The American Bar Association committee that is reviewing accreditation standards for law schools has recommended the most sweeping updates so far in the jobs-related information that schools would be required to report, along with stricter penalties for those that fudge data.
The recommendations, which will go before the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar in March, would require law schools to report the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile salary figures that graduates earn. Salary lists would include 15 categories of employment, including big law firms, solo practice, academic, or public-interest positions.
Critics have charged that the data law schools have reported in the past are vague and misleading, and give prospective students an unrealistic idea of their chances of finding jobs that will allow them to pay off their debts.
The new proposal says published data “shall be complete, accurate, and not misleading to a reasonable law-school student or applicant.”
One of the biggest changes between this and an earlier proposal by an ABA committee is the requirement that individual law schools publicly report salary data. By contrast, a committee that was reviewing the questionnaire the ABA sends to law schools called last month for more detailed information, but it would have published salary data only by state. (Under the earlier proposal, schools would have reported the three states where the largest number of their graduates ended up working, and the ABA would have reported salary statistics for those states.)
“It will be very useful for students to be able to compare how graduates of different schools fare,” said David N. Yellen, dean of Loyola University Chicago School of Law and a member of the standards review committee. “Until now, there has been no way for them to do that.”
The revised standards would also require schools to share retention data on conditional scholarships with recipients, as well as the public.
Jeffrey E. Lewis, dean emeritus of Saint Louis University School of Law and chair of the standards review committee, said that if the recommendations are approved, schools that violated accreditation standards would no longer be automatically let off the hook if they cleaned up their act.
“The council now has the authority, if a school has an egregious string of violations, including publishing misleading employment data, to put that school on probation, where it doesn’t under current standards,” he said.
Kyle McEntee, who heads a watchdog group called Law School Transparency that has faulted schools for not reporting enough data, said the proposed changes would “make it far more difficult for law schools to actively mislead people.”
