Drop-out rate at unaccredited California law schools

Nearly 9 in 10 students drop out of unaccredited law schools in California - LA Times

 

I am ALL about nontraditional schools--I used to be a big fan of California's unaccredited schools (some of them) before accreditation became so much more available. And I truly like the idea of nontraditional routes to the legal profession. But there is also a consumer protection issue here. I wish DL law schools could go through the CalBar accreditation process, and that the state would require it of all of its law schools.

 

Maybe it's nature's way of exuding a little population control. Don't we already have enough lawyers? If lawyers were deer, people would be allowed to hunt all year long just to thin the herd. :AR15firing:

 

I respect and appreciate everyone's opinion. I especially like Pug's post of thinning out the herd lol. The article shows how someone, with probably no aptitude for learning the law, took his chances and now feels like he's been mistreated. I have mixed emotions about this. While attending NWCU I saw the attrition rates and felt that it was a dream that many would not attain. But at least it gave them a chance and to see what online law study is all about. The pilot was a good example of someone that had the necessary downtime from work and could put in the amount of study time, over and above, that is necessary to be successful. Myself, while operating a business, could study more in slow times and less in busier times and still maintain the 2 1/2 hrs. per day average. However, and I know this now, I didn't prepare enough for the Baby Bar. I still came close nonetheless, but at the time didn't know what I didn't know. The bottom line is you're basically on your own. It's up to you to put in the time and effort with no one watching to make sure it's done. Of course, with some, it doesn't matter how much you study. If you can't understand and retain and regurgitate the material, then it's a lost cause. So don't go crying to the press and say what an injustice it was that befell you. You, as an adult, made the decision to try and study law by distance-online. There are other avenues available. And if you've read my previous posts (this is to anyone reading this) you've seen that I usually always recommend part-time law school locally if at all possible.

So if you want to make sure that only those that are capable of law study, actually become students of the law, ABA accredited or not, make everybody take the LSAT. Just don't take away the option of affordable online distance law study.

 

I'm not sure the LSAT would accomplish that. It is supposed to be a predictor of a student's potential for success in law school. But studying the law alone--which is what either reading the law or studying by correspondence is all about--is a different animal. I don't think the LSAT is at all geared towards predicting success in a process so completely removed from the traditional law school experience.

I also don't support leaving this up to the applicant. Although these are the consumers of the product, they are the least capable to judge the efficacy of the process. That's why we have airplane inspectors, accrediting agencies, food inspectors, and a host of other roles designed to protect the generally unaware public.

 

I see your point and agree with you. I'm just not so sure that the CalBar and/or the ABA would be far enough removed to be objective regarding unaccredited law schools. And there's the rub. I agree there should be a vetting process but if it gives the same power to the ABA that they already have on all the other law schools then they'll chip away until there are no distance law schools. And since there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the oversight by the California Committee of Bar Examiners, what consumer protection agency would have the knowledge and experience to come forward to oversee?

 

Has anyone have a successful law career (attorney) with a JD from Non-ABA accredited school? I think these schools are weak for graduates to sell their legal services.

 

If you pass the bar you are eligible to work as a lawyer. You can start a law firm the day after passing the bar. There's no guarantee that anyone will ever hire you but you can do it, nonetheless.

The first person on Concord Law's Alumni news website is probably a good example of a person who clearly benefited from this. This woman started working at a law firm as a receptionist, graduated from Concord, passed the bar and is now employed at the same firm as an attorney. It's a small firm with five partners and three associates. But I'm sure she's doing better than she was a receptionist and she's undoubtedly employed as a lawyer (NOTE: all of the partners at the firm graduated from ABA accredited schools).

People like this make me support these schools even when they have crappy graduation and pass rates. My mother did basically the same thing as this woman (except she was employed as a paralegal before she went to law school). Had she not lived in NYC she would not have had such access to such a large number of law schools and she likely would still be working as a paralegal. She, too, was promoted to associate at a small workers comp firm (she's now "of counsel").

So there are people who do benefit from graduating from poorly ranked (or unranked) and even unaccredited law programs. For a lot of these people success is relative. Making $60k a year as an associate at a tiny firm is a much better life than making $30k as a receptionist (if you're lucky). New York, incidentally, allows you to take the bar if you graduate from an unaccredited program. The problem is that they specifically exclude any form of online study. So, I'd be curious what would happen if a graduate of the pilot ABA accredited hybrid JD program were to sit for the exam in New York. It wouldn't be the first time that New York set conditions that excluded certain ABA graduates from taking the bar (we discussed a few months ago the completion time requirement that New York has which excludes some part-time programs from bar eligibility despite being ABA accredited).

It's hard to justify some of these rules as anything other than a failing attempt to preserve wages by creating barriers to entry.

 

Except that's not what's happening, at least with admissions. Law schools are admitting and producing far more attorneys than the market has jobs for. It's a nationwide dilemma. Law schools--except at the very top--are hardly creating barriers. They're instead retrenching madly to cope with a reduction in applications as college graduates have (finally) caught on.

Given the fluctuations in what it takes to get a passing bar exam score, I suspect that's what's being used to limit the influx of attorneys, making the prospects of law school graduates even dimmer.

Working as a paralegal in a law firm and going to school at night (or, as in the example above, by correspondence) seems a good way to go, especially for those who cannot get into the most elite schools. Better to earn some cash and credibility and take an extra year (4 part-time instead of 3 full-time). But....that still doesn't fully justify going to an unaccredited law school. After all, even if one's current employer is cool with it, that doesn't mean future (potential) employers will be so open-minded.

Being in private practice reduces this--most customers won't know the difference between accredited, state-accredited, and ABA-accredited schools. But there's a word for many attorneys who are in private practice: poor.

The real problem here is imperfect information and information transfer to law school prospects. That's why consumer protections are necessary. But that's not unique to law schools; graduate schools in many disciplines graduate far more PhDs than there are academic jobs for. And even if you tell prospective students, there's a lot of denial going about it. It's kind of like show business. If you want to find a screenwriter in Hollywood, go have lunch. He'll be the one who serves it. (He's probably got a law degree, too. Or a PhD.)

 

I know, Rich, that's why I said the attempt was failing. Most of these guidelines, at least in New York, are fairly old. These aren't new regulations trying to stop the hemorrhage. These were guidelines that prevented non-NY trained lawyers from practicing in NY. Graduates of ABA programs in other states weren't eligible to take the bar exam.

Nowadays, as has been pointed out in another thread, there are very few part-time programs that fit the criteria for exclusion in NY. This was not always the case. Weekend programs were once much more common. There were even weekend programs in NY at ABA accredited schools but graduation from these programs, with the same JD as your full-time counterparts, was useless for practicing law in New York.

Agreed.

One shouldn't need "justification" as this should be a consumer decision. If the degree qualifies you to take the bar exam, that's really the first question that needs to be asked. No qualification = no go. But if the credential does qualify you to take the bar exam it should be an option on the table. The unaccredited (in every sense) and NA California approved schools are one world. But on the opposite coast, the RA (and non-ABA) MSLAW is another extreme of where a law school can be. You're talking about schools which, in many cases, can allow a person to access a legal education with a credential that immediately qualifies them to take the bar exam in their state (and be admitted on motion to surrounding states).

The bar admission component is simply too large to ignore. A lawyer who read the law and passed the bar can practice law while the Harvard Law graduate who didn't pass the bar cannot. Employer perceptions aside, that bar admission is a big consideration.

New York also allows foreign attorneys to be admitted to the bar, sometimes without an LLM, those attorneys are in a similar place. They, too, lack an ABA accredited JD. And there are a considerable number of ABA grads who are un-(or under)employed. And there are non-ABA and foreign trained lawyers who are gainfully employed.

From what I hear in legal hiring circles, lawyers tend to either be incredibly loyal to their alma mater or otherwise open. A lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law may decide that he is only hiring lawyers from Harvard law. But to assume that a lawyer is sitting around basically open to all ABA schools but drawing the line at a non-ABA school is a weird assumption to make. Could it limit your employment prospects? Sure. Will it? There are entirely too many variables (such as practice area, geographic location, the specific skills of the individual etc) to make a statement either way.

Nor should a consumer necessarily care about these things. I care about discipline records and positive references from people I trust when I hire a lawyer. I couldn't possibly care less where they attended law school. And considering New York and California have, arguably, the two most difficult to pass bar exams in the country it's silly to think that a licensed attorney in either of these states is ill-prepared for a legal career just because their law school wasn't ABA accredited.

I agree with you on the problem but not on the solution. Both lawyers and PhDs require a fair amount of research skill, wouldn't you say?

Getting blindsided by a crappy job market in 1981 might have made some sense. But today if you can't do a simple google search to find out that the hiring market for attorneys is crap, degrees from any law school below the first tier generally don't land you anything better than a public defender job and that there are more academics than tenure track teaching positions I really strongly question how effective that person is going to be in those professions even if you secured a job for them.

I mean, there is simply too much information out there to say that the problem is that students "just didn't know" or to think that presenting crappy statistics to those students is going to make them make an informed decision. It's like the posting the larger warnings (or the graphic warnings) on cigarettes. People still smoke. They smoke knowing it is bad for them. They smoke even when smoking eats away at their discretionary income. People who want to smoke are going to smoke.

Likewise, people who want to earn a PhD in Silent Film are going to earn a PhD in Silent Film. Crappy job statistics will not phase them. Maybe they're in denial. Maybe they're arrogant. Maybe, and this is perhaps more likely, they just don't think too far into the future. Acting like consumer protections are going to save that student from him or herself is akin to outlawing suicide. If you're going to take your own life, the threat of imprisonment is not going to stop you.

 

Well, I guess that all depends on what you mean by doing better. I know several law firms where the receptionists and paralegals make far more money than the associates. The logic is that that the receptionists and paralegals add more value to the final product and are more likely to stay with the firm while the associates are likely to leave after 1-2 years.

Really, being a law firm associate is like being on a baseball farm team. If you have it you will move up to the majors and if you don't you wont. Since most wont, the salaries reflect that.

 

So you're saying that you think it's entirely likely that she took a massive pay cut for working at the same firm?

Or that the partners of the firm slashed her salary because they figure she'll move on after 1-2 years despite having worked for them for years at that point?

Yes, it's also possible that she's generally unhappy, is addicted to painkillers and has a horrendous diet that is causing her a multitude of health problems. So, maybe she isn't "doing better" at all by many other measures.

Let's be reasonable here. The woman is featured on the Concord Law website as touting her legal education for having improved her career. Trying to diminish what was obviously an achievement with irrelevant anecdotes while ignoring the woman's own statements is revisionist, at best.

 

I have a friend who graduated from the U of LaVerne law school in the LA area, at a time when it wasn't ABA accredited. He ended up making partner in an LA-area firm and retiring before the age of 50 to a veritable mansion. Big money. That said, he was a special case: he spent a decade working his way up through the ranks of a police department in an LA suburb, and decided to go to law school rather than accepting a position as Chief of Police in his LA-area suburb. He graduated valedictorian from LaVerne, so that certainly helped breaking into the practice of law. I'm a lawyer also who went to a top-quartile law school, and his legal career kicks my legal career's butt.

So it can happen, a person from an unorthodox academic background making it Big Time, but there usually has to be some sort of special circumstances present.

 

Yes, let's be reasonable. The question isn't whether she herself is doing better the question raised by my post is whether she is a representative sample. Of course, she is a representative sample if the general population is one because any other anecdotes besides hers is "irrelevant".

But back in the real world 9/10 people are not making it. Right now, with a glut of lawyers law firms can skim the cream of the crop and leave the rest fight over nothing. A single unicorn--a person whose life situation is non-repeatable--doesn't disprove the point.

 

I think that you would find that a small law firm would rather promote a long time paralegal to associate than skim the "cream of the crop." Just because you graduate from law school doesn't mean that you have an immediate use to that firm. Someone who has worked as a paralegal at the same firm for, say, 10+ years, however can immediately get to work and the partners already know that person, their work ethic, the quality of their work etc.

Success is relative. A $35k per year job as a public defender is a tragedy if you have a quarter million dollars in student loan debt. If, however, you graduated with very little (or no) debt and are doing what you want to do then that job is a dream come true. The same can be said of a $60k non-partner track job or virtually any job, for that matter.

The real problems come into play when you are saddled with an enormous birthweight of student loan debt before you land your first job interview. But none of that means that the ABA should be the final arbiter of what constitutes quality legal education.