As Employment Rates Worsen for New Law Grads, ABA Under Microscope

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published August 02, 2011

Rebecca E. Neely

According to the washingtonpost.com article, the Department of Education recently reviewed the ABA's accreditation work, and found the ''agency does not demand schools keep loan default rates below a certain level, as required.'' In addition, the ABA did not ''set minimum standards for postgraduate employment rates and show that it has a transparent and public accreditation process''. The panel also discovered the ABA unit ''fell short on meeting 17 federal standards required of accreditation agencies.''

While it's not unusual for accreditation agencies to not be 100 percent compliant, and yet still have their accreditation rights renewed, Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) posed questions to the ABA in a letter dated July 11^th, focused on merit based scholarships and borrowing levels, and wrote: ''The ABA appears to be doing little to assess student-loan default rates in its law school accreditation process.''

Also according to the article, the ABA sent a letter in response to Grassley's, saying ''it does not track student loan default rates for all law schools because most - 181 of the 200 ABA-approved schools - are part of larger universities that do not break out the data for each academic program. The ABA, however, does track default rates for the remaining 19 schools, which operate independently; default rates at those schools range from zero to 7.4 percent.''

However, interestingly, Stephen Zack, ABA President, said he is in agreement with Grassley's concerns about debt and employment, and compliance issues found by the Department of Education ''are being dealt with in an expedited manner.''

Hulett ''Bucky'' Askew, the Bar's legal education consultant was quoted as saying: ''The criticism of the [Education] Department is not that we don't collect the data, the criticism is we don't have a benchmark for what's an unacceptable rate for a law school. Is 10 percent too high that raises a compliance issue? It's our impression that they're asking us to set a benchmark for what's acceptable and not acceptable.''

Paul Schiff Berman, dean of George Washington University Law School was quoted as saying: ''My only concern about an absolute debt cutoff number is the potential, depending on what the number is, of pricing lower-income students out of the legal education market. If they say no student shall be allowed to take on more than a particular amount of debt, or a law school shall not allow a student to take on more than a particular amount of debt . . . it might hurt lower-income people who need to take out that amount of money to pursue opportunities that a legal education provides.''

''The American Bar Association is the largest voluntary professional association in the world,'' with almost 400,000 members. According to information at ABA's website, the ABA ''provides law school accreditation, continuing legal education, information about the law, programs to assist lawyers and judges in their work, and initiatives to improve the legal system for the public.''

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