Earlier today, we highlighted the law schools with the best bar passage rates for 2023. While the top law schools like to believe that they are the best suited to turn out graduates ready to excel on the profession’s favored hazing ritual test of minimum competence, it turns out that it’s not a perfect overlap. But top law school graduates do, on balance, overperform on the exam.
Which law schools have underperformed when it comes to bar passage? You’ll never… okay, you can absolutely guess.
Per the ABA Journal:
Western Michigan University’s Thomas M. Cooley Law School had the lowest two-year bar passage rate for 2021 graduates among ABA-accredited law schools, according to data released Monday by the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.
Cooley’s two-year bar passage rate for 2021 law grads was 55.87%, according to data… on the ultimate two-year bar passage rate.
As the for-profit InfiLaw schools faded from the scene — though not without a fight — Thomas M. Cooley Law School has reasserted itself as the poster child of disappointing law schools. There may be schools that have it worse, but no school combines the struggle to meet ABA standards with a public relations team shameless enough to release its own law school rankings placing itself second only to Harvard.
It’s a particularly sad state of affairs because the school has, in the past, produced distinguished alums like former Trump fixer and AI reasearch expert Michael Cohen or Stanley Cup winning coach Jon Cooper… as well as a lot of people who actually practice law. But the years haven’t been kind to the school as its reputation has faltered and students have suffered.
A two-year rate below 75% runs afoul of ABA accreditation standards. Cooley had already sought an extension to try to dispute the last time the school failed to meet this threshold. At a certain point, the numbers don’t lie.
At least Cooley isn’t alone. The University of the District of Columbia Law fared only slightly better with a 57.14% passage rate. Two Puerto Rico-based schools — Pontifical Catholic and Inter-American University of Puerto Rico — came in at 63.33% and 65.84%, respectively. Western State College of Law, the only for-profit law school left (after Charleston converts its status), scored 68.42%. Southern University Law Center barely missed the 75% cut with 72.15%.
The bar exam is, make no mistake, a terrible institution. It routinely blocks qualified applicants from access to the profession while shuffling through all the lawyers that routinely grace disciplinary hearings. That said, the test is not worthless as an aggregate predictor of minimum competence. When almost half of a school’s graduates aren’t passing over the course of a couple years, it does say something about the school’s ability to recruit and then train attorneys.
As a profession we should junk the independent bar exam and get a lot more serious about making sure anyone graduating with a law degree from an accredited school is competent to practice based upon three years of iterative testing on a practice-ready curriculum.
Until that day, students suffer. They’re the ones forking over tons of tuition to be handed a professional degree that not only doesn’t guarantee them access to the profession, but may well stunt their chances of ever getting access to a license. Accreditation is what needs to tighten up and that can’t happen while schools pawn off responsibility to bar exams.
But I digress. For now, Cooley is yet again at the bottom of the heap. Its students deserve better and its alumni definitely deserve better to the extent this reflects on their degrees.
New Bar Passage Stats Show Several Law Schools Below ABA Cutoff [ABA Journal]
Joe Patrice is a senior 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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.