Utah Dean Adler: 100% Bar Passage/100% Professional Employment And The Value Of Aspiration

Following up on my previous post, Utah Law School Celebrates Opening Of New Building With Audacious Goal: 100% Bar Passage, 100% Professional Employment:  Robert W. Adler (Dean, Utah), 100/100 and the Value of Aspiration:

At the dedication of the new home for the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, I announced our new 100/100 Initiative, which establishes a firm goal of attaining 100% first-time bar passage and 100% full-time professional employment for our new graduates as quickly as possible. ...

I fully expected mixed reactions to my announcement of the 100/100 Initiative, from praise to some serious skepticism. In his otherwise positive blog post, Professor Paul Caron referred to the 100/100 goals as “audacious.” I agree. They are bold, and intentionally so. We care about every one of our students, and we want every one of them to succeed.

Just as important, our goals are backed up by very concrete steps we will take to meet them as quickly and as aggressively as possible. For bar passage rates, those measures include better academic support to our second and third-year students; increased and enhanced formative assessments during core bar exam courses; and better predictive modeling of those students who face a higher risk of not passing the bar exam. For employment, they include more one-on-one mentoring; improved student-alumni networking; exploratory incubator programs; and rural job placement programs.

I am quite serious about our intent to meet these goals.  And if we fail to meet the 100/100 goals, we will add and modify strategies with the intent of getting closer and closer. Every year. As aspirational goals, they prompt us to do better than we are now, and better than we would have otherwise.  Thus, even as goals, they will serve a very useful purpose.  In my CWA article, I labeled this phenomenon “aspiration as asymptote.” The goals prod us to get closer and closer, even if we never quite reach the end.