50% Of Law Schools Selected For Random ABA Audit Flunked Placement Data Documentation

Inside Higher Ed, Law Schools Flagged for Job Data:

The first audits of the employment data that law schools report about their recent graduates have generated concern among watchdogs, with a series of reviews finding several deficiencies that raise questions about the class of 2015’s reported outcomes.

Most notably, a review of 10 randomly selected schools found that half had missed a compliance benchmark for the documentation they are supposed to keep on file when reporting key metrics like whether their students are employed 10 months after graduation and whether they are working in a position that required them to pass the bar. Schools were flagged for not being able to show documentation to support important parts of reported employment data, or if investigators found evidence key pieces of employment data were incomplete, inaccurate or misleading. Other reviews found issues at a substantially smaller percentage of schools related to handling documentation or posting required information online.

The audits, performed at the behest of the arm of the American Bar Association that accredits law schools, are not final. ABA leaders say they do not have a hard timeline for when the reviews will be completed, but indicated that the issues uncovered tend to be clerical in nature and were not instances of "gross misreporting" or "attempts to manipulate." ...

The initial audit results were delivered in an Aug. 5 memorandum to the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, the ABA’s accrediting arm. The memo, from Deputy Managing Director Bill Adams, said that contractor Berkeley Research Group conducted three types of initial reviews: a website compliance review, a random school review and a random graduate review. ...

The issues identified tend to be small things like which boxes to check on forms or where to store information, according to Barry A. Currier, managing director for accreditation and legal education at the ABA. “If the underlying information turns out to have been accurate, which is what we are finding, that’s good news,” Currier said in an interview. “Then, getting them to do the paperwork in exactly the right way is our major concern, and we’re just checking and doing some education.” ...

The ABA audit’s initial findings drew interest from law school observers — and differing levels of concern. The website violations are a significant concern, said Kyle McEntee, the executive director of Law School Transparency. ... 

Disgruntled bloggers were critical as well. The blog Outside the Law School Scam labeled the audit results shocking and called for an expansion of the number of schools audited. “Otherwise, we will be left to wonder whether a school's employment survey results are really just lies in highly granular form, a whole bunch of numbers that represent not actual jobs for recent grads so much as a school's success in hoodwinking the ABA and its prospective students,” it said.

It is difficult to measure the significance of the audit findings without more context, said Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values there. Institutions failing the audits because they are not familiar with reporting requirements would be different from institutions failing because they are trying to conceal poor employment outcomes for their graduates, he said.

The audit results could have been better for a law school sector that has gotten a bad reputation in recent years, Leiter said. But the ABA has improved reporting requirements. Now it is time to follow through and make sure schools are adhering to them, he said. “You would have liked to have seen a very high rate of compliance,” he said. “We didn’t get that.”