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Alternative Paths to Diversity: Exploring and Implementing Effective College Admissions Policies
No full textThe Supreme Court has established the parameters within which universities can practice race-conscious affirmative action for college admissions in a series of decisions beginning in l978. The key issues concern the educational impact of campus diversity and whether or not it is necessary to give some consideration to students’ race into order to produce a diverse student body in highly selective colleges. The most recent decision, Fisher v. University of Texas II, taken in June 2016, raised the question of whether there was a viable nonracial alternative policy that would produce the level of diversity for universities to realize the benefits of diverse learning experiences that are a central goal of the great majority of selective colleges and universities. This report explores the issues before the court and the continuing responsibilities of universities under the decision and introduces a series of new studies, most commissioned by a collaboration between the Civil Rights Project and ETS—three of which are included in this volume. The study concludes that the best evidence from the most recent social science studies and research syntheses show that the major proposed alternative policies are far less successful than affirmative action and thus do not meet the Court’s definition of feasible alternatives. This conclusion led the Court to approve affirmative action
Validity, Competence, and the Bar Exam
No full textThe bar exam is broken: it tests too much and too little. On the one hand, the exam forces applicants to memorize hundreds of black-letter rules that they will never use in practice. On the other hand, the exam licenses lawyers who don’t know how to interview a client, compose an engagement letter, or negotiate with an adversary.
This flawed exam puts clients at risk. It also subjects applicants to an expensive, stressful process that does little to improve their professional competence. The mismatch between the exam and practice, finally, raises troubling questions about the exam’s disproportionate racial impact. How can we defend a racial disparity if our exam does not properly track the knowledge, skills, and judgment that new lawyers use in practice?
We can’t. In the language of psychometricians, our bar exam lacks “validity.” We haven’t shown that the exam measures the quality (minimal competence to practice law) that we want to measure. On the contrary, growing evidence suggests that our exam is invalid: the knowledge and skills tested by the exam vary too greatly from the ones clients require from their lawyers.
We cannot ignore the bar exam’s invalidity any longer. Every legal educator should care about this issue, no matter how many of her students pass or fail the exam. The bar exam defines the baseline of our profession. If the exam tests the wrong things, we have a professional obligation to change it
Race and Law School: The Intersection of Obstacles for Aspiring Black Lawyers
No full textRecent data of the legal profession have raised red flags about the lack of diversity in the field as compared to other career choices. Due to the fact that 4 of 5 lawyers are white, this leaves very little room for black lawyers to fill jobs in their desired positions. This paper first establishes the literary origins of the black lawyer and succinctly follows the progression made to the emergence of corporate law as an attractive legal sector for black lawyers and further analyzes the connection of the two. Using the survey data, the paper gathers and explains lived experiences of black law students and graduates and calls upon their struggles in their path as a black person in their respective institutions
Helping Our Students Reach Their Full Potential: The Insidious Consequences of Ignoring Stereotype Threat
No full textA psychological phenomenon may be a significant cause of academic underachievement by minorities in law school. This phenomenon, called stereotype threat, occurs as a result of the fear of confirming a negative group stereotype (such as African-Americans are not as intelligent as Whites). When subject to this threat — as a consequence of being confronted with environmental or explicit triggers — people do worse in academic settings than they otherwise are capable of doing. In this article, I explore the implications of the research on stereotype threat for law schools and make several recommendations to deal with the threat.
There are natural implications for law school admissions, of course. If a portion of our applicant pool is affected by stereotype threat, then we cannot trust the accuracy of the metrics we typically use in law school admissions, i.e., prior academic performance and LSAT scores of law school applicants. Indeed, those credentials actually may under-evaluate the academic potential of these applicants, who are often minority students. This should cause law schools to reevaluate their admissions policies.
After students are admitted, law school provides fertile ground within which stereotype threat can flourish. This, of course, means that the performance of minorities in law school — in class, on exams, and in other areas — is likely to be diminished, such that many minorities will not perform up to their academic capacity. And, obviously, we would expect this same dynamic to play out on the bar exam.
Law schools can address stereotype threat at each of these levels, and they should do so. This article lays out a framework for understanding and dealing with the threat
Value of a Law Degree by College Major
No full textWe estimate the increase in earnings from a law degree relative to a bachelor’s degree for graduates who majored in different fields in college. Students with humanities and social sciences majors comprise approximately 47 percent of law degree holders compared to 23 percent of terminal bachelor’s. Law degree earnings premiums are highest for humanities and social sciences majors and lowest for STEM majors. On the other hand, among those with law degrees, overall earnings are highest for STEM and Business Majors. This effect is fairly small at the low end of the earnings distribution, but quite large at the top end. The median annual law degree earnings premium ranges from approximately 45,000 for humanities majors
Foundations for Practice: The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient
No full textThe employment gap for law school graduates is well-documented. Almost 40% of 2015 law graduates did not secure full-time jobs requiring a law license and only 70% of 2015 graduates landed a full-time job that either required a law license or gave a preference to candidates with a juris doctor. One in four 2015 graduates did not report having any type of job, even a non-professional job, after law school. The employment gap is exacerbated by another gap: the gap between the skillset lawyers want in new graduates and the skillset lawyers believe new graduates have. Only 23% of practitioners believe new lawyers have sufficient skills to practice. The gap between what new lawyers have and what new lawyers need exacerbates the employment problem, but it is even more insidious than that. When new lawyers enter the workforce unprepared or under-prepared, it undermines the public trust in our legal system. Something has to shift. And for something to shift, we had to understand exactly what new lawyers need as they entered the profession. So we asked. In late 2014, we launched Foundations for Practice (“FFP”), a national, multi-year project designed to: 1. Identify the foundations entry-level lawyers need to launch successful careers in the legal profession; 2. Develop measurable models of legal education that support those foundations; and 3. Align market needs with hiring practices to incentivize positive improvements in legal education. In 2014-15, we distributed a survey to lawyers across the country. The response was overwhelming. More than 24,000 lawyers in all 50 states from a range of backgrounds and practice settings answered. Their answers are illuminating and pose opportunities and challenges to the schools that educate lawyers and the employers that ultimately hire them
Loan Counseling for Graduate and Professional Students
Get PDFThis report provides an overview of existing literature that examines loan counseling and financial literacy for graduate and professional students, and includes actionable recommendations for stakeholders to better support students in making optimal financial decisions about their loans and other aspects of their personal finances. The report was authored by Patricia Steele, Ph.D., and Chad Anderson with Higher Ed Insight
From the Bachelor\u27s to the Bar: Using College Completion Data to Assess the Law School Pipeline
Get PDFThe story of declining law school applications is well known among the legal education community. Over 100,000 individuals applied to law school for admission in fall 2004, but demand for legal education has since declined — only 54,000 applicants sought admission in fall 2015. Accesslex Institute examined college completion data to determine whether undergraduate interest in fields most popular among law school applicants has also waned in recent years. In particular, this research brief summarizes bachelor’s degree completion in the top 10 law school feeder majors over the last 10 years, and compares degree production in these fields to those in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
Testing the Testers: The National Conference of Bar Examiners\u27 LSAT Claim and a Roller Coaster Bar Exam Ride
No full textOstensibly, the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) is a consistent measurement of minimum competency to serve as an officer of the court. But bar exam pass rates have been undergoing substantial declines as of late. Although the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) posits a variety of possible reasons for the declines, the NCBE provides empirical evidence for one claim, namely, that bar exam declines correspond with similar declines in Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores by admitted law students (and therefore, by implication, subsequent bar exam test takers). Taken at its face value, the NCBE’s LSAT claim seems reasonable. In this article, we test the NCBE’s LSAT claim using step-by-step empirical analysis of a database of all University of Denver first-time Colorado bar exam takers for July bar exams for the period 2008 to 2015. Based on statistical analysis, the NCBE’s LSAT claim lacks merit
Cultural Community Connections and College Success: An Examination of Southeast Asian American College Students
No full textLow rates of college success continue to be a persisting problem in the United States, particularly among Southeast Asian Americans and other populations of color. The purpose of the current inquiry was to understand how cultural community connections influence the success of Southeast Asian American college students. Qualitative methods were employed and face-to-face individual interviews were conducted with 34 Southeast Asian American undergraduates. Participants identified 3 types of connections that facilitated their success in college: physical, epistemological, and transformational cultural connections. Implications for future higher education research and practice are discussed