Seeking Clarity – Some Dangerous Questions for Professor Lyke

Another question: What is your law school doing to help students from "the margins of society" succeed in law school, pass the bar, and succeed as lawyers? Does your law school mainly use traditional teaching methods, or does it use approaches tailored to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds? Does your law school use active learning approaches and formative assessment? Does your school emphasize a theoretical approach or a practical one? Does your school help students develop their professional identities?

Whittier has more than twice the percentage of Hispanic students and twice the percentage of Black students than can be found at UCLA. Their numbers v. UC Irvine are equally impressive.

When discussing citizens at the margins of society or underrepresented ethnicities or underclasses, there is a thin green line that separates opportunity from exploitation. Is the payday lender/pawn shop an opportunity provider or a pillager or a bit of both? Florida Coastal and Charlotte are not charities (heck, unlike LST they aren't even 501c3 organizations). Long ago law many (at least 50) law schools entered the check cashing and loose cigarette selling marketplace.

I continue to be disappointed, but not surprised, that there are not more critical voices from the academy. Thank you Deb Merritt, Dave Frakt, Bill Henderson, Brian Tamanaha, Paul Campos, and the handful of vocal others who want to fix this, or, at the very least want a more truthful and transparent dialogue about legal education and the nuts and bolts and costs of the American legal profession in 2015.

For crying out loud, America's paper of record recently opined that it views your industrial practices as a "scam." I know that many of you take umbrage at that, but that's not the point. The point is that the b.s. has been so thick for so long at such a steep cost that a serious news organization that is otherwise sympathetic to causes and values that most of you find dear (justice, representation, freedom, expression, democracy, accountability) believes that many schools have become indistinguishable from extended warranty salesmen.

To the readers who are sick of the law school "puffery" please remember LST this holiday season, who surely puts the money to better use than Dear Alma Mater.

Diversity in the legal profession is a good thing. However, it is worth repeating, from somebody who sees the inside of a courtroom nearly everyday, there is no work or jobs. The market is grossly oversaturated with attorneys of all stripes and experiences. It does them NO damn good if there are no jobs. Governments are not hiring, small firms are struggling. Being a solo and a newbie with no corresponding referral network, clients or connections means Unemployment. The numbers speak for themselves. In my jurisdiction, Illinois has 92K registered lawyers and 95,146 people employed by car dealerships. Nearly every adult in Illinois owns a car or two and will purchase several during their life times. All of those cars will need servicing from time to time. How often does an average adult require representation or the services of a lawyer and how often during her life time? Not much unless you are unlucky or very wealthy. the numbers are not sustainable.

Jojo:

I think you have summed up the point. Lyle and Anon are sheltering behind minorities, not helping them. Not so long ago pretty well every decent person, and many law professors, were decrying the "reverse-redlining" of minority neighbourhoods and the clear evidence that sub-prime lending targeted minorities, including inter alia, often forcing black and hispanic homeowners who would have qualified for regular mortgages to take sub-prime. Reverse red-lining encompassed all sorts of financial chicanery, income not stated (liar loans), balloon mortgages, etc. The key feature of this activity was moral hazard – the banks engaging in it were securitising the loans and getting the risk off their books. The ultimate consequences are also well reports, foreclosure, financial disaster, and many poor a minority neighbourhoods blighted by the foreclosures.

All along the banks involved, for example Well Fargo, justified their activities on the basis that they were bringing financial opportunity to minority neighbourhoods, the chance to become "home owners…" To that end they packed boiler-rooms with willing and well remunerated "spivs" who cold called carefully selected targets and enticed them to sign up to these loans (funny how many "sub-prime" law schools have been reported cold calling potential students too.)

So here is a basic question, how is Whittier different? How are you, Sheldon Lyle different from the "corporate flacks," the mouthpieces that defended reverse-redlining on behalf of the banks that engaged in it? How can you discuss in a class where at least some of the students hope to represent the minority communities they came from the sort of blatantly exploitative practices that target those communities, without sensing the irony? Could you answer a 2L or a 3L who asked about the parallels with a straight face? Even answer on this forum?

Here is another question for Sheldon: in all likelihood, many of the minority students Whittier is admitting are the first in their families to attend law school. What sort of pre-enrollment counseling is Whitttier giving them on the total cost of financing their education, job prospects, bar pass prospects, etc? I am still surprised when I encounter a prospective student or his/her parents who, because they have no lawyers in the family, are not truly aware of the full cost of attendance or dismal job prospects.

They did worst than that. They gave "liar loans" and "stated income only" loans to people who had no chance of paying them back. Hair Dressers, part time Nannies and school bus drivers with 100K in income? Very similar as well to many ranked and unranked law schools. The risk on all of this is handily shifted a third party. Unwitting investors in the former and tax payers on the latter.

Thank you for posing these excellent questions, David. I agree that this is an essential discussion for legal educators to have. The analogy that M@cK makes to subprime mortgages is chilling but apt. We as a society told ourselves, based on the experience of families with a steadily employed wage earner and middle-class assets, that mortgages and home ownership are always a positive. That rhetoric justified high-interest loans to families without steady employment or middle-class assets.

There probably were some families in the latter group who succeeded: they were able to pay the mortgage and realized their dream of home ownership. But at what cost? How many families lost both the dream and the few assets they had already acquired? How many lost more than they ever could have hoped to gain–while others profited substantially from their losses?

These are the same questions we need to ask within our profession, and the questions are more pointed because we claim to be a profession rather than just an industry. I don't think we can afford to say "every school should examine its own practices and most of us are okay." As a profession, we have a responsibility to maintain the integrity of all actors. That's why society grants us so many special privileges.

That, I think, is the point of the LST report: to urge responsibility, not only among schools that are admitting too many students destined to fail, but among the profession as a whole. There has always been a tension between providing access to the profession and setting students up to fail. Law schools managed that tension relatively well because they had so many applicants to choose from. But these times are different: with the decline in applications, some schools have become dramatically less selective. At the same time, tuition is high and jobs are more scarce. We really are in danger of doing what lenders did: applying one paradigm, which forecast reasonable success, to a very different group of students living under different circumstances. The differences here are not about race; they are about tuition, projected bar success, and employment.

Indeed DM:

One of the remarkable ironies in this situation if that educational lending is excluded from Federal Truth in Lending Act specifically excludes Federal Title IV loans (Stafford, Perkins and PLUS) – but interestingly not private education loans (which fell under the act from 2010 under regulation Z.) So when various persons suggest that private loans might take the place of Federal, one might want to consider that detail. Even then, s many lawyers will tell you TILA is a low bar.

By the way, that the rules do not apply to Federal loans does not in fact morally absolve law schools of their responsibilities, though it seems that many in the law school industry think so.

By the way, having perused Sheldon Lyke's teaching description at Whittier, i.v., Property and Wills & Trusts, it would seem to me that he should be teaching his students about redlining, reverse-redlining, etc. so this is a subject that he, if he is doing a thorough job, will have to discuss with a straight face.

Mr. Frakt,

First, and foremost, my Friday post was not an attempt to defend Whittier Law School's admission policies. Whittier Law School has done nothing wrong that needs defense. My post brought into serious question, whether the evidence that LST relies upon actually substantiates the claims that the organization makes. If you claims are untrue, and we make policy in response to those claims, the result will be catastrophic for those of lower socio-economic backgroound and racial and ethnic minorities. My post was an attempt to reframe a problematic national discussion on the future of legal education and providing opportunities to individuals who have traditionally faced discrimination.

You raise a number of important questions, and I am extremely excited to respond to these questions in a subsequent post next week. I have briefly examined the studies that you have referenced, and will be happy to discuss why, in my professional opinion, they might not support your contention that the LSAT is a valid predictor of bar passage.

In the meantime, would you mind addressing the two main points that I raised in my initial post? The first dealt with the correlation between LSAT and first-time bar passage, and the second dealt with the overemphasis of first time bar passage and the lack of emphasis of eventual bar passage rates.

(1) Do you continue to defend your assertion that the LSAC Study provides evidence of a strong correlation between the LSAT and first-time bar passage?

(2) Can you provide reliable (I use the term reliable in its statistical meaning, not pejoratively), systematic evidence that the LSAT is predictive of eventual bar passage? First, you point to an anonymous school. This is somewhat problematic. But what is more egregious is that you provide and rely on percentages to demonstrate correlation. If we were dealing with a data set of 10 people, perhaps a layman could eyeball a statistically significant correlation. But you are discussing data dealing with hundreds of students over multiple years. Providing percentages based on grouping risk categories that you have grouped and constructed is not systematic. A systematic quantitative analysis would take the anonymous LSAT scores, and at least run a test, perhaps a linear regression, to see if some statistically significant relationship exists.

Also, as I discuss the issue of bar passage and transparency, I will discuss what I believe is a socially constructed false crisis that has emerged as the result of LST's discussion of low tier law school admissions. I am a junior faculty member at Whittier Law, and not a part of the administration. My words are my own and a reflection of my analysis of the current pervasive framing of low tiered law school admissions.

I look forward to an engaging and civil conversation.

respectfully,

Sheldon Bernard Lyke
Assistant Professor, Whittier Law School
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Whittier College (by courtesy)

Professor Lyke,

I am so glad that you have agreed to respond to these questions and that you agree that these are important issues.

I understand that the LSAC study is dated. When I came up with the LSAT risk bands that LST subsequently chose to adopt for their report, I was relying in large part on my experience at Western State University College of Law, one of Whittier's competitors, from 2005-2010. I had access there to a comprehensive database which tracked Western State's applicants over several years and had data on all of their LSAT scores, UGPA, first year and cumulative Law school GPA, bar passage results and other data. I also drew on my experience from being a faculty member at Barry University School of Law in Orlando, where I was on the faculty from 2010-2. I also drew on my father's experience. My father was Dean at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles in the 1980s, Dean of Widener University Law School in the 90s, and served as principal consultant in the founding of Drexel University's Law School. He also served as a special assistant on bar passage at Western State for a couple of years to help the school through its bar passage crisis. I reviewed all of the available literature that I could find on the correlation between bar LSAT scores and bar passage. All of the research confirmed my own experience and validated the risk bands as I have framed them. The reporting by the University of Denver and the anonymous school in the LST report further validated these risk bands. Of course, in a state with a very easy or very difficult bar exam, the risk bands could perhaps be adjusted a point or two up or down. But the general principle would still be the same. And given that a graduate of an ABA law school can take the bar anywhere, and that all ABA schools are required to meet the same standards, having one general framework for assessing risk at schools nationwide seemed appropriate.

Although I am not a statistician or social scientist, I do understand that there is a difference between the predictive value of the LSAT for individuals as opposed to its predictive value for entire classes. And I understand that an LSAT score is not destiny. I acknowledge that the occasional student with a very low LSAT will defy the odds and pass the bar exam. But studies have found a near perfect correlation between a school's first time bar passage rate and the LSAT scores of the student body. That is compelling evidence of the predictive value of the LSAT.

To my knowledge, neither LSAC nor any individual law school has made the data available that would enable the kind of "systematic quantitative analysis" that you would like to see. So what we are left with is a mixture of basic common sense and experience, combined with the available data on school bar passage rates and school LSAT profiles. And all of those things overwhelmingly support the conclusion that students with very low LSAT scores are at very high risk of failing out of law school or failing the bar exam.

What LST has suggested is that law schools that have lowered their admission standards to levels never before seen, at the same time that bar pass rates are plummeting, should provide some empirical justification for their admissions decisions. My message to LST's critics is this: rather than constantly attacking LST's methods of data analysis as faulty, how about providing some actual data that contradicts LST's conclusions? LST has identified 72 schools with problematic admission practices. Not one of these schools has come forward with any data to justify their very dramatic declines in admissions standards. Of course, it is easy to say that Whittier (or any other other schools on the list) have nothing to defend. But when a school's bar pass rate drops to historic lows, and the same school then lowers their admission standards even further, then it is not unreasonable to ask if the school is acting reasonably and in good faith.

You may not think it is statistically significant if students with a 145 or 146 LSAT at a given law school have a first time bar pass rate of 18%, but students applying to that school with a 145 or 146 LSAT might find that information very helpful in deciding whether to attend that law school (or attend law school at all). And if one school is doing better than others at getting students with similar predictors (LSAT and UGPA) to pass the bar, then that information should be made available as well.

Please see my forthcoming law review article entitled: "Payday Loans: providing much needed assistance and opportunity to peoples of lower socio-economic background and racial and ethnic minorities."

Full disclosure: My salary is paid by proceeds from said payday loan company, however I went to Yale law school, so you have to take what I say as fact because I scored high on the LSAT, not that the LSAT is predictive of intelligence.

Sheldon: I hope you will tell us why Whittier and its peer law schools did not admit minorities with law LST/GPA scores in years past when application number were more robust and applicant qualifications generally higher. Didn't lower qualified minority applicants the deserve with same opportunity? Please also let us know if Whittier will continue to admit these lower credentialed applicants should application number and applicant credential rebound.

I know you are not an administrator, but do tell us why you think Whittier did not admit applicants with lower credentials in the past whe they sought the opportunity to become lawyers.

Why not do away with the requirement that you need to go to law school before you take the bar exam? Then law schools would have much more pressure to show that they educate rather than credentialize. This would also remove one barrier to a poor person becoming a lawyer.

You post was not an attempt to defend Whittier?

It specifically criticized LST for an analysis of bad behavior by a class of law schools of which Whittier is a very prominent member.

Please, don't treat readers as stupid …

For that patronizing contempt alone you should answer all the awkward questions about Whittier. But you won't.

But I think everyone here knows the concept of "negative inference."

MacK – Please show respect and courtesy to Professor Lyke. Unlike the vast majority of LST's critics, who won't even identify themselves, he has offered to respond to the questions we have posed. in fact, he said "I am extremely excited to respond to these questions in a subsequent post next week."

You or I may not agree with his positions, but let's give him a chance.

David,

I am perfectly willing to return respect with respect. However, to suggest that he is not defending Whittier does not treat those reading this thread with respect. He is, quite transparently making his arguments (and evasions) to the benefit of Whittier. To suggest he is not is, frankly, to treat us as fools, hardly an act of respect.

The fact that so few within law schools have worked outside of law schools is proof enough that the system is broken. Please, please, please change this.

Out of a class of about 320 (full time only), Whittier has 114 students who are Hispanic or African American. Assuming arguendo an even distribution of employment outcomes across demographics, Whittier sends about 29 Hispanic or African American graduates directly into legal careers (their long term, full time, BPR rate). Almost as many (about 22) Hispanic or African Americans students will have failed out.

Let's compare to another southern California school, USC. It has 99 H+AA students out of a total size of 600. So, if we just chop the school in half we can make things about even, 50 out of 300. It's taking less than half as many H+AA students than Whittier. However, about 40 of these students will make it into the legal profession, and most likely none will fail out.

If Lyke truly does believe in a mission of helping to get black and brown people into the legal profession, perhaps he should speak to Whittier's very high attrition rate, and other less-diverse schools' ability to get their minority students into the legal profession. Or, is Lyke going to hold very closely to his exact wording of giving them the opportunity to "sit for the bar." There Whittier does provide more of an opportunity, but I suspect most bar sitters are more concerned with the opportunity to practice law than to take a test.

Derek,

Why does it strike you as problematic that at the left side of the distribution the dropout rate is higher? That is without doubt true of every profession and academic subject. Each year Whittier by your own calculus adds more than two dozen minority lawyers to California – and they are sorely needed. Your only solution apparently is to shutdown the Whittier's of the world or starve them of resources. Where do those two dozen students go then? You would apparently be willing to force them to live with BA's only for the rest of their careers.

Anon

Your comment is racist and disgusting.

David,

If you are considering academic attrition, you should also be considering transfer attrition. Many unranked schools lose as many or more students through transfer than through academic attrition. Presumably only the best students are transferring, and these students are probably passing the bar at a much higher rate than the average student with the same LSAT. These students are also probably seeing better employment outcomes. Many students go to unranked schools with every intention of transferring to a better school. If you are going to use bar pass to judge admissions standards, students who transfer need to be considered as well.

I don't claim that this would make a huge difference to LST's major conclusions, but I think it seriously undermines your claim above that students from anonymous school with a given LSAT had only a 25% chance of passing the bar. Were there no transfers from this anonymous school to other schools?

I also want to echo the comments I have seen on this blog saying that the higher ranked schools should get more heat from LST. The current system is unfairly advantaged against the lower tiered schools. The first tier schools don't have to report the low LSAT numbers of students who transferred in, but they get to report the high bar pass rate of these students. The lower tiered school has to report the low LSAT score but is not allowed to include the high bar pass number. This system is far from transparent.

While I agree that schools accepting transfer students should be required to report LSAT scores of transferees, I don't see how this is unfair to lower-tiered schools; if they want a high passage rate, they should raise their admission standards. They are not entitled to a certain level of enrollment and they do not deserve sympathy for failing to achieve it.

Yep, because per Anon's comment at 10:13, there is literally NOTHING ELSE for the BA-holding students to pursue to better themselves and contribute to society other than the vehicle of a law degree. Accounting, business, science, mathematics, sociology, history, medicine, the arts…all off the table, and all out of reach.

Twbb,

Different anon here. I don't think the point is that higher ranked schools' not reporting LSAT scores of transfers-in is unfair to lower ranked schools. I think the point is that higher ranked schools' not reporting LSAT scores of transfers-in is non-transparent and therefore misleading to (1) prospective students considering those schools and (2) legal employers and others who are evaluating said schools based on the actually reported, but incomplete, class profile/ranking.

Re-reading the thread, I should modify my response: the earlier anon's point may be that it is unfair to lower ranked schools. My point is that it is non-transparent and misleading to prospective students and employers.

Anon 10:13 here. My main point is that Frakt needs to take transfers into account. His claim that students admitted to the anonymous school with an LSAT score of 144 or lower have a 25% chance of passing the bar is therefore false. It is just plain wrong to take academic attrition into account without also considering transfer attrition. He is painting an unfairly gloomy picture of the prospects for admits with a low LSAT at a tier 4 school. The best case scenario for these students is probably the one he totally ignores: transferring to a tier 1 school and passing the bar. Many, many tier 4 students do this. Failing to take this obvious variable into account makes me question his statistical claims elsewhere.

The unfairness and lack of transparency I was referring to is in how the system is skewed. Tier 4 schools report the low LSAT scores of admits, but can't report their bar pass when they graduate elsewhere. Tier 1 schools don't have to report the low LSAT of the students who transfer in, but they do get to report the high bar pass percentage of these high performing students. Its a lose/lose for the tier 4 schools and a win/win for the tier 1 schools. I am not trying to say that the system necessarily needs to change, as I think having tier 1 schools admit low LSAT students who have proven themselves is a good thing. However, I do think there is a lack of transparency, and schools like Florida State and Georgetown are taking advantage of this. However, I never hear any criticism from LST, as they only talk about how problematic it is to admit students with a low LSAT. In truth, these schools are essentially using the tier 4 schools as an admissions tool for finding the students with low LSATs who can succeed and pass the bar.

dupednontraditional: there are lots of things worth doing in life other than being a lawyer or pursuing a JD. But the critics of law school don't make that argument generally speaking. I take it their complaint is that law school is just too expensive. And therefore only those students who can be demonstrated to earn more than they spend pursuing a degree should be allowed to go to law school.

The problem is that for all sorts of reasons limiting access to law school by closing down schools like Whittier will have a disparate impact on minorities – as the diversity figures for Whittier v. UCLA/UCI indicate.

In other words one might say that for all sorts of complex historical and other reasons minorities have to try twice as hard to succeed in law. But at least now the California system (which allows non-ABA and for profit law schools and on line law study) increases the chances that at least some additional minority students can become lawyers.

It might make sense to have a conversation about how to make it easier for minorities to succeed in law school. In fact one elite school – Berkeley – has been working hard to find other ways to measure the impact of the LSAT and consider alternatives (see their Shultz/Zedeck study).

But by adopting the broad brush approach that LST takes – relying on the dated single factor of the LSAT – they end up with a solution that will hurt black and hispanic applicants.

I have to say that the latest "dog whistle" defence of the bottom feeding law schools is that LST and other critics are racist (i.e., "hit me now with the minorities in my arms.") It's an interesting tactic, which was also engaged in by the pay-day loan business, reverse-redlining banks and others who transparently set out to exploit minorities.

The transfer issue is an effort at smoke and mirrors, combined with selective reading. LST has published information that suggests that students with very low LSAT scores have a high risk of failing the bar. Various Anon's argue, "but hey, those evil higher ranked law schools are stealing our better students," paternalistically ignoring the reality that a student is more likely to secure a career graduating from say Georgetown than American or Catholic (the two schools it and GW are accused of poaching from), and he/she owes the law school nothing (and by the way, is more likely to become a lawyers out of the transfer school (I thought that was the point), and can make his/her own choices. This also in the preferred example ignores the fact that LST does not include Catholic (bottom 25% LSAT 151) or American (bottom 25% LSAT 152) in that group of law schools admitting large number of students at high risk of failing the bar exam. The argument also ignores the obvious, even if students from the very lowest ranked law schools were transferring, they would still be those near the top of their class, who are unlikely to be be the high risk and very high risk admits that LST identified.

I notice that after Prof. Merritt asked the question, not of the usual Anon's answered, at what point is it helping minorities and at what point is it exploitation, of the minority student as little more than a federal loan conduit? rTough question, I can see why the Anon's cower from it.

One of the things you run into in practicing law is grifters. When you are a junior lawyer, you spot some of the grifters easily – but as you practice longer you slowly discover that many, if not most, do not present themselves in ways that match the stereotype – many are soft-spoken, have Yale and Harvard degrees, express high minded thoughts, dress tastefully – but they are still grifters.

no doubt the LST folks are well intentioned folk, not a racist bone in their bodies. but the numbers don't lie. Whittier takes in more black and hispanic students. UCLA is now prohibited from using affirmative action and soon that may spread across the country. so what do we do?

Hardly anyone would defend admitting white students with extremely low predictors of success, but for some reason people are lining up to defend the practice of admitting minority students with extremely low predictors of success. Notwithstanding restrictions on affirmative action at some public schools, any minority with undergraduate grades and LSAT scores that suggest even a modest aptitude for the study of law can get into a very respectable law school. In Southern California alone, USC, Loyola, Pepperdine, Chapman and USD are all very good law schools with aggressive affirmative action in their admissions to promote diversity. As a result, there are few minority students with reasonable predictors of success interested in attending Whittier or Thomas Jefferson or LaVerne, schools with low prestige, and poor bar passage rates and job placement statistics. In order for Whittier to have such a large percentage of minority students, they must therefore admit many minority applicants whose LSAT and undergraduate GPA predict failure as the most likely outcome.

Consider this statistic from the NCBE: A student with a 140 LSAT scores an average of 132 on the MBE. A student with a 150 LSAT averages 143 on the MBE. Source: http://www.ncbex.org/assets/media_files/Bar-Examiner/articles/2011/800411Testing.pdf The cut score in California on the MBE is 144. Whittier's 75/50/25 LSAT in 2014 was 150/146/143. This means that 75% or more are potentially at risk of failing the bar, unless they outperform their predictors. This is not an exaggeration. Whittier's entering class of 2011, the group that took the bar in summer of 2014, had LSATs of 154/152/149. That group achieved a first time pass rate of 43% on the July 2014, California Bar Exam. Even accounting for some transfer attrition from the top of the class, that is very low, especially when considering that Whittier had attrition for the entering class of 2011 of 23.4 (56 academic and 8 "other") .

Although the great Examsoft debacle of July 2014 may have slightly depressed Whittier's first-time pass rate, I predict that when the summer 2015 results are released (probably next week) that Whittier will have a similar or worse performance because the entering class of 2012 was substantially weaker than the entering class of 2011. The results for minority students will almost certainly be even worse than the results for the class overall. In July 2014, the first time pass rate for white students from California ABA-approved schools was 75.4%. For black students from CA ABA schools it was 53% and for Hispanic (the term used by the California bar) students 59.5%. This kind of disparity in performance by race has been consistent over the years. In July 2013, white students passed at 80%, black students 58%, Hispanic 70% (again, first time takers from CA ABA law schools). Summer 2012: W- 81,B- 59,H-70. Summer 2011. 81-W, 58-B, 65-H.

If Whittier's statistics were proportionally similar to the rest of the state, that means to earn their 43% overall first time rate, they probably had a white pass rate in the upper 40s to low 50s, a black pass rate in the low to mid 30s and a Hispanic pass rate in the mid to upper 30s. These numbers will continue to decline for at least the next 3 years (15, 16 and 17) as ever weaker classes move through Whittier and the other schools that have similarly lowered their admissions standards.

Nice to clarify that … Since it's not what was dog whistled.

First, private law schools can continue to treat diversity as an admission criteria.

Second, solving the current Supreme Court's views on affirmative action (which I disagree with) is a different issue from admitting students that have very little chance of actually becoming a successful minority lawyer – indeed recent admission profiles suggest that many who would be successful lawyers, including minorities, are increasingly off by the desperate straits that so many young lawyers find themselves in. That is caused both by debt and too many law graduates, an issue the legal professoriate is desperate to pretend does not exist.

Frankly, the professoriate has been so self serving (with a few exceptions) that their arguments on this front lack credibility.

"so what do we do?"

If Whittier wants to provide disadvantaged students with opportunity, why is the tuition so high? Doesn't that conflict with that goal?

Whittier is just like many of the other schools on LST's list of serious risk schools. They have not necessarily made a conscious decision to exploit underqualified minority students. Rather, they have tried to stay open and hold on to jobs for faculty, staff and administration by doing whatever they have to do to get enough tuition paying (federal loan borrowing) students in the door to pay everyone's salaries. This has meant lowering their standards ever further, while keeping a close eye on what competitor schools are doing to make sure that their drop in standards is roughly commensurate with their peer schools and at the same time turning a blind eye to the consequences on the people whose lives they are ruining. The "we are serving underserved minority groups" line of argument is simply an after the fact attempt to justify wholly indefensible admission practices. It is only the threat of loss of accreditation that can get these schools to act responsibly. Arguments about ethics and professionalism and other such abstract principles are insufficient to persuade schools struggling for their very survival. Whittier, like many lower tier schools, had a choice – maintain reasonable admission standards and make dramatic cuts to faculty and staff (or dramatic pay cuts to all) or lower standards significantly and make more modest cuts to the budget and freeze or reduce hiring. With few exceptions, law schools have chosen the former over the latter.

I meant the latter over the former.

I've been looking forward to Prof Lyke's promised followup post all week. Maybe we'll get it today.