As I wrote in a recent column about America's least selective law schools, the days of widespread predatory admissions practices by ABA-accredited law schools seems to have come largely to a close. The schools that engaged in these practices have either gone out of business (Whittier, Valparaiso, Charlotte School of Law, Arizona Summit) converted to State-Accredited Schools (Thomas Jefferson, University of LaVerne) or have been sufficiently chastened by ABA sanctions that they have largely reformed their ways (Florida Coastal, Ave Maria, Atlanta’s John Marshall, Texas Southern, Appalachian, North Carolina Central, Western Michigan (formerly Thomas Cooley).
But although law schools are no longer admitting large numbers of unqualified students, the legacy of the years of these irresponsible and unethical admission practices carries on in the form of atrocious bar pass rates at the schools that engaged in these reprehensible practices. The worst admissions abuses occurred between 2013 and 2016, so law school are still feeling the effects today. Most students who matriculated in 2016 graduated in 2019, but many part-time students admitted in 2016 will be graduating this year.
The ABA has recently released comprehensive bar pass statistics, including first year bar pass statistics for 2019 and ultimate bar pass rate statistics for 2017. UBP measures the percentage of graduates who pass the bar within two years of graduation. You can find the ABA’s spreadsheets here. Overall, these statistics are up, and that is good news. Nationwide, 89.5% of 2017 law graduates who sat for a bar exam passed it within two years of graduation. This is up from the 2016 UBP rate of 88.64%. And the 2019 first time pass rate was up substantially, at 79.64%, a nearly five percent increase from 2018, when it was 74.83%. But these aggregate statistics mask, to some extent, how dire the situation still is at the bottom.
Eight of the nearly 200 ABA-Accredited Law Schools failed to meet the current ABA Standard 316, which has just gone into effect. (Incredibly, no law school ever was found out of compliance with the old Standard 316)
The current ABA Standard 316 is very simple: “At least 75 percent of a law school’s graduates who sat for a bar examination must have passed a bar examination administered within two years of their date of graduation.”
The 2019 HALL OF SHAME
Here is a chart depicting the nine law schools that are currently out of compliance with Standard 316 based on their UBP for the class of 2017. I added their first-time pass rate to give readers a sense of where these graduating classes started out.
2017 Ultimate Bar Pass Rate within two years of graduation
UBP for 2017 First time pass rate 2017
FAULKNER UNIVERSITY |
62.50% |
50.68% |
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA |
64.06% |
38.46% |
MISSISSIPPI COLLEGE |
64.15% |
53.84% |
WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY |
66.01% |
45.95% |
SOUTH DAKOTA, UNIVERSITY OF |
67.21% |
46.00% |
FLORIDA COASTAL SCHOOL OF LAW |
67.29% |
39.52% |
ATLANTA'S JOHN MARSHALL LAW SCHOOL |
67.32% |
49.34% |
FLORIDA A&M UNIVERSITY |
70.83% |
51.24% |
CHARLESTON SCHOOL OF LAW |
72.12% |
43.59% |
So, what happens now? Here is an excerpt from a Q&A released by the ABA last year:
Q: What happens if a law school does not meet R316?
A: If the data a law school reports to the Council suggests non-compliance with R316, as is true with C316 or any Standard, the Council will write the school and ask for an explanation. If the Council subsequently determines that the school is out of compliance with R316, public notice of that fact will be given. The school will be given a period of two-years to take steps to demonstrate that the school has subsequently brought itself back into compliance. That will primarily be determined by the bar exam outcomes for the following year. If, at the end of the two-year period, the school remains out of compliance the Council would remove the school’s accreditation unless the school can establish extraordinary circumstances that would lead it to conclude that the school should be given an additional period of time to demonstrate compliance.
A review of the 2018 and 2019 first time bar pass rates at these nine schools suggests that at least two of them – and as many as five or six -- are unlikely to be able to get back into compliance within the allotted two years. The schools most likely to lose accreditation based on bar pass rates are Western Michigan and District of Columbia. Western Michigan had a woeful first-time pass rate of 42.23% in 2018 (even lower than their 2017 rate) and plummeted even further in 2019 to 36.36%, more than 35% below the weighted state average where their graduates took the bar. District of Columbia is also in dire straits. After a 38.46% first time pass rate in 2017, DC improved to 45.07% in 2018, then fall back even further in 2019 to 37.74%. It is hard to envision how either of these schools will make it to 75% UBP (or even close) for either the class of 2018 or 2019. Also on the chopping block is Charleston. Charleston improved from 43.59% in 2017 to 51.58% in 2018, but dropped back slightly to 50% in 2019. Charleston will struggle to get back within standards. Florida A&M U, is also not likely to recover with a 48.33% first-time pass rate in 2018, even lower than 2017. With a 58.33% first-time pass rate for the class of 2019, FAMU might make it back into compliance in two years, if the ABA gives them that long.
Atlanta’s John Marshall will have difficulty meeting UBP in 2018 due to a 38.86% first time pass rate in 2018, but should make it with the 2019 class, which had a 62.22% first time pass rate. Mississippi College is in a similar situation; their 44.23% first-time pass rate in 2018 probably won’t improve to a 75% UBP, but the 60.61% achieved by the class of 2019 makes 75% UBP achievable for that class.
Faulkner and Florida Coastal are both going in the right direction and should be out of the woods within two years if not before. Faulkner went from 50.68% in 2018 to 55.27% in 2019 to a respectable 73.24% in 2019. Similarly, Florida Coastal improved from a woeful 39.52% in 2017 to 56.76% in 2018 to an almost acceptable 61.76% in 2019. Lastly, South Dakota is already out of the woods. South Dakota rebounded from a a disastrous 46% in 2017 to a decent 69.86% in 2018, followed by a perfectly acceptable 76.6% in 2019.
DISHONORABLE MENTION
There are a couple of other schools that are currently in compliance with Standard 316, but are in danger of falling out of compliance next year or the year after based on recent bar results. Appalachian just made the UBP standard for the class of 2017 (77.27%), but had a disastrous 30% first time pass rate in 2018 and followed that up with a miserable 48% performance in 2019. Barry Law School is also in trouble. They squeaked by with a 75.90% UBP for 2017, but had a pathetic 41.57% first time pass rate in 2018, followed with a 56.79% rate in 2019.
Other schools that bombed* the 2019 bar:
San Francisco: 38.60%, 30.60% below state average
Golden Gate: 43.88%, 26.41% below the state average
Vermont: 45.76%, 25.70% below state average
Cal Western: 49.26%, 20.17% below state average
Widener Delaware: 54.64%, 19.44% below state average
Texas Southern: 55.77%, 21.63% below state average
Hofstra: 58.33%, 25.35% below state average
*Note - I define “bombed” as below 60% and 19% or more below the state average
So, what should we make of all this? Overall, trends are positive. Ever since the Standard was announced, schools are more focused on bar pass and bar pass rates have been going up. Standard 316 also has helped to put a stop to the exploitative admissions practiced by many law school in recent years, when many law schools subsidized their operations by admitting woefully unprepared students and charging them full tuition. As for the few schools that still have unacceptably low bar pass rates, undoubtedly, law school faculties and administrations bear some blame for the poor performance of their students on the bar. But the single biggest factor in predicting bar passage rates is the LSAT scores of the incoming students. It is worth noting that of the 10 schools (excluding Puerto Rico schools) with the lowest LSAT entrance credentials in 2016 (Western Michigan, Appalachian, Arizona Summit, Charleston, Charlotte, Florida Coastal, North Carolina Central, Southern, Thomas Jefferson and Faulkner), most have since either gone out of business or lost ABA accreditation, or are currently out of compliance with bar pass standards. The one school on this list with a decent par pass rate in 2019 - North Carolina Central (76.23% first-time pass rate in 2019) - only managed to achieve this by having the highest first-year attrition rates in the country - 37.7% for the entering class of 2016. (NCC has since reformed its ways.) In contrast, schools with reasonable admission standards (LSATs at or above 151/149/147) have generally had no trouble meeting Standard 316 -- even in California. In fact, it must be noted that none of the dire predictions about what Standard 316 would do to California law schools have come to pass. Indeed, all the remaining ABA- accredited law schools in California met Standard 316 for the class of 2017. (Golden Gate squeaked by, hitting 75% UPB exactly). Given that fact, there is no reason to believe that California ABA law schools will dramatically alter their diversity admission practices as some had feared. While Standard 316 may result in a handful of marginal schools shutting their doors, there will be more than enough capacity in American law schools to meet the needs of the legal profession for new attorneys for the foreseeable future. In my opinion, Standard 316 is exactly what American legal education needed to get back on track.
Hofstra being on this lists shocks me. They used to be a good law school. How far they have fallen!
Posted by: Susan | February 22, 2020 at 12:48 PM