It Ain't Getting Prettier, Whittier

Back on December 4, Whittier Law Professor Sheldon Lyke wrote a post here on TFL which was sharply critical of Law School Transparency. In fact, he accused Law School Transparency of “instigating a dangerous national discourse” by suggesting that law schools were admitting students at very high risk of failing out of law school and/or failing the bar based on their poor LSAT scores and grades.  In his post, Professor Lyke claimed that the “LSAT is at best a weak predictor of first-time bar passage” and  “there is no evidence that law school graduates are not eventually passing the bar.”  Both of these claims are nonsensical. 

I wrote a response to this post on December 5. In the post, I challenged Professor Lyke to answer several questions related to the admission practices of Whittier Law School and other peer schools. 

Professor Lyke responded to my post with a long comment.  In his comment, Professor Lyke said that his initial post “was not an attempt to defend Whittier Law School’s admission policies” (although it sure read like one) because “Whittier Law School has done nothing wrong that needs defense.”  He said that he was “extremely excited to respond to these questions in a subsequent post next week.”

Seventeen days have passed and we are still waiting for Professor Lyke’s response.  In the meantime, the detailed July 2015 California Bar Examination results  have been released.  Based on the results, Professor Lyke may want to rethink his assertion that Whittier has no need to defend its admission practices.

Whittier’s first-time pass rate in July 2015 was 38% (46 of 122).  This was the lowest of the 21 (!) ABA-Accredited law schools in California, just edging out Golden Gate (48 of 122 for a 39% first-time pass rate).  In fact, Lincoln Law School of Sacramento, a California-accredited, non-ABA approved school had better results than Whittier. (23 of 53 for a 44% rate). Two other state accredited schools also surpassed Whittier’s results, albeit with very small groups of takers.  And Whittier’s summer 2015 results were no fluke.  In Feb 2015, their first time pass rate was 30% (3 of 10). In July 2014, it was 43% (70 of 164).

So, Dean Penelope Bryan, do you still contend that “[t]he LSAT score has no predictive value for the success of Whittier Law School students on the bar exam” as you told the LA Times?

But what about the eventual pass rate, you say?  Remember, according to Professor Lyke, “there is no evidence that law school graduates are not eventually passing the bar.”   Well, here is some evidence.  The pass rate for Whittier’s 84 repeat takers on the July 2015 exam was just 14% (12 of 84).

About the only positive thing one can say about Whittier’s performance is that they did better than InfiLaw. The combined first-time pass rate for the three for-profit InfiLaw Schools was 8% (2 of 24)  [Florida Coastal  (0 for 4); Charlotte School of Law (1 for 7); Phoenix School of Law (now Arizona Summit) (1 for 13) (note- this was actually an improvement for Arizona Summit, their students went 0 for 17 on the California Bar in 2014)]

In InfiLaw’s defense, they did not have the worst performance for first-time takers. The honor in this category goes to Syracuse Law School at 0% (0 for 13) with honorable mention to Suffolk (0 for 10) and Thomas Cooley (0 for 8).

For those keeping score at home, InfiLaw’s repeat-takers actually outperformed their first-time taker colleagues with a whopping 10% pass rate (4 of 41)  [Florida Coastal (2 of 11); Charlotte (1 for 6); Phoenix (1 for 24)].

For those who argue that schools like Whittier are providing opportunities for entry into the profession for underrepresented minorities, it should be noted that the first-time pass rate for black exam takers in this administration was 53.4% and for Hispanics, 61.3%.  For repeaters, the overall black pass rate at California ABA schools was 20.7% and for Hispanics 14.7% (compared to 71.8% for first time white takers and 28.9% for white repeaters).  Given that Whittier’s overall pass rate was 30% below the CA ABA average of 68% and their repeater pass rate was 10% below the overall CA ABA repeater pass rate of 24%, one shudders to think what the pass rate for Whittier’s minority students was.  I don't suppose  anyone at Whittier would care to share this information?

Before someone else points it out, let me acknowledge that Whittier had a few students (presumably from the top of the class) transfer to other schools and some of them undoubtedly passed the bar.  But far more Whittier students were lost to academic attrition than to transfer attrition.  Looking back at the Fall entering class of 2012, 227 students enrolled, according to the school’s 2012 ABA Standard 509 report.  When we review the 2013 report, we can see that from that class, there were 45 lost to academic attrition, 38 lost to “other” attrition and 29 who transferred out, while 3 transferred in.  If we deduct the 29 who transferred, that means that only about 46 of 198 students who started at Whittier in the Fall of 2012 and did not transfer graduated in the Spring of 2015 and took and passed the California bar on their first try.  (While a handful of Whittier students may have taken the bar outside California, the number is likely very small, perhaps 3 or 4. Whittier reports that in 2014, 181 of their graduates took the California bar and one each took the bar in Washington, New York, Pennsylvania and New Mexico.  In 2013, 194 took the California bar and 4 took another state bar.  In 2012, 155 took the California bar and 5 took another state bar.)  When these numbers are considered, the questions I posed in my last post to Professor Lyke about admitting students with a 25% chance of becoming a lawyer don’t seem all that far-fetched.  At Whittier in the fall of 2012, it wasn’t just the bottom quartile that had a 25% chance of graduating and passing the bar on their first try, it was the entire class. 

Unfortunately for Whittier's current students, the outlook is even more bleak.  Perhaps the most horrifying fact of all is that the fall entering classes of 2013 and 2014 had substantially weaker entrance credentials than their abominably-performing predecessors from the fall of 2012.

It is important to emphasize that I am not criticizing the quality of the legal education provided by Whittier.  My assumption is that the faculty are highly qualified, highly skilled and highly dedicated and that the overall educational program is on par with other ABA law schools.  But the fact is that even the best teachers cannot get students with extremely low aptitude for the study of law to pass the bar, especially a difficult bar like California's.  Thus, while I do not blame the faculty for the poor bar results, to the extent that the faculty acquiesced in the admissions policies that led to these completely predictable results, they do share responsibility for the consequences of those policies. 

The other group that deserves blame for this disaster is the ABA, whose laissez-faire attitude towards law school admissions policies has allowed schools to get away with lowering their admission standards to unconscionable levels without fear of repercussions.  There are signs that the ABA is finally starting to take their regulatory role seriously with regard to admissions.  Let's hope that these latest results spur them to take some serious actions.

 

Comments

[[M][a][c][K]]

One is left with the question for Professor Lyke, if Whittier is considering other factors that it thinks are predictive of success on the bar exam of in legal practice, please tell the world what they are?

Given that information, at least some of the professors here will be able to explain, based on reliable evidence - that those factors are, to use a technical expression, bogus, unreliable, nonsense.....

Frankly, I suspect a lot of confirmation bias in Whittier and Lyke's analysis. They want to find that some criterion means that a student loan conduit can succeed, they want to reject a criterion that says he/she won't.

Even most law school critics would agree that at the middle and high end LSAT scores make little difference to bar or professional success (and I scored, if I remember correctly 44, on the old scale.) For the most part I regard intelligence tests as BS. But at the low end, where students are getting little better scores on the LSAT than random guesses would secure - please be realistic - there is no other way to put it, you have to be illiterate, innumerate and possibly plain stupid to score that low.

[Jojo]

Whittier is getting a harsh lesson in the Steisand Effect. It is no surprise that any further defense of its conduct has not been posted.

The ABA will reluctantly step in with ineffective changes in a face-saving move once it no longer can ignore the problem caused by schools like Whittier/Cooley/etc.

Query this: if the LSAT is not a predicter of bar exam passage, then what's going on here? The alternative explanation is that Whittier does a bad job teaching law students and leaves them unprepared for the bar, right? So which is it?

Further query: if eventual bar passage is the more fair metric of success, how does one get his landlord to accept an eventual rent check when his eventual bar passage required job comes though in a year or three?

Yet further query: Even if you don't think law school is an outright scam, law faculty, can you at least see why some critics do? Do you really want to throw in your lot with those who flirt with grifting, or do you want to actually fix this thing? Rocking the boat is scary, but sitting silently on a doomed vessel is no solution.

[jDpre]

It should be noted in the linked results that Washington University (St. Louis) had a 39% pass rate and the University of Minnesota had a 27% pass rate. These are schools that I believe have a much higher incoming LSAT median than Whittier, so I would ask Mr. Frakt and LST if they can explain those schools' poor performance.

It might be more useful to look at actual results than projected results.

[anon]

jDpre, for Washington University (St. Louis), n=23, while for the University of Minnesota, n=11. Making inferences based on sample sizes that small in this context is unreasonable.

[confused by your post]

Frakt, I wasn't so sure about you when you started posting here a while ago. A lot of us around here love you now! Your post today is this site's equivalent to a touchdown dance.

Showboat!

[Anon]

And yet Frakt attacked infilaw and other schools with such an "unreasonable" way.

[Sy Ablelman]

It doesn't really matter where an attorney graduated from law school. I graduated from a decent, traditional law school with a good reputation and ranked. If you do not have the connections, network, family or work, you will end up like me: a Solo with too much time on my hands posting to this blog and no new work or sign ups in the last few weeks. On the other hand, if an attorney attended Whittier and has the blessings of those connections, she will do very well. I know two Cooley graduates who are earning top dollar in their gub'mint attorney gigs. They are members of a public employees Union and well protected and represented. Answer me this: If your buddy is hiring to fill an attorney position, will she turn down her buddy because she graduated from Whittier but the other applicant graduated from Yale?

[David Frakt]

JD pre - Many schools performed poorly on the California bar, which is regarded as the second hardest in the country after Delaware, but very few Wash U or University of Minnesota grads take the California bar, as compared to Whittier, where virtually all the graduates take the California bar. Like many California law schools, the Whittier curriculum and academic success/bar prep programs are specifically geared toward the California bar, with several California law specific classes offered, so we should expect better results. Indeed, California ABA schools outperform non-California ABA schools (68.2% first-time pass rate vs. 58.8% first-time pass rate) primarily for this reason.

In addition to the small numbers of Minnesota and Wash U grads that took the bar, we have no way of knowing whether these students were from the top, middle, or bottom of their classes, so we can't say whether these students underperformed their predictors. With Whittier, we have the results from the whole class so it is possible to draw more concrete conclusions.

[David Frakt]

Confused by your post -

Thank you for your kind words, but I really don't mean to gloat. Any satisfaction I have in being proved right (again and again) is heavily outweighed by my sorrow at the great human tragedy that is unfolding, with thousands of students who never should have been admitted to law school doomed to failure, and saddled with huge debt and a useless degree (if they even managed to get their degree).

[Sy Ablelman]

Oh, one more thing. If I were to get into criminal trouble or need a PI attorney, I would hire this attorney I know from Florida Costal. I think he is one of the finest attorneys I have observed. He is affable, a hoot and works the system. He schmoozes and "bullshits" with the best of them. Being a great attorney is how you get along in the system. Likeability. He is loved by everybody. The best book on this subject is entitled "Craft of Justice" by Fleming, Nardulli and Eisenstein.

[Anon]

(Different anon here): I am nearly certain that the "low sample size" argument as a justification for poor bar passage results in any state would be roundly derided by law school critics were it put forward by such schools as an explanation for why such poor results should be discounted. Yet here, when asked what the disproportionately poor results at some schools as compared to their LSAT ranges means for the critics' theses regarding the putative near-determinative correlation between entering LSAT and bar passage, law school critics now deem low sample size to be sufficient justification for lack of direct response.

[[M][@][c][K]]

Anon:

More "straw men." I thought you'd given up on the projection....

[confused by your post]

I look forward to Professor Sheldon Lyke's upcoming post detailing how Whittier uses a method superior to the LSAT to predict academic/bar exam success and to admit its students. I feel certain it will be littered with points about increasing the total number of minority lawyers, Whittier's latest CA bar pass fiasco.

38% for first time takers. 12% for repeaters. 25% of admitted students pass the bar on their 1st attempt. Oh, the humanity!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbxsZjagMVA

[anon]

Brackets,

Do you make it your business to cyber-stalk anyone who posts as anon (which might not even be the same person you're thinking of/obsessing over) to recycle your ridiculous responses and faux-psychology?

[Sy Ablelman]

Fellas, you need to keep it nice here, or you will end up as one of my clients. You guys being professors with no background or "sheet" I will get you "paper."

[anon]

Anon 10:57, small sample sizes do not "justify" anything, other than viewing the results one obtains with caution and probably discarding them if they are tiny. If Whittier grads were 3/3 (or 9/10, for that matter) in passing the NY Bar, that would not make Whittier a great school. If they were 0/4 or 4/17 in passing the TX bar, that wouldn't make Whittier terrible. What makes Whittier terrible is the July 2015 38% passage rate in CA with n=122. What makes Whittier terrible are their LSAT ranges and employment outcomes and tuition.

With that said, I know you're trying to derail the conversation but I'd tread cautiously were I a prospective Minnesota or WUSTL student looking to practice in CA, small sample size and all.

[anon]

I'm not trying to "derail" anything: I don't teach at Whittier, MUSTL, Minnesota, or any of the other schools under discussion in this thread, so I have no motive to derail the conversation. Feel free to bash away.

[Knn]

I would say it is the sign of a poor school that takes people with good LSATs but cannot get them through the bar. I would say such a school is perhaps worse than a school that takes people with poor LSATs and cannot get them through the bar, as they had less to work with.

[Anon]

And/or it's a sign that they take significant numbers of transfer students with LSAT scores lower than the generally presumed ranges (I.e., lower than what's factored into US News or publicly discussed), which is yet another reason why increased transparency regarding transfers is needed.

[The Nicker]

"I would say it is the sign of a poor school that takes people with good LSATs but cannot get them through the bar. I would say such a school is perhaps worse than a school that takes people with poor LSATs and cannot get them through the bar, as they had less to work with."

Two restaurants. Restaurant A goes dumpster diving and brings in the worst, rotten ingredients for their cooks to use. Restaurant B orders from a standard food distributor and provides acceptable ingredients to its cooks. Both serve terrible food. Both charge exorbitant prices for their food.

Would I have more respect for the cooks that work in Restaurant A? Partly, because they are doing more with less. But they also aren't objecting to being given rotten ingredients that can only produce rotten food. In both cases, these restaurants suck and I would expect them to close as the word gets out about their terrible quality and high prices. In both cases, the management is the main culprit at fault for producing a lousy product. So what's the difference to the consumer?