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Education, Not Deportation : A Pilot Study of Undocumented Student Experiences in Law and Medical Degree Programs
No full textIncreased numbers of culturally competent professionals in the legal and medical fields are urgently needed in a diverse society like the United States. This is largely due to the decisive role legal and medical services play in the everyday lives and well-being of communities of color. Due to recent developments in federal immigration policies and educational association policies, increased numbers of immigrant students, in particular undocumented students, are enrolling in professional degree programs. Little is known, however, regarding undocumented students’ experiences applying to and studying in these professional degree programs and how their experiences compare to that of other immigrant student populations. Employing the use of a mixed methods approach consisting of a national survey of immigrant law and medical degree students, this paper describes the findings from a pilot project examining the effect of legal status on students’ educational trajectories and workforce experiences. In doing so, this work sheds light on the role of immigration status plays on immigrant students’ pursuit of postgraduate education and offers critical interventions in scholarly discourse, policy, and practice
Evaluating the Impact of the Post-9/11 GI Bill on Veterans\u27 Graduate School Enrollment
No full textIn this study, I use data from the American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and National Postsecondary Student Aid Study to examine the effect of the Post-9/11 GI Bill on veterans’ graduate school enrollment. This analysis reveals that the Post-9/11 GI Bill has contributed to growth of veterans enrolled in graduate schools. On average, the increase is between 1.5 and 2 percentage points among veterans with bachelor’s degrees. However, because a substantial proportion of veterans have attended graduate school without receiving veterans’ benefits, the increase of 1.5–2 percentage points underestimates the effect of the Post-9/11 GI Bill on beneficiaries. Results of this study suggest a strong and significant effect of financial incentives on graduate enrollment among veterans
Combating Silence in the Profession
No full textMembers of the legal profession have recently taken a public stance against a wave of oppressive policies and practices. From helping immigrants stranded in airports to protesting in the face of white nationalists, lawyers are advocating for equality within and throughout American society each and every day. Yet as these lawyers go out into the world on behalf of others, they do so while their very profession continues to struggle with its own discriminatory past.
For decades, the legal profession purposefully excluded women, religious minorities, and people of color from its ranks, while instilling a select group of individuals with the privilege of power and prestige. And while the profession often attempts to take concrete steps to address its history of exclusionary conduct—most recently through the passage of Model Rule 8.4(g)—the vestiges of its discriminatory past continue to affect all corners of the profession, particularly for communities of color. When one looks at the partnership ranks of large law firms, the clerks who work for Supreme Court Justices, the faculties that educate law students, and even the members of law review editorial boards, the continued challenge of creating an inclusive and diverse profession remains apparent. These challenges, at least in part, are related to the covert discrimination that confronts women and people of color each and every day both within and outside the legal profession.
And yet, there are steps that the profession can take to address the most insidious forms of discrimination that remain within its ranks today. Drawing on scholarship from the fields of professional responsibility, employment discrimination, and organizational behavior and management, this Article argues that members of the legal profession should adopt policies and practices that (i) address covert discrimination throughout the profession and (ii) encourage individual attorneys to stop remaining silent and instead give voice to their experiences of discrimination, harassment, and bias. Research suggests that traditionally unrepresented groups within the profession often exist within a shroud of silence. They are often forced to silence themselves, their opinions, their views, and their experiences for fear of being labeled angry, troublesome, sensitive, or unwilling to be a “team player.” That silence, it turns out, is quite damaging. As such, the profession should adopt policies targeted at “Combating Silence in the Profession” that will encourage underrepresented groups to voice their concerns and experiences, so that a more inclusive profession finally comes into being
Measuring Institutional Efficiencies in Producing Student Outputs for Legal Education
No full textLegal education relies heavily on the American Bar Association and U.S. News and World Report to monitor law schools and hold them accountable as an accreditor and to the public. However, the metrics favored by these organizations were found to produce poor measures of institutional efficiency using frontier analyses to examine the educational production-function. Once controlling for institutional focus, efficiency scores improved, but still fell short of expectations. This finding suggests that the metrics favored by the ABA and USNWR are not accurately capturing institutional performance and should be revisited to more precisely understand academic, financial, and employment operations. Future research should build upon this finding by deconstructing the current reporting and ranking structures in order to develop a stronger tool for holding institutions accountable to their mission through improved access, affordability, and transparency
Examining Graduate Lending: Access vs. Private Lending
Get PDFThis report, the second of our two-part series on graduate lending, uses federal data to show, as one example, that black borrowers and Historically Black Colleges and Universities would likely be severely harmed by a move to significantly limit or outright eliminate federal lending to graduate and professional students
Connecticut Bar Exam Statistics
No full textThis source includes data on Connecticut bar exam outcomes
Building a Better Bar Exam
No full textIn the wake of declining bar passage rates and limited placement options for law grads, a new bar exam has emerged: the UBE. Drawn to an allusive promise of portability, 36 U.S. jurisdictions have adopted the UBE. I predict that in a few years the UBE will be administered in all states and U.S. territories. The UBE has snowballed from an idea into the primary gateway for entry into the practice of law. But the UBE is not a panacea that will solve the bar passage problems that U.S. law schools face. Whether or not to adopt a uniform exam is no longer the question. Now that the UBE has firmly taken root, the question to be answered is what can be done to make sure that the UBE does less harm than good?
This paper will, in four parts, examine the meteoric rise and spread of the UBE and the potential costs of its quick adoption. Part one will survey the gradual move away from state law exams to the jurisdictionally neutral UBE. Part two will identify correlations between recent changes to the multistate exams and a stark national decline in bar passage rates. Part three will address the limitations of the UBE, including the misleading promise of score portability and the consequences of forum shopping. Part four will propose additional measures that can coexist with the UBE to counterbalance its limitations to make a better bar exam for our students and the clients they will serve
The Diversity Imperative Revisited: Racial and Gender Inclusion in Clinical Law Faculty
No full textThe demographics of clinical law faculties matter. As Professor Jon Dubin persuasively argued nearly twenty years ago in his article Faculty Diversity as a Clinical Legal Education Imperative, clinical faculty of color entering the legal academy in the 1980s and 1990s expanded the communities served by law school clinics and the lawyering methods used to serve clients in significant ways that enriched legal education and the profession. They also broadened clinical scholarship to include deconstructions and reconstructions of clinical teaching, offered crucial role modeling and mentorship to students of color, and helped to elevate cross-cultural communication and multiracial collaboration as core lawyering skills.
The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) created the Committee for Faculty Equity and Inclusion to draw attention to the crisis of diversity among clinical faculties, and to urge law schools to take proactive steps to remedy this longstanding failure. This Essay assesses what progress has been made since Professor Dubin\u27s intervention and interrogates historical trends in the racial and gender composition of clinical faculty from 1980 to 2017, using existing data. We had hoped to analyze data on diversity beyond race and binary gender and at the intersection of various identities, but existing data only allow us to draw conclusions about limited racial categories and binary gender representation. And although Professor Dubin focused on race, we include data on gender as a point of comparison for historical trends in another important area of equity and inclusion