Whittier's challenges may have been unique to California

On the heels of my analysis of the challenges facing Whittier, I starting thinking about how Whittier compared with a great many other law schools in the country that are facing the same challenges--a shrinking law school applicant pool, declining quality of applicants, continued challenges in bar exam pass rates and graduate employment statistics. Whittier's incoming class profile isn't unique. What makes its situation different from other schools?

The answer, I think, lies in California, along three dimensions--state bar cut scores, transfers, and employment.

I recently read a law professor suggest that Whittier was making a significant mistake closing because it was located in Orange County, California, a place that would experience great demand for legal services in the near future. I tend to find just the opposite--if Whittier were dropped into just about any of the other 49 states in the country, it likely would not be facing the same pressures it faces in its current location. (This is, of course, not to say that it wouldn't be facing the same kinds of pressures in legal education generally, but that its problems are exacerbated in California.)

I looked at the incoming class profiles from 2013 and picked 11 other schools that closely matched Whittier's overall incoming LSAT profile.

School Name	Matriculants	75th LSAT	50th LSAT	25th LSAT
Atlanta's John Marshall Law School	235	152	149	146
John Marshall Law School	404	152	149	146
Mississippi College	159	153	149	145
New England Law | Boston	238	153	149	145
Nova Southeastern University	305	152	149	146
Oklahoma City University	162	153	149	145
Suffolk University	450	153	149	145
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth	78	151	148	145
University of North Dakota	83	153	148	145
Western New England University	120	152	149	145
Whittier Law School	221	152	149	145
Widener-Commonwealth	74	151	148	145

First, I looked at the first-time bar pass rate for the July 2016 bar, with each state's cut score and the state's overall first-time pass rate among graduates of ABA-accredited schools. (As of this writing, neither the Mississippi state bar nor Mississippi College have disclosed school-specific bar pass rates yet.)

School Name	State	Cut score	July 2016 Pass Rate	Statewide Pass Rate
Mississippi College	MS	132	*	75%
Widener-Commonwealth	PA	136	79%	75%
Western New England University	MA	135	74%	81%
New England Law | Boston	MA	135	73%	81%
University of North Dakota	ND	130	73%	73%
Suffolk University	MA	135	70%	81%
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth	MA	135	69%	81%
Oklahoma City University	OK	132	67%	75%
John Marshall Law School	IL	133	65%	77%
Nova Southeastern University	FL	136	63%	68%
Atlanta's John Marshall Law School	GA	135	43%	73%
Whittier Law School	CA	144	22%	62%

A Pepperdine colleague blogged last year that if Whittier were in New York, it would likely have had a 51% first-time pass rate instead of a 22% pass rate. New York's cut score is relatively low--a 133.  (Whittier's average combined California bar score for first-time test-takers in July 2016 was a 135.5, above 133 and well below California's 144.) If Whittier were in Massachusetts or Georgia, it might have had something near 51%. If it were in Mississippi or North Dakota, its pass rate may have approached 60%. A first-time pass rate of 3 in 5 is still not something to be happy about, but it's a far cry from a first-time rate around just 1 in 5.

It isn't that some of these schools figured out how to help their students to pass the bar and that Whittier lagged; it's that California's high cut score makes it more difficult to pass the bar than if Whittier grads had taken the bar in almost any other state. (This isn't to say that a higher or a lower cut score is better or worse; it's simply to describe the situation that California schools face compared to others.)

Second, a factor in bar pass rate includes the loss of high-performing students as transfers elsewhere. I looked at transfer rates among these schools in 2014, a loss of students who matriculated to the school in 2013.

School Name	Transfers Out Pct	Transfers Out
Atlanta's John Marshall Law School	19%	45
Nova Southeastern University	13%	41
Whittier Law School	13%	28
John Marshall Law School	12%	50
New England Law | Boston	11%	26
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth	10%	8
Western New England University	8%	10
Suffolk University	8%	37
University of North Dakota	5%	4
Oklahoma City University	3%	5
Widener-Commonwealth	3%	2
Mississippi College	3%	4

It may come as little surprise that larger states with many competitive schools that shrunk the incoming class sizes to preserve their LSAT and UGPA medians tended to rely on transfers to help backfill their classes. Atlanta's John Marshall lost 20 students to Emory, 10 to Georgia State, and 5 to Mercer; Nova lost 16 to Miami and 5 to Florida State; and Whittier lost 15 to Loyola-Los Angeles. These schools lost a number of their best students, and, unsurprisingly, had some of the worst bar outcomes among this cohort. (Four of these schools are in Massachusetts, and perhaps no single school attracts the bulk of transfer attention; and schools in less competitive states like Mississippi, North Dakota, and Oklahoma experienced insignificant attrition.)

Third, Whittier had low job placement in full-time, long-term, bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage positions, but it's a reflection of the fact that the placement rate of California schools lags most of the rest of the country. (It's also exacerbated by the low bar pass rate.) Consider each school's placement in FTLT BPR & JDA positions, and the statewide placement rate into such (unfunded) jobs.

School Name	FTLT BPR+JDA	Statewide emp	Delta
Mississippi College	76%	72%	4
Oklahoma City University	73%	77%	-4
Widener-Commonwealth	68%	83%	-15
Suffolk University	66%	79%	-13
John Marshall Law School	66%	77%	-11
New England Law | Boston	60%	79%	-19
Atlanta's John Marshall Law School	58%	77%	-19
Nova Southeastern University	58%	65%	-7
Western New England University	57%	79%	-22
University of North Dakota	57%	57%	0
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth	55%	79%	-24
Whittier Law School	39%	64%	-25

Whittier lags in placement here, too, but in part because California has unusually low placement. (North Dakota, a state with just one flagship law school, serves as an outlier.) This is not a total defense of a particular school's outcomes, either--Florida also appears to have a relatively high number of law school graduates, and its employment rate shows similar challenges. But coupled with Whittier's low bar passage rate, one can see why securing students in positions, particularly "bar passage required" positions, would be even more difficult. Several other schools show employment rates that are 19 to 24 points behind the state average. (School like Oklahoma City, one of three; Mississippi College, one of two; and North Dakota, the only school in the state, may distort these comparisons somewhat.)

I then read another piece from a graduate from the 1970s lamenting that Whittier had "lost its way" in training graduates ready to take the bar. I pointed out Whittier's challenges were hardly recent, as the ABA had placed Whittier on probation in 2005, which lead to efforts that bolstered Whittier's first-time bar pass rate in California past 84%.

But it's worth looking back to the 1970s, when Whittier first sought accreditation, to consider its situation and aspirations. Here's an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times in 1978 when Whittier received ABA accreditation:

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In 1978, a 550 was around the 51st percentile of LSAT scores--something like a 151 today. Its tuition in 1974 was $1200 per year, or around $6000 per year in 2017 dollars. It was on pace to increase to $2900 per year in just four years, or about $11,000 in 2017 dollars. There are obviously significant benefits that arise from becoming an ABA-accredited law school. But there are also costs with accreditation--and I'm not sure that a law school with tuition levels at $11,000 a year would be facing the same kinds of pressures among selecting prospective students.

I don't pretend to understand the dynamics of legal education in California in the last 40 years, with more than 20 ABA-accredited law schools and a number of California accredited and unaccredited schools. But I do think some context about the California market suggests that some of the problems Whittier faced were exacerbated by the California market in particular.