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Clinics and Costs
May 6th, 2017 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Bob Kuehn has written an incisive article about the relationship between law school tuition and clinical education. Contrary to many educators’ assumptions, Bob finds that there is no statistically significant relationship between the tuition charged by schools that require a clinical experience and schools that do not. Requiring students to complete a clinic before graduation, in other words, does not correspond with increased tuition.
Similarly, schools that guarantee students a clinical experience–should they choose to take one–do not charge significantly higher tuition than schools without that guarantee. Accounting for tuition discounts did not change these results: Schools with clinical requirements or guarantees did not acquire significantly more tuition revenue per student than those without those requirements or guarantees.
The same story emerged when Bob analyzed clinical course availability (rather than requirements or guarantees). Enhanced clinical opportunities never correlated significantly with higher tuition (either list price or discounted). On the contrary, several analyses found a significant relationship between clinical opportunities and lower tuition rates. Bob summarizes the results of his research in a post on the Best Practices for Legal Education blog.
How could this be? Aren’t clinics incredibly expensive to run? Well, yes and no. As Bob explains, the availability of clinical education depends more on the choices that law schools make than on the direct cost of clinics.
Our Broken Bar Exam
May 4th, 2017 / By Deborah J. Merritt
The bar exam is broken: it tests too much and too little. On the one hand, the exam forces applicants to memorize hundreds of black-letter rules that they will never use in practice. On the other hand, the exam licenses lawyers who don’t know how to interview a client, compose an engagement letter, or negotiate with an adversary.
This flawed exam puts clients at risk. It also subjects applicants to an expensive, stressful process that does little to improve their professional competence. The mismatch between the exam and practice, finally, raises troubling questions about the exam’s disproportionate racial impact. How can we defend a racial disparity if our exam does not properly track the knowledge, skills, and judgment that new lawyers use in practice?
We can’t. In the language of psychometricians, our bar exam lacks “validity.” We haven’t shown that the exam measures the quality (minimal competence to practice law) that we want to measure. On the contrary, growing evidence suggests that our exam is invalid: the knowledge and skills tested by the exam vary too greatly from the ones clients require from their lawyers.
We cannot ignore the bar exam’s invalidity any longer. Every legal educator should care about this issue, no matter how many of her students pass or fail the exam. The bar exam defines the baseline of our profession. If the exam tests the wrong things, we have a professional obligation to change it.
* * *
For the rest of this essay, please see aalsnews. I discuss the concept of exam validity, our lack of agreement on “minimal competence,” and how educators and practitioners could work together to solve these serious problems.
Jobs and Salaries for New Lawyers
April 30th, 2017 / By Deborah J. Merritt
What does the job market look like for new lawyers? The ABA will soon release statistics about the Class of 2016, and NALP will add additional information by the end of the summer. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) gives us an advance peak.
Each year, BLS reports job numbers and salaries for a wide range of occupations. This series of reports includes only salaried positions; for the legal profession, the series omits both solo practitioners and equity partners in law firms. Still, since most new graduates seek salaried positions, these numbers offer a useful measure of the profession’s ability to absorb and pay new members.
Does Feedback Improve Performance?
April 27th, 2017 / By Deborah J. Merritt
My colleague Ruth Colker gives her 1L students the opportunity to obtain mid-semester feedback on their written work. In her Constitutional Law course, currently taught during the spring semester of the first year, Ruth invites students to submit a practice answer to an essay question drawn from a previous exam. She grades each practice answer using the same rubric she used on the previous final, makes extensive written comments on the answers, and encourages students to discuss their answers with her in person.
The exercise is not mandatory; nor does it factor into the final grade. About half of Ruth’s students choose to obtain this optional mid-semester feedback. She wondered if those students performed better on the final exam than students who did not elect the feedback. To study this question, she assembled a team of colleagues, including an expert statistician, Abigail Shoben, from Ohio State’s College of Public Health.
I was delighted to work as part of this team, which also included law colleagues Ellen Deason and Monte Smith. We’ve just published our results. Here are some of the highlights:
International JD Students
March 18th, 2017 / By Deborah J. Merritt
A recent news story notes that 17% of Harvard’s first-year law students are international students. This statistic intrigued me. International students have long been a staple of LLM programs, but how many enroll and graduate from ABA-accredited JD programs?
The answer, it turns out, varies a lot from school to school. I used the ABA’s Standard 509 reports to count the number of “nonresident alien” students enrolled at each accredited law school. That number undercounts “international” students because it does not include foreign students who hold permanent resident visas. Nonetheless, it offers some measure of a JD demographic that has received little press attention. I explore here the presence of nonresident aliens in accredited law schools–although I will refer to these students as “international” students (a somewhat imprecise but friendlier term).
Thinking and Writing Like a Lawyer
March 15th, 2017 / By Deborah J. Merritt
If law school classes teach students to think like lawyers, then why are so many final exams poorly written? It’s not that students “can’t write,” it’s that we haven’t really taught them to think like lawyers.
Joan Rocklin is the latest educator to tackle this issue, in a paper just posted on SSRN. Rocklin explains why law professors should teach exam writing to their students and, equally important, how we can do that effectively.
New Semester, Old Classes
January 10th, 2017 / By Deborah J. Merritt
The optimistically named “spring” semester has begun at most law schools. One-L’s nervously await their fall-semester grades while climbing a mountain of new reading. Two-L’s focus on their externships, student organizations, and job searches, while mostly ignoring the assigned reading. Three-L’s celebrate with glee the fact that this is their “last first day.” They haven’t even opened their course syllabi, much less the assigned readings.
In a very thoughtful essay, Bob Kuehn reminds us what’s wrong with this picture. Whether the students do the readings or not, they’re not learning enough of the professional skills they will most need as new lawyers. Study after study demonstrates that law schools fail to give students enough education in professional essentials like listening effectively, interviewing, counseling, negotiating, identifying client goals, strategizing to meet those goals, and problem solving.
Law schools prepare their graduates to perform as superb appellate lawyers, but only mediocre (at best) lawyers for every other type of legal problem or client need. Graduates slowly learn how to lawyer for those clients, but they don’t give their early clients and employers the excellence those groups deserve. And, without a sound foundation at the start, these graduates may never become the superb counselors, strategists, and problem solvers they could have been.
Law schools have made progress, but we haven’t traveled nearly far enough–and our progress has been crawl-like. As 2017 unfolds, I hope to offer some ideas for more effective progress. Meanwhile, put Bob’s essay on your personal first-week reading list. And then, do more: read the underlying studies and reflect on what they mean for legal education. Let’s try for a newer new semester this time next year.
The Long Road
December 23rd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Women now make up a (slight) majority of JD students and that’s a milestone to celebrate. But why did it take us so long to reach this milestone? And will we be able to maintain women’s success throughout law school and their careers? I offer some thoughts here.
A Milestone for Legal Education
December 15th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
For the first time ever, women constitute a majority of JD students at ABA-accredited law schools. 50.32% of JD students studying for fall exams are women.*
It’s a milestone to celebrate–but also one to view with caution.
As Kyle McEntee and I reported last month, female law students remain clustered at the least prestigious law schools. You can find a graphic representation of these data, along with a podcast in which Kyle and I discuss the numbers, here.
After crunching the latest disclosures, there remains a strong (and statistically significant) correlation between a law school’s US News rank and its percentage of female students: On average, the better ranked schools enroll a significantly smaller percentage of women students. The correlation remains when we look at schools’ placement outcomes. Men are significantly more likely than women to attend schools that place a large percentage of their graduates in full-time, long-term jobs requiring a law license. Women are more likely to attend schools with weak employment outcomes.
When we looked at last year’s data, we found a correlation of .381 between a school’s US News rank and the percentage of women it enrolled. This year, the correlation is almost as high, at .357. The story is similar for the relationship between percentage of female students and good job outcomes. Last year’s data showed a correlation of -.520, while the updated data yield an association of -.508. All of these relationships are statistically significant: the odds of them occurring by chance are less than one in a thousand.
Women now outnumber men in law schools, but our pipeline is still broken. Let’s do more to recognize and correct gender bias in the profession. You can start with Law School Transparency’s podcast series on Women In the Law.
* Source: The ABA’s annual data release. These totals include students from Penn State’s two campuses, which seem to have been omitted from the “All Schools” spreadsheet on the ABA site. 55,059 of this year’s students are men, while 55,766 are women.
Women In the Law
December 7th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Law School Transparency continues its excellent series of podcasts, Women In the Law. Recent episodes discuss the portrayal of women lawyers in the media, the leaky pipeline in law school admissions, and ongoing pipeline leaks in practice. Each episode has generated a set of op-ed columns and other commentary; all of those are linked on the episode pages. Check out the conversation and keep it going with your own friends and colleagues.
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