My short answer to the question of whether the LSAT is an “intelligence” test is, No.  Understanding that the LSAT was not an intelligence test (beyond core abilities to read and process information in the English language) was a key step in my own LSAT preparation and my 180 score on my only try. Lots of people were telling me that the LSAT was a disguised intelligence test which, had it been true, would have made it impossible for me to get my highest LSAT score.  What I determined was that none of those people could produce a shred of convincing evidence in favor of the intelligence test thesis; it was pure assertion, mostly by people who’d never taken the test.  I didn’t know if it was or wasn’t a test of intelligence but decided to test the hypothesis by preparing for and taking the exam believing it wasn’t a test of intelligence as much as a test of what seemed more obvious, my ability to take this test.

This video discusses a related point of cognitive research, which is why, in high-stakes tests, people with higher cognitive abilities actually have more trouble that those with less such power.  That’s, of course, exactly the opposite of what you’d expect if the LSAT and similar tests tested intelligence.  Had I known about this research when I was preparing for the LSAT, I wouldn’t have had to wonder about whether the LSAT is an intelligence test; I’d have been much more confident that it isn’t.

At a minimum, that finding of cognitive research indicates that what high-stakes tests test is largely, well, the ability to just take the test.  That’s a theoretical point with practical implications—it changes how you should prepare for the LSAT, and the video focuses on these practical implications.  Theory can be interesting, I suppose, but the key for those who are actually going to take the exam is to be able to operationalize the theory so that it makes an actual difference in your ability to obtain your best LSAT score.  Otherwise, it’s just wind.

I hope the video is helpful to you.  The video is one of a series that I periodically produce (of course, clients have on-demand access to over 55 videos, most of which won’t be publicly available, but I think it’s important to try to give a little perspective and assistance to a wider audience as well).  You can access the videos by clicking on the “Watch our Videos” button on any page of the Advise-In Solutions website.  You can also subscribe to Advise-In’s videos once you’re on YouTube, so that you’ll be notified automatically of new videos.  Or you can visit Advise-In’s YouTube channel by clicking here.

One of those groups is graduate students, including law students, who will no longer have access to federally subsidized loans.  What difference does that make for law school borrowers?  About $300 per month.  That’s how much more a borrower will pay, every month, for the repayment term of a maximum (for law students) of about $26,500 available through the soon-to-be-unsubsidized program.  The changes go into effect in July of 2012, just in time for next year’s entering law class.

What was a subsidized loan?  It was a loan in which the government paid the interest on a loan while the borrower was still in school, and for several months after graduation.  Now, that interest will simply accrue.  Students won’t have to pay it while they’re in school, but if they don’t, that just increases the amount of the monthly payment that will be due during the loan repayment period.  CNN calculates that number at about $207 a month.  I’m not sure how CNN got to that figure—when I calculate the numbers, it’s very close to $300 (assuming a $26,500 loan amount and no change in the interest rates for federal loans), or $3,600 per year.

For debt-laden law students whose law school debt load has increased significantly over the last several years, to say nothing of any undergraduate debt that students were already carrying into their legal careers, $3,600 is not chump change.  Considering the current average debt load and the state of the legal market, most law students won’t be taking that $300 out of “surplus” after graduation.  It will have to come from somewhere, either larding on yet more debt (in that case, probably high-interest consumer debt) or out of consumption, savings or investment, or some combination of all of those.

And what else could you do with $3,600 per year?  You could buy decent health insurance, repair damage from that burst pipe, pay for unexpected dental expenses, lease a pretty nice car, take a nice vacation, upgrade your wardrobe substantially, etc., etc.

Every law student borrowing after the change kicks in and anyone thinking about going to law school in 2012 or after should work this change in law into their financial spreadsheets, or have a trusted advisor do it.  I do that kind of work for any Advise-In admissions and application client who wants me to, and we integrate their debt profile into several post-law school income scenarios.

The loss of the “grace period” is also difficult, since many students will need to pay for their bar review course (often taking out even more debt in the process) and will likely have significant wardrobe and other expenditures related to getting (or looking for) a professional job.  The grace period was one way to help bridge that period.  But it’s gone, R.I.P.  That should also be thrown into the spreadsheet scenario cauldron.

None of this factors in a likely result of the debt ceiling crisis—whether next week or next year, at some point, if as a country we continue to say that repayment of our debts is optional, the cost of borrowing is likely to increase.  It may not happen right away because a lot of alternatives (European national debt, for example) are a little scary at the moment.  But it’s hard to see how, over the next several years, interest rates can stay at their current low level, so potential borrowers should be factoring in an increase of some basis points for loans that they’ll need for their second and third years of law school.  Now, if inflation increases, and if current borrowers won’t need to borrow more at those inflationary rates, some of that impact could be mitigated.  Increasingly, however, many borrowers seem to be repaying debt by taking out more debt.  That simply can’t end well.

The bottom line is that unless you’re able to pay your debt out of surplus after law school, every dollar of debt adversely affects your well-being by several dollars.  At some point, for many the debt becomes unmanageable, affecting not only financial well-being but also psychological health and relationships.  The loss of federal subsidies may or may not have been a wise choice in setting our national priorities.  Irrespective of that, law and other graduate students will have to deal with it.  The option that Congress apparently thinks it has—maybe we’ll pay our debts and maybe we won’t—isn’t a choice it will give student borrowers.

Understanding that paradox and knowing what to do with it was central to my getting a 180 LSAT score on my first and only try.   This new video, “LSAT Analytical Reasoning: Dealing with Timing Pressure in LSAT Logic Games”, explains part of Advise-In’s approach to analytical reasoning.  If you want to see that approach in action, you can also watch “Simplifying LSAT Line Games (and Making You Faster): Advise-In Solutions’ Step-by Step Approach to LSAT Line Games”.

There are a lot of analytical reasoning videos on the internet. Advise-In’s approach is distinctive for a few reasons:

1. It’s proven.  It’s how I got a perfect score and how my clients do as well as they do on the LSAT.

When you take the LSAT, you want the pressure of the day to melt away. The way to do that is to have clear, repeatable techniques that are simple to apply and that make the right answer clear with a minimum of (which is not to say no) mental strain. That’s particularly possible in LSAT logic games. If you can keep the logic games clear and straightforward, you’ll be less likely to make careless mistakes or to so sap your mental energy that you won’t have as much left for the rest of the LSAT as you should. And that’s what it takes to get your best LSAT score.

If you’re preparing for the LSAT, you shouldn’t be afraid of analytical reasoning, but should look at it as the section where, more than any other, you can simply be a mechanic. What’s important in logic games is getting your initial diagram correct from the start and thinking it through fully.  After that, for about two-thirds of the questions (on average), you should not have to think much at all; the answers should jump off the page. 

2. You see the 180 LSAT scorer who teaches all Advise-In clients. If you look at most big-box mass-LSAT prep company videos, you see the person they want you to see, presumably the best they have, in their opinion. If everyone were equally good, well, they’d do a video with every instructor. If you like the person they have as their front-person, great, but good luck getting that person to teach you. Mass-prep companies won’t (as far as I know) guarantee that, and many are likely not even working with the company still. You get who they give you. That’s just how Wal-Mart-type LSAT prep works.  Unlike Wal-Mart, though, you can’t actually buy what you just saw in the window.

In contrast, at the end of this Advise-In video, you see my number and, if you call it, you’ll talk to me. If you’re a client, you’ll work with me. If you don’t like the video, well, Advise-In isn’t for you. If you do, there’s no bait-and-switch.

My clients already enjoy unlimited access to over 50 LSAT prep videos at no extra charge.  Of course, even over 50 videos can’t substitute for the intensive, customized programs that I design and implement for my clients. Nor will they substitute for the detailed analysis of each piece of paper that my clients send to me over the course of their programs. And by definition, the videos won’t incorporate the real-time adjustments I make to each client’s program based on their performance and needs.  But they’re an exciting additional resource for my clients.

I hope this video is helpful for you as you prepare for the LSAT.

Things have been a little busy lately, but sometimes delay is a good thing.  In this case, it allowed me to have lunch with Elise Jaffe, a former law firm colleague who is now the pre-law advisor at Hunter College in New York City.  Elise and John are always insightful and, while this post is my view, it owes a lot to those conversations.

There are several reasons why reading comp seems to be the forgotten stepchild in LSAT prep courses and marketing.  Some of them are merely commercial; others are inherent in the relatively short-term nature of LSAT prep, which is to say that most programs don’t address reading comprehension very well because—within the structure of most LSAT prep programs—it’s harder to address.  In combination with the limited objectives of most LSAT programs, the result is that reading comprehension feels like an afterthought.

I’ll talk about a little theory below.  The practical payoff is simple, though: Read—a lot—before you begin your intensive LSAT prep.  The more of a reader you are, the easier you’ll find reading comprehension especially, and logical reasoning to a lesser (but still significant) extent.

As Elise and John, in their own way, noted to me, taking a too-narrow view of the LSAT (which, I’ll add, is in the commercial interest of most LSAT prep programs) is positively damaging to performance.  Elise emphasizes that in one very important way, LSAT prep isn’t a short-horizon task.  It may be that you only “prepare for the LSAT” for a relatively short time but you start from somewhere; that is, you rely on a long personal development of reading and analytical skills.  To help develop those skills, Elise recommends to her students that, throughout their college careers, they become regular readers of the New York Times (relatively inexpensive with student rates) and at least one other respected news source, targeting op-ed pages in particular if they don’t have time to read the entire publication.  One of my first posts on this blog contained similar advice.

John’s R.E.A.D. principle is in a similar vein.  It’s a great “back-to-basics” reminder that what the LSAT, in its essence, is asking you to do is to understand and analyze the information it presents.  No one starts doing that from a blank slate.  Any taker relies on a better or worse history of doing exactly that, understanding and analyzing information as it’s presented.

I’m not recommending extending dedicated LSAT prep time—I think that too long spent preparing is just as unhelpful as too short a time, as I’ve said several times on this blog.  What’s important is the preparation you do before you start “preparing” for the LSAT.

A great LSAT prep program can maximize your reading ability but can’t create it from scratch (or nearly scratch).  Knowing and using the right techniques for you are important to maximizing your LSAT performance—but they’re not alchemy.  LSAT books that purport to teach you “how to read for the LSAT” are more harmful than beneficial—that’s another reason why I continue to believe that the best decisions I made in my own LSAT prep were to take all those books to the dumpster and to ignore all those programs and tutors that held out the possibility of great results (“crushing the LSAT,” “beating the LSAT,” etc.) without any pedagogically sound plan as to how to get to those results.

The basic fact is this. Takers of the LSAT have been reading (more or less well and more or less heavily) for a long time.  For example, although I didn’t start my LSAT prep anywhere near the 180 score I got on my only LSAT, I had the advantage that I was a heavy reader (and I had no idea what the LSAT books were trying to tell me about reading—they had nothing to do with how I read or should read, and I was pretty convinced that I was already a better reader than the books’ authors).  I didn’t read quite the way the LSAT wanted me to but I read a lot.  So, what I needed to do was to change the way I processed and analyzed information.  But I didn’t need to learn how to read, understand or process information at a reasonably high level.

When prospective clients take a diagnostic (or show me their actual LSAT after having taken another program), I worry more about the ultimate cap on their scores if reading comprehension is weak.  I’m upfront about that with them.  I think that’s my duty.  The bottom line is that I’m not qualified—nor, to my knowledge, is any other LSAT instructor—to teach remedial reading.  I can help tweak reading habits but 10 weeks—or, for that matter, 6 months—isn’t enough time to completely rebuild reading habits.  I can teach more efficient reading, better analysis of arguments and various other techniques specifically to maximize how any individual is already reading—but I can’t teach someone how to read.  And any LSAT book or instructor who tells you it or he can (especially in a few weeks) is either badly deceived, less than truthful or a severely underpaid sorcerer.

Even in making adjustments to how you read, the longer you have and the more dedicated you are, the better off you’ll be.  That’s the function of the pre-program that I offer to my clients.  The objective of that program is to get clients in the habit of reading in the way that the LSAT wants them to read without using up LSAT questions doing it, and giving ourselves more time to get it right.  Some of my clients are doing the pre-program (at no additional charge) for over a year—it’s just a few hours a week but it pays considerable dividends.

I don’t know of any other LSAT prep company that offers a similar program.  Why?  Well, it’s time and effort, for one.  And most LSAT prep programs are volume-based, so it’s not worth their effort.  But since the issue with those whose reading comprehension is weaker is more one of reading generally—and less one of 8 or 10 or 26 weeks of LSAT prep—these programs don’t emphasize reading comprehension.

They can’t, really.  And to the extent that mass-market LSAT prep intends to get its students a marginal improvement on a base score, they don’t have to—they can get enough small improvements through marginal moves.  Still, they should make the limitations of what they’re doing clear, in my opinion.  If what you want—and you should—is your best LSAT score, you should start preparing for the LSAT long before you start preparing for it, either in a dedicated pre-program like the one I offer clients or in a self-designed program.  If you do that, your LSAT-specific work will have greater impact.

That’s all in “LSAT mode.”  There’s a more important consideration.  As a lawyer, one of the two or three activities that will take up the largest proportion of your time will be—reading.  And you’ll need to be a very careful and efficient reader to be a first-rate lawyer.  While I am generally of the opinion that the LSAT has a single purpose—to help get your best law school admission with the most merit-based financial aid you can get—it’s important to keep the end goal in mind.  If you don’t like to read, you should think carefully about whether the law and being a lawyer are right for you.  And the most practice you get at analytical reading—of the type tested on the LSAT, among others—the better off you and your clients will be when you become a lawyer.

There was good news last month that indicated that the ABA might approve a significant overhaul to the current lax reporting system.  I held my tongue on the grounds that you can’t tell the number of chickens by counting eggs.

But yesterday, the ABA announced that its Legal Education and Admissions section has approved significant changes, which will be reported next year.  There are still hurdles—among them, defining certain terms and seeing how law schools actually report the data—but law school applicants and their advisors should have to fight through a lot less white noise beginning next year.  In the meantime, applicants need not wait until actual publication to politely request relevant data from law schools.  Law schools can no longer (as some of them, unbelievably, did) claim they just don’t have some basic data.

Most important, the ABA appears to have taken seriously its job as law schools’ regulatory body.  It doesn’t matter so much that it may (or may not) have done so under increasing political pressure or that the ABA’s own statements of concern were often clumsy, at best.  Nor may it matter that the ABA explicitly noted that it wants to avoid “unnecessary” effort by law schools—you could take that to say that law schools simply do (or clearly ought to) have basic information available.

There are a few highlights but the best way of seeing the scope of the changes is to look at the chart that the ABA appears to be requiring law schools to complete (see the last page of the memorandum that begins of p. 20 of this pdf) and comparing that chart to what had previously been required.

Assuming that these changes were adopted in full (today’s ABA release includes confusing language saying that “these [reported] and other proposed changes were recommended in June,” leaving open the possibility that some of the changes described below may not have been approved), here are some of the more significant changes:

1.  Instead of requiring simple employment data, the ABA will require a specification of what jobs require a J.D.; which one prefer a J.D., and which ones don’t.

2.  Full-time vs. part-time employment will now be reported separately.  That’s a significant advance and should prevent law schools (depending on the definition of “part-time”) from slipping over the significant difference between the two in income, prestige and future career potential.

3.  The ABA will require reporting of the number of jobs funded by the law school, a technique that several prominent (and other) law schools have used in the last several years that had the effect of significantly enhancing the appearance of employment percentage numbers.  You can appreciate that law schools want to “bridge” their graduates’ employment in tough times and still want to understand the extent to which they’re doing it, appropriately discounting the employment numbers.

4.  Law firm jobs will be broken out by size of firm.  That’s a significant improvement over the prior aggregation of law firm data.  The ABA, unfortunately, did not require law schools to further disaggregate their government and business employment data.  That will still be something that applicants will need to find out on their own.

5.  Salary information will be “unbundled” from employment information.  This should help with some of the incredible numbers we’ve seen some law schools report regarding their “median” salaries, which have been artificially inflated by (in some cases) shockingly small sample sizes.  Instead, the NALP numbers on statewide salaries will become the gold standard, on the theory that this will decrease cherry-picking of statistics by law schools.

To be honest, I was initially suspicious of this unbundling but have come to believe that the ABA made the right choice.  If any individual law school’s sample size is large enough to be meaningful, applicants and their advisors can put it on the list of items to cover.

6.  Clerkship data has been broken down into federal and state clerkships.  That’s important and, while the data could always be more granular, it should prevent some law schools from touting clerkship numbers as if they are the equivalent of U.S. Supreme Court clerkships.

I think there’s more the ABA could have done but what they appear to have done is a lot.  There are still uncertainties to be resolved, of course, before anyone should exhale.  First, we’ll see what law schools actually do.  I’m pretty confident that some will engage in some creative interpretation of the requirements.  That’s related to a second point.  Just as when legislation is passed, attention turns to regulatory lobbying, here the ABA’s official statement notes that “Definitions for these categories [part-time/full-time; J.D. required; J.D. preferred; “another profession”; “non-professional”] will be developed this coming fall.”  Um, that’s 90% of the game—if the definitions are lax, the data will be meaningless and potentially deceptive.  It will be of paramount importance to see how these categories are actually operationalized.  I haven’t eaten my crow yet but I’m really hoping that I’ll have a double-helping when it’s finally out of the oven.

If the categories are operationalized in a meaningful way, I won’t say that the new reporting scheme will make my clients’ and my job easier.  There’s still additional information that any individual client or law school applicant will want in order to make her or his decision responsibly.  More important, the task of getting that information and negotiating with law schools in a friendly and productive way will continue to be a challenge requiring careful tactical thinking.  All that is just the nature of the business when you’re making a six-figure investment in law school.

Here’s what I hope the new reporting scheme will do.  First, it will make applicants’ and my work more productive and efficient.  There should be less obfuscation and obstruction to combat, and law schools will be less able to hide the ball or cherry-pick their statistics.  Perhaps more important, at least for the moment, the ABA has signaled that it will act, and that business-as-it’s-been-practiced simply isn’t good enough anymore.  If law schools internalize that regulatory mood, and some of them likely will (others likely will immediately look for new ways to manipulate their data), law schools may also be more forthcoming with—and view it as less of a burden to provide—additional or clarifying information that law school applicants need to make a good-faith, responsible decision about which law school to attend.  Law school applicants may also feel a little bolder about requesting data they need to make their decisions.

I hesitated a little to do this project.  My father, who passed away several years ago, told me a story once about when he first wanted to learn how to use his ATM card at a community bank.  The bank said it would be happy to train him but really preferred that he not use it, since the bank liked to see and talk with its customers (as you might guess, that was a long time ago).  I had a similar quandary with this video project.  The hallmark of what Advise-In Solutions does is customized, individual work with my clients.  But sometimes, more is, well, more, and I ultimately decided that as long as the videos were a supplement to, and not a substitute for, my clients’ and my intensive one-on-one work, they would make Advise-In’s LSAT programs even more effective.

The videos include the place of the LSAT in law school admissions, LSAT foundations (including especially Advise-In’s emphasis on simplicity and preparing with one day—exam day—constantly in view), practical introductions to the LSAT and each of its sections, LSAT techniques and dos and don’ts in studying for the LSAT.  Over half of the videos are step-by-step practical illustrations of how to do individual types of LSAT questions. Since I don’t outsource any teaching or advising to temporary employees or those looking for a little money on their way to law school but who may or may not have any real teaching ability or commitment to students, all of the videos were done by me (I’m hoping my clients won’t get too tired of watching me—but that’s what the “stop” button is for).

Some of these videos will be released publicly in the future—I’d have loved to have gotten those out a little earlier but (unlike my internet vendors), current clients are my first priority, prospective clients and the public my second.  The public videos won’t include the detail that my client-only videos do (and in many cases, the client videos won’t be public) but they will provide a lot of free help with LSAT preparation for those who aren’t in a position to use Advise-In’s programs. 

I’d also thought of doing some admission and application videos, and there’s some of that in the videos I did.  But I ultimately decided against a full-on set of videos, simply because there are really very few general rules for law school applications and admissions that haven’t already been discussed in one way or another on this blog—almost everything else depends entirely on each individual’s situation.

Of course, I’m thrilled to provide another resource to help each Advise-In client obtain her or his best LSAT score and law school admission and financial aid opportunities.  I also want to express my deep appreciation to Nikola Dević and Anne Gwynn (on the video side) and Carl Lorentzen (for redesigning Advise-In’s website).  Their efforts have been tremendous and they have my thanks.

      –Paul F. Campos, professor, University of Colorado School of Law

That’s the most stunning statement in yesterday’s New York Times article on the law school admissions market.  The Times sometimes takes awhile to catch up to what market participants have known for some time but this is the second recent article in the Times targeting law schools.  Like its last article on excessive law school debt, yesterday’s piece doesn’t provide a lot of new information to the well-informed but it’s a must-read distillation for anyone considering applying to law school.

Here are some highlights:

1.  The flat structure of law school tuition.  The article focuses on New York Law School and its (soon-to-be-former) “reformer dean,” Richard Matasar.  The article notes that NYLS tuition and fees now exceed Harvard’s, despite the obvious difference between Harvard and NYLS in reputation, graduate placement, and virtually everything else that matters to a law student.

We’ve talked about the flatness of the tuition structure on the Advise-In Solutions website and this blog repeatedly.  It’s one reason why law school is a risky, uncertain investment.  If you want to make that investment anyway, it’s vital to improve your attractiveness to better law schools as much a you can by raising your GPA (with challenging courses), getting your best LSAT score and submitting a top-flight application package.  You’re likely to pay virtually the same amount regardless of what law school you attend, but the payoff from higher-ranked law schools is astonishingly better than from other law schools.

2.  The squishiness and unreliability of law school employment data.  While the ABA has announced some reforms relating to the employment data law schools are required to report (more on that in a future blog), the current data is often less than useless.

We won’t use Prof. Campos’ “F” word but, for example, NYLS reported to US News that its “median” graduate starting salary was $160,000 (in other words, it’s median was the starting salary at large New York City firms)—and this despite the acknowledgment that “most of its graduates, in fact, find work at less than half that amount.”  I don’t know how to parse that—a “median,” by definition is a peg that is supposed to reflect that one-half of the relevant group are above the median and one-half below.  So, even what should be a clear statistical measure is, apparently, not.

This kind of data indicates why it’s important to ask law schools the right questions, and to have a strategy for doing so.  The median, even if it were reliable, doesn’t tell you anything about the average starting salary.  Nor does it tell you how those salaries are broken down by class rank.  One of the key differences between law schools is the depth of the bench, i.e., how far down the class rank the really good jobs go.

That doesn’t even touch the question of low reporting rates from graduates.  NYLS’ (and every other law school’s) data is based on those who responded to its requests for initial employment information—a whopping 26% of its class.  You don’t need to wonder whether the unemployed are less likely to report than the employed, or whether the underemployed are less likely than the fully employed.  They are, so law school data, even absent “fraud,” will always reflect a cheerier reality than, well, reality.

I’ve talked about the difficulty of getting law schools to provide meaningful employment information.  In some cases, law schools simply refuse to do so, or don’t do it after promising that they will.  I’m happy to say that none of my clients have attended any law school to which they’ve been admitted who didn’t provide meaningful employment data to them.  To do so would be like buying a stock when the company refuses to disclose financial information.  It’s a bad idea.  No qualifications.  Just a bad idea.

3.  Law school tuition continues to rise, and it’s rising at a pace considerably faster than undergraduate education.  In the late 1980s, annual law school tuition was, on average, less than undergraduate education; now, it averages considerably more.  We should not expect that trend to change, unless and until there is less demand for the limited number of law school seats available.

*************************************************************************************

There’s a lot more useful data in the Times article but they key points are these: law school are a business, and a lucrative one.  What’s more, law schools are institutional businesses.

To say they’re businesses isn’t a slam (I run a business, too), it’s just a fact.  But its being a fact—and that you should expect law schools to act like businesses—is not always clear to applicants, and law schools not only don’t make it clear, they often cover their business mission in a veneer of “education”- and “altruism”- speak.  That’s persuasive to a lot of people because we have a cultural image of people who go into education as self-sacrificing and underpaid.  In a lot of cases, that’s true, but not at law schools.  There’s a lot of money to be made, and law schools don’t mind making it.  Dean Matasar, when asked about one of the contradictions between his “reformist” agenda and what NYLS (and a lot of other law schools) are actually doing, said simply “The answer is that we exist in a market.”

That’s a refreshing admission but it’s worth noting that Dean Matasar is stepping down as dean and is pursuing future career options “outside of legal education.”  That gets to the institutional point.  It isn’t that law school administrative personnel or faculty are terrible people; it is that they’re part of an institution and respond to institutional imperatives.  They’re not business owners that can respond solely to their own demands of integrity (or, in some cases, lack thereof).  So, while Dean Matasar, Prof. Campos and others can acknowledge the problems, there’s only so much they will be willing to do to solve them.  That’s why meaningful oversight from the ABA as well as pressure from outside groups such as pre-law advisors, bloggers and advocacy groups is so important.

But the most important pressure is going to come from prospective law students.  I know it doesn’t seem like it sometimes but applicants have power, principally the power to vote with your feet.  Know the information you need from law schools and develop a strategy for getting it.  If you can’t get that information from a particular law school, don’t go there—and tell the law school why.  The bottom line is this—institutional businesses in a competitive market will, some of them anyway, get away with what they can.  One way to distinguish those who are legit from those who aren’t is whether they’re forthcoming with meaningful information (a good caution for the LSAT prep market as well).  The only way that some of the less wholesome practices of law schools will stop is, in the end, for applicants to make them stop.

At a “macro” level, that may already have started to happen.  The Times’ data on spiking law school enrollment is old and doesn’t account for the steep drop in applications this year.  That decline is a good sign but it doesn’t really help those who really do want to go to law school and become lawyers.  If you’re one of those, you can help yourself by doing you due diligence and not accepting unsatisfactory answers to legitimate questions.

A friend and I started the workshop, which involves about 30-35 hours of instruction, to help prospective law students who couldn’t afford commercial LSAT prep courses (or couldn’t afford them again, since many of our students have previously taken one or more). We also aren’t confident that those programs are really valuable. Before I took the LSAT, I cast around for private tutors and investigated nearly every LSAT preparation program available. I came away convinced that most would do me more harm than good, and that none could get me to my best LSAT score. I designed my own program and improved from a 162 initial practice test to a 180 on my actual LSAT (and yes, it was the only time I took the LSAT).

Obviously, a one-week workshop can’t replicate that result. The workshop is classroom-based and has some of the limitations of volume-based classroom teaching. And it’s just a week. That isn’t to say that it hasn’t been very, very successful. Students from the program have attended top U.S. law schools including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Virginia, NYU, Boalt and Duke, among others. A lot of the workshop’s success is, I think, due to the fact that, as a former college professor, I’m so conscious of what classroom teaching can and can’t accomplish that I work very hard to incorporate as much individualized attention as possible. And I focus on simplifying techniques so they’re useful on a stress-filled exam day.

When I started Advise-In Solutions, I decided to continue this workshop. One reason is that it’s fun. The students are a pleasure. The hosts at Weber State University are delightful and it’s always nice to be in gorgeous country (and out of hot and sticky New York City) this time of year.

The most important reason to continue doing the workshop is that it’s the right thing to do. Public service is important to me and Advise-In incorporates a pro bono component elsewhere in its programs as well.

As time permits, I’ll probably do a couple of blog posts based on questions that arise from this year’s students. There are always some interesting issues, and since they raise them publicly, I’m a little freer to talk about them on this blog.

In my last post, I discussed one reason why, over the last decade, the percentage of women in law school has declined.  Although (until this year) the number of women applicants has increased, the number of men applicants has increased much more sharply.  The most recent year is an exception, but it doesn’t alter the long-term trend very much.  There are likely a plethora of economic, societal, and individual reasons that have contributed to this perplexing trend that would require an intensive research project to uncover.  I haven’t done such intensive research yet and I can’t talk definitively about all women, but I can talk about myself and my perceptions. For me, lower average earnings and the deficiency of female lawyers in powerful positions of influence combined with the relative inflexibility and unpredictability of legal work schedules are among the things that I will need to think about carefully before sending in my own applications.  

But all of this doesn’t explain LSAC’s data on admissions.  It makes sense that fewer women should be admitted to law school as part of a smaller pool of applicants, but this does not account for the entire gap.  The percentage of female admits has been steadily decreasing for the past decade, from 48.91% in 2000 to 45.71% in 2010.  This does not match up percentage-wise to the decrease in female applications (49.43% to 47.24%).  On average, in the past decade, the admission rate for women has been 4.12 percentage points lower than for men; this has nothing to do with the size of the applicant pool, but rather seems to have implications as to the “quality” of the applicants.  This difference in admission rate may partly account for the disparity between top 10 enrollments and overall enrollment.  In autumn 2009, women composed 47.06% of enrollees at law schools nationwide.  Taking the average enrollment percentages from the top 10 schools in the Catalyst study shows us that only 45.76% were women.

Those data are pretty shocking—and it’s surprising that it’s gotten very little attention from the legal press.  What could account for the data? 

There is the possibility that better-qualified women have found equivalent or better career opportunities in the last decade in greater numbers than equally qualified men; however, it’s hard to find much hard evidence for that, and it seems unlikely.  Then there is the possibility that applications from women are, on average, not as strong as applications from men.  Do men have higher GPAs? No, on average, women have higher GPAs than men.  Could male applicants have more extensive or desirable work histories, better personal statements or recommendation letters?  Maybe, but again, it’s hard to come up with a convincing explanation for why any of that would be true.  More important, even if those differences did exist, why have they become more pronounced over the last 10 years? 

What about the LSAT?  Men have traditionally scored somewhat better on the LSAT.  Could it be more than coincidence that the growing gap between male/female admission rates was, for a large part, tracked closely by a growing gap between the LSAT scores of men and women?  Using data from the LSAC from the years 2001-2006, Colleen Honigsberg shows that while the mean male LSAT score increased from 152.7 to 154, the mean female LSAT score barely increased at all—151.1 to 151.5. 

It’s also true that average female scores on the SAT don’t quite match up to average male scores.  On critical reading (a big deal on the LSAT), women are about 5 points behind men; on math (not a big deal on the LSAT), the gap is much wider at about 34 points behind men.  It is only in writing that women excel by about 10 points. 

Kyle has made (and asked that I make) the point here that the LSAT isn’t a “standardized test” in the way we usually mean, and that thinking of the LSAT as a sort of super-SAT is damaging to LSAT takers.  Point taken, but I’m saying something a little different.  The LSAT, Kyle will agree, isn’t a “specialist” test—it doesn’t require specific outside knowledge (that’s why it’s not a standardized test like the SAT).  And it’s not an intelligence test for anyone, man or woman.  So, why do women score lower and, more important, why has the gap between men and women increased even though the LSAT hasn’t changed at all in the last decade? 

That suggests to me that women aren’t as equally advantaged by standardized test prep.  Perhaps the programs that are widely available are somehow male-centric and tailored programs that give optimal prep for women are not widely available.  That’s a depressing possibility.  It would mean that, unless the market changes and/or women become more selective about their LSAT prep programs, the trends are not likely to change very much. 

Does this mean that women are on average not as fit to practice law as men?  In my strong opinion, the answer is no.  But law schools maintain or improve their rankings largely on the basis of LSAT scores, and it’s hard to believe it’s accidental that an increasing proportion of male admissions is unrelated to a growing gap in LSAT scores.  

Fewer applications and a lower admission rate have both contributed to the ever-growing gap in percent of female law school admits.  The gap was a 1.77 difference in percentage points in 2000 and has grown to 8.2 percentage points by 2010.  This year’s data may show a slight reversal of that trend but it will be slight and it may not continue in the future.  Fewer female admits translates to fewer female enrollees.   Women are paid less, occupy less prestigious positions and are more likely to leave legal work after short careers.  All of these factors are indicators to college-aged women like me that maybe law isn’t the best future career decision.  I see impediments at virtually every point in the process—from the best LSAT preparation programs for women to their eventual careers in law.  These are the factors that are going to have to change in order for more women to perceive law as a potential future. 

The problem is so multifaceted, so I’ll try to be optimistic.  As an undergraduate woman considering a career in law, it means that all I can do is to try to confront one obstacle at a time.

Welcome, Devon Lawrence.

    –Kyle Pasewark

I am very pleased to introduce Devon Lawrence, an undergraduate at The University of Chicago and an intern at Advise-In Solutions.  Soon after Devon accepted the internship, the legal press reported the news that the percentage of women attending elite law schools had declined.  Somehow, that seemed providential; Devon set about the tasks of investigating the data more deeply, and also reflecting on what it might mean for her, a woman considering her career options, including law school.

What she found—and what she thinks of what she found—will be presented in two blog posts.  While my lawyerly caution inclines me to a Sony DVD-like disclaimer that the opinions of guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Advise-In Solutions management, in this case, I pretty much agree with everything Devon says and sincerely appreciate the very hard high-quality work she put in to produce these posts. 

It goes without saying that the topic is one of tremendous importance.  The decline in the percentage of women attending law school is reversing a late 20^th-century trend toward gender parity in law school (the practice of law is a somewhat different matter).  While increasing disparity does not (necessarily) reflect declining career opportunities for women (to know that, you’d have to show that law is the best option for the women who are no longer attending law school), I think it’s axiomatic that, if it continues, it’s bad news for the future of the legal profession.  If the legal profession can’t attract women like Devon or allow them to maximize their law school and legal practice opportunities, that’s its loss.

Here is the first of Devon’s posts on the topic of women, law school and the law.  I think you’ll find both enlightening.

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I am a college undergraduate who is seriously considering law school and a career in the law; I am also a woman.  So when Kyle asked me to investigate more deeply the data he mentions in his introduction above, I was excited, and a little apprehensive about what I might find. 

To begin with some basic data, a recent article at Poets and Quants showcased findings from Catalyst: there is an increasing disparity between the percentages of men to women enrolling in top law schools (by US News rank).  In fact, as data from the ABA shows, this is a trend at law schools in general, not just the “elite.”  In 2000, enrollment was more or less equal at 21,499 women to 22,019 men.  However, by 2009, the gap had widened considerably with enrollment at 24,305 women to 27,341 men.  Although the overall number of women enrolling did increase in the past decade, percentage growth for male enrollment is almost twice that of female enrollment (13.05% to 24.17%) and total female enrollment, as a percentage, has fallen from 49.4% in 2000 to 47.2% in 2009.

The declining percentage of women enrolling in law school is the consequence of two other trends combined—a decline in women’s application rates and a decline in their admission rates.  Published data from the Law School Admission Council shows both a declining percentage of law school applications from women and an even sharper decline in admission rates.  It should be noted that 2010-11 application rates somewhat reversed this trend; data presented by LSAC at the NAPLA conference on June 10 indicates that in the last year—in which law school applications dropped by over 10%—applications from men declined 12.1%; from women, 9.7%.  However, the percentage of male applicants remained higher than any year since 2000, except for last year.

This data (especially the admission rate) is disconcerting to me.  Even more disconcerting are the possible explanations for this increasing gender disparity.  In this post, I’ll talk about the declining application rate for women; in the next, the especially troubling sharper decline in admission rates. 

The first point at which women lag behind men is in applying to law school.   According to the LSAC, in 2000 more women than men applied to law school by a margin of 360.   In the most recent round of applications reported on LSAC’s website (leaving out of account the data presented at NAPLA), men outnumbered women by 4,380.  It seems to me that applications can be more or less construed as the desire to enter law or a law-related profession combined with the conviction that the significant investment that is law school will be paid off and worth it in the future.   So, how could this shift have happened? 

Perhaps the answer to the disparity in applications is plain and simple: women do not want to work in law as much as men do.  I find this a little difficult to believe.  However, I am a college-aged woman with future aspirations in law, so perhaps that makes me stubborn.  It is incontrovertible that on the whole, women practicing law are not the equals of men with regard to money and power.  According to the Catalyst study, as of 2009 only 19.2% of partners at law firms were women and 99% of firms reported that their highest paid lawyer was a man.  To add to that, the ABA reported in 2011 that on average, women earn about $500 less/week than men.  That adds up to $26,000/year, certainly not a sum to be scoffed at.  Money isn’t everything, and this wouldn’t stop me from doing what I wanted.  However, as I think about making a living after law school, the lower average income among women is a bit of a flashing yellow light.  My future law school decision may have to be a little more careful that than of an “average” man considering the same career decision. 

Maybe the widespread perception that women are more family-oriented than men is true.  But I think that this perception may be partly a side-effect of the inequality in monetary return and influence.   The desire of parents (dads too!) to stay at home and take care of their children is understandable.  However, if the family with a new baby is suddenly going to be a single-source income household, then the parent who makes the most money will probably be the one to continue working.   Ergo, the stay-at-home mom is much more common than the stay-at-home dad.

Whatever the cause, it’s clear that lawyers who are mothers leave the practice of law at a high rate.  A recent Washington Post article discussed a national survey that showed that 25% of lawyers who are mothers had left the workplace 15 years after graduating.  This is striking in comparison to mothers with medical degrees, in which only 6% had left the workplace in the same amount of time.  Essentially, the reason given for this difference is that Dr. Mom is allowed more flexible hours and part-time work than Mom, Esq.

Coming back to the issue of applications–it seems as if a mix of perceptions and realities deter women from having the same level of conviction and desire to go to law school.  Law is perceived as an intense, stressful, and time-consuming profession.  Then again, so is medicine and medical schools are relatively equal gender-wise.  The perception of law for women may be a short career full of the realities of salary and influence inequality before giving up their job to take care of their children while their more “successful” husbands continue to work.

My guess is that the disparity in applications might have to do with women who would have gone to law school deciding that they’d rather make do with just a college degree or go into a career with a little more leeway.  Perhaps more women are skeptical that the increasingly expensive investment in law school is worth it. 

These concerns aren’t universal, of course.  I spoke to the pre-law advisor at my college, The University of Chicago, about my concerns and my findings.  She told me that from the UofC, there has been no change in the level of interest or applications from women (equal to or even slightly ahead of men) and that in her experience, very few women with whom she talks are concerned about the aforementioned issues, such as flexible work schedules.  Maybe women who attend colleges such as UofC have ambitions that are more impervious to the drawbacks of law school and law.  I’m not sure—but speaking for myself, I’ll consider my decision about whether to go to law school and pursue a legal career differently in light of these issues.

Even if I (and other women) decide to apply to law school, there’s still the even more troubling data that I’ll talk about in my next post—the admission of women to law school has declined even more sharply than their application rate.

  –Devon Lawrence