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Building Belonging: Proven Methods to Decrease Attrition and Best Serve Law Students
No full textA crucial task for legal educators is to determine how to retain our students, especially those who may be most vulnerable to attrition – first-generation students and students of color. This article looks at nine similarly situated ABA-accredited law schools and assesses these schools’ success at retaining their students. The nine schools are all public, operate both part-time and full-time programs, generally enjoy above average diversity, and have somewhat similar national rankings. The nine schools also report similar median LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs of recent incoming classes. The overall attrition rates and attrition rates for students of color vary somewhat among these schools; however, taken as a whole, the schools show a downward trend in attrition over the last eleven years. They have also enjoyed a general upward trend in median LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs for their incoming 1L classes, a shift which may partially explain the simultaneous decrease in attrition. However, the reduction in attrition can also be tied to the schools\u27 increased, intentional efforts to retain students. Because these efforts are essential to retaining law students who may be particularly vulnerable to attrition, interviews were conducted with the nine schools’ academic success directors, administrators, faculty, and alumni to determine the schools’ most effective methods of retention. From this study of successful institutions and from the guidance of experienced and successful law school educators and alumni, a practical, hands-on model of best practices was developed
2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being: National Report
No full textA data dashboard for this report can be found here.
This report summarizes the data for the national sample of the 2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being (2021 SLSWB). The primary goals of collecting and analyzing the responses from the 2021 SLSWB were to increase knowledge of: current substance use among law students, frequency and type of mental health issues among law students, help-seeking attitudes of law students around mental health and substance use issues including factors that may discourage help-seeking, the extent to which law students have experienced trauma and are dealing with ongoing effects of trauma, and concerns of 3L students intending to sit for the Bar exam.
In addition, we hoped to gain insight from study participants regarding actions taken or that could be taken by their law schools to support law student well-being
Report on the Survey of Perspectives on Being a Lawyer
Full text linkOver the last several years, there has been a significant growth across law schools in the number of required first-year courses/programs focused law student professional development. We do not know very much, however, about which of these approaches to fostering professional formation is the most effective.
To a large extent these courses/programs have been designed based on convenience/motivation. Within a given law school, someone who wants to champion this effort to promote professional development/formation takes the initiative and within the particular curricular ecosystem and political economy of the faculty of that law school designs something they think is interesting and beneficial that also is palatable to enough faculty to get approved as an addition to the curriculum. As a result, these professional development courses/programs come in a variety of stripes with a variety of points of emphasis.
These courses/programs have not necessarily been designed with a specific set of learning objectives or a plan for assessment of whether those learning objectives have been accomplished. There has not been much assessment (or at least, not any published assessment) of the effectiveness of these courses/programs.
With the addition in 2022 of ABA Standards 303(b)(3) and Standard 303(c), law schools will now have to generate more opportunities for students to reflect upon their professional identity as a lawyer and to become more cognizant of bias and racism within the legal system as well as the need for cultural competence to provide meaningful access to justice for people from different cultural backgrounds.
Over the last two decades, there has been a growing awareness that the first-year of law school functions as a formation/socialization experience as law students begin their journey into the profession. Starting with the research work of Larry Krieger and Ken Sheldon, the first-year has been shown to facilitate a decline in well-being among law students along with a shift from intrinsic motivation to extrinsic motivation.
This research endeavor was designed to try to begin the process of developing methods for assessing the effectiveness of professional formation/development courses while also providing further insights into the consequences of the first-year socialization experience (and whether the professional formation/development courses ameliorated or changed some of the socialization experience)
Rethinking Inclusion: Ideal Minorities, Inclusion Cultures, and Identity Capitals in the Legal Profession
No full textUsing preliminary observations from three parallel projects that employ a range of methods (network and content analysis, surveys, focus groups, and interviews), this article traces the experience of navigating different kinds of identity as useful capital within the legal profession. Identity is not the first kind of non-economic capital to influence professional navigation, but it is distinct in that it is owned and deployed primarily by minority actors. Adding to scholarship that has located the extensions for identity as capital, three interrelated contributions follow from this research. First, it reveals the prevalence of a diffuse field of diversity consciousness where, regardless of outcome, there is a sense that diversity is useful capital. Second, despite being notionally useful, these multi-method sources reveal the ways in which navigating such capital is simultaneously complicated for both actors within visible (e.g. race and perceived gender) and invisible (e.g. some disability, genderfluidity, and religion) identity categories. The isomorphic diversity posturing by organizations fosters a system where being a minority is seen as an advantage, but inclusion feels like accommodation either because it demands certain portrayals of precarity or because it leaves individuals unsure of their worth beyond the expected performance of their identity. As a result, even though the new version of the ideal professional norm might valorize identity as capital, it continues to serve organizations rather than individuals. Finally, these data make the methodological case for the usefulness of the periphery as an analytical vantage point to assess systemic inequalities in legal profession research
Law School in a Pandemic, Year 2: Moving from Emergency Remote Teaching to Emerging Best Practices in Distance Legal Education
No full texthttps://arc.accesslex.org/featured_publications/1021/thumbnail.jp
What Is Quality? Advancing Value-Added Approaches to Assessing Law School Bar Exam Performance
Full text linkU.S. News & World Report rankings and tier groupings are often used as proxy measures of law school quality. But many of the factors that contribute to both law school outcomes and U.S. News rankings (e.g., undergraduate GPAs [UGPA], LSAT scores, admission rates) do not reflect the impact law schools have on student outcomes, such as bar passage and employment. We propose a method for measuring institutional quality that is based on a school’s ability to improve its graduates’ likelihood of first-time bar passage while controlling for those students’ preadmission characteristics. Using a value-added modeling technique, we first isolate each law school’s expected bar performance for the 2013–2018 bar takers given those cohorts’ entering characteristics and the school’s attrition and transfer patterns, then identify the degree to which this prediction overperforms or underperforms the school’s actual bar performance. Additionally, we utilize a bar pass differential rather than a school’s first-time bar pass rate, allowing us to account for variation between jurisdictions’ grading and cut scores. Finally, we provide a ranked list of law schools based on their added value for each entering cohort
What Is Quality? Advancing Value-Added Approaches to Assessing Law School Bar Exam Performance
No full texthttps://arc.accesslex.org/featured_publications/1023/thumbnail.jp
More than the Numbers : Empirical Evidence of an Innovative Approach to Admissions
No full text“I am proof that your LSAT score does not define you; law schools need to understand that every student’s lived experience is unique. Thanks to Southwestern’s admissions process I was able to show that I’m more than the numbers on my application.” This second-year law student was admitted to Southwestern Law School and went on to place top 20% after her first year following an admissions waitlist interview, based on Southwestern’s first-of-its-kind empirically-based approach that utilizes factors beyond the typical numerical indicators that drive admissions decisions – in particular, the Law School Admission Test – and limit access to law school and the legal profession. This scalable toolkit is connected to preparation for practice, may improve diversity outcomes using a race-neutral approach, and is a low-cost supplement to other admissions tools.This paper reports on Southwestern’s three-year empirical project, developing an evidence-based tool to more fully and meaningfully assess applicants’ law school potential. This tool goes beyond the limited cognitive measure of the LSAT, which at best is only predictive of first-year law school performance. This project is driven by the moral imperative that law schools – as gatekeepers to the legal profession – should commit to innovative and rigorous admissions processes that define merit broadly and provide opportunities based on a spectrum of factors, beyond the traditional numerical indicators. This research, based on hundreds of waitlist interviews, has produced initial reliability and validity metrics for the measure developed – i.e., a tool that could be used with confidence in the admissions process
Are Law Schools Cream-Skimming to Bolster Their Bar Exam Pass Rates?
No full texthttps://arc.accesslex.org/featured_publications/1022/thumbnail.jp
An Access and Equity Ranking of Public Law Schools
Full text linkOver the past few decades, several comprehensive ranking systems, including the influential U.S. News and World Report’s Best Law Schools rankings, have emerged to provide useful information to prospective law students seeking to enroll in law school. These ranking systems have defined what is measured as “quality” and what outcomes law schools focus on to gain a better position in the ranking. These rankings fail to measure what many law schools claim to be one of their longstanding goals—diversity, access, and equity.
One of the problematic and shocking reasons U.S. News cites for not including diversity measures in the ranking is that law schools themselves have no consensus on diversity. I counter this argument, asserting that while there may not be widespread consensus—for certain people—on diversity, there is substantial academic scholarship and agreement on the tenets of diversity that ranking enthusiasts can use to design an effective diversity measure. I maintain that any ranking that does not include diversity, access, and equity measures often leave communities of color and their interests in the margins. Therefore, this Article seeks to center the needs of Black and Latinx prospective law students through a new ranking system.
Given that public law schools aim to increase racial/ethnic diversity—that is, the number of racial/ethnic minoritized students—because of their institutional missions, the Article provides the first ranking of public law schools on “Access and Equity” measures. It describes ranking law schools based on measurable outcomes related to diversity, access, and equity. This ranking uses twelve access and equity measures that are significant to Black and Latinx law school fit. This “Access and Equity Ranking” is the only ranking to date that will help Black and Latinx students identify which public law schools centers their needs