What Has Happened to Law School Attrition?

    I have been following the recent conversation started by David Yellen with much interest. Some of this, I’m sure, is because I work at a law school that will probably be 207 on the list when we obtain our full accreditation. Needless to say, when you are about to join what is an undeniably crowded market, you have to pay attention to whether there is going to be a market.

    One thing I noted about the discussion is everyone is talking about the number of students who are being admitted to law school. My first thought is that the number who are graduating are of more direct interest. After all, if law schools are admitting 40,000 students this year, but only 25,000 of them graduate, the number of new lawyers being trained would seem to match the market demand for new attorneys.

    What flashed through my mind at this point was the old statement supposedly from the orientation of a typical law school, “Look to your left. Look to your right. One of these two people will not be graduating with you.” If this truism is accurate, only about 27,000 of the 40,000 would graduate and things are not as out-of-balance as we thought.

    I looked at the table of data that the ABA maintains (with thanks to Brian Tamanaha for giving us the link). I have downloaded the data and converted them into a spreadsheet. I then did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the attrition rate. To do this, I had to make an assumption about how long it would take a student to complete the program (any student we admit this year will not graduate for two to six years, after all). Consequently, for my rough calculation, I assumed that all students are full-time students who take exactly three years to finish law school.

    When I did this, an interesting transformation can be seen (Download ABA attrition data). For law school graduating classes through 1974, the approximate attrition was more than 20% with the high for the period being 1966 at 45%. (If I were going to take these calculations off of the envelope, I would want to try to find out whether the Vietnam War was having an effect here of artificially raising the rate of law school drop-outs or push-outs). For many of these years, the “look left, look right” adage is fairly accurate.

    Starting in 1975, however, the attrition rate drops and never goes above 20% again. More recently, it is even lower. As an approximation, since 1994, law school attrition is around 10%, far below the 33% predicted by the adage.

    What this suggests is that our collective focus on entering class may be inappropriate. Are the students of today much better than the students of the 1960s and 70s? If not, why are they finishing law school? Maybe our focus should be on whether our academic standards have become too lax. Raising academic standards could cure two problems, after all, over enrollment and another burning issue with the ABA  — bar passage rates.

Comments

[pweed]

This is a delicate topic so I will post anonymously. Another factor reducing the attrition rate is the increased diversity of the students. About half of certain URM groups are in the bottom 10% of their class. Flunking out students based upon grades would lead to intolerable results.

[James Milles]

I would arguably that even 10% attrition is too high. High attrition rates are indicative of law schools whose business model is based on admitting large numbers of students who are bound to fail, but who might still be able to hang on for a year or two at full tuition. The fact that attrition remains as high as it is suggests that law schools are still more reliant on quantity than quality than is healthy for anyone.

[Ralph D. Clifford]

In response to pweed, I agree that it is a problem. Ultimately, though, weaker students (of whatever group or non-group) should be provided with aggressive academic support to allow them to enhance their performance to an acceptable level. At the end of the day, however, they have to pass the bar exam and have the knowledge and skills to be lawyers.

I disagree with James fairly strongly. It is possible that a high attrition rate is the sign of a school that is churning students for the money, but more often it is based on the fact that the data we have that predicts a student's future performance in law school are weak. Even when you combine the two primary predictors of performance, undergraduate GPA and LSAT scores, correlations between predictors and performance tend to be around 0.65. This is a strong correlation, but it indicates that a significant number of promising students will be admitted who will not do well. This matches what all of us who teach first-year students know. For a significant percentage of them, although they may be bright and hard working, they will still not "get it."

[Orin Kerr]

I'm no expert in this, but I have thought that the high attrition model came with relatively open admissions standards. Lots of people were admitted in their 1L year and then the major question was who would be invited back after their 1L year. In contrast, the more recent approach is to use the LSAT (first given in 1948 and expanded through the 1960s) to try to approximate 1L grades, which lets schools make initial admissions harder but then let everyone stick around once they are in.

[Bill Turnier]

The high attrition rates in the Vietnam War era were attributable to two factors. First, going into that era, grading for undergraduate programs and law schools were a lot tougher. In many schools grade inflation came on in a big way as professors sought to keep students, even bad ones, away from draft boards. Second, most draft boards would yank people right out of law school to sent them off to the jungles of Vietnam. Those that did operated on the theory that they had given you a deferment for a bachelor's degree (BA) and pursuit of an LLB was merely your clever way of avoiding the draft by seeking another deferment. They would then draft you right out of law school. This caused many schools to join Washburn and Chicago (the only schools then granting JDs) and grant a JD. My draft board was one such draft board but before I completed my first semester, I had gone overage (I have an unusual career history before entering law school). I provided the above so readers could realize that it is hard to compare data across the decades and draw much from the comparison unless one understands the "history" of each of the decades.

[Beau Baez]

Attrition began going down across all of higher education beginning in the 1960’s—this trend is not limited to legal education. Under the old paradigm (pre-1960’s), the approach was to academically dismiss any student that did not “get it” (i.e., was not academically prepared for college). As higher education became more democratized, universities decided that they actually needed to teach those that did not have the same skills that those from the more privileged classes tended to have.

A smaller attrition rate is not related, primarily, to cognition but instead academic preparedness. In my situation, my family moved from what had become a working class neighborhood to an upper middle class neighborhood during my junior high school years. The public junior high school I attended in seventh and eighth grades, which was highly regarded when my mother attended it in the 1950’s, was no longer providing a quality education—old books, old pedagogy, and worn out teachers. What a difference when I began attending my new public junior high school, which was actually preparing students to go to college. There are many other potential lawyers out there that need for us to provide them with the skills they need to succeed because many of them were not given the same opportunities that most of us in the academy were provided. Some of our students may not be able to write well, but we can teach them that skill—it takes effort. To demand that an academic success counselor teach them how to write is an abdication of our teaching duty, which is much more than making sure they know Torts, Contracts, Property, or Civil Procedure.

[Derek Tokaz]

Would anyone in their right mind spend $45,000 for tuition when there's a 20-30% chance of being kicked out with triple the student debt you started with (average undergrad is ~$25k) and no additional degree?

Law schools cost (in inflation-adjusted dollars) three times as much as they did thirty years ago. It should be no surprise that this huge financial burden comes with at least the guaranteed opportunity to graduate.

[BoredJD]

Remember that there are law schools, such as Cooley, where a large percentage of the class is dismissed after the first year. I have heard between 20-33% of the class.

The reason for doing this may be the bar passage rates- if a certain percentage of students cannot pass the bar, the school loses accreditation. Failing out a certain number of poorly performing students would allow the school to collect a year's tuition while maintaining their passing rates, and it spares the student a large investment of debt over the second and third year. With the placement rates and debt loads out of these schools, I'd say the students who fail out after 1L are actually the lucky ones.

[MacK]

My own view is that the cost of law school and the high level of student loans drives a sunk cost type fallacy that deters students from dropping out. If first year tuition was much lower, a lot more would drop out.

[RB]

MacK - but you could argue the other way as well. A lower cost of the 2nd and 3rd year could encourage those considering dropping out to stay in, since it isn't that much more money.