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Examining the Determination, Consistency, and Variation of Law School Cost of Living Estimates
No full textLaw school cost is an increasingly important part of conversations within the legal education community. Since 1985, inflation-adjusted tuition and fees at private American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools have increased 175%. At public ABA-approved law schools, tuition and fees have increased 490% (Law School Transparency, 2020). Traditionally, labor market returns to a law degree were sufficiently high so that most people did not question the cost of legal education. However, changes to the legal services market regarding job opportunities and salaries have led to increased scrutiny of law school costs (AccessLex Institute, 2020; Matasar, 2010; Tamanaha, 2013).
Discussion of law school costs often focuses on tuition and fees. However, to know the true cost of law school, we must also consider a law school’s estimated living expenses. Living expenses is defined as the general living expenses associated with attending an institution of higher education. These include costs for items such as books, supplies, housing, utilities, food, groceries, clothing, and miscellaneous personal expenses (2018-2019 Federal Student Aid Handbook, 2019). As part of a law school’s yearly ABA Required Disclosures, it must provide students with an estimate of living expenses associated with attending that institution. According to 2019 ABA data, the average estimated total cost of attendance for full-time in-state law school students living off-campus was around $43,500. About 54% of that total cost of attendance was attributable to living expenses
Improving the Signal Quality of Grades
No full textWe investigate how improving the signal quality of grades could enhance the matching of students to selective opportunities that are awarded early in academic programs. To do so, we develop methods to measure the signal quality of grades and to estimate the impact of changes to university policies on the identification of exceptional students for these opportunities. We focus on law schools, a setting where students are awarded important academic and professional opportunities after just one year of a three year program. Using transcript data from one top law school over a 40 year period, we document large gains in identifying exceptional students if selective opportunities were awarded with more grades and if law schools were to change certain personnel, course, and grading policies. Our findings provide motivation and a blueprint for how law schools and universities more generally could leverage their internal records to ensure that fewer exceptional students miss out on selective opportunities
It\u27s Not Where You Start, It\u27s How You Finish: Predicting Law School and Bar Success
Get PDFIn this study, we examine the extent to which academic and student engagement factors explain law school grades and first-time bar exam performance. Applying fixed effects linear and logit modeling, our analysis leverages law student transcript data and responses to the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) among students from a diverse group of 20 law schools to estimate academic performance and odds of bar passage. Most notably, we find that GPA improvement during law school is associated with greater odds of passing the bar exam, particularly among students who struggle the most during the first semester. Furthermore, while we find that LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA are predictive (p \u3c 0.05) of both law school performance and bar success (as in previous research), these effects are quite modest. Based on these findings, we propose and discuss several recommendations. These should be helpful to higher education scholars and practitioners, particularly law school deans, administrators, faculty, and academic support staff
Mindsets in Legal Education
No full textIf you teach 1Ls, you may share the following concern. At the start of each year, we meet enthusiastic and successful students who are passionate about law. They arrive on campus invested in learning, ready to work hard, and eager to participate in class. But trouble brews soon thereafter. Students worry whether they have what it takes to do well, whether they will fit in, and whether they belong in law school. Answering questions in class, many sense (rightly or wrongly) that their professors and peers think that they aren’t smart and that they will not do well. When they encounter difficulty making friends, finding study groups, and connecting with professors in office hours, they worry that “maybe this means that people like me do not belong or cannot succeed here.” Worse yet, discussions in class lead many to lose sight of why they chose to go to law school and the important role that lawyers play in serving the public. These experiences erode confidence in their abilities and their engagement in law school, and they cause distress and undermine well-being. Given the inherent interest of law, our commitment to teaching, and our concern for our students’ well-being, we tell ourselves, there is surely some small change that would allow our promising students to thrive. Yet any solution remains paralyzingly elusive.
This article validates the impulse to treat law students’ engagement, learning, and well-being as interconnected and improvable. Indeed, on this fifteenth anniversary of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE), we applaud LSSSE’s collection of over 350,000 law student responses from 200 law schools forming one of the largest datasets capturing student voices and experiences in law school. We offer a way forward that builds on LSSSE’s rich data and the findings and efforts of legal scholars who have studied law students’ well-being for the past two decades, and we suggest ways in which LSSSE data can be used by researchers who wish to intervene to improve law students’ well-being.
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We break no new ground in suggesting that law schools could benefit by drawing from social psychological insights. As Part I describes, numerous scholars have made this argument over the past two decades. Recognizing the severity of the distress that law students face, the profession and the academy have shown enthusiasm for change along the proposed lines. Yet law schools have not followed their advice—even when presented with promising, concrete proposals. The cause and consequence of this inaction are few effective, empirically measured interventions in legal education.
Our contribution is to explain why such psychologically attuned interventions are becoming ever more feasible, how to pursue them, and why doing so could transform legal education. As we detail in Part II, social psychology has developed several models that provide promising explanations for why law students’ subjective well-being drops so precipitously after matriculation. Part III proffers solutions, with a focus on small-footprint, psychologically attuned interventions that have dramatic results. In passing, we briefly discuss how our own interdisciplinary, multi-institution collaboration used LSSSE data in building a program to mitigate the psychological friction law students experience when preparing for the bar exam. Part IV ends with a call to action. It reviews prior obstacles to improving law students’ well-being, but observes that some have already eroded and identifies opportunities to overcome the remainder
Closing the Law School Gap: A Collaborative Effort to Address Educational Inequities Through Free, Asynchronous Tools
No full textAccording to the latest Profile of the Legal Profession by the American Bar Association, 860% of all lawyers identify as non-Hispanic white individuals. Diversifying the legal profession requires diversifying the law student population, but simply admitting more law students from underrepresented communities is inadequate. To work towards true equity, all students must be given the tools to succeed in law school. A recently developed resource - the CALI Law School Success Lessons, a series of interactive online lessons on how to be a successful law student -was designed with precisely this goal in mind- to enhance equity in law schools. This article explores why and how these lessons were developed, the historical roots and future reach of academic success work in U.S. law schools, and how access to individualized online academic skills instruction enhances equity for first generation law students.
The article also discusses the ways that the lessons use technology to recreate individual meetings between an academic support professor and students, teach students that the first step to improving their performance in law school is through enhancing their metacognitive understanding, and help students transfer both skills and knowledge throughout law school and their legal careers. Success in law school requires not only a knowledge of the law, but a keen understanding of how to learn and apply the law. An increasing number of law students come to law school without a foundation in this method of learning, and without a support network to rely on for assistance. Thus, the onus is on law schools to provide students with this support. The CALI Law School Success Lessons are one tool that all law schools can use to help level the playing field for first-generation law students by providing free, individualized instruction in law school skills. All law schools and legal educators should take the time to review this lesson series and encourage students to complete them at various points throughout their time in law school -from before orientation to when they are studying for the bar exam
Racial and Ethnic Ancestry of the Nation\u27s Black Law Students: An Analysis of Data from the LSSSE Survey
No full textAffirmative action continues to be one of the most controversial programs in American society. For example, in 1996, California voters adopted Proposition 209, a constitutional amendment that banned “preferential treatment” based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in college admissions. In the November 2020 elections, California voters rejected Proposition 16, which would have repealed that ban, by a vote of 56 percent to 44 percent. The First Circuit affirmed the lower court decision that Harvard’s affirmative action plan met constitutional requirements in the Fall of 2020. That decision was appealed to the Supreme Court. On June 21, 2021, the Court invited the Acting Solicitor General to file a brief expressing views on the case. And, anyone familiar with affirmative action, also recalls that at the close of Justice O’Connor’s opinion for the five person majority in Grutter v Bolinger she wrote: “We expect that twenty-five years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” The precise implications of O’Connor\u27s twenty-five-year period are debatable. At one extreme, it is an essential part of the holding of Grutter. As a result, affirmative action policies must end in twenty-five years. At the other extreme, it is a time to reflect upon where selective higher education programs and American society are with respect to the continued need for considerations of race and ethnicity in the admissions process. Arguably, since the Court did not reiterate the twenty-five year period in its decisions in either Fisher I or Fisher II, it may prove to be irrelevant. Regardless of how the federal courts ultimately resolve the 2028 deadline, one thing is clear, affirmative action will remain a controversial program under constant scrutiny.When affirmative action began in the 1960s, the racial and ethnic makeup of the population, not only of the United States, but also of Blacks, was vastly different than it is today. According to the 1960 census, Caucasians constituted 88.6 percent of all Americans, with an additional 10.5 percent classified as black. The 1960 census categorized Hispanics/Latinos based on their race, not their ethnicity. Thus, African-Americans and Caucasians comprised 99.1 percent of the American population. As the 1960s dawned, America had also lived under its most restrictive immigration measures for the past thirty years. Consequently, during the 1960s, the percentage of foreign-born Americans plummeted to its lowest recorded levels in US history.American society is now about 60 years removed from the initiation of affirmative action programs. Not only has the racial and ethnic ancestry of Americans changed substantially during that period, so has the racial and ethnic ancestry of Blacks. According to a 2019 Pew Research Center publication, of the estimated 46,800,000 people with Black ancestry, 13% (up from 7% in 2000) viewed themselves as mixed-race. Over that period, the percentage of those who were counted as non-Hispanic mixed-race Blacks was 8%, double what it was in 2000 and 5% were Black Hispanics (as compared to 3% almost two decades earlier). We refer to those who both indicated that they are Hispanic/Latino and have some Black ancestry as “Black Hispanics.” While the percentages of mixed-race blacks and Black Hispanics among the Black population were increasing, so were the percentage of foreign-born Blacks and their children. For example, the percentage of the Black population that was foreign-born increased from 1.1 in 1970, to 3.1 in 1980, to 4.9 in 1990, to 6.1 in 2000, and to 8.8 in 2010. From census data for 2019, for Blacks Alone and in Combination, 11.8% were foreign-born and an additional 8.8% were the children of foreign-born Blacks. Thus, first and second-generation Black immigrants made up 20.6 percent of the Black population.This article will provide the first empirical data on the nation’s law students with some Black ancestry. In doing so, we will provide data on Ascendant Black law students and law students from the three major Successive Black groups: Black Hispanics, Black Immigrants and Black Multiracials. We do not propose to address whether the changing racial and ethnic ancestry of Blacks at law schools is a positive or negative development. Rather, we seek only to provide empirical information about the existence of this change and to assert that because it exists, it has altered the landscape for thinking about how affirmative action applies to those with Black ancestry
Still Strangers in the Land: Achievement Barriers, Burdens, and Bridges Facing African American Students Within Predominately White Law Schools
No full textThis Article examines the barriers to an environment where African American law students no longer view themselves, and no longer are viewed as, what American abolitionist Harriet Tubman coined, “a stranger in a strange land.” In this Article, I explain the research on the structural, psychological, and social factors that face the African American community, and more specifically, the African American legal community. I discuss the implications of these factors for African American law students and law schools. Finally, I make recommendations to help overcome the achievement gap experienced by African American law students. The prognosis is one of optimism
Secure Online High Stakes Testing: A Serious Alternative as Legal Education Moves Online
No full textPandemic-related health and financial issues, travel and group gathering bans, and public service and protection demands all point to an immediate need to develop alternatives to traditional in-person law school and bar exams, for this summer and an unknown amount of time thereafter. Secure, online remote-proctored exams should be thoroughly studied as one possible alternative, and protocols for high stakes exams that account for these new realities must be considered, analyzed, and pilot-tested as soon as possible. This paper calls for the immediate assembly of local advisory panels for jurisdictions facing bar administration decisions and a national emergency task force that includes experts in remote-proctored testing and bar exam administration, and other relevant legal education, testing, and professional disciplines to study the issues, make recommendations, and provide guidance to jurisdictions on the implementation of controlled pilot tests. These pilots can then be studied, assessed, and improved upon should the current emergency need continue into the future
Immigrant and International College Students\u27 Learning Gaps: Academic and Sociocultural Readiness for Career and Graduate/Professional Education
No full textThis mixed-methods study is based on transformative education and asset model, thus challenging conventional deficit view about immigrant and international student groups in American colleges and universities facing the challenges of improving equity and inclusion. Using bachelor’s degree completion with full-time job employment or graduate/professional school enrollment as barometers of college success, this study explores undergraduate students\u27 learning gaps in terms of academic and sociocultural readiness. Quantitative analysis of the Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) data reveals mixed patterns of college learning gaps: the first-generation immigrant students lagged behind the U.S.-born natives, whereas international students fared relatively well except for full-time job employment. In terms of college major, both immigrant and international groups were overrepresented in STEM fields but underrepresented in humanities and human service fields including education and law. Qualitative analysis of interview cases offers further insights into the immigrant and international students’ challenges and strategies for improving inclusive equity
#ForTheCulture: Generation Z and the Future of Legal Education
No full textGeneration Z, with a birth year between 1995 and 2010, is the most diverse generational cohort in U.S. history and is the largest segment of our population. Gen Zers hold progressive views on social issues and expect diversity and minority representation where they live, work, and learn. American law schools, however, are not known for their diversity, or for being inclusive environments representative of the world around us. This culture of exclusion has led to an unequal legal profession and academy, where less than 10 percent of the population is non-white. As Gen Zers bring their demands for inclusion, and for a legal education that will prepare them to tackle social justice issues head on, they will encounter an entirely different culture—one that is completely at odds with their expectations. This paper adds depth and perspective to the existing literature on Generation Z in legal education by focusing on their social needs and expectations, recognizing them as critical drivers of legal education and reform. To provide Gen Z students with a legal education that will enable them to make a difference for others—a need deeply connected to their motivators and beliefs—law school culture must shift. Reimagining, reconstituting, and reconfiguring legal education to create a culture of inclusion and activism will be essential and necessary. Engaging in this work “for the culture” means getting serious about diversifying our profession by abandoning exclusionary hiring metrics, embedding social justice throughout the law school curriculum, and adopting institutional accountability measures to ensure that these goals are met. Gen Zers are accustomed to opposing institutions that are rooted in inequality; law schools can neither afford, nor ignore the opposition any longer. We must begin reimagining legal education now—and do it, for the culture