are leanly staffed compared to a lot of schools.” Getachew echoed her concerns, noting that adding support staff can be as important as hiring new counselors.

These numbers underreport the burden that falls directly on Hopson and Lawson. The overwhelming majority of students at the Law School seek private sector employment as a first choice, as compared to those who start out seeking public service positions. This means that nearly every student is at least nominally advised by the Office of Career Services, making truly personalized advice and specialized knowledge very difficult to provide. The Public Service Center has seen a significant increase in visits this year, as many first-year students abandoned plans to pursue positions with private firms.

Unfortunately, at the same time that the Law School most needs additional counselors, the economy has handicapped the Law School’s ability to hire more assistance. The alumni network—lauded as one of the Law School’s biggest assets—has relieved some of the pressure by facilitating entrance into certain geographic markets and practice areas. But until the economic downturn reverses itself, adding full-time staff may remain an unfulfilled wish for the Law School.

In spite of the resource constraints, Career Services promises that further changes will be made throughout the spring and into the fall recruiting season, though at present the plans are insufficiently defined to share with the student body. This is on top of the migration from CASE (a relic of the mid-1990s) to Symplicity, which should reduce the administrative workload on Career Services. In the meantime, Morris advises students “not to hesitate to come to someone and ask for help; we can’t work with someone if we don’t know their position.”

Students and career counselors alike have been dealing with the physically and emotionally draining job market as best they can. Despite the duty to be professional with her advice, when it comes to qualified students who continue to struggle after months on the job market, Lawson laments that “it’s heartbreaking and incredibly stressful. You want to help students.”

Perhaps because of the difficult market, each individual offer to a student seems more precious. They are no longer taken for granted. Said Getachew, “Every day an e-mail goes out where we found someone a job.” While this represents progress, it is hard to say whether it will be enough in light of the looming specter of the continuingly flagging economy. As one third-year student put it, “I have little doubt that, absent my clerkship offer, my fall job search would have turned into a spring, and possibly even a summer, job search. Things are bad out there.”

(Editors’ Note: In comparing the Law School’s career counseling resources to other top law schools, we looked for individuals who held the same titles or performed the same functions as Hopson, Lawson, Payne, and Getachew. We erred on the side of excluding professionals at other schools if unsure of their roles; in other words, we calculated the staffing numbers as favorably to the Law School as possible.

On the student side, we found the best information we could for each school’s entering class of J.D. students and multiplied that by three. We excluded transfer and LL.M. students, too, in hopes of keeping the numbers consistent.

While these steps skewed our calculations in absolute terms, they almost certainly had little effect on each school’s place in the relative order. Whether the Law School actually has a counselor-to-student ratio of 255-to-1 instead of 290-to-1 is much less important than determining that either ratio is higher than that found at any other top 15 school.)