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Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility
No full textWe characterize intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile. Second, children from low and high-income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend, indicating that low-income students are not mismatched at selective colleges. Third, rates of upward mobility – the fraction of students who come from families in the bottom income quintile and reach the top quintile – differ substantially across colleges because low-income access varies significantly across colleges with similar earnings outcomes. Rates of bottom-to-top quintile mobility are highest at certain mid-tier public universities, such as the City University of New York and California State colleges. Rates of upper-tail (bottom quintile to top 1%) mobility are highest at elite colleges, such as Ivy League universities. Fourth, the fraction of students from low-income families did not change substantially between 2000-2011 at elite private colleges, but fell sharply at colleges with the highest rates of bottom-to-top-quintile mobility. Although our descriptive analysis does not identify colleges’ causal effects on students’ outcomes, the publicly available statistics constructed here highlight colleges that deserve further study as potential engines of upward mobility
The Secret to 85% First-Time Bar Passage Rates
No full textMany law schools have implemented bar preparation courses either as free-standing courses or as an integral part of their academic support program. On April 1, 2016, the ABA Journal published an article on the subject of law school bar preparation courses. Three law schools were featured in that article: Belmont University College of Law ( Belmont ), Florida International University College of Law ( FIU ), and the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law ( UMKC ). According to the ABA Journal, these law schools are out-performing their peers on bar exams due in part to in-house bar preparation courses. The story in the ABA Journal, however, was published several months before the ABA released complete bar exam results for calendar-year 2015; those results were released on December 15, 2016. With complete 2015 bar exam results now available, the purpose of this article is to substantiate the thesis of the ABA Journal article and to provide more information about these three successful bar exam programs. The article will also show that these three schools did outperform their peers on the bar exam in 2015. Belmont, FIU, and UMKC each had a first-time bar passage rate of 85% or higher, a remarkable accomplishment in this era of plummeting bar passage rates. Section I of this article will examine whether the three law schools featured in the ABA Journal (Belmont, FR, and UMKC) truly excelled on bar exams in 2015. Using linear regression analyses, Section 11 will address a more important question: whether those law schools actually outperformed their peers on bar exams in 2015? Section III will disclose, based on available evidence, whether Belmont, FR, and UMKC continued to outperform other law schools on the bar exam in 2016 (and February 2017). Finally, Section IV will describe in detail a successful law school bar preparation course
Market Analysis for Law School Admissions
Get PDFThe numbers are truly astonishing. Between 2011 and 2015, total enrollments in the 200- plus United States law schools whose data are regularly tracked by the American Bar Association (ABA) decreased by more than 20 percent. The total number of “missing students” was just shy of 30,000, an amount which translates into the total enrollments of 38 average-sized law schools—24 private not-for-profit and 14 public.
Almost equally astonishing, however, is the fact that so little actually changed. None of the 200-plus law schools that reported their enrollment data to the ABA closed. The 65-35 percentage split between private and public enrollments was maintained. While total net revenue from JD tuitions declined by more than $400 million dollars, or 13 percent, law school staffing levels also declined, but much less dramatically. There was some reduction in the market-prices some law schools charged (defined as average net tuition revenue per full-time JD student), but there were also increases particularly among top-tier law schools, many of which increased their total JD enrollments despite the overall contraction in the market.
Those variances in price suggest that there might be considerable complexity behind the enrollment contraction and the price behavior it engendered—a complexity largely masked in the summary reports detailing a significantly smaller market for law school admissions after 2011. Drawing on our previous work for two major law schools, and our modeling of the price behavior across the market for collegiate undergraduate admissions, we set out to develop a set of statistical models capable of predicting the market-prices U.S. law schools were able to charge in 2015. The data for this analysis came from the ABA via the Access Group’s Center for Research and Policy Analysis website—complete enrollment, admissions, program, and staffing data for 171 law schools
NALP Report Database
No full textEach fall, NALP-member law schools receive a report from NALP that summarizes employment data for the second-most recent graduating class. The employment data contained in the NALP report are highly valuable to prospective students. Because NALP already collects the employment data and distributes the report to schools, there is no cost associated with publishing the reports. Starting with the class of 2010, Law School Transparency (LST) requested that schools make these reports available to the public. This page tracks public NALP reports as known to LST
1L Is the New Bar Prep
No full textLaw school graduates, in growing numbers, are failing the bar exam. This reality is all the more staggering when we consider that these graduates have been preparing for the bar exam since their first year of law school. First-year legaI-writing courses teach students specific fundamental skills that are the foundation for success on the bar exam. This Article provides the perspective that the goal of passing the bar exam and teaching Iaw students to think and write like lawyers is a symbiotic relationship. It directly analyzes the correlation between the fundamental skills associated with thinking like a lawyer and successful bar-essay writing.
The question then becomes, if law schools are teaching these skills, why do students continue to struggle with the bar exam? To answer that question, this Article analyzes the challenges law students face when they are required to apply the skills learned in an earlier context to a later assignment. Without proper instruction and sustained practice, it is unrealistic to expect law students to retain the skills necessary to solve one legal problem and then later apply those same skills to solve a different problem. This Article emphasizes how law schools have a duty to bridge the gap and foster the transfer of learning from the first year of law school to bar preparation. To guide law schools in better preparing their students for passing the bar exam, this Article concludes with a comprehensive approach detailing how law faculties can facilitate the transfer of fundamental skills from the beginning to the end of law school
Testing Basics: What You Cannot Afford Not to Know
No full textSimply put, the purpose of licensure is to protect the public by identifying individuals who are not adequately prepared for entry-level practice. Licensure exams are used to determine whether candidates have attained a minimum threshold of essential knowledge, skills, and abilities for entry-level practice. The bar exam cannot realistically assess all the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for entry-level legal practice. Passing the bar exam is intended to ensure that candidates can meet a minimum threshold of necessary knowledge and skills for entry-level legal practice but is not sufficient to ensure that a candidate is adequately prepared or that the candidate will be a competent lawyer in all situations
Is Bar Exam Failure a Harbinger of Professional Discipline?
No full textTwo of the reasons students fail the bar exam are lack of diligence and incompetence; these are also the primary reasons attorneys are disciplined. Using bar exam and disciplinary data from Tennessee, this Article substantiates the following theses: (1) The more times it takes a lawyer to pass the bar exam the more likely that lawyer will be disciplined for ethical violations, particularly early in the lawyer’s career; and (2) The more times it takes a lawyer to pass the bar exam the more likely that lawyer will be disciplined for lack of diligence—including non-communication—and/or incompetence
Getting Up to Speed: Understanding the Connection between Learning Outcomes and Assessments in a Doctrinal Course
No full textMany professors are bristling over the recent changes to the American Bar Association (ABA) Standards and Higher Learning Commission (HLC) Criteria, requiring law schools to have learning outcomes and assessments. While such criteria have existed outside the law school environment for many years, the concepts are new to most law professors. This article explains what a learning outcome is and how to create one. It then explores the flip side to outcomes, assessments. It provides a variety of ways for creating and incorporating assessments into a doctrinal course. More than just providing a basic introduction to outcomes and assessment, the paper explains how the shift to learning outcomes and assessments is good for legal education. With the shift, content knowledge and skill development based on that knowledge becomes the constant and the time it takes to cover material becomes the variable. Both professors and students can be assured learning, and the right learning, is happening. Moreover, through the professor’s focus on a demonstration of knowledge, students will leave law school with a vast skill set designed to allow them to do something with the knowledge they have acquired
Diversity, Hierarchy, and Fit in Legal Careers: Insights from Fifteen Years of Qualitative Interviews
No full textThis limited openness and the processes of professional continuity and change are the topics of this article, which begins with a provocative photograph of “diverse” “elite lawyers” on the golf course. It is the first article based on the three waves of qualitative interviews of the After the J.D. longitudinal study of lawyer careers. These interviews took place over a fifteen-year period. The total number was 219 interviews, and the vast majority of them were conducted personally by the authors of this article. Twenty of the individuals were interviewed twice and twenty-seven three times. Our qualitative interviews are unique in allowing us to see changing attitudes and situations over the course of more than ten years. This article uses this unique resource to examine the evolving role of race, gender and ethnicity in lawyer careers. The article addresses theoretical perspectives on the role of race, gender and ethnicity in legal careers, contrasting our “capital assets” approach with a variety of other legal and sociological approaches and presents the qualitative interviews beginning with the elite track of large law firms, followed by similar issues in medium size firms; variations of Big Law careers – of counsel and in house in particular--; concluding with examples of how people build “off-Broadway” careers that draw upon diversity and find ways to capitalize on it. The concluding part draws the qualitative interviews together in a general conclusion, demonstrating how the capital asset approach is enacted in the interviews through the concept of “fit.” Fit is a way for embedded histories and power relationships to make it more difficult for minorities, women, and people who do not possess the cultural capital represented by golf, for example, to succeed in particular settings – including the corporate law firm
The Rising Tide of Graduate Student Debt: Evidence of Change 2008 to 2012
No full textThe price of a graduate training in the US continues to rise, and in 2012, graduate students borrowed more than 35 billion dollars in federal and private loans to finance their education. Using data from the National Study of Postsecondary Student Aid (NPSAS) this study examined changes in graduate student education debt from 2008 to 2012. While the greatest percentage increase in debt from 2008 to 2012 was for students in some Master’s level programs, findings revealed increases in many graduate level programs, including Medicine with a 2012 cumulative debt of over 124,000. Increasing education debt may discourage students from even considering enrollment and may motivate degree completers to seek more lucrative jobs after graduation simply to pay off loans. Additional implications are discussed