Is It Time to Start Shutting Down Law Schools? - Bloomberg Business

Is It Time to Start Shutting Down Law Schools? - Bloomberg Business
by Natalie Kitroeff

This month, the American Bar Association provisionally accredited a new law school at Concordia University. More than 200 law schools are accredited in the U.S. An analysis of data from the ABA itself raises the question whether that list should be getting any longer.

Law schools exist for a lot of reasons, but a pretty important one is to prepare people to be lawyers. By that standard, a large handful of institutions seem to be failing. Last year, 10 law schools were unable to place more than 30 percent of their graduating class in permanent jobs that required passing the bar, according to ABA data. Those job numbers don't include positions that schools fund for their graduates or people who say they are starting their own practice.

At the University of Massachusetts School of Law, the American school with the worst job outcomes by this measure, just 22 percent of people who graduated in 2014 got those types of law jobs.

“We are a work in progress, and we need to improve our bar-pass rate and improve our employment, and I am not embarrassed about that,” says Mary Lu Bilek, the dean of U-Mass Law. Forty-two of the 60 U-Mass Law students who took the bar in February or July 2013 passed the test. The school counted 81 graduates in 2014. Bilek notes that theschool's employment numbers have improved in recent years and says she doesn’t think it’s fair to discount people who have opted to do things with their J.D. besides become lawyers.

“The traditional elite jobs aren’t the jobs that our students generally want,” she says. “There’s not room for another law school that wants to have students who want to do that, because there aren’t enough jobs for that.”