Quantifying Law School Contributions to Bar Passage and Employment With Value-Added Modeling

• In Event: Tracking the Role of Professions Education in Stimulating Societal Benefits

Abstract

Traditional methods for evaluating the performance of law schools (e.g., ranking systems) often fail to measure the extent to which these institutions contribute to their students’ later success. We propose a new metric of law school performance that estimates law schools’ contributions to their graduates’ first-time bar passage and employment. Our intention is to create a metric that captures a school’s contribution to students’ outcomes using value-added models (VAM). To that end, we use publicly available data from ABA Standard 509, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. We compare each school’s VAM score to its position in the 2024 U.S. News Best Law Schools ranking for bar passage differential and employment rate.

Authors

• Jason Scott, AccessLex institute

• Andrea Pals, AccessLex Institute

• Paige Matthews Wilson, AccessLex Institute