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Assessing the Viability of Race-Neutral Alternatives in Law School Admissions
No full textThe past several years have been challenging times for law schools. Many have experienced declines in student enrollment due to a shrinking applicant pool. The declining number of applicants presents increased challenges for law schools, particularly concerning their efforts to educate students in racially diverse learning environments. In light of recent challenges to the constitutionality of race-conscious affirmative action, it is imperative to engage in a project, such as this, that examines the relationship between racial categories and race-neutral identity factors in law school admissions. Understanding the relationship between racial groups and certain race-neutral identity factors will help law schools comply with Fisher I’s mandate that universities consider race-neutral means for achieving diversity before using race in the admissions process. Moreover, the data from this study illuminates the structural inequalities that continue to exist for certain racial minority groups and rebuts the assumption that those who are privileged enough to make it to law school are insulated from the structural inequalities that race-conscious affirmative action was created to address. This empirical study surveyed first year law students at public ABA approved law schools and asked them about race-neutral aspects of their identity, such as family background and education institution characteristics, to determine the relationship, if any, between race and certain socioeconomic identity factors. The goal of the project was to determine if there exists a relationship between certain race-neutral identity factors and the race of first year law students. The findings will enhance law schools’ understanding of race-neutral admissions factors that may or may not contribute to their ability to assemble a racially diverse student body, and will give law schools the tools to experiment with trying to yield a racially diverse class without asking applicants about their race. Possessing such knowledge will greatly aid law schools as they develop and implement admissions policies in their efforts to provide greater access to students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the legal profession while also fulfilling their commitment to educate all law students in a diverse learning environment
Solving the Legal Profession\u27s Diversity Problem
No full textThe legal professions lack of progress on diversity stems from a systems problem, not a lack of moral resolve, and applied research suggests there are ways that law firms can address the systems program. The system of creating successful lawyers and partners is not much of a system at all. Creating a high performing partner is based on selection (aptitude and motivation) as well as development (experience, training and feedback, and coaching and mentoring)
Charting the Course: An Empirically Based Theory of the Development of Critical Thinking in Law Students
No full textRecent large-scale research studies indicate that many college students graduate with critical thinking skills no greater than those they possessed upon matriculation. These findings have sent shockwaves through the academy, calling into question the value and efficacy of higher education, particularly when it comes to equipping graduates with the advanced reasoning and problem-solving skills most in demand in the 21st Century. Many of these under prepared graduates pursue advanced education, including the study of law that traditionally has groomed citizens to assume positions of high leadership and solve society’s most complex problems using advanced reasoning and communication skills. As these students enter law school, the legal academy faces intense scrutiny for failure to adopt valid empirically based teaching approaches and demonstrate adequate educational results, prompting the American Bar Association to exercise its regulatory authority to mandate that law schools must now demonstrate learning outcomes.
Traditional law school academic support programs cannot address the fundamental deficits in critical thinking among incoming students, and a scarcity of research in legal education has left the legal academy calling for empirical guidance to inform cohesive approaches to the systemic challenges it faces. To address the daunting challenges facing the legal academy, I conducted a qualitative grounded theory study to formulate a comprehensive conceptual model of the development of critical thinking skills in law students that may assist legal educators in establishing best practices for the advancement of higher order thinking skills in law students. The resulting Critical Thinking in Law Students model provides the legal academy with empirical guidance to formulate new strategies to improve learning outcomes and comply with regulatory mandates, while also offering the broader academy insight into the intricate combination of factors that affect the ability of higher education institutions to provide their students with effective education for the development of higher order thinking skills
The Way of ColorInsight: Understanding Race and Law Effectively Through Mindfulness-Based ColorInsight Practices
No full textDespite much good effort to the contrary, reports from a wide variety of fields and locations serve daily to remind us that race still matters in America. To many legal scholars, these reports are not only not news but they suggest work that must be done within the legal academy to minimize racial bias within contemporary law. For example, in his groundbreaking Article, Trojan Horses of Race, Jerry Kang highlighted the research identifying and confirming implicit bias as a pervasive cognitive, interpersonal dynamic, and placed on the research agenda that should follow this revelation scholarship by law professors examining “teaching strategies,” as well as “debiasing programs, and [educational] environments.” More recently, Margalynne Armstrong and Stephanie Wildman have argued that educators, especially those in law, must move from “colorblindness to color insight,” developing approaches to teaching law which increase our capacity to understand race, and in particular Whiteness, and its pervasive operation in the law. This is so even though teaching and learning about race, and especially about Whiteness, is notoriously difficult for all of us.
To teach about race in ways that increase understanding and minimize bias, and to do so in increasingly diverse classrooms requires that we each continually explore new methods and be radically open to adopting what works. This Article breaks ground by importing analyses and findings from the interdisciplinary literature on the pedagogy of race into the legal education literature, a body of scholarship which elaborates how both colorblindness and implicit bias may impact performance in law school classrooms and in practice beyond, and by identifying ways that contemplative pedagogy may be an important component of effective corrective responses.
Specifically, in this Article, I argue that educators may increase capacity to understand the impacts of race and color on law and legal education, minimize implicit bias, improve student performance and better promote the interests of justice in a diverse society by working to incorporate and blend these two important pedagogical trends: the theory and practice supporting inclusive and identity-safe classrooms; and the theory and practice of mindfulness in teaching and learning. Building on the work of Armstrong and Wildman, DiAngelo, and other scholars of the pedagogy of race, I identify mindfulness as essential to teaching and learning in this area. Specifically, I introduce and describe the Practices of ColorInsight as a set of mindfulnessbased and compassion-based pedagogical practices which support the development of such awareness and the building of the capacity and stamina necessary to cross-racial engagement notwithstanding the challenging issues that routinely arise across personal, interpersonal, and systemic domains
Suffering in Silence: The Survey of Law Student Well-Being and the Reluctance of Law Students to Seek Help for Substance Use and Mental Health Concerns
No full textThis article reports the results of the Survey of Law Student Well-Being (SLSWB) implemented in spring 2014 at fi fteen law schools around the country. The SLSWB is the first multischool study in over twenty years to address law student use of alcohol and street drugs, and the first-ever multischool study to explore prescription drug use and the mental health concerns and help-seeking attitudes of law students. The results of the study indicate that roughly one-quarter to one-third of respondents reported frequent binge drinking or misuse of drugs, and/or reported mental health challenges. Moreover, the results indicated that significant majorities of those law students most in need of help are reluctant to seek it. The article concludes by discussing how law school administrators and other relevant leaders within the legal academy and legal profession can promote and improve wellness so that law students are better-positioned to find success as law students and to serve their future clients well as lawyers
The Struggle for Access from Sweatt to Grutter: A History of African American, Latino, and American Indian Law School Admissions, 1950–2000
No full textIn this Article, using a wide array of published and unpublished data, researchers attempt to document and analyze law school admissions opportunities for African American, Latino, and American Indian Students over the past fifty years. In particular, they review the meager representation of students of color in law schools in the pre-affirmative action era. They also analyze the early development of affirmative action in the late 1960s, particularly at so-called ‘elite’ law schools, and researchers consider the increase in competitiveness of law school admissions during this same period -a phenomenon that led schools to place increasingly greater reliance on the LSAT. In chronicling the national enrollment and admissions decision patterns since the 1970s, the Article also focuses partly on the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Regents of University of California v. Bakke
Examining Sex and Ethnoracial Differences in Graduate School Enrollment
No full textThe study examines enrollment disparities in graduate education enrollment among students of differing sex and ethnoracial identities. In doing so, we analyze a national sample of students who successfully completed their undergraduate education to understand the individual and institutional factors that influence their likelihood of enrolling in graduate school within the first few years of finishing college. Results from our general model emphasized the importance of educational aspirations, academics, college involvement, and institutional metrics in understanding the propensity to enroll in graduate school. The results across sex and ethnoracial identity reveal the complexity of the graduate enrollment process, and the importance of understanding how individual and institutional factors operate across these demographic classifications
Does the Bennett Hypothesis Hold in Professional Education? An Empirical Analysis
No full textPolicymakers have been debating the Bennett Hypothesis—whether colleges increase tuition after the federal government increases access to student loans—for decades. Yet most of the prior research has focused on studying small changes to loan limits or Pell Grants for undergraduate students. In this study, I examine whether business schools (the most popular master’s program) and medical schools (one of the most-indebted programs) responded to a large increase in federal student loan limits in 2006 following the creation of the Grad PLUS program by raising tuition or living expenses as well as examining whether student debt burdens also increased. Using two quasi-experimental estimation strategies and program-level data from 2001 to 2016, I find little consistent evidence to support the Bennett Hypothesis in either medical or business schools
Life After Law School: A Pilot Study Examining Long-Term Outcomes Associated with Graduating Law School and the Value of Legal Education
Get PDFMany policymakers and leaders have been paying close attention in recent years to the near-term job placement and earnings of law school graduates, which they often declare are representative of the “value” of a law degree. Such a focus on the economic payoff of a law degree is understandable because legal education has become a more costly and leveraged endeavor. While such metrics have merit, they do not provide a holistic view of graduates’ lives or the broader benefits that legal education provides
Implications of Attrition from Graduate Education to Labor Market Outcomes
No full textThe economic return of higher education has been broadly studied for undergraduate and graduate degree recipients. However, no empirical study focuses on the economic outcomes of those who received some graduate education but left without earning a formal degree. Guided by human capital theory, the current study examines labor market outcomes – specifically, labor force participation, employment, earnings, and student loan repayment status – of a cohort of first-time baccalaureate degree recipients four years after earning their degrees. The study found no statistically significant difference in labor market outcomes between those who pursued a graduate/professional degree but left without earning one and those who never pursued graduate education. The findings were counter to the conventional understanding that more education or training results in better paying employment, thus calling for more scrutiny into application of the human capital investment perspective