Law school academic dismissal and conditional scholarship eliminations, 2024
I have previously highlighted the fact that law schools have wide variance in how they handle academic dismissals of first-year law students and how they handle reducing or eliminating scholarships. Both categories, I have argued, are negatives for law schools and the kind of information that USNWR could (and perhaps should) incorporate into its rankings. I offered a few ways of comparing schools to one another.
Here’s a visualization of the percentage of first-year law students who were academically dismissed in 2024. These percentages are slightly different than the opaque percentages that are reported to the ABA. These figures look at enrollment as of October 5, 2023; and the ensuing total number of first-year law students who were academically dismissed the following year. The figures exclude transfers, and those who withdrew for other reasons. I organize the chart roughly by USNWR ranking and only look at the top 100-ish schools. Last year’s charts are here.
You can see that most schools have zero or negligible academic attrition, and that it picks up slightly as the chart moves down. But a few schools have somewhat higher academic attrition, 5% or higher. (For what it’s worth, in my judgment, negligible attrition, 1% or so, is entirely appropriate for a school as it makes risk tradeoffs for admissions, as it may desire to broaden the applicant pool and give a larger cohort of students a chance than a more stringent policy.
Now over to scholarship reductions or eliminations. The ABA does not distinguish between the two, or distinguish in the amount. Instead, any reduction or elimination is included. The percentage here is also slightly different than the ABA data—it is the percentage of the overall class in this chart, not the percentage among scholarship recipients. That is, if you did not receive a scholarship, you are included in the denominator in this chart, so this chart includes all 1Ls at each school.
There are far fewer schools that reduce or eliminate scholarships, because the vast majority of school simply do not have “conditional” scholarship policies. But, again, as one moves down the chart, one can see some more reductions or eliminations, with a handful eliminating or reducing scholarships for 10% or more of the class. And there is some overlap among academic attrition rates and conditional scholarship data.