Placement and Accreditation

This is what we know about placement and the ABA standards.  On Sunday, November 6, 2011, Professor Ralph Brill (Chicago-Kent) sent out on LawProf a link to a draft proposal to amend the Interpretations to ABA Standard 301 (quality of program) to add minimum placement benchmarks.  As I reported last week, by the afternoon of November 8, 2011, the draft had been pulled from the ABA server.  As Dan Filler reported, Scott Norberg, the Deputy Consultant on Legal Education explained that

The posting was of a subcommittee draft for an earlier meeting, not December, and the matter was not acted upon by the Council and is now off the table. Once we realized it was mistakenly still on the website, we pulled it off because it could be misleading.

But Norberg did not stop there.  Instead he also said:

The Council is still considering the use of placement data in accreditation reviews. We plan to be more explicit in reviewing placement data for how it may reflect on any aspect of a law school's program, from quality of the academic program to the adequacy of career services. We do not at this stage propose to change any Standards or to establish a benchmark placement rate for schools as a compliance matter. (Emphasis added.)

The old draft may be "off the table," but it seems that the ABA is considering requring something more than better, and more available, reporting of placement data. It may be misleading as to the ABA's current thinking, but it does suggest how the ABA might connect placement data to the Standards.  I have put up a copy of pertinent portions of the September 22, 2011 subcommittee draft. Note that:

• the original file on the ABA site contained suggested changes to other aspects of the Standards;
• I have extracted the portions that related to placement, edited the title, and saved them as a separate file; and
• I leave it to the ABA and its committees to make the other portions available if, as, and when appropriate.

The subcommittee suggested amending Interpretation 301-3 to add placement rates to the list of items to be considered in deciding whether a law school has met Standard 301(a), which provides:

A law school shall maintain an educational program that prepares its students for admission to the bar, and effective and responsible participation in the legal profession. (Emphasis added.)

The subcommittee also suggested adding a new Interpretation 301-7 that would have imposed minimum placement rates.   Here's the executive summary:

• Imputed unemployment rates: Both graduates reported as "unemployed, seeking," and those whose job status is "unknown," are treated as unemployed.
• Relative benchmarks.  The benchmarks for imputed unemployment rates would not be absolute, but rather would be relative to one of two alternatives:
  • no more than one standard deviation below the average for graduates of all ABA law schools (Approach A); or
  • no more than 15 percentage points below the average for all ABA law schools in the two states in which most of a school's graduates took the Bar (Approach B); and
• Alternative compliance method. A law school that does not meet the benchmark can still show that
  • employers find its graduates "adequately prepared for entry-level employment " and
  • the school devotes "satisfactory ongoing efforts" to help its graduates find jobs.

Suggested Interpretation 301-7 raises the question of the purpose of legal education.  Unsurprisingly, it treats law schools as trade schools. After all, the ABA is a trade organization.  Putting greater emphasis on preparing students to be practicing lawyers is perhaps the dominant theme of the changes in the Standards that are being considered by the Standards Review Committee. Broader missions are laudable, but most law students are mortgaging their futures so that they can get jobs as lawyers. It does not matter that the traditional approach to legal education has left practice skills to the profession.  For at least a generation, the profession has been growing increasingly concerned about law-school graduates not being "practice ready."

I doubt that suggested Interpretation 301-7 would satisfy the scam-bloggers, the Senators, and others who sympathize with the emerging "Occupy Law Schools" movement. Among other things, the ABA standards count a graduate as employed, regardless of whether the employment is full-time or part-time, or whether the job requires a JD or an admission to the Bar (update:  or a JD is preferred).  Most graduates with substantial law-school debt will not be pleased to finding themselves tending a bar, rather than practicing before the Bar.

I will discuss the methodology of suggested Interpretation 301-7, and look at some data, in later posts.

Comments

[GM]

The practicing lawyers type terms along with the push for only counting jobs that "require a JD" are interesting, and perhaps problematic. For example, there are many jobs in State Capitols or in DC which prefer a JD or an MPP. Neither is required, but chances are you won't land that staffer job drafting legislation with just a BA. If these standards are written in a way that too narrowly defines "practicing lawyers" it may fail to count people who have a very good reason for going to law school, although they may never take the bar exam or "practice" law in the narrow sense. Now maybe that's not a lot of people, but it's certainly an important factor for a not insignificant number of law schools who place their students in policy related jobs.