My take: The only people who are really hurting to find jobs right now are people who are looking for jobs in biglaw. I'm at Mercer, and I ended up with 4 summer job offers.
I'd be careful about equating summer job offers with full time job offers. Still, good job on that.
Yeah, I realize that, but I also know that at least 2 of the offices hire a ton of their 2L interns, so it's not like there's no translation at all.
Were your offers Macon firms? I have heard that Mercer is pretty protected from the overall crash because it has a lock on the Macon firms.
While I grow weary of seeing OP's sentiments browbeaten into everyone in every thread, I do appreciate the sentiment behind this thread, because it is easy even if you are not biased against T3 and T4 schools to end up not even able to analyze them properly because many of us first encountered any organization of the schools in the US News rankings...and they don't even bother to rank the T3 and T4. So it's easy for a majority of ls hopefuls to see only T1 and T2 schools as options, and end up making all their choices among those.
It is good to research continuously on these schools...while getting into a top 10 school feels good psychologically (and 90% of getting through anything hard is mental), being considered tops of the entering class feels good psychologically too, and so does attending school in an area you would LOVE to live and work for the rest of your life, ESPECIALLY doing it for free! lol
So again, people, don't use up all your analytical skills on practicing for the LSAT...once that's done, really look at every ABA-accredited school (and the non-accredited in California if you like risk and don't want to keep open your options of practicing outside the state)...use the Detailed Search funtion of the ABA guide to search for any combination of criteria that fits your description or what you are looking for.
TLS has a list and reviews (by clicking on the hyperlinked names) of the T3 and T4 schools, with their 25th-75th percentile GPAs and LSATs. You can start there if the ABA search function is a bit intimidating...then go on the schools' websites! While I always say it's good to know the good and the bad...the OP's point is that most if not all of what's on the net about these schools are very bad. So balance it out with a visit to the website of the schools you're interested in...read the Dean's letter, the history, their blurb about their location...click around, there are always interesting facts that may be just right (or all wrong) for you that you won't find out by listening to only one side of the story. Do NOT ignore the bad news about a school, but have a comprehensive file of info on it.
Do your research and buyer beware. Know your priorities in a school and choose the schools in that order of priority, not anyone else's.