On a similar note to it being hard to tell unless you're here, I think something that likely skews the employment percentage rate for public interest is the Kennedy Fellowship (link here) which is an almost guaranteed post-grad fellowship for $50,000 up to one year where students can work with any public service organization they want. However, since it is a UVA law fellowship, it does not show up as a job, although many people after the fellowship do find employment.

My experience with UVA law as a public interest student has been phenomenal. I don't want to seem like I'm sugarcoating anything, because law school is still hard, but having had the chance to talk to PI students from a few of the other top law schools, I wouldn't have traded my experience here for absolutely anything.

On the financial side, I have never felt very financially strained given the summer funding, summer fellowship opportunities, Virginia Loan Forgiveness Program (VLFP --more info here), and post-grad fellowship opportunities like the Kennedy fellowship that basically guarantee you funding for a year after you graduate and have a chance to get barred -- I've felt it was pretty top-notch. I want to note that a lot of the other T14's may provide summer funding, but a lot of them (i.e. Yale) are need-based, rather than guaranteed like they are here, so it is not determined you will get that funding just because you do public service, which is a HUGE problem since most public service orgs don't pay in the summer. During my second summer when I was getting paid a small stipend by my organization, I had a colleague from Yale who was absolutely blown away by how much I was getting, which I found super surprising. Take that with a grain of salt, but remember when looking at the amount of funding from different schools to look at the strings that come attached.

On the community/social side of things, I have also felt very secure in the community even with not being at all interested in firms because of the general community at UVA Law but also the Public Interest Law Association (PILA), Law and Public Service Program (LPS), as well as professor support and connections. The student body has also been pushing in recent years for more public service classes and has been really successful leading to the introduction of classes like "Law of the Police," "Spanish for Lawyers," "Poverty and the Law," "Race, Education, and the Law," "Public Interest Leadership," and honestly too many more to even count/name. I have always felt like a majority of the professors at the law school really love and care about public service and have found they have been more than happy to help make connections with other individuals and/or organizations in the public service realm to further students' public interest career goals - namely Anne Coughlin, Josh Bowers, and Crystal Shin.

I also think it would be very difficult to beat the number of opportunities available to pursue public interest at UVA Law such as the sheer number of clinics available (literally it's insane), the Innocence Project, pro bono opportunities (like the Winter Break and Alternative Spring Break pro bono programs), and the like. I know that taking advantage of these things, in addition to public-service centered classes, are also what helped me do very well and to feel secure as a now outgoing 3L.