Will Denying Admission To Students With 'At-Risk' LSAT Scores Keep Minorities, Poor From Becoming Lawyers?

Following up on Wednesday's post, LSAC, LST Debate The Use Of LSAT Scores As A Bar Passage Predictor:

Sheldon Bernard Lyke (Whittier), Adding Clarity to Law School Transparency:

Lower tiered law schools that admit students with low LSAT scores should be celebrated for providing an opportunity to enter the legal profession for those students at the margins of society. Unfortunately, their work has lately been characterized as predatory in popular media like The Atlantic and the NYT. With its 2015 State of Legal Education report, Law School Transparency (LST) has instigated a dangerous national discourse, arguing that some ABA-accredited law schools have been engaged in a process of admitting students with low LSAT scores (which the LST labels “high risk”) who do not have a reasonable chance of passing the bar. LST’s framing of these law school’s actions is disturbing given that: (1) the LSAT is at best a weak predictor of first-time bar passage, and (2) there is no evidence that law school graduates are not eventually passing the bar.

As a sociologist and law professor at Whittier Law School—one of the law schools that LST has labelled as high-risk—I decided to take a closer look at the results that LST relies on in coming to its conclusions about bar passage and risk.

LST relies strongly on results published in the LSAC National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study (LSAC Study). I agree with the recent press release by the LSAC that it is problematic to use a 25 year old study to assess current bar passage risk. Over the past 25 years, the LSAT has not only changed with respect to its score scaling, but also its content and substance. However, even if you assume you can draw current inferences about today’s LSAT from the decades old LSAC Study, it fails to provide evidence supporting LST’s contentions. ...

Law school administrators and faculty must resist perpetuating and participating in the dangerous narrative advanced by LST. Others have highlighted the paternalistic and problematic nature of this narrative. In recent years, law school applications have been in decline. This has made it somewhat easier for an individual to get accepted into a law school. When admissions standards become easier, those at the margins of society—specifically the poor and black & brown racial and ethnic minorities—have the potential to benefit. But just at the moment when it becomes easier for those at the margins to gain admission into the legal profession, the media and organizations like LST engage in a crusade to vilify law schools and pressure them into accepting fewer students. This is done in the name of “transparency” and a paternalist drive to help the “unqualified” applicant who is at high risk of failing the bar. Instead, LST’s strategy is at high risk of keeping black and brown people, and the poor from having the opportunity to ever sit for a bar.

David Frakt (Chair, Law School Transparency National Advisory Committee), Seeking Clarity — Some Dangerous Questions for Professor Lyke:

I was pleased to see Professor Sheldon Lyke's attempt to defend Whittier's admission practices. His post raised many questions in my mind.  In this reply, I will pose some questions to Professor Lyke that I hope he will answer in a future post.  I encourage other readers to add additional questions for Professor Lyke in the comments.

Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State), Comment:

[T]he point of the LST report [is] to urge responsibility, not only among schools that are admitting too many students destined to fail, but among the profession as a whole. There has always been a tension between providing access to the profession and setting students up to fail. Law schools managed that tension relatively well because they had so many applicants to choose from. But these times are different: with the decline in applications, some schools have become dramatically less selective. At the same time, tuition is high and jobs are more scarce. We really are in danger of doing what lenders did: applying one paradigm, which forecast reasonable success, to a very different group of students living under different circumstances. The differences here are not about race; they are about tuition, projected bar success, and employment.