The limits of transparency

This post should be read in conjunction with DJM's post yesterday regarding employment outcomes at higher-ranked schools. It provides a glimpse of how bad things are getting in the lower tier.  The Florida bar association maintains a particularly useful attorney search engine, that enables all kinds of interesting sorting of data. (Update: A commenter suggests there may be problems with the search engine, and that it isn't listing some Barry graduates who are members of the Florida bar).  Here I'm going to look at what's happening to graduates of Barry University's law school, and what light this throws on the successes and limits of the law school reform movement.

Low-ranked law schools are intensely regional: if a Barry grad is going to get a job as a lawyer, it's almost certainly going to be in Florida.  The ABA statistics for the 209 graduates in the class of 2011 reflect this: of those Barry graduates who were employed, 114 had jobs -- not necessarily legal jobs of course -- in Florida, while three were employed in New Jersey, and two in Illinois.  This means there was no more than one 2011 Barry grad was employed in any other state.  Here's another bit of evidence of how local Barry is: there are a total of six Barry graduates currently barred in California.

144 Barry graduates took the July 2011 Florida bar exam, and 104 passed. An additional 31 took the February 2012 exam, with 24 passing.  Now we don't know how many of these people were class of 2011 graduates, but it's likely that the vast majority were.

Alarmingly, as of seventeen months after the class's graduation, only 70 out of 209 class of 2011 Barry grads -- 33.5% -- are currently members of the Florida bar.  Given that only a handful of the members of this class are likely barred outside Florida this suggests that, a year and half after graduation, less than half of the graduating class is even barred, let alone actually practicing law.

When we look more closely at what the third of the class that has a license to practice law in the state where the vast majority of Barry grads who ever practice law will do so, the picture becomes even more dire.  Here's what these 70 people are doing per their current bar registration:

2-5 lawyer firm: 21
Solo practice:  11

No business address: 5

51-100 lawyer firm: 5

State and local DA: 5

6-10 lawyer firm: 4

Two 2011 grads forming two-person firm: 4

Clerking for a solo: 3

100+ lawyer firm: 2

In-house: 2

21-50 lawyer firm: 2

11-20 lawyer firm: 1

Clerking for two-person firm: 1

Local government attorney: 1

Public Defender: 1

Guardian ad Litem: 1

Criminal Conflict Civil Regional counsel: 1

Note that the 90% of Barry 2011 grads who graduated with law school debt had an average reported debt of $137,680 (Barry was one of at least a half dozen schools that initially misreported their graduates' debt, reporting it originally as being less than a third of the actual number).  The $137,680 figure doesn't include accrued interest, which means that when 2011 Barry grads with law school debt took the Florida bar they were actually carrying around $155,000 in such debt. Nor does it include undergraduate debt, which means the average Barry 2011 grad probably had at least $175,000 in educational debt.

When you look at these numbers, it ought to be incredible that anyone is reckless enough to continue to enroll in a school where perhaps ten to fifteen out of 209 graduates were making as much as the (fictional) "median" salary for the national class of 2011 of $60,000 as reported by NALP, and where almost all the class was carrying well into six figures of educational debt.

And here we run up against the limits of transparency.  Barry's entering class this fall (296) is 42% larger than its graduating class of 2011, and 10% larger than its entering class last year.  The school achieved this deplorable feat by slashing it's already bottom of the barrel admissions requirements to something very close to an open enrollment policy: The entering class this fall has a median LSAT in the 33rd percentile for all test takers (a quarter of the class is below the 26th percentile, which is perilously close to a random score), while the class's median GPA of 2.92 is well below the average GPA of current college students, let alone prospective law students.

Now there may be practical limits to this strategy, even without serious federal educational loan reform (which would of course shut down the school almost instantly).  More than a quarter of Barry grads are currently failing the Florida bar, and the school's increasingly flexible admissions policy seems certain to drive that number quite a bit higher, to the point where even the somnolent ABA may bestir itself to do something about this disgraceful operation.

But let's not be unfair to Barry: after all, the school's statistics are not notably worse than that of dozens of other fully "ABA-accredited" institutions. And here's the real stinger, which ties in directly with DJM's post: Barry's wretched employment stats have far more in common with those of many a "top tier" school than the latter school's employment stats have with Harvard's or Penn's (which as DJM points out aren't so great any more either).

So yes, Barry should be shut down today if not sooner, but Barry is much more like the "average" law school than the average law school is like the tiny handful of schools which produce acceptable outcomes for an acceptable percentage of their current graduates.