It is no coincidence that the first six months of the Trump 2.0 administration has brought close scrutiny of the work of the American Bar Association [ABA].
Hi Dan, this is fundamentally a good article. You and I often see eye-to-eye on matters of legal education. However, I'm baffled by the attack on the ABA Council in your penultimate paragraph over the issue of whether a score on a standardized test like the LSAT should be required for admission to law school.
As a member of the Council for five years, I was intimately involved in, and an advocate for, removing the LSAT requirement. Surely, you must recall that on two separate occasions during that time period, the Council aggressively attempted to remove the LSAT test requirement, only to be shot down in the "Big ABA" House of Delegates, which objected. We took the position we did as a result of a LOT of learning--about the predictive value of the LSAT for law school success, about what constitutes validity and reliability in standardized tests, and more mind-numbing statistical matters. We hired an outside pspychometrician to educate us on the science of test-taking and to opine on the utility of the LSAT. We gained a great deal of understanding that led to the our near-unanimous (one nay vote) decision to end the standardized test requirement for law school admission.
Whatever else may be wrong with the Council, you impugn a lot of good folks who freely give of their time to the accreditation project when you suggest they are unwilling or unable to learn.
One more rhetorical question: how much is the ABA Section on Legal Education doing to warn students about borrowing too much money, as we scream into the first academic years in two decades without GradPLUS Loans (which law students availed themselves more than any other segment of higher education)? Even in our heightened age of tuition discounting post-Law School Crisis, most students face bills of more than $50,000/year, which is the new limit for federal student loans for professional school. At my dear alma mater, the difference between the sticker cost of attendance and the median discount is $67,000/year, meaning the median students will have to borrow $17k/year from Sallie Mae or one of her peers. At Columbia, almost half the student body receives no tuition discounts and the cost of attendance is over $125,000 a year. I ran some numbers on that last week. That works out to a minimum student loan payment of over $3,000/month, almost $2,000/month of which are for those private student loans, and a total payback over 20 years of over $700,000. Now what if such a student didn't get Biglaw, or burned out, or AI took all the junior associates' jobs, or whatever. Ruined. Beyond question. Ruined. Where is the ABA's guidance on this? Where are the solemn "Be careful how much you borrow" admonitions? I haven't seen any.
This is a great turn of events for private student lenders, who of course have been lobbying Congress to eliminate GradPLUS Loans since at least the failed PROSPER Act in 2016. The CEO of Navient, that's the part of Sallie Mae that is the private lender, had an exuberant earnings call last week with investors, ecstatic that the company's primary competition was eliminated and eager to bundle some new SLABS, or Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities. Naturally turning all those nondischargeable loans into securities and selling them to third party investors means the private lenders won't be doing any more due diligence than, say, Countrywide Mortgage before the Great Recession, if even that much. And in fact, because they are securities, it means occasionally they are rated on Wall Street. I came across such a set of ratings by S&P, dating way back to January of 2004, when no law school even charged $35,000/year in tuition and law students could borrow $18,500/year in federal student loans. Wouldn't you know it? Private law school loans had some of the highest predicted default rates in all of higher education, led by Access Group's at 12%, or 1 in 8 borrowers. God only knows what it will be like in the future, with students having to borrow vastly more in private student loans into a job market that features, in real dollars, lower salaries.
Again, where is the ABA Section in all this, if they work to protect students, as is averred in the column?
I hate the Trump admin's bad-faith attacks on higher education, including those levelled against law schools. At the same time... I mean the ABA Section on Legal Education is objectively horrible. It gets itself in existential hot water at least once a decade. In the 90s it was that 'law schools must pay their professors above X' accreditation standard that wound up in a consent decree with Justice. In the 00s it was violating that consent decree. In the 10s it was their abject indifference to the "Law School Crisis," which culminated in NACIQI recommending the Department of Education yank their accreditation powers in 2016. And now it is falling afoul of Trump for using one of Chris Rufo's forbidden words. In between we have their unspoken acquiescence to law schools offering a plethora of worthless master's degrees to make up the lost revenue from JD programs post-Law School Crisis.
Let's be real: that is a uniquely terrible track record among non-profit accreditors of primarily non-profit graduate schools. It is an outlier much more in line with the ignominious likes of ACICS than with its putative professional school peers like the Liaison Committee on Medical Education.
"As I and others have written, the Section does important work in protecting the interests of law students "
Sorry, what work is that? It only stopped allowing law schools to claim "98% employed at graduation at $160k median starting salary!!!" based on 3% of their graduates when Senators Boxer and Grassley began to threaten a Senate investigation. It did NOTHING to clamp down on skyrocketing law school tuition, which has massively outpaced undergraduate tuition since the 1980s. As NACIQI noted in the transcript of their infamous 2016 meeting with the ABA Section on Legal Education, it did nothing about the Law School Crisis. When it agreed to third party audits of ABA Form 509s after that NACIQI meeting, the first round of audits failed 5 out of 10 randomly selected law schools and that was the last time the Section ever had third party audits. It still does not require law schools to provide information on graduate salaries or the percentage enrolled in income-based repayment plans for partial economic hardships (a 2021 Wall Street Journal estimate basically concluded 2 in 3 recent grads were likely on those plans). It remains content to let the shadowy NALP claim "record" law grad salaries - salaries that are only record if you don't adjust for inflation. If you do, the Class of 2024 isn't even in the top third of median salaries over the last 25 years. And on, and on, and on.
"The requirement of a “valid and reliable” admission test, for example, is out of whack with the pattern of regulation in other professional settings and, moreover, there has been precious little truly exemplary work done by the Council to interrogate either the fundamental question of what value a particular privileged test, such as the LSAT, provides to access and opportunity for prospective students or to the learning culture of the law school."
I would be more tempted to agree with this if we didn't have years of empirical data in the 2010s showing dozens of law schools with 1) plummeting LSAT scores 2) steady uGPA scores, and 3) crashing bar pass rates starting three years after those LSAT scores started dropping. But we do have that data, and more to the point, without those test scores we wouldn't have known that law schools were lowering their admissions standards to keep enough revenue, I mean students, flowing through their doors. Suffolk is a great example of this phenomenon: in the mid 2010s their median LSAT dropped from 156 to 146, with concurrent drops in their 25th and 75th percentile scores, while their uGPA splits moved by maybe 0.02. Sure enough, three years later their bar pass rate went from ~85% to 60% or so. This happened all over the country at sundry desperate law schools. Never mind that Suffolk was only placing 1 in 3 grads in the legal profession in the first place and had no business maintaining its student body size.
Speaking of bar passage rates, there's an accreditation standard for that. It came online in what, 2019? 2020? At least a dozen law schools have failed it, including a few that have failed it every single year. NONE have been punished in any way for it, unless you count open-ended multi-year extensions "punishments." This is in the same vein that no law school has ever been punished for violating accreditation standards 501(b) to only admit students who appear capable of passing a bar exam, or 509 you must be truthful in your marketing. We literally had law review articles in the early 2010s worrying about law deans falling afoul of wire fraud or the FTC, not to mention a dozen plus lawsuits, so brazen were their misrepresentations about employment rates and salaries, and nary a law school ever punished. Hell, my own dear alma mater's claimed median starting salary nine months after graduation for my graduating year is, after adjusting for inflation, more than 50% higher than the College Scorecard's median salary for grads of my law school FIVE YEARS after graduation - and that figure is sourced right from the tax returns of everyone who borrowed federal student loans.
As for the "big" ABA caring about the profession, I seem to recall reading that the formation of the ABA was tied up in the same "Oh no the ethnics and girls are coming into the profession!" hysteria that drove Langdell to remake law schools as pseudoscientific finishing schools for wealthy young men, with all actual professional training to be done by genteel law firms. The ABA was in there, cheek to jowl with the Langdells, working to keep out the Catholics and immigrants and Blacks and women who were largely taught black-letter law from so-called "correspondence law schools" from, ahem, sullying their noble profession. 150 years later, we still live in their system.
tl;dr: The Trump admin's attacks against the ABA and Section on Legal Education are monstrous and stupid and predicated on antebellum notions of race and intelligence. Also: the ABA and Section on Legal Education are objectively horrible for law students.
Hi Dan, this is fundamentally a good article. You and I often see eye-to-eye on matters of legal education. However, I'm baffled by the attack on the ABA Council in your penultimate paragraph over the issue of whether a score on a standardized test like the LSAT should be required for admission to law school.
As a member of the Council for five years, I was intimately involved in, and an advocate for, removing the LSAT requirement. Surely, you must recall that on two separate occasions during that time period, the Council aggressively attempted to remove the LSAT test requirement, only to be shot down in the "Big ABA" House of Delegates, which objected. We took the position we did as a result of a LOT of learning--about the predictive value of the LSAT for law school success, about what constitutes validity and reliability in standardized tests, and more mind-numbing statistical matters. We hired an outside pspychometrician to educate us on the science of test-taking and to opine on the utility of the LSAT. We gained a great deal of understanding that led to the our near-unanimous (one nay vote) decision to end the standardized test requirement for law school admission.
Whatever else may be wrong with the Council, you impugn a lot of good folks who freely give of their time to the accreditation project when you suggest they are unwilling or unable to learn.
One more rhetorical question: how much is the ABA Section on Legal Education doing to warn students about borrowing too much money, as we scream into the first academic years in two decades without GradPLUS Loans (which law students availed themselves more than any other segment of higher education)? Even in our heightened age of tuition discounting post-Law School Crisis, most students face bills of more than $50,000/year, which is the new limit for federal student loans for professional school. At my dear alma mater, the difference between the sticker cost of attendance and the median discount is $67,000/year, meaning the median students will have to borrow $17k/year from Sallie Mae or one of her peers. At Columbia, almost half the student body receives no tuition discounts and the cost of attendance is over $125,000 a year. I ran some numbers on that last week. That works out to a minimum student loan payment of over $3,000/month, almost $2,000/month of which are for those private student loans, and a total payback over 20 years of over $700,000. Now what if such a student didn't get Biglaw, or burned out, or AI took all the junior associates' jobs, or whatever. Ruined. Beyond question. Ruined. Where is the ABA's guidance on this? Where are the solemn "Be careful how much you borrow" admonitions? I haven't seen any.
This is a great turn of events for private student lenders, who of course have been lobbying Congress to eliminate GradPLUS Loans since at least the failed PROSPER Act in 2016. The CEO of Navient, that's the part of Sallie Mae that is the private lender, had an exuberant earnings call last week with investors, ecstatic that the company's primary competition was eliminated and eager to bundle some new SLABS, or Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities. Naturally turning all those nondischargeable loans into securities and selling them to third party investors means the private lenders won't be doing any more due diligence than, say, Countrywide Mortgage before the Great Recession, if even that much. And in fact, because they are securities, it means occasionally they are rated on Wall Street. I came across such a set of ratings by S&P, dating way back to January of 2004, when no law school even charged $35,000/year in tuition and law students could borrow $18,500/year in federal student loans. Wouldn't you know it? Private law school loans had some of the highest predicted default rates in all of higher education, led by Access Group's at 12%, or 1 in 8 borrowers. God only knows what it will be like in the future, with students having to borrow vastly more in private student loans into a job market that features, in real dollars, lower salaries.
Again, where is the ABA Section in all this, if they work to protect students, as is averred in the column?
I hate the Trump admin's bad-faith attacks on higher education, including those levelled against law schools. At the same time... I mean the ABA Section on Legal Education is objectively horrible. It gets itself in existential hot water at least once a decade. In the 90s it was that 'law schools must pay their professors above X' accreditation standard that wound up in a consent decree with Justice. In the 00s it was violating that consent decree. In the 10s it was their abject indifference to the "Law School Crisis," which culminated in NACIQI recommending the Department of Education yank their accreditation powers in 2016. And now it is falling afoul of Trump for using one of Chris Rufo's forbidden words. In between we have their unspoken acquiescence to law schools offering a plethora of worthless master's degrees to make up the lost revenue from JD programs post-Law School Crisis.
Let's be real: that is a uniquely terrible track record among non-profit accreditors of primarily non-profit graduate schools. It is an outlier much more in line with the ignominious likes of ACICS than with its putative professional school peers like the Liaison Committee on Medical Education.
"As I and others have written, the Section does important work in protecting the interests of law students "
Sorry, what work is that? It only stopped allowing law schools to claim "98% employed at graduation at $160k median starting salary!!!" based on 3% of their graduates when Senators Boxer and Grassley began to threaten a Senate investigation. It did NOTHING to clamp down on skyrocketing law school tuition, which has massively outpaced undergraduate tuition since the 1980s. As NACIQI noted in the transcript of their infamous 2016 meeting with the ABA Section on Legal Education, it did nothing about the Law School Crisis. When it agreed to third party audits of ABA Form 509s after that NACIQI meeting, the first round of audits failed 5 out of 10 randomly selected law schools and that was the last time the Section ever had third party audits. It still does not require law schools to provide information on graduate salaries or the percentage enrolled in income-based repayment plans for partial economic hardships (a 2021 Wall Street Journal estimate basically concluded 2 in 3 recent grads were likely on those plans). It remains content to let the shadowy NALP claim "record" law grad salaries - salaries that are only record if you don't adjust for inflation. If you do, the Class of 2024 isn't even in the top third of median salaries over the last 25 years. And on, and on, and on.
"The requirement of a “valid and reliable” admission test, for example, is out of whack with the pattern of regulation in other professional settings and, moreover, there has been precious little truly exemplary work done by the Council to interrogate either the fundamental question of what value a particular privileged test, such as the LSAT, provides to access and opportunity for prospective students or to the learning culture of the law school."
I would be more tempted to agree with this if we didn't have years of empirical data in the 2010s showing dozens of law schools with 1) plummeting LSAT scores 2) steady uGPA scores, and 3) crashing bar pass rates starting three years after those LSAT scores started dropping. But we do have that data, and more to the point, without those test scores we wouldn't have known that law schools were lowering their admissions standards to keep enough revenue, I mean students, flowing through their doors. Suffolk is a great example of this phenomenon: in the mid 2010s their median LSAT dropped from 156 to 146, with concurrent drops in their 25th and 75th percentile scores, while their uGPA splits moved by maybe 0.02. Sure enough, three years later their bar pass rate went from ~85% to 60% or so. This happened all over the country at sundry desperate law schools. Never mind that Suffolk was only placing 1 in 3 grads in the legal profession in the first place and had no business maintaining its student body size.
Speaking of bar passage rates, there's an accreditation standard for that. It came online in what, 2019? 2020? At least a dozen law schools have failed it, including a few that have failed it every single year. NONE have been punished in any way for it, unless you count open-ended multi-year extensions "punishments." This is in the same vein that no law school has ever been punished for violating accreditation standards 501(b) to only admit students who appear capable of passing a bar exam, or 509 you must be truthful in your marketing. We literally had law review articles in the early 2010s worrying about law deans falling afoul of wire fraud or the FTC, not to mention a dozen plus lawsuits, so brazen were their misrepresentations about employment rates and salaries, and nary a law school ever punished. Hell, my own dear alma mater's claimed median starting salary nine months after graduation for my graduating year is, after adjusting for inflation, more than 50% higher than the College Scorecard's median salary for grads of my law school FIVE YEARS after graduation - and that figure is sourced right from the tax returns of everyone who borrowed federal student loans.
As for the "big" ABA caring about the profession, I seem to recall reading that the formation of the ABA was tied up in the same "Oh no the ethnics and girls are coming into the profession!" hysteria that drove Langdell to remake law schools as pseudoscientific finishing schools for wealthy young men, with all actual professional training to be done by genteel law firms. The ABA was in there, cheek to jowl with the Langdells, working to keep out the Catholics and immigrants and Blacks and women who were largely taught black-letter law from so-called "correspondence law schools" from, ahem, sullying their noble profession. 150 years later, we still live in their system.
tl;dr: The Trump admin's attacks against the ABA and Section on Legal Education are monstrous and stupid and predicated on antebellum notions of race and intelligence. Also: the ABA and Section on Legal Education are objectively horrible for law students.