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Paying for Law School: Law Student Loan Indebtedness and Career Choices
No full textStudent loan debt has reached crisis levels, topping $1.64 trillion dollars this year and surpassing credit card debt to become the second largest source of debt held by Americans. When discussing student loan debt, it is easy to fixate on the aggregate impact of the burdens this debt places on taxpayers, the economy, and borrowers alike, such as the depressive effects that student loan debt has on marriage, homeownership, and entrepreneurship. Yet, a discussion of which graduates are saddled with the largest student loans and how their debt obligations impacts their career choices is often absent from conversations about student debt and has been understudied to date. This Article contributes to the discourse about student loan debt and its potentially negative externalities by investigating responses from an original survey administered at four law schools, revealing novel findings about law students’ expected debt loads, career choices, and intentions to participate in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.In Part I of this Article, the student loan crisis is more closely examined with particular emphasis on its salience for law school graduates. In addition, the first part of this Article provides credible descriptive evidence that rates and amounts of borrowing to attend law school impact law students differentially on the basis of their endowed characteristics, such as race and parental education. Next, Part II explores the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, describing the program’s creation and implementation, in addition to evaluating its efficacy and the direct and indirect costs of its administration. Part III discusses two pervasive issues within the legal academy with significant social implications — the access-to-justice gap and the public-interest drift — against the backdrop of the student loan crisis and the possible answers that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program could provide in addressing these issues. Part IV describes the data collected from the original survey, the methods used to analyze these data, and reports and discusses the results. The findings reported in Part IV offer insight into how a law student’s endowed and acquired traits influence their career intentions and provide evidence of the causal relationship between loan debt and career choice and intentions to enroll in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Finally, this Article concludes by suggesting that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program presents the best available option to address problems stemming from the access-to-justice gap and the public-interest drift, while also offsetting the negative effects of structural stratification in legal education
Women of Color: A Study of Law School Experiences
No full textThe NALP Foundation and the Center for Women in Law are pleased to provide the legal industry with this first-of-its-kind report detailing the educational and social experiences of women of color in law school across the country. The results explore postgraduate employment expectations and involvement in and perspective on judicial clerkships, study groups, grades, and networking opportunities as well as employment intentions, and educational debt. The report gathers opinions regarding the state of race and gender relations within law schools, explores the advice and guidance students solicit and receive, and provides an in-depth analysis of students\u27 experiences with various law school departments, faculty, and peers. The comparative results for women of color with those of their majority counterparts are significant and informative and reveal experiences among women of color differ considerably, depending on their specific race/ethnicity. This must-have report will enable organizations to develop targeted, effective strategies to address this critical issue in the legal profession
Roadmap to Enrolling Diverse Law School Classes, Volume 4: Contextualizing Admission Factors
Get PDFLaw student diversity is critical to the robust exchange of ideas that is the basis of legal education. Unfortunately, many law schools struggle to enroll classes that reflect the demographics of the regions, states, and even cities in which they are located. A commonly cited reason for the dearth of diversity in many schools is that the pool or “pipeline” of eligible prospective students is not diverse itself.
The premise of this critique is rooted in the manner in which “merit” in the admission process is conceived. LSAT scores are the most prominent admission factor. Past academic performance, typically undergraduate GPA (UGPA), is often given prominence as well. Applicants with high LSAT scores and UGPAs will have many possible options for law school. Law schools also consider other factors, such as personal statements, letters of recommendation, and work experience. But the LSAT score and UGPA typically bear the most weight.
Ideally, the weight conferred to admission factors is justified by the value of each factor (or combination of factors) in predicting outcomes. Fairness, equity, and the fostering of diverse student bodies require that admission factors be properly contextualized. Narrow conceptions of merit can place applicants from underrepresented backgrounds at a disadvantage in the admission process, due, most significantly, to clear and enduring racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic LSAT score disparities. When factors such as LSAT scores are given undue weight, their impact is unduly harmful to some applicants.
But how can a law school determine the predictive value of different admission factors? The purpose of this fourth volume of the Roadmap to Enrolling Diverse Law School Classes series is to provide law schools with a guide to using empirical research methods, such as regression analyses, to gain a better understanding of the relative impact of admission factors on student outcomes
A Starting Point for Disability Justice in Legal Education
No full textThis article explores how a disability justice framework would provide greater access to law school and therefore the legal profession for disabled students of color; specifically, disabled Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students. Using DisCrit principles formulated by Subini Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri (2013), this article provides suggestions for incorporating a disability justice lens to legal education. In doing so, this article specifically recognizes the work of three disability justice activist-attorney-scholars, Lydia X. Z. Brown, Talila “TL” Lewis, and Katherine Pérez, and considers lessons from their advocacy and leadership that can apply in the law school setting
Shhh!!!! Can You Keep a Secret?: A Cultural Bias Against Disclosing a Mental Disability & Its Impact on Seeking Reasonable Accommodations for the Bar Exam
No full textThis article will first discuss the enactment of the ADA and its expansive application as it relates to learning disabilities. The article will then discuss the Supreme Court\u27s initial interpretation of the ADA and the Court\u27s interpretation after Congress\u27 amendments to the ADA. The article further discusses both the Court\u27s and experts\u27 challenges in applying the ADA to individuals with learning disabilities. Then, the article will discuss the cultural bias against disclosing learning disabilities. This article will address the importance of taking cultural biases into account in determining eligibility for an accommodation and the importance of flexibility in assessing the required documentation to ensure all students taking the exam are on equal footing. Finally, the article discusses the intersectionality between cultural bias and disability along with the importance of education, legislation, and advocacy
Mind the Gap: Gender Pay Disparities in the Legal Academy
No full textDifferences in pay between women and men in the same jobs have captured the public’s attention in recent years. However, public interest in and press coverage of salary differences on the basis of gender—or any other ascriptive class—in the learned professions are wanting. Moreover, few studies have spoken directly on the gender pay disparities in the legal academy, despite emerging evidence of it at multiple law schools. In this Article, we use a unique dataset, drawn from the only nationally representative survey to date of tenured law professors in the United States, to track how gender and race are tied to salary outcomes. But we look beyond the raw differences in salary, probing the mechanisms that undergird gendered pay inequities.Part I of this Article introduces the concepts of human capital and social capital as important factors underpinning inequalities in outcomes for the legal profession. We then provide an overview of how careers in law—and particularly in the legal academy—are stratified by access to social capital and returns to human capital. In Part II, we introduce the After Tenure survey, from which our data originate. Next, we describe our analytical approach, examining the demography of the legal academy and the legal profession more broadly to discuss the ways in which law professors experience their jobs differently along lines of gender and race. In Part III, we provide evidence of gendered earnings disparities among tenured law professors that is particularly acute for women of color. We conclude by demonstrating how these disparities stem from the differential valuation of human capital
Examining the Relationship Between Law School Rank and Student Engagement
No full textLaw school rankings such as U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Law Schools” dominate the conversation on quality in legal education. Potential law students frequently cite using rankings in their law school search process. In addition, rankings have been shown to influence the behavior and culture of law schools. Despite their popularity, the criteria used to rank schools often has little to do with the quality of the educational experience. If rankings are intended to demonstrate some level of collegiate quality, then these measures should be related with other measures of collegiate quality, such as student engagement. The current study investigated the relationship between law school rankings and student engagement using data from the Law School Survey of Student Engagement. Findings reveal no relationship between ranking and engagement, except for a modest, positive relationship between ranking and satisfaction
Evaluating Productive Mindset Interventions that Promote Excellence on California’s Bar Exam
No full textAs Mindsets in Legal Education (MILE) researchers, we designed, administered, and evaluated the online productive mindset intervention referred to as the California Bar Exam Strategies and Stories Program (the program). In partnership with the State Bar of California (SBC), we streamlined and simplified the enrollment process while improving participation on the July 2018 and July 2019 California bar exams.
1. Proven Effectiveness: Working closely with the SBC, we conducted a preliminary analysis of the program in January 2020. The results suggest that the program increases the likelihood of passing the bar exam, after controlling for LSAT and GPA, by between 6.8 to 9.6 percent, depending on the analysis conducted.
2. Boost for First-Generation and Underrepresented Minority Students: The program particularly helped applicants who were first-gen college students and underrepresented minorities, according to our analyses.
3. Reductions in Psychological Friction: Our analyses suggest that the productive mindset intervention succeeded by reducing psychological friction. Among applicants studying for the exam, it fostered stress-is-enhancing and growth mindsets that helped them succeed in the face of stress, anxiety, and mistakes.
In light of these results, we recommend that the SBC offer the California Bar Exam Strategies and Stories Program to future cohorts. Future test takers would likely benefit from the stress-is-enhancing and growth mindsets that the program fosters. Adaptive mindsets may be especially important in the immediate future, as applicants face adversity associated with COVID-19. We anticipate updating the program to address these new sources of psychological friction
Do I Belong at This Law School?: How Perceived Experiences of Bias, Stereotype Concerns, and Social Capital Influence Law Students\u27 Sense of Belonging
No full textRecent research has shown the importance of sense of belonging in law students’ performance and satisfaction outcomes, particularly for minoritized students (Green et al., forthcoming). However, what affects and supports students’ sense of belonging? Using the 2018 Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) data, this dissertation examines the extent to which perceived experiences of bias, stereotype concerns, and various sources of social capital influence law students’ sense of belonging at the intersection of race and gender. The results provided evidence that sense of belonging is patterned by race-gender, which is associated with students’ actual experiences in school reflected in their perceived experiences of bias, stereotype concerns, and the usage of various sources of social capital for support. Moreover, this dissertation shows that the effects of perceived experiences of bias and stereotype concerns on students’ sense of belonging can be mitigated by tapping into various sources of social capital. These findings have important implications for our theoretical and practical understanding of how legal education is experienced by minoritized students and how to support them
The Quiet Resignation: Why Do So Many Female Lawyers Abandon Their Careers?
No full textThirty percent of female lawyers leave their careers. The same is true for female doctors. Over time, an increasing number of married professionals have recreated traditional gender roles, and society has lost a tremendous amount of training and well-honed talent as a result. Neither workplace discrimination nor family obligations can fully and satisfactorily explain the trend. Both of those theories assume that women take a more dependent and vulnerable position in the household because of constraints, but in one important respect, men are more constrained than women, and they are better off for it: to maintain social status, men have to work. Women do not.
This Article advances a theory and corroborating evidence that the cultural acceptance of female underemployment is a privilege in the abstract, but a curse in practice. Even under the best conditions, the early stages of professional careers involve mistakes, mismatches, and disappointments. An opportunity to escape the stress of the public sphere by focusing on the family may have great appeal in the short run even though the long-run consequences are severe. Asymmetric cultural acceptance creates an easy off-ramp for females, to nearly everybody\u27s detriment