First Monday Musings By Dean Vik Amar: Evaluating Legal Education's Vital Signs At The End Of The Academic Year

It's a tale of the (relatively) good, the (pretty) bad, and the (downright) ugly.

Flat line alert on a heart monitorA lot of assessments are taking place this time of year. Analyses of the First 100 Days of the Trump Administration are among the most prominent examples, but each law school also uses this season take stock of the academic year. So in my space today I’d like to offer a few big-picture thoughts on the state of legal education generally these days, highlighting the (relatively) good, the (pretty) bad, and the (downright) ugly.

First, the (relatively) good: the employment picture. America’s ABA-accredited law schools just finished the process of collecting, submitting, and posting their job-outcome data for the Class of 2016 (the one that graduated last summer), and while the ABA has not yet compiled and publicly presented aggregate statistics for easy comprehensive analysis, my own review of the few dozen or so schools that I keep close track of suggests that – at least for schools considered in the top quartile of the nation’s 200 or so law schools – the overall percentage of recent graduates who were employed in full-time, long-term, non-university-funded law jobs (that is, jobs that either require a license or for which a JD is preferred) moved up a few percentage points this year. (I know that the creators of Above the Law’s law school rankings – which are generally published in late May – have for plausible reasons decided to exclude “JD preferred jobs” and instead look at bar-license-required jobs only, but I lump both categories together for today’s purposes.) A big part of the reason for the progress at many schools this year may be that the size of graduating classes has shrunk, so that even if the number of new hires out there is staying roughly the same (or even shrinking a tad), the percentage of new graduates who are employed has increased. But there are also schools (and I know this because we are one of them) that saw the absolute number of graduates employed increase quite significantly in the Class of 2016 compared to the Class of 2015.

A related point is that Biglaw hiring seems to be holding its own; the percentage of recent graduates employed at firms with 100 or more lawyers seemed to go up this year at several law schools I looked at, even if only by small amounts. At Illinois, we saw the percentage of law grads from the Class of 2016 employed at firms of 100 or more lawyers move up significantly to about 34%, which is higher than it’s been in at least six years. And, again, while our numbers may not be representative of other types of schools that feed different markets, our experience is consistent with the finding that the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) made for the previous year (the Class of 2015) that the only sector in which the absolute number of new jobs increased from the previous year was very large law firms.

Once more, it’s important to note that the two trends I just observed are certainly not true for all law schools – and indeed many schools whose employment rates have been under the most severe stress in recent years probably experienced much more uneven progress or even further slippage in the Class of 2016 – but I feel pretty comfortable in saying that the employment landscape is generally somewhat more favorable than it was just two years ago.

Let’s move from the (relatively) good to the (pretty) bad: aggregate application volume. Even though the number of LSAT takers in the 2015-2016 cycle edged up (for the first time in several years), that increase hasn’t yet translated into an increase in the number of people applying to law school this year. In fact, as of April 21, 2017, the number of applicants to American law schools is off about half a percent from the April 2016 number (which itself was up just a bit from the previous year). Given the steep slide in application volume over the past half dozen years, perhaps flatness over the past two years is progress. But I must say I think today is an historically great time to apply to law school — if you are interested in law and competitive for the stronger institutions. It’s easier to get into a great law school than it has been in many decades – every school, even Yale, is taking some folks it wouldn’t have accepted five years ago — the financial aid packages are very attractive, and, given class size reduction and gradual improvement in some sectors of the marketplace, the number of aggregate jobs and recent grads are coming into good alignment (especially for graduates of the stronger schools). Given these factors, and the increased awareness among many young folks of the importance of the powers and limits of government, a number of analysts expect meaningful increases in application volume in the coming years. But for now, still pretty bad.

Now for the truly ugly: bar pass rates. As writers for this website have admirably reported, bar passage rates in many states and at many law schools have been abysmal over the past few years. There was a lot of press recently about the likely closure of Whittier Law School in California. While the prospect of a fully ABA-accredited law school closing its doors is quite extraordinary, consider that Whittier’s first-time bar pass success rate on the California bar exam, where most of its graduates sit for the bar, went from an already troublingly low 43 percent in July 2014 to 38 percent in July 2015, to an almost hard-to-believe rate of 22 percent in July 2016. While, as I have written before, the California bar examiners may be setting their passing score threshold at too high a level, these shockingly low pass rates at Whittier go a long way to explaining the decision by university officials to wind the school down. Even with the prospect of better aggregate times for legal education ahead, all law schools must figure out how better to enable their graduating classes to pass the bar. The academic strength of the students coming in is of course a factor, but every school, even ones with pass rates three or four times higher than Whittier’s 2016 showing, must attend to this issue more now than ever before.


Sponsored

Vikram David Amar Vik AmarVikram Amar is the Dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, where he also serves the Iwan Foundation Professor of Law. His primary fields of teaching and study are constitutional law, federal courts, and civil and criminal procedure. A fuller bio and CV can be found at https://www.law.illinois.edu/faculty/profile/VikramAmar, and he can be reached at amar@illinois.edu.

Sponsored