Don't exploit poor students

From ABA's Proposed 75% Bar Passage Requirement Underscores Tension Between Consumer Protection, Diversity Concerns by Paul Caron.

What is happening at universities in general and law schools in particular is a moral outrage. The established interests are serving their own venal ends at the expense of poor minority students. They have hidden it for years but it is now becoming more and more obvious.

In the instance Caron is reporting on, the facts are pretty plain. African American and Hispanic students, for a multitude of reasons, pass the bar exam at lower rates than do others. The American Bar Association (ABA) is committed to greater inclusion and diversity.

The context is that the legal industry has had a rough ten or fifteen years with declining demand for services and declining profitability. There are fewer first year jobs for lawyers graduating from law school and the legal profession compensation is lower so fewer people are applying to law school. Law Schools, which used to be cash cows for universities, have, across the nation, seen plunging enrollments. Lower enrollments mean lower revenue.

The response at the federal level has been to make it easier for students to obtain cheap loans to finance their way through the three years of law school. At the Law School level, the response has been to lower admissions standards. They are accepting less and less academically prepared students into their programs.

Less academically talented students mean that a lower and lower percentage are actually passing the bar exam after graduating law school.

That's the rub. What should be done about the situation where Law Schools are admitting more students who are less likely to pass the bar exam (and therefore derive financial benefit from the three years of study.) The moral quandary is that the Law Schools are making it easier for students to go deeply into debt, waste three years of study, and derive no financial benefit. That at the least has the appearance of fraud and unavoidably looks like preying upon the most vulnerable in order to shore up the business model of the most privileged.

Add in race and ethnicity to the mix and you end up with something pretty appalling. The bottom tier of Law Schools desperately need these students, otherwise they will have to close. These schools are packed with African Americans and Hispanic students. They are induced to take on debt while the probability that they will pass the bar exam is low.

The Law Schools apparently have no qualm about this fraud. The ABA ought to be the independent body that closes down this exploitation of poor students. But the ABA has its own objectives. Many of these poorly performing Law Schools are affiliated with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). If the ABA closes schools with low bar pass rates, which they ought to do if they want to prevent exploitation of poor students, then they will disproportionately close HBCU Law Schools which will in turn harm already financially precarious HBCUs. It will also appear that the ABA is targeting Law Schools that have predominantly African-American and Hispanic students.

The ABA wants to keep these schools open and it wants to appear to be more diverse than it is. That means keeping the loans flowing and the bar pass rates low. That approach means that more and more minority students will be exploited by taking on loans that they won't be able to repay, thus locking them in to a downward spiral.

Alternatively, the ABA could take the principled position that Law Schools should only admit students likely to financially benefit from investing upwards of $150,000 and three years in a degree. That means a high pass rate in a short time frame. If they do that, Law Schools will have to do the right thing and only admit those likely to pass. But that means the ABA will have to give up its feel-good goal of achieving more Law School diversity.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we subscribe to the SJW worldview.

I would like it if we could focus on the simple objective - don't exploit poor students.