A colleague sent me a revealing chart, showing what the employment stats for the top law schools would have looked like if U.S. News had already been employing the new policy of treating those unemployed but allegedly "not seeking employment" as part of the stats. UCLA's placement would have fallen from the reported 99.7% to 94.4%, while USC's stats would have fallen from 98.2% to 93.3%! Those were the biggest changes (5.3 and 4.9 percentage points, respectively), though Michigan and Vanderbilt were close: Michigan's employmente rate would have dropped from 99.7% to 95.8%, while Vanderbilt's would have gone from 99.0% to 95.5%. Only Cornell and Stanford would have been unaffected by this change, though the differences for Penn, Duke, Yale, and Columbia would all have been less than 1%. (Texas, for those curious, would have reported an employment rate 1.2% lower.)
To be sure, there are some graduates of law school who are genuinely not seeking employment--but it has surely not been in the numbers that some schools have been reporting.
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