Failure is not an option

Update:

When I ran the numbers for 2013-14 I found a total of seven cases of academic dismissal among the top 14 schools. Five of these were third year students. This fact led me to consider something I should have taken into account originally, which is that some (perhaps most or all) cases of academic dismissal at top schools don’t involve failing to maintain adequate grades, but rather some kind of academic misconduct. So it’s quite possible that top schools now literally, or almost literally, never flunk out an admitted student.

When I first started teaching at CU’s law school 23 years ago, the faculty would get petitions once or twice a year from students who had failed to stay academically eligible (students have a right under the school’s rules to petition for readmission). A few weeks ago it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen such a petition in a very long time, so I checked and discovered that we haven’t flunked anybody out in nine years.

This set me off on a little research project, regarding the changing culture of law school and (failing) grades.

There’s a proverbial story about a law school dean telling the entering class, “look to your left and look to your right — next year one of you will not be here.” And in fact it turns out that this story reflected reality not that long ago. In 1966 11,507 people — almost all men — graduated from ABA law schools. Three years earlier 20,776 students had enrolled at those schools, meaning that in the mid-1960s 55.4% of initial law school matriculants eventually graduated (This number is not literally exact, since the 1966 figure includes some graduates of part-time four-year programs who enrolled in 1962, and doesn’t include 1963 matriculants from such programs who graduated the following year, but since these two numbers are almost identical the 55.4% figure is accurate).

So 50 years ago, nearly half the people who entered law school did not graduate. (I don’t have figures on how many of the people who didn’t graduate quit on their own, as opposed to being kicked out.)

Yet just ten years later (1976), the ratio of graduates to matriculants had shot up drastically, to 80.9%. A decade after that it was up to nearly 90%, where it has more or less stayed ever since (It was 88.5% for the class of 2013).

Since some people decide to quit on their own, it’s clear that law schools now end up flunking out, on average, less than one in ten of the people they admit. But “on average” is a deceptive term in this context, as schools have drastically different rates of academic disqualification. Generally speaking, both elite and second-level law schools have almost eliminated the practice of flunking people out. Here are the figures for the so-called T-14 schools, and rest of the top 50 ranked law schools, for the 2011-12 academic year:

T-14

Stanford 1 (1 1L)
Virginia 4 (1 1L)
Michigan 1 (0 1Ls)
Berkeley 2 (1 1L)
Chicago 1 (1 1L)
Northwestern 1 (1 1L)
GULC 1 (0 1Ls)
Harvard: 0
Yale: 0
Columbia: 0
NYU: 0
Penn: 0
Duke: 0
Cornell: 0

The rest of the top 50:

Texas: 0
Vanderbilt: 0
UCLA: 0
USC: 2 (2 2Ls)
Minnesota: 0
GW: 4 (0 1Ls)
WUSTL: 1 (1 1L)
BC: 0
BU: 1 (0 1L)
Fordham: 2 (1 1L)
Alabama: 7, including 6 1Ls (3.5% of the class)
Wisconsin: 1 (0 1L)
Indiana: 0
OSU: 1 (1 1L)
North Carolina: 0
William and Mary: 0
Washington and Lee: 0
George Mason: 3 (1 1L)
Wake Forest: 0
Notre Dame: 0
Illinois: 1 (0 1Ls)
Emory: 0
Georgia: 0
Washington: 0
Arizona: 0
ASU: 1 (1 1L)
BYU: 0
Maryland: 1 (1 1L)
Colorado 0
Florida: 1 (0 0Ls)
UC Davis: 0
UC Hastings: 2 (0 1Ls)
Iowa: 0
FSU: 7 (3 1Ls)
SMU: 2 (0 1Ls)
Tulane: 2 (0 1Ls)

Summary: The top 50 law schools academically disqualified an average of exactly one student each in the most recent year for which data are available. These schools had a collective enrollment of around 40,000 students, so for the average student the odds of flunking out were slightly better — or worse, depending on how you think about it — than 1000 to 1.

Interestingly less than half (22) of the students who flunked out were first years (Nationally, nearly three quarters of law school attrition takes places after the first year), with just two schools, Alabama and Florida State, accounting for 40% of the total. 72% of top 50 schools did not flunk out a single first year student.

At the other end of the scale, a number of low-ranked law schools failed out relatively large percentages of their first-year classes:

Whittier: 19%
Western State: 18%
Thomas Jefferson: 15%
San Francisco: 13%
Golden Gate: 13%
Florida Coastal: 12%

However, some law schools with de facto open admission policies flunked out much smaller percentages of their 1Ls:

Thomas Cooley: 5%
Phoenix: 4%
New England: 4%

I’ll have more to say about the interpretation of these numbers in another post.