ABA Council Meeting — up to minute updates

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Michele Pistone

As you know, the ABA Council is meeting today in San Fran to discuss the accreditation standards.  If you want up to the minute reporting, Dean Paul McGreal, from Dayton, is tweeting on it and also providing more detailed commentary on the LinkedIn group:  Legal Education and Law Schools.  

 
By the way, it sounds like Section 3 (The Program of Legal Education) is on the agenda for this afternoon.  Kate Kruse should be presenting comments on behalf of CLEA later today as well.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

New Article Interviewing Contributor Michele Pistone

Posted on August 8, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

One of our blog contributors, Michele Pistone, has been recently interviewed by InformationWeek Education about promoting “Blended Learning” for Law Schools. You can check out the article here!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on New Article Interviewing Contributor Michele Pistone

Why Formative Assessment is Essential in Legal Education

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Michele Pistone

As the ABA Council meets to consider and debate the proposed revisions to the Accreditation Standards found in section 3, The Program of Legal Education, I want to highlight a Forbes article by Michael Horn of the Clayton Christensen Institute.  Horn has been studying disruption in education for the last several years.  

If we take as a given that our goal in educating potential lawyers is for every single one of our graduates to have mastered the material before graduation, then a system that incorporates formative assessment and feedback is essential.  That’s because our current system of feedback and assessment does not ensure that students will be motivated to achieve mastery.  Why?  According to Horn, “the keys events embedded within curricula that could help students feel successful – examinations – occur [at the end of the semester].  Students generally don’t receive feedback on how they did for another couple weeks while the professor grades them.  And when the grades are handed out, the privilege of feeling successful is reserved only for the best students.  By design the rest experience failure.”  

But, according to the “Jobs To Be Done” theory that Clayton Christensen and Horn posit, law students hire law schools in part to make them feel successful and make meaningful progress.  How can our system of assessment be so out of line with what students hire us to do?

The article is definitely worth reading and explains why I envision blending online learning with active, problem-based, face-to-face instruction as a means to build motivation and thrive for mastery in learning for all our students.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Formative Assessment is Essential in Legal Education

What Do the Best Law Professors Do?

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Michele Pistone

Kudos to fellow bloggers, Michael Hunter Schwartz, Gerry Hess and Sophie Sparrow for highlighting excellent pedagogy in their new book, What Do The Best Law Professors Do?

In the comments below, let’s share some more ideas.  What do you or your colleagues do that would make this book?

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on What Do the Best Law Professors Do?

ABA FUTURE LEGAL ED TASKFORCE “WORKING PAPER” AVAILABLE: “a field manual for people of good faith.”

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Mary A. Lynch

The ABA Taskforce on the Future of Legal Education today posted a thirty-four page “WORKING PAPER” in preparation for its next public hearing and meeting on August 10th in San Francisco see schedule. (Note: all  blue font below is my “emphasis added” in this blog post and not found in the original document).   After briefly summarizing challenges and obstacles, the Working Paper states,

The Task Force has resolved these challenges by structuring the Working Paper as a field manual for people of good faith who wish to improve legal education as a public and private good.

Early on, the  drafters alert the reader to  Section VII (“Themes Addressed to All Parties”) and call that section “the heart of the field manual.” In the Overview,  the drafters identify the following “Key themes:”

  1. “need for a systematic (rather than tactical) approach to the deficiencies of law school financing and pricing;”
  2. “greater heterogeneity in law schools and in programs of legal education;”
  3. “an increased focus on the delivery of value by law schools;”
  4. “a focus on the development of competences (sic) in graduates of legal education programs;”
  5. “the profound importance of cultural change, particularly on the part of law faculty;”
  6. “the need for changes in the regulation of legal services to support key changes in legal education;” and
  7. “the need for institutionalization of the process of assessment and improvement in legal education.”

In Section II,  the Taskforce identifies and addresses a tension in legal education (which IMHO is too often overlooked — at great risk to  American law and society). The drafters refer to it as “The Fundamental Tension.”  On the one hand, there is societal interest in the training of lawyers as a “public good” and the “centrality of lawyers in the effective  functioning of ordered society.” Requiring ethical training or encouraging faculty scholarship may be an important  “public benefit.” On the other hand, American legal education is also a “private good,” providing trained lawyers “with skills, knowledge and credentials which will enable them to earn a livelihood.” This private good aspect subjects legal education to consumer preferences and market forces. The Taskforce wisely  acknowledges that any “credible” set of recommendations will have to “carefully calibrate” the public and private concerns.

In Sections III to VI, the Report outlines guiding principles, intelligently discusses the forces and factors prompting need for action and aptly details what actions or initiatives can be realistically undertaken to effect change. The Taskforce comments that it  structured its proposed plan to:

(a) encourage and facilitate appropriate action by each actor in the legal education system; and

(b) to the extent possible coordinate those actions to achieve large-scale improvement.

In Section VII, the Working Paper lays out and develops key  themes mentioned above. In the eighth (VIII) and final section of the Working Paper, the drafters set out seven sets of specific recommendations addressed to particular “groups or actors in the system of legal education.” Some of those recommendations call for modification or elimination of current ABA standards which according to the drafters “Directly or Indirectly Raise the Cost of Delivering a J.D. Education Without Contributing Commensurately to the Goal of Ensuring that Law Schools Deliver a Quality Education.” Those include standards pertaining to tenure and security of position, faculty-student ratios, distance learning and adjunct faculty. Others call for revising, eliminating or adding standards to encourage innovation, including for programs of legal education that result in less than a J.D.  but which serves public needs for legal services:

Incentives, resources, and encouragement can be powerful supports for innovation, and these can come from many participants in the system (as well as participants outside the legal education system). The ABA Section of Legal Education can support innovation by modifying or eliminating Standards (including those governing variances) that constrain opportunities for experimentation and risk-taking. As noted above, experiments or successful risk-taking by one participant can influenceothers to go down a similar path. In addition, there exists a wealth of knowledge schools can draw, from organization theory and elsewhere,to facilitate their acting in ways that might lead to innovation.

In order to alert readers to the availability of the report as promptly as possible, I have posted immediately and have had only the briefest of opportunities to digest the Working Paper in its entirety.  So without addressing any specific recommendations, here are my thoughts as to what the Taskforce and Working Paper got right:

  • The Taskforce correctly focuses on the “Fundamental Tension” between public good and private livelihood demands.
  • The Taskforce highlights appropriately  the critical importance of providing real “value” to student-consumers (and the unfair consequences currently for need-based law students without the highest of LSAT scores).
  • The Taskforce underscores effectively the need for permanent institutionalization of ongoing assessment and improvement mechanisms for legal education.
  • The Working Paper accurately identifies  the need for correction and balance in faculty culture.
  • The Working Paper also accurately identifies the need for adjustment in curricular focus on student competencies and skills.
  • The Working Paper aptly emphasizes the need for innovation, experimentation and flexibility at this moment in legal education.

Although this “Working Paper” is a good start, the Taskforce still has more issues to include in its deliberations. I think these issues include:

  • How to continue to protect academic freedom as part of  law schools’ role in aiding the “public good.” The need to properly protect academic freedom is not a mere “hypothetical” issue as those professors and clinics who have experienced the backlash will tell you. (See also my discussion about it in an article on outcomes in the William Mitchell Law Review.)
  • How to reconnect law schools’ “public good” mission with governmental funding priorities; specifically, to revive or replace DOE funding for client-centered education, the elimination of which (20 years ago) has contributed to the current maldistribution of legal services and gaps in access to justice.
  • How to manage the risks that accompany deregulation, i.e. the potential for pragmatic market-oriented reforms to establish a de facto two-tiered system, which could exacerbate current inequities in quality of legal services and opportunities for advancement in the profession.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Standards Review Committee Materials Posted

Posted on July 31, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

The materials that the Standards Review Committee is sending to the Council for their consideration for approval to send for notice and comment have been posted on the Council’s website

You can view the materials here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Standards Review Committee Materials Posted

How Much Experiential Legal Education is Enough?

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez

I remember when I first started teaching, many schools had limits on how many law school credits students could earn through clinics, externships and simulation courses.  I am not sure exactly why.  I think the idea was that these courses were “soft” and did not require the intellectual rigor that classroom courses required.   There might have been a concern about grading in those courses as well.  It was thought that the grading might be inflated since they were usually not subject to the imposition of a grading curve.

My, how times have changed.

Now that employers want students who are prepared for the practice and students want education that prepares them for the practice, the question is now, how much experiential education is enough to prepare them?  Karen Tokarz, Peggy Maisel and Bob Siebel and I recently completed an article suggesting that  about one third of the curriculum would be ideal.  We suggest the courses should be spread throughout the three years (we include legal research and writing as a “skills” course.)  We believe that this amount would capitalize on the legal knowledge and analytical skills they develop in the  traditional  law school classroom and would help students better understand the values and develop the skills they need to become successful lawyers.   Simulation courses  such as trial practice, moot courts, negotiation and counseling, alternative dispute resolution, etc would help students develop and perfect the technical skills and well designed hybrid courses, externships and clinics would help students integrate the skills, knowledge and values that will enable them to develop as competent and ethical lawyers.   This would remedy the fact that students are often bored by the third year of law school and it would focus law school education on helping students prepare themselves to do pursue the careers they seek.  We suggest that law schools should develop learning objectives for their programs and work on assessing the effectiveness of the overall program, including classroom, simulation courses and hybrid, clinics and externships.

In the article we point to  schools that have been moving in that direction.  We highlight the seventeen (17) law schools that require clinical course work and we also describe the growing movement of schools that guarantee a clinical course for every student who desires one.   Now, we need to engage one of the most important principles of Best Practices for Legal Education, we need to assess the effectiveness of our programs.  That will tell us how much experiential education we need.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Uncategorized | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

ABA Taskforce on Future Legal Ed Report Expected Soon

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Mary A. Lynch

See this interesting back and forth on Bloomberg Law about the accuracy of legal education critiques with Assistant Dean and Professor Stephen Sheppard at the University of Arkansas School of Law here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Comments Off on ABA Taskforce on Future Legal Ed Report Expected Soon

Potential Game Changer Regarding Technology in the Classroom

Posted on July 26, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

Professor Helane Davis, one of the readers of our blog and the Associate Dean and Director of the Schaffer Law Library at Albany Law, has brought this article to our attention with this email:

“Just my opinion, but I think these types of things are game changers – whether we’re paying attention or not.”

We agree here at Best Practices.  The times they are  indeed changing and legal educators need to adapt  and evolve too!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Potential Game Changer Regarding Technology in the Classroom

Six Suggestions for Law School Reform

Posted on July 24, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

The New Republic recently published an article regarding potential reform to the law school dynamic. These six proclaimed experts echo some unsurprising suggestions.

  • Alan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard University, suggests making the third year of traditional three-year law school model an optional experience, focusing on practical experience.
  • Mike Kinsley, editor-at-large at The New Republic, promotes professors moving away from the Socratic Method in favor of more experiential instructional methods.
  • Paul Campos, professor of law at the University of Colorado Law at Boulder, warns against the burgeoning debt that law students are incurring in pursuit of entering into the profession by saying that there should be a upper limit to educational loans for law students and that the cost of law school should be what it was a generation ago.
  • Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and legal correspondent for Slate, promotes less students attending law school (and more students dropping out).
  • David Lat, founder and managing editor of Above the Law, advocates for a mandatory post-college break before entering into law school to permit potential law students to examine the possibilities and ensure that law school is the best course of action.
  • Mark Chandler, general counsel at Cisco Systems, urges for interns to be paid and earn class credit for their internships.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

10 big ideas from eduTECH…

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Michele Pistone

Lots of people in education are talking about best practices, here is a list from the eduTECH conference, including ownership, collaboration, relevance, problem solving, creativity. Isn’t this why experiential learning is so valuable in legal education? Let’s think about ways to add these elements to all aspects of the law school curriculum. Ideas?

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on 10 big ideas from eduTECH…

Four Proposals on Faculty Forwarded to Council on Legal Education

Posted on July 21, 2013 by Mary A. Lynch

As readers of this blog remember, the July ABA Standards Review Committee (SRC) meeting was slated to be an important one. SRC actions taken with respect to the curriculum and program of legal education were discussed by Professor Michele Pistone last week here. In this post, I want to alert readers to the SRCs decisions regarding faculty competence, tenure and security of position, governance rights, and compensation and perquisites. I have read Karen Sloan’s National Law Journal article discussing the July meeting here. In addition, I reviewed the very helpful and thorough CLEA and SALT reports on the meeting submitted by Professors Claudia Angelos and Carol Chomsky here.

HOW FINAL ARE ANY RECOMMENDATIONS FROM SRC?

The CLEA/SALT report does a good job of explaining the process.

The Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar is the accrediting agency for JD programs in U.S. law schools. The Council’s Accreditation Standards, contained in the“ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools,” are subject to a comprehensive review every five years. The Council has delegated to the Standards Review Committee, an appointed committee comprised of legal educators and others, the task of recommending changes to the standards. After receiving a report and recommendation from the SRC, the Council asks for comment from interested constituencies on the proposed changes and then acts on the SRC’s recommendations…

The SRC’s proposals most notably include final recommendations on student learning outcomes and on faculty tenure, governance, and academic freedom (emphasis added). The Council will receive and discuss these recommendations at its next meeting, in San Francisco on August 9, 2013. After the Council considers and possibly amends these recommendations, they will be sent out for notice and comment by the public.

WHAT DID SRC DO AT THE JULY MEETING?

1.  Proposed eliminating the minimum faculty-student ratio requirement. As Karen Sloan in the National Law Journal points out,

The ABA committee reviewing the organization’s accreditation standards has voted to do away with the rule establishing a minimum student-to-faculty ratio. The panel reasoned that determining the true size of a law school faculty is just too complicated, given the number of adjuncts and non-fulltime teachers.

Law schools would still have to have enough faculty members to carry out their mission and comply with all the other accreditation standards, said Barry Currier, the ABA’s managing director for accreditation and legal education. But schools no longer would need to annually ensure they have at least one fulltime faculty equivalent for every 30 students.

Read more here.

2. The SRC also sent four proposals (A-D) regarding faculty security, academic freedom and governance up to the Council on Legal Education. The CLEA/SALT report states

All four alternatives contain provisions requiring law schools to adopt and adhere to policies that provide that all full-time faculty have academic freedom and “meaningful participation” in law school governance over mission and curriculum. They all require (in varying language) that schools have a comprehensive system for considering and making decisions regarding promotion, tenure, renewal of contracts or other forms of security of position, and termination. While there are some bedeviling details, the primary differences among the four alternatives relate to tenure and security of position for faculty.

MARY’S ANALYSIS:

The recommendations on Faculty must be read in conjunction with other recommendations in Chapter 4 and in other Chapters and can only be fairly viewed as part of an integrated whole. Moreover, the Council must use common sense and their experience of human behavior in deciding appropriate rules.

For example, Alternative D proposes no security of position (including tenure) for any faculty member. The only requirement is that a school demonstrate it can “attract and retain a competent faculty.” This proposal assumes one can ensure academic freedom (required elsewhere in the rules) without tying it to security of position. Now, in the abstract that may appear like a workable plan. But seriously, outside of academics, pundits and those who are so independently wealthy that security of employment matters little, where has anyone witnessed regularly an employee freely declaring, writing, and advocating on controversial or unpopular subjects and the advocacy having no bearing on one’s ability to keep one’s job, support one’s family and pay one’s bills?

In another example, the SRC proposals under Chapter 3 Program of Legal Education require law schools to focus more intently on student learning outcomes, experience-based opportunities, academic support for students, and preparing students for practice. This push was demanded by consumers, the economy, and the profession, and the proposed revised standards appropriately respond to those demands. However, that kind of teaching requires small class sizes, close supervision and multiple feedback opportunities. Yet,the SRC proposal eliminates minimum faculty-student ratio requirements. In addition, the student-learning focused activities encouraged by the standards will, in the real lives of faculty and students, compete with the ability to spend considerable time working on intense writing projects and pathbreaking scholarship. Thus, one would think that both activities should be, at the very least, equally encouraged and certainly there should be no DISINCENTIVE to focus on teaching rather than primarily focusing on scholarship. Yet, in all but one of the faculty proposals sent to the Council the standards allow for discrimination in security, compensation, and/or governance against many of the very faculty members who will be working most closely on student learning needs and innovative teaching.

If you care about legal education, about preserving academic freedom while updating law school teaching to meet the challenges of a global digitalized economy, be vigilant. As noted above, the Council considers these recommendations at its San Francisco meeting on August 9, 2013 and will soon send them out for public notice and comment.

Filed under: Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Web Tools for Teachers and Students

Posted on July 19, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

Darlene Cardillo with the Instructional Education at Albany Law blog recently posted about various online tools to use during educational instruction. This is what she had to say:

“At the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) conference (my absolute favorite conference when I was working in the K-12 environment) this year, Adam Bellow, founder of EduClipper, and Steve Dembo, Online Community Manager for Discovery Education offered a quick run through of some favorite apps.

Here is their list of 13:

1. Padlet used to be called Wallwisher, but it got a makeover and a name change recently. It’s essentially a virtual board with sticky notes that can be easily moved, shared and embedded. There are several views, including something that looks more like a scrollable blog and it’s easy to both personalize the experience and organize notes. The privacy and moderation settings make it easy for students to become members of a board where a teacher can post resources and encourage them to do the same.

2. Ipiccy is like free Photoshop, but less complicated. It has intuitive editing control panels that allow for the simple things like filters, effects, cropping and resizing. It’s also easy to undo anything that didn’t turn out as imagined. But if the project requires a more sophisticated treatment, Ipiccy has layers that like Photoshop allow a user to make very professional final products. Best of all, it’s easy to upload projects to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks that a class might be using to house finished work.

3. Thinglink allows a user to add content to images. For example, a student could display a map of Washington, D.C. and add a video explaining how a bill becomes a law over the Capitol building. And it’s easy. The user just clicks a spot on the image and adds text, a link to a website, or an embed code for video. It’s a quick and easy way to make a project more dynamic and interactive.

4. Easel.ly is a fairly easy way to create an infographic, a visual depiction of information. The tool offers set themes that can be dragged onto a blank canvas to give students somewhere to start. A good example is a map of the United States with bubbles highlighting statistics about specific areas. Then icons can be added, sized, and edited to visually represent information. It’s good for those uncertain of their tech skills, but who want to begin integrating some digital tools into the classroom. It won’t do the work for you, and it forces students to represent what they know at the end of a research project, while giving some creative license.

5. The Noun Project is making clip art icons for every known noun making it a perfect place to look for the images needed for a precise infographic. It can take a lot of time to find a perfect image of a cracked cell phone or a specific kind of dog and the Noun Project makes that a little easier.

6. Infogr.am is another tool to visually represent information. It has templates that allow you to throw in your facts and build beautiful charts to represent the information.

7. Poll Everywhere has been around for several years, and a familiar tool with many teachers. It’s built with HTML 5 so it can be used with any device and is responsive to screen size. Teachers can create both multiple-choice questions and open ended questions that student respond to via text. Students get excited that they can use their phones in class and teachers gain valuable feedback about how well students understand a concept.

8. InfuseLearning is the student response suite challenger to Poll Everywhere. It’s a simple interface that’s free to teachers and it doesn’t require any advanced planning or setup. In real time teachers can send out questions, prompts or quizzes and have students respond in a variety of formats; true/false, multiple choice, open ended, even with a doodle. It also has an audio function that includes language translation, opening up more use possibilities.

9. BigHugeLabs provides a great way to make posters and trading cards easily. Best of all, using the free education-specific login students won’t see any advertisements. It’s good for younger kids or an older kid who wants to put together a presentation fairly quickly. One great use would be a movie poster featuring themes and characters of a book.

10. Sign Generator allows users to create their own clip art by changing the letters in photos of signs. The tool provides over 500 templates or a user can upload a photo of a sign and change the letters around. It’s a fun way to get creative.

11. Delivr creates QR codes, the codes that a mobile device can easily scan and trigger an image or website. QR codes can be displayed interesting ways including as a way to engage students as they come into class or in a treasure hunt format. The nice thing about Delivr is that it will remember all the QR codes ever created and users can edit and change associated urls if to send users to a different website. That adds some unpredictability and suspense to the day.

12. Aurasma is a free app that lets a teacher turn any object into a QR code, rather than just a square bar code, and plays with the idea of augmented reality. Students can hold a mobile device up to an image, such as a bulldog, and be taken to a website, a video or an image about bulldogs.

13. WeVideo is a simple web-based video editing tool that turns video projects from a huge time sink to an easy and fun experience. The tool allows users to upload content, save it in the cloud, and can link to other storage space like Google Drive. It can be powerful for making student-centered projects because it allows students to mute parts of the base video, record themselves and add that narration to the video. The video can be published using different file sizes, the smallest of which is free. The tool also offers a number of themes, effects and transitions to spiff up any video.

Although these tools are meant for K-12 teachers and students, they definitely could find a place in higher ed. classrooms (even in law schools.)

Here is another even more comprehensive list entitled 101 Web 2.0 Teaching tools. Many of them you have heard of but there even ones that I think will be new to you:

o Grammarly: online grammar checker that checks for more than 250 points of grammar.
o Online Stopwatch: a web-based stopwatch teachers can use for timed exams and other assignments.
o Yugma: free web conferencing feature with Yugma and also share their entire desktop in real-time with one student.
o Vyew: online meeting service – The free version is limited to 50 pages, 20 participants.
o Mindomo: highly productive method of visual brainstorming that you can use to plan projects or to map out a knowledge base.
o Bubbl.us: online tool for brainstorming and class discussions.
o Edmodo: Extremely similar to Twitter, except specifically designed for educators
o NoteMesh: collaborative wiki style class note taker. Users can post their lecture notes or contribute to existing lecture notes.
o Prezi: non-linear alternative to PowerPoint
o MultiURL: allows users to combine multiple links into just one shortlink, which can then be shared more easily.
o bitly: shortens links
o Zamzar: online file conversion tool
o TubeChop: allows users to chop a specific section from a YouTube video and share it.

Feel free to comment if you have used any of the above or want to recommend something new.”

Read the original post here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Fairly Evaluating the Investment of a Law School Degree

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Mary A. Lynch

Consumer analysis is one important lens through which to consider legal education reform. Thoughtful consumer analysis generally asks two foundational questions:  1) “What is the value to your professional and personal life of a law school degree?” and 2) Do you have meaningful and accurate information upon which to make that judgment?” Just this week, law professor, Michael Simkovic, and labor economist, Frank McIntyre, together released a draft of their study which estimates the “mean pre-tax lifetime value of a law degree as approximately $1,000,000.” See Economic Value of a Law Degree Study (thank you to Albany Law Professors Christian Sundquist and Donna Young for alerting me to this study).

The study has already generated a number of positive responses in the news http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-value-does-a-law-degree-have-2013-7 (“STUDY: A Law Degree is Actually an Amazingly Good Investment”); http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/whats_the_value_of_a_law_degree_1m_in_a_lifetime_report_says/ (“What’s the Value of a Law Degree?  $1 Million”); http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/17/report-shows-law-school-still-good-investment; (“The Upside of Law School”)

Professor Steven M.  Davidoff’s review in the NYT notes that some of those who have most repeatedly attacked law schools were angered by the study:

Averages, though, are only part of the story, as they can be biased upward by a small number of high earners while many others make nothing. Mr. Mystal’s (of Above the Law) critique strongly focused on this point.

But the authors also found that median additional lifetime earnings for those with a law degree were $610,000. That means half of law school graduates made more and half less than this amount over their lifetime. So even at the 25th percentile, lifetime additional earnings were $350,000.

Thus, the earnings for 75 percent of law school graduates easily exceeded the amount of tuition paid, even with tuition at about $50,000 a year. The authors also found that the median law degree holder earned 60 percent more than the median college graduate.

I think this scholarly analysis certainly provides better context for  evaluating  the financial value of law school and am  grateful to for this important contribution to the discourse.   It does not answer – nor does it pretend or aspire to do so – questions about what Tomorrow’s lawyers will need to be equipped for Tomorrow’s jobs.   That issue remains ripe for analysis on the pages of this BLOG.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

ABA Standards Review Committee votes for 6 credits of experiential learning

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Michele Pistone

Karen Sloan at the National Law Journal reports that the ABA Standards Review Committee made some decisions during its recent meeting.  In addition to eliminating the faculty-student ratio, here are some other highlights from her article:

• The committee voted to require law students to complete at least six credit hours of experiential coursework—clinics, externships or simulation courses. That would be up from the existing one credit-hour requirement, but less than the 15 hours suggested by the Clinical Legal Education Association or the 15 hours being pursued by the State Bar of California.

• It adopted a new student-learning outcomes requirement. Law schools would have to establish a list of competencies that students must achieve and assess whether they are meeting those goals. This measure is intended to make schools look beyond bar-pass rates to determine whether they are meeting student needs. However, the recommended standard leaves law schools plenty of leeway in determining what the learning outcomes should be and how to assess them.

• The committee voted to increase the number of credits law students may receive from distance learning classes from 12 to 15 and eliminated the rule that students may take no more than four distance-learning credits per semester. Students could take a full semester of courses away from their home campus.

Read more: here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »