Law Schools

Open Letter To The DOE: Put Above The Law In Charge Of Accreditation

It's time to fire the ABA... and hire us.

By  
on

10 for 10 logoTo Whom It May Concern:

It has come to our attention that the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (the unfortunately acronymed “NACIQI”) recently advised that the Department of Education strip the American Bar Association of its authority to accredit law schools. At least that’s the polite way of putting it. A more accurate description of the NACIQI hearing and finding is an old-fashioned ass-chewin’ that completely blindsided the ABA. Anyway, as we’re sure you’re aware, going through with such a bold move would leave a vacuum in the important task of serving law students and advancing the legal profession through education.

Thankfully, the field of legal education would not have to fear the ABA’s absence. We respectfully submit that, should the Department choose to heed the recommendation of NACIQI, Above the Law — armed with its 10 years of trailblazing coverage of legal education — is more than prepared to accept this heavy responsibility. Indeed, we are prepared to excel in this role!

We understand the problem, we know the solution, and we have a passion for punishing the host of tin horn academic institutions out there ripping people off. We are the avenging angels cruising the boulevard of broken legal careers just waiting for the power to drop some real Old Testament brimstone on these schools. Give us this opportunity. When you consider the grave situation in legal education, we trust that you’ll determine that you have no choice.

If we were to sum up our philosophy in one sentence: raise standards generally and start being honest about the role different tiers of law schools play… and should cost.

Student Debt Standards

This is the easiest selling point we can make to the Department: at least we understand that this is a problem, which is more than we can say for the ABA.

Sponsored

After all, the suggestion of suspending the ABA’s duties was broached, in part, over the committee’s concern about student debt. The transcript of NACIQI’s hearing with the ABA, released last month, reveals that the committee raised considered, difficult questions about debt that the ABA was, astonishingly, unprepared to answer. As committee member Paul LeBlanc put it:

This feels like an agency that is out of step with a crisis in its profession, out of step with the changes in higher ed and out of step with the plight of the students that are going through the law schools.

But even after the NACIQI vote, Barry Currier, the managing director of accreditation and legal education for the ABA, did not seem to appreciate the gravity of the committee’s concerns:

In an interview with the ABA Journal, Currier said that setting a standard for law school loan amounts has never been considered. “Really it’s just fruitless to go into a longer conversation about it. It certainly would be complex,” he said.

“Fruitless”? This is the not the response any Department wants to hear after posing an important question.

Sponsored

Above the Law, on the other hand, thinks this discussion is pretty freaking fruitful.

Our Top 50 Law School Rankings already employ tuition as a factor in evaluating school quality. Armed with the proper authority, we can easily expand this into a formula that takes tuition, average public/private debt loads, and employment prospects to determine whether the average student is walking out of that law school in a position to thrive in the profession or embark on a lifetime of mastering the perfect macchiato pour.

And to ensure that students properly grasp the data at their disposal, we’ll express these as pot odds.

That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Everyone at these schools think they’re the exception — the valedictorian who will brook the odds and become the first Ave Maria grad to become Cravath’s managing partner. Just saying “there’s a 90 percent chance you won’t make it” isn’t enough. That’s where poker comes in. Balancing the debt vs. the odds of future income and putting a dollar amount on that risk can make someone see futility really quickly.

Mandatory Drug And Alcohol Testing

All students planning to attend law school must submit to a substance test. We’re not anti-drug crusaders here. We propose a sliding scale of drug and alcohol abuse. To wit, if a student is planning to attend Yale, they can be shooting heroin with the aplomb of a young Keith Richards and we wouldn’t care. But if the student is eyeing Thomas M. Cooley, they must be as clean as a Quaker. We have to make sure that no one makes a horrible life decision under the influence!

Getting LSAT/GPA Cutoffs Right

There are two primary objections to tightening admission standards:

1. It stifles diversity; and
2. The justice gap requires more lawyers from “lower-tier” schools.

There is, of course, the real risk that tightening standards based on a standardized test and undergraduate grades will only reinforce pre-existing advantages and make the profession less diverse. But you know what’s a bigger risk? That lower-tier law schools are dangling an unrealistic goal in front of students who can barely afford to pay for it and then wrapping themselves in the noble rhetoric of diversity to dupe the powers-that-be into giving them a pass. Screw those people. We’re not going to fall for that.

The LSAT is a strong predictor of eventual success on the bar exam and undergraduate grades are — assuming the student isn’t from some grade-inflating Ivy — an effective indicator of work ethic and smarts. If a law school is making a habit of admitting students with LSATs in the 140s and grades that would make Blutarsky blush, then they shouldn’t be in the law school business.

Diversity requires seeing through potentially unrepresentative raw numbers to find students who will enrich the educational experience. It doesn’t mean creating an expensive pipe dream factory. As accreditors, Above the Law would impose a hard LSAT/Grades cutoff average. We’re not going to handcuff a school that sees promise in individual students, as long as it demonstrates an overall commitment to admitting students with strong academic indicators.

And we’re also going to tie that average to tuition because we’re definitely not going to handcuff a school willing to take the tuition hit to extend legal education to communities that may underperform on the standard admissions metrics. For instance, UNT Dallas, a school that the ABA scoffs at — or at least decided to scoff at after the NACIQI put them on blast — would receive our provisional endorsement because they’ve coupled their decision to take on more students at risk of failing the bar with a commitment to keep the out-of-pocket costs of these students low.

It’s really simple: if you aren’t Harvard, why are you charging like Harvard? Again, we’ll raise standards generally and then hold schools to charging what their admissions policies demand and accredit them accordingly.

Minimum Bar Passage Requirements

Oh, look! An ABA committee has just now decided that bar passage rates may need to be tighter. No kidding? All it took was a threatened suspension and watching a law school pass only one student to figure this out. The Department of Education can do better than relying on that kind of reactive governance.

We’ll be tossing schools that can’t get their students across the bar exam threshold. These are, ultimately, professional schools and if they can’t get their pups into the profession then they shouldn’t be in business. Once again, we’ll tie this to tuition — if a student is out $10K for a 20 percent bar passage rate, that’s not nearly as bad as being out $250K for a 50 percent bar passage rate. Schools should be rewarded for what they’re showing us on the field — if they’ve taken on middling students and gotten middling passage rates, then that’s to be expected. As long as the students aren’t suffering on the back-end — see the above cutoffs discussion — this is an acceptable outcome.

Administrative Salary Cap

One reason why law school is so expensive is the explosion of administrative positions and salaries. It’s not just that deans are paid huge salaries to forego better opportunities to try and score a sponsor for the new dorm they don’t actually need to build, it’s the proliferation of assistant deans performing wholly unnecessary jobs. Across higher education, the “full-time non-faculty professional” saw the largest percentage expansion. And what does the “Senior Associate Dean of Strategic Thinking” or some nonsense even do? Other than trying to justify massive tuition hikes to themselves, not much. There’s no need to pay someone a premium to reprint their business cards.

We want a salary cap. It works for professional sports, so why not law school?

After conducting an exhaustive study of law school salaries, we will recommend an ample salary cap, relative to full-time faculty expenditures and size of the student body, for senior administrative salaries. Skimp on your dean if you want more bodies walking around with fancy titles, but let’s rein in the out of control spending to get schools back to the basics of providing a quality legal education for a reasonable price.

Instituting An Annual Purge

On one day, every year, all crime in the law school should be legal. Not only is this a good way to work out aggression and student/faculty angst to create a better law school environment, but it creates a treasure trove of potential fact patterns for future crim exams.

My bet’s on Laurence Tribe coming out of this on top — he seems like a cagey competitor.

Three Years?

The third rail of legal education is the “third year” discussion. President Obama suggested a two-year law school and professors started demanding his birth certificate. While it may be rough on academics to excise the useless “Law and…” courses that populate every 3Ls schedule, it’s time to move on.

The predominant argument for the third year is the specious claim that it’s needed to make students “practice ready,” which they are never going to be anyway. Clinical experiences may make students “closer” to practice ready — and we applaud those efforts in a world married to the third year — but with the power to accredit, we would no longer require schools to offer a third year of instruction. This will rob the schools of some revenue to be sure, but it should also invite the necessary streamlining to bring costs down and it’ll minimize the outlay of students who don’t make it.

An often underemployed, but better, argument is that the third year is necessary as a disincentive to the casual student who we don’t want in the profession. It’s a fair concern. But given the success of functional diploma mills in the status quo, it seems the third year isn’t the talisman necessary to keep people out. Let’s reform tuition and the academic qualifications for entry rather than rely on poor potential lawyers to balk at a third year.

Law school is about learning to think like a lawyer and they handle that in about 18 months. Everything else is just profit-taking. Schools willing to go to a two-year model will be seriously considered for accreditation.

Conclusion

There you have it, Education Department honchos! Don’t fret slapping the ABA with a little suspension. Legal education will be in good hands over here at Above the Law. And, hey, maybe when that year is up you might decide we’ve got the better procedure over here.

Stranger things have happened over the last 10 years.

Transcript Reveals Debate Over ABA’s Accrediting Power [Big Law Business]
Federal panel ‘sent a signal’ to ABA about law school loans and accreditation enforcement [ABA Journal]

Earlier: ABA May Be Stripped Of Power To Accredit New Law Schools
ATL Top 50 Law Schools

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

Topics

, , ,