Brian Leiter has just posted rankings of the Top 10 law schools by percentage of transfer students. See . It is generating a lot of traffic, see, e.g, and , in part because Brian names names.
More transfers. Between 1997 and 2004, non-academic 1L attrition, which is the ABA-LSAC Official Guide category that would include transfers, has increased at statistically significant levels. See Morriss & Henderson, Measuring Outcomes, Fig. 2 and accompanying text. I would posit that this coincides with a rankings payoff of higher entering credentials, not a rethinking of admissions policies driven by principles of equity and opportunity. We should not confuse colorable justifications, which lawyers are expert at, with underlying motivations of self-interest.
- Perceive their relationships with other students to be as
positive as students who did not transfer. - Work with other students outside of class to complete an
assignment. - Have serious conversations with students who are different
from themselves. - Discuss ideas from reading or assignments with others
outside of class. - Work on a paper or project that required integrating ideas.
- Participate in cocurricular activities.
P. 14-15. The report continues, "These findings underscore that many of the strongest student
relationships are formed during the first year of law school before transfer students
join the campus community." (p. 15). Note these findings describe group results. Please spare me anecdotes in the comments about well-adjusted transfer students. We
cannot generalize, and thus make policy, from individual data points. We need a
representative sample, which LSSSE provides.
Harms to Curricular Innovation. If the best students from Tier 3 and 4 are siphoned by Tiers 1 and 2, lower ranked schools have one hell of a time demonstrating the value of their curricular innovations. And these innovations often require immense commitments of time and money. The substantive value may be there, but the school will not get an adequate return on the investment. So incentives to innovate are diluted.
At the end of the day, the increase in transfers represents a giant collective action problem. But it could be solved if U.S. News reworked its methodology. The putative regulator here is the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar. Are they even paying attention? I often wonder. After the jump are the charts that show net transfers by U.S. News rank. It is very ugly.
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