Late last month the ABA released employment data for the law school graduating class of 2012. While much of the commentary the data generated focused on the paltry 56 percent of graduates working full-time in "employed bar passage required" jobs, one significant change has so far gone unnoticed: For the first time in three years, the ABA was able to provide complete employment data for all three of Puerto Rico’s nationally accredited law schools. The results are shocking: A scant 9 percent of the three schools’ graduates were employed full-time, long-term in bar passagerequired positions. More than a third of those graduates were unemployed, and 14 percent couldn’t be reached.
One obvious explanation for these scandalously low employment numbers is Puerto Rico’s sputtering economy. In 2010 the per capita GDP of the United States stood at more than $46,000. Puerto Rico’s, by comparison, was just $26,000, but because the commonwealth’s large financial and service sectors send much of the island’s domestic product abroad, the national income was actually closer to $17,000 per capita. Puerto Rico also has a high unemployment rate, and it’s often criticized for the large federal transfer payments it receives that allegedly discourage the employable from taking jobs. These factors help explain why Puerto Rico’s population has fallen by 100,000 people total since 2004 due to emigration. It’s possible that Puerto Rico is to the United States what Cyprus is to the European Union, but milder.
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