Cooley Law School and the collapse of standards in American legal education Pt. 2

Yesterday I outlined how Cooley Law School became the largest in the nation by having significantly lower admissions standards than any other ABA school, and how this business model began to fail over the past three to four years, when dozens of other schools decided to slash standards so radically that Cooley’s applicant pool declined by 80%.

There’s now a debate between people in and around legal academia regarding what the general collapse in admissions standards to low-ranked ABA law schools — a good number of which have gone to a de facto open admissions policy — portends for future bar passage rates.

This is a debate in the same sense that there’s a debate about climate change, with law school critics taking the view that poor performance on one standardized test (the LSAT) is a predictor of future poor performance on another (the Multi-State Bar Exam), and defenders of the law school status quo taking the view that this isn’t necessarily the case because of reasons.

For example, Cooley’s Dean and President for Life Don LeDuc is calling out nefarious (unnamed) critics for violating the Law School Admissions Council {LSAC} prime directive that the LSAT is not supposed to be used for any purpose except to predict law school performance. To think it can be used for any other purposes, LeDuc writes, is a canard:

Lately, assertions based on at least two false premises have dominated the blogs. The first is that a lower LSAT number in a school’s entering class means that the school’s graduates will be less capable of passing the bar. The second premise is even worse—that a lower LSAT number means that a school’s graduates will be less capable to practice as lawyers and that those below a certain number will be incapable of practicing law.

These assertions are blatantly contrary to limitations on the use of LSAT scores issued by the Law School Admissions Council, which creates and administers the test. In light of the claims now being made about the impact of changes in LSAT scores, let’s see what the LSAC has to say.

Is the use of an LSAT score for any purpose other than law school admissions proper?

Unequivocally, no. The LSAC’s cautionary policies say “[t]he LSAT was designed to serve admissions functions only. It has not been validated for any other purpose.” How much clearer can it be? Using the LSAT to make judgments about the capability of an individual—or a group of individuals like a law school’s entering class—to pass a bar examination is one of the misunderstandings and misuses that the LSAC warns against.

Those asserting that an individual will be unable or unlikely to pass a bar examination because that person’s LSAT score is below a certain level should be held to account. The LSAC has declared that the LSAT has not been validated as a predictor of future bar results. Anyone claiming that there is a relationship between an LSAT score and bar passage should be called to account and required to provide supporting evidence. And the burden should be on the person making the assertion, since the LSAC cautionary policy has already established that the LSAT has not been validated for that purpose.

Where could one find evidence that there is “a relationship” between LSAT scores and bar passage rates? Let’s select a state at random — say, Michigan — and two law schools in that state, for example, the University of Michigan and the Western Michigan Thomas M. Cooley Law School (By the way, shame on Western Michigan University for lending or rather selling its name — and apparently nothing else — to LeDuc’s increasingly egregious grift):

Michigan July Bar Passage Rates:

Univ. of Michigan: 92%

Cooley: 39%

75/50/25 LSAT percentiles for graduating class of 2015:

Michigan: 97th/96th/93rd

Cooley: 48th/26th/17th

But really, there is no point in arguing with, if I may reach for le mot juste, a shameless bullshitter like LeDuc, who is obviously willing to say anything to try to protect his (as of FY2013) $676,000 annual compensation package.

Indeed, rather than paying any attention to LeDuc’s quackery, it’s more profitable to examine Cooley’s own published data, and the institution’s subsequent behavior, in regard to the predictive value of LSAT scores. Back in the day, before meanie bloggers starting harassing it, Cooley actually revealed some inside information about the precise relationship between the LSAT scores of its matriculants and their subsequent academic success. In this context, “academic success” merely meant not flunking out of Cooley, as opposed to passing the bar or getting a job:

Academic Success Rates at Cooley Law School, January 1996-January 2003

LSAT Academic Success

171-180 100%
166-170 100%
161-165 100%
156-160 95%
151-155 90%
146-150 81%
145 79%
144 78%

These numbers reveal several things:

(1) Cooley was well aware that its historical target market — applicants with LSAT scores in the mid to high 140s, i.e., applicants who until about four years ago were unlikely to be admitted to any other ABA school — were people whose scores indicated they were hovering very near a border, beyond which it would become likely that an applicant would be unable to do what even at Cooley would qualify as passing work, let alone subsequently pass a bar exam.

(2) As a consequence, Cooley, which was otherwise willing to do just about anything to become by far the largest law school in the country, maintained a policy of rarely dipping below 144 in the applicant pool, even though every year tens of thousands of LSAT takers receive scores below that mark.

(3) By more or less holding the line at a 144 LSAT, flunking out about 15% of its students, turning law school into a three-year bar review course, and taking advantage of the ABA’s very lax bar passage accreditation requirements, Cooley managed to boldly go where no law school had gone before in regard to harvesting the shallow end of the applicant pool.

In other words, Cooley itself has been well aware for decades that LSAT scores are good predictors of law school performance, which in turn is an excellent predictor of risk of bar passage failure. Even back when it was expanding at warp speed, Cooley wasn’t willing to go below the mid-140s in regard to applicant qualifications, because it knew from decades of experience that this standard, such as it was, demarcated the border between moderate risk of academic failure or subsequent bar failure, and unacceptably high risk, despite the lassitude of an ABA regulatory process largely captured by low-ranked law schools.

But now, with many other law schools rocketing downward far below the 150 LSAT range in their desperation to keep the tuition dollars flowing, Cooley has thrown in the towel. This year’s entering class had a median LSAT score of 141, meaning that a large majority of the class is made up of people Cooley wouldn’t have been willing to admit even four years ago, because of the school’s well-founded belief that at some point it becomes too difficult to flog potential matriculants past academic and regulatory finish lines.

The three to four year lag time between law school admission pools and eventual bar passage rates means that we’ve only begun to see the carnage from this development, but even so, bar passage rates are already falling almost everywhere. And it’s going to get a lot worse, unless the ABA regulatory apparatus can be convinced that it’s simply “unfair” not to give people who can’t score above the 20th percentile on the LSAT a chance to practice law on an unsuspecting public. Given past history, I wouldn’t be surprised if that argument eventually wins the day.