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Dollars and Sense: Student Price Sensitivity to Law School Tuition
No full textLaw school tuition prices have been on a steady upward trajectory over the past decade, leading to declining affordability. Using institution-level data on 194 law schools from 2006 to 2015, this study investigates whether students are price sensitive to increasing costs. Incorporating two-way fixed effects models, results suggest that higher tuition and fee prices are not associated with fewer applications to law school. However, higher estimated net costs of attendance are associated with greater numbers of first-year enrollments, particularly among private schools. When stratified by tiers on the basis of selectivity, this positive relationship exists among law schools in the third and fourth tiers, yet no association between net costs and enrollments are observed among law schools in the first, second, and fifth tiers
Law School Applicants by Degrees: A Per Capita Analysis of the Top Feeder Schools
Get PDFIn this research publication, AccessLex Institute explores applicant concentration at the top 240 feeder schools, as published in the Law School Admission Council\u27s (LSAC) Top 240 Feeder Schools for ABA Applicants list. The resulting per-capita figures help contextualize the feeder school trends
Living Expenses
No full textSchool-specific cost of living data come from the American Bar Association. Cost of living reflects the maximum amount a student can borrow from the federal government to cover nine months of room & board, books & supplies, transportation, and other personal expenses. Schools can use any reasonable method for determining the maximum allowable budget, from periodic surveys of student population to local real estate assessments. Law School Transparency uses the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) for inflation, which covers 89% of the total U.S. population
Each Law Student Must Take Increasing Ownership Over Professional Development During Law School
No full textImagine that faculty and staff, working together, could help each law student grow over three years to take increasing ownership over the student’s own professional development. This shift of responsibility for driving the educational process for each student from external pressures created by the faculty and staff to internalized ownership of continuous professional development would be extremely beneficial to the students, the faculty and staff, legal employers, clients, and the legal system.
This article first analyzes how the competency of internalized ownership over continuous professional development is foundational for legal education’s evolution toward competencybased education. Each student’s growth toward later stages of this competency will provide substantial benefits to students as well as to faculty and staff at a law school. The article then looks at the importance that legal employers give to this foundational competency, and the obvious benefit to a student who can demonstrate evidence to potential employers that he or she is at a later stage of development on this competency. The article finally looks at what we know about effective curriculum to foster each student’s growth toward later stages of ownership
First-Generation Students in Law School: A Proven Success Model
No full textHigh school graduates whose parents did not themselves graduate from college are now entering undergraduate institutions in overwhelming numbers. They represent a significant constituency on college campuses across the country and undergraduate programs are investing resources to study and facilitate the academic success of these students as they work towards an undergraduate degree. Those students have been graduating in greater numbers and many are now pursuing graduate degrees, including law degrees. To grow student retention and graduation rates, law schools should be proactive in addressing the needs of this growing body of students.
For over two decades, the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law has offered an alternative admissions program, called the Tennessee Institute for Pre-Law (“TIP”). This program aims to facilitate the admission, academic success, and graduation of diverse law school applicants who are denied admission through the regular application process. Among the diverse students TIP serves are first-generation college students. Over the years TIP has guided numerous first-generation college students to achieve law school admission, succeed academically, graduate, and ultimately pass the bar exam. TIP implements many strategies that benefit first-generation college students and should serve as a model for law schools interested in investing in the success of this growing population
Rosenblatt\u27s Deans Database
No full textThis website provides information about law school deans. Ever wondered who is the longest serving dean? Which current dean has held the most deanships? What schools a dean attended? Who were the former deans at a particular law school?
The RDD is designed to answer these questions and provide information to those who take an interest in law school deanships. This database may be used by law deans, dean search committees, university officials, or members of the public and is available without charge.
An attractive feature of the RDD is that it is always current. Unlike printed lists of deans that go out of date when changes occur, the RDD is updated instantly whenever information is inputted to the database
The High Cost of Lowering the Bar
No full textThe culmination of a law student’s educational journey is taking and passing a state bar exam, the final step to professional licensing as an attorney. The passage of a bar exam, once an arduous but almost guaranteed rite of passage for a law school graduate, has transitioned to a genuinely precarious proposition over the last decade. In July 2018, nationwide performance on the bar exam reached the lowest level since 1984. In one of the largest and most heavily affected states, California, the pass rate on the July 2018 bar exam was 40.7%, reaching a 67-year low. The final step in the process of becoming a lawyer has now become uncertain for more law graduates than at any time in recent memory.
The steep decline in bar pass rates over the last decade has prompted many states to consider lowering the bar exam passing score (often called the “cut score”). The Supreme Court of California commissioned a series of studies from the State Bar of California to reexamine the bar exam. In 2017 the California Supreme Court ultimately decided to leave the passing score in place at that time. But the continuing declines in pass rate in 2018 in California and across the nation have reignited the debate. The controversy has caused many to wonder that the role and even purpose of the bar exam is, and the Supreme Court of at least one major state (Texas) has asked for a task force report about whether to effectively abolish the bar exam by adopting a “diploma privilege.”
The process of licensing lawyers through the use of a written bar examination is one that took hold in the early twentieth century and gained momentum through the creation of the National Conference of Bar Examiners around mid-century. The bar exam is designed as a test of minimum competence of prospective lawyers. It tests legal reasoning, and bar exam scores correlate with other measures of legal ability. Like any test, it is not perfect. Scrutiny of its imperfections has highlighted a rift between the licensing authorities and law schools. But much of this debate centers on generalizations without evidence about the effect that changes to the bar exam may have.
To help provide evidence for a more meaningful debate, we have examined the relationship between bar exam scores and career discipline rates. In this Essay, we present data suggesting that lowering the bar examination passing score will likely increase the amount of malpractice, misconduct, and discipline among lawyers. Using a large dataset drawn from publicly available California State Bar records, our analysis shows that bar exam score is significantly related to likelihood of State Bar discipline throughout a lawyer’s career. We investigate these claims by collecting data on disciplinary actions and disbarments among California-licensed attorneys. We find support for the assertion that attorneys with lower bar examination performance are more likely to be disciplined and disbarred than those with higher performance.
Although our measures of bar performance have only modest predictive power of subsequent discipline, we project that lowering the passing score would result in the admission of attorneys with a substantially higher probability of bar discipline over the course of their careers. But we admit that our analysis is limited due to the imperfect data available to the public. And we do not infer a causal relationship between low cut scores and high discipline rates. For a precise calculation, we call on state licensing authorities to use their internal records on bar scores and discipline outcomes to determine the likely impact of changes to the passing score
Smarter Law Study Habits: An Empirical Analysis of Law Learning Strategies and Relationship with Law GPA
No full textNon-empirical law school study advice that emphasizes reading and briefing cases, memorizing rules, and outlining without frequent self-testing and formative self-assessment is contrary to cognitive science and leads to a law school learning trap. Law students fall into a law school learning trap by focusing on memorization of cases and rules for class prep, putting off practice application of the law as exam prep. Law students and legal educators misjudge the power of testing as a learning tool, instead relying on non-empirical, anecdotal resources to guide law student study methods.
Empirical research from a Law Student Study Habit Survey shows that practice application of the law through self-testing, self-quizzing, and elaborative strategies positively correlates with academic success in law school, while reading and briefing cases, weak critical reading skills, and rote memorization of rules without practice applying the law negatively correlates with academic success in law school.
Both legal educators and law students need to incorporate testing and formative assessment as a study and learning strategy to learn each new topic, not just exam prep. Self-testing and formative assessment are not only critical for success in law school, but help students develop successful learning strategies for the bar exam and as lifelong learners in law practice
Perceptions of Effectiveness and Job Satisfaction of Pre-Law Advisors
No full textDespite playing an important role, preprofessional advising has received little research attention. For this study, 313 U.S. preprofessional advisors were surveyed in 2015. Drawing on work adjustment and social cognitive career theories, we analyzed the job satisfaction and perceived effectiveness of pre-law advisors. The major findings reveal that advisors having a law degree, the ability to secure more resources, and a commitment to spending significant hours weekly in advising tend to be more satisfied and perceive themselves to be more effective in helping students gain admission to law school and preparing them for academic success than other pre-law advisors. Other factors related to participant self-perceptions on advising future law students are also discussed
The Perennial (and Stubborn) Challenge of Cost, Affordability, and Access in Legal Education: \u27We Will Continue to Muddle Through\u27
No full textThis paper explores the long-term challenge of legal education’s financial viability and focuses on the business model that serves contemporary legal education. That model – based on a value proposition – sees long-term student loans and plentiful lawyer jobs as the way to underwrite legal education’s sustainability, even as tuition rises. Loans and jobs are inextricably connected; the idea being that student debt can be manageably repaid over some amount of time after graduating and obtaining a well-paying lawyer job. The paper is divided into three main parts. The first looks to the past in order to understand the business model – the value proposition, its development, and its logic. In doing so it will talk about the one factor that makes the value proposition viable – loans, and especially the role of the federal government with respect to loans. It also talks about the intertwined issues of cost and access to legal education, which became increasingly important in the development of the business model. The second provides an empirical context for the concerns raised by those critics. It does so by exploring data (some likely familiar, but perhaps not all) on key patterns and changes in legal education since the late 1940s. The third part treats the patterns and changes in enrollments in the wake of the Great Recession as a rough natural experiment that allows us to consider whether the critic’s fear of a day of reckoning for value proposition has now finally arrived and what it means