Tag Archives: Dennis W. Archer

THE ABA IS RAISING THE WRONG BAR

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“[W]hen we look at these low performing schools, you guys are doing absolutely nothing.”

So said a member of the Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity last June. I wrote about the painful session in August. The question on the table was whether the American Bar Association should lose its power to accredit law schools. The ABA leaders on the receiving end of that stinging rebuke had expected routine approval. What they got instead was a three-hour thrashing.

Disaster Avoided

The ABA beat back the committee’s recommendation of a 12-month suspension of its accreditation power. Even worse, it learned nothing from the episode. That became apparent in October, when the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar recommended a rule change that it thought was monumental. It’s actually far too little coming far too late.

The new rule would require at least a 75 percent of a law school’s graduates to pass a state bar exam within two years of receiving their degrees. The current standard requires a 75 percent pass rate within five years. Since 2000, only four law schools have faced difficulty under the current standard, and all were restored to full accreditation.

Looming Disaster Remains

The Department of Education’s heat directed at schools taking advantage of their students could cool significantly under President Trump, who recently paid $25 million to settle former students’ fraud claims against Trump University. The troubling law school backstory is a less dramatic variation on the same theme.

Plummeting national bar passage rates coupled with growing student debt for degrees of dubious value are the culmination of a dysfunctional market in legal education. That dysfunction is taking a cruel toll on a generation vulnerable to exploitation by elders who know better. Sooner or later, we’ll all pay the price.

The ABA’s latest misfire toward a remedy misses the key point: even passing the bar doesn’t mean getting a law job. Within 10 months of graduation, fewer than 60 percent of 2015 graduates obtained full-time long-term employment requiring bar passage. Compared to the class of 2014, the number of such positions declined by 10 percent (from 26,248 to 23,687). The total number of 2015 graduates: 40,000.

Students attending marginal schools bear the greatest burden. Their schools use a business model that relies on federal student loan dollars to fill classrooms. Because schools have no accountability for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes, they are free to dip ever deeper into the well of unqualified applicants. Prospective employers have noticed.

Disaster For Many Students

The ABA’s persistent refusal to confront the employment rate problem brought the Department of Education into the picture. At the June hearing, committee members posed tough questions that ABA Managing Director Barry Currier had a tougher time answering. As some marginal schools received huge federal dollars, the committee noted, the vast majority of their graduates couldn’t get law jobs.

Now the ABA proposes tinkering at the edges. Even at that, based on the outrage generated from some inside the professorial ranks, you’d think it was trying to do something truly revolutionary. Some educators complained that shortening the 75 percent bar passage rate period from five years to two would discourage schools from admitting minority candidates, thereby leading to a less diverse profession.

That’s a non sequitur. If an additional three years after graduation is needed for some graduates to pass the bar, whatever they’re learning during that post-graduate period can’t be coming from their former classrooms. And, of course, nothing in the ABA proposal solves the employment problem.

Disaster Rewards a Few

As educators rely on student debt to keep their law schools operating, they’re getting paid, regardless of how their graduates fare in the job market. That frames the issue with which the ABA should be grappling but continues to dismiss: Marginal law schools are unable place most of their graduates in full-time long-term bar passage-required jobs.

Solving that problem requires schools to have financial skin in the game. Here’s one suggestion: tie the availability of a student’s federal loan dollars to a law school’s employment outcomes. That would create accountability that no dean or administrator currently possesses. And they sure don’t want it.

The ABA is institutionally incapable of embracing the change required to create a functional market in legal education. Vested interests are too embedded. The clout of the marginal schools is too great.

For example, the head of the ABA’s last “task force” on the challenges of financing legal education was also serving as the chairman of the national policy board of the Infilaw consortium of for-profit law schools, including the Charlotte School of Law. In fact, Dennis W. Archer still chairs the Infilaw national policy board. On November 15, Charlotte was the subject of a rare event: the ABA placed the school on probation because of its admissions practices. The ABA also ordered public disclosure of its bar passage rates.

But the ABA didn’t address the bigger problem with Charlotte that afflicts students at similar schools: dismal full-time long-term bar-passage required employment rates. Charlotte’s rate for the class of 2015 was 26 percent — down from 38 percent in 2012. Here’s the real kicker: from 2011 to 2015, the number of graduates at Charlotte increased from 97 to 456.

Growing supply in response to shrinking demand. That’s what happens when the people running law schools view students as revenue streams for which the schools will never have any financial accountability. The federal government backs the loans; educational debt survives personal bankruptcy; many in a generation of young would-be attorneys begin adulthood in a deep, six-figure financial hole.

Perhaps President-elect Trump will identify with the plight of the student-victims of this continuing disaster. Where would he be today if he had not been able to discharge his business loans through a string of bankruptcy filings? Not in the White House, that’s for sure.

INFILAW AND THE ABA

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After a setback last summer, Inflilaw has flown under the radar in its quest to acquire the Charleston School of Law. Since July 2013, the private equity owners of Infilaw  — a consortium of three for-profit law schools (Florida Coastal, Charlotte, and Arizona Summit (formerly the Phoenix School of Law)) — have been trying to add Charleston to their portfolio.  (For more on Infilaw, see Paul Campos’ recent article in The Atlantic.)

The persistence of Infilaw’s effort alone says something about the situation: There’s money to be made in legal education. Venture capitalists specialize in finding opportunities for above average investment returns. It doesn’t matter to them that the main source of that money is federal student loans. Nor do they care if the vast majority of students who obtain those loans to attend marginal schools are unable find JD-required employment. If there’s a market failure to exploit for profit, they’re on it.

On November 6, 2014, the ABA Accreditation Committee issued its recommendation of acquiescence — yes, that’s what it’s called — in connection with Infilaw’s proposed acquisition. It found that the desired change in control “will not detract from [Charleston School of Law’s] ability to remain in compliance” with ABA accreditation standards.

The Deal

The ABA recommendation identifies key aspects of the proposed acquisition, but then ignores their implications. For example, under the Asset Purchase Agreement, Infilaw would acquire most of the school’s assets, but it makes no promise of post-acquisition employment for any existing employees. None. Only on the “eve of closing” will Infilaw disclose the faculty members it wants to keep. Nevertheless, the ABA is willing to accept on faith that this pig in a poke — whatever it turns out to be — won’t “detract from the school’s ability” to retain its accreditation.

Under a separate Administrative and Consulting Services Agreement, Infilaw will receive “substantial consideration” to provide “non-academic, administrative, and consulting services” to the law school. Those services probably account for these troubling lines in the ABA committee’s recommendation:

“Infilaw contemplates that…the legal market permitting, it will increase the size of entering classes to approximately 250, or ‘pre-downturn levels.’…The law school will have access to and benefit from the collective knowledge of Infilaw and its three existing law schools with respect to student recruiting and enrollment.”

The Market?

What does “the legal market permitting” mean? Charleston enrolled 145 full-time students for its expected graduating class of 2017. Returning to “pre-downturn” levels would increase that number by 75 percent. Such near-term growth in demand for the school’s new lawyers is a pipe dream. The recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report on legal sector employment confirms painful reality: Over the past year, the number of all legal jobs — not just lawyers — is actually 1,300 lower than a year ago.

But “access to and benefit from” Infilaw’s existing three schools “with respect to student recruiting and enrollment” means law school behavior that has little to do with actual “legal market” employment conditions for new graduates. Rather, as I’ve discussed previously, the current operation of the Inflilaw business model makes the future of Charleston as an Infilaw holding apparent.

A Race To…The Bottom?

The Infilaw model depends on federal student loans to produce revenue streams that create profits for investors. As the demand for lawyers languished during the Great Recession, Infilaw schools increased enrollment and tuition.

Meanwhile, North Carolina bar passage rates for first-time takers graduating from Infilaw’s Charlotte School of Law dropped from 87 percent in July 2010 to 58 percent in July 2013. The school placed seventh (out of seven NC schools) in its July 2014 bar passage rate: 56 percent. Florida Coastal’s first-time rate dropped from 75 percent in July 2012 to 67 percent in July 2013. Its first-time Florida bar passage rate in July 2014 was 58 percent (10th out of 11 Florida schools). Arizona Summit’s first-time bar pass rate in its home state for July 2014 was 55 percent (third out of three Arizona schools).

Overall, only 35 percent of 2013 graduates from Infilaw schools found full-time long-term JD-required employment. By comparison, 53 percent of Charleston School of Law  graduates from the class of 2013 secured full-time long-term JD-required jobs — just below the national average for all law schools.

A Statistic On The Rise

At Florida Coastal, average student loan debt for 2014 graduates was $175,274. The other two Infilaw schools haven’t updated their websites to provide 2014 information. For 2013 graduates of Arizona Summit, average student law school debt was $184,825. At Charlotte, it was $155,697, plus another $20,000 in private student loans. (Average law school debt for Charleston graduates in 2013 was also too high ($146,595). But its 2013 employment outcomes were much better than any Infilaw school.)

Infliaw isn’t home free in its quest. After a closed session of the Accreditation Committee on December 5 in Puerto Rico, the recommendation will go to the ABA’s Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions. Then the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education has to approve the deal. Last summer, a committee of that commission voted 3-to-1 against, prompting Infilaw to withdraw its application while promising a return bout that will probably occur in early 2015.

The ABA

People sometimes ask where the ABA has been in the ongoing search for solutions to the current crisis involving law schools whose graduates are incurring staggering debt for JD degrees of dubious value. The answer is becoming clearer.

It’s “acquiescing.”

But wait. The ABA has done one more thing. It has convened a special Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education to recommend fixes for a dysfunctional legal education market. Former Detroit Mayor Dennis W. Archer, the chairman of Infilaw’s National Policy Board, is still chairman of that Task Force. In 2003-2004, he was president of the ABA.