Bar Passage Rates and Personal Environmental Factors that Affect Admission to Law School

This factor is obviously important. If you want to go to law school, you probably want to be a lawyer. This is impossible in most states, however, without passing a state bar examination (discussed in greater detail later). Accordingly, you should ascertain the bar passage rates of graduates of the schools you are considering attending. These figures are not guarantees, but they are very important statistics that are indicative of the quality of legal education of the school in question. Keep in mind that they are also subject to the usual individual variables of hard work and ability.

As one might expect, many times graduates from a particular school with good to average grades have, as a group, an excellent bar passage rate, but students from the same school with poor grades have, as a group, extremely low passage rates. You will not, of course, be able to further narrow your own odds until you attend a law school and fall into an identifiable GPA niche. However, the schools with the highest overall passage rates provide the highest comfort level to all groups. Not coincidentally, these schools also almost universally have good to excellent academic ratings. Therefore, all other criteria being equal, you should choose to attend a law school with a high bar passage rate.


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Personal Environmental Factors

Just as important as the previous factors, and perhaps even more so, is that you attend a law school located in a region of the country that you like. Doing well in law school depends a great deal on your mental state. Consequently, if you pick a school that is perfect in all other respects but whose location or customary weather you absolutely hate, your law school performance will probably suffer. You may also be extremely unhappy during all three critical years of law school. Accordingly, in choosing schools, consider such things as:

• proximity to friends and family
   
• weather
   
• recreational and leisure opportunities
   
• the physical environment around the school (for example, is it located in an urban or suburban setting? Is it in the middle of a college campus? Is it by itself in a run-down area of a big city?)

Use common sense about your level of comfort with the physical environment of the school. For example, if you absolutely love going to the beach, think hard before saying yes to that excellent school in the Midwest. If you love to ski every weekend, you probably will not want to study law in Hawaii.

The atmosphere of the school is another personal factor to be considered. Are relationships among students friendly or competitive? Are the professors friendly and accessible? How large are the first-year classes? How well your personality fits into the atmosphere of a place where you contemplate spending three years is an important consideration.

The best way to determine whether you like a school's setting, amenities, and surroundings is to visit that school. This should always be done before accepting an admission offer. Doing so will allow you to see where the law students live and determine whether the housing and living options available at or around the school suit you. It will also allow you to sit in on a few classes to see what the law school's faculty and students are like on a more personal level. The admissions office of the school in which you are interested can help you plan your visit. Call the admissions office and inform the staff that you are planning a visit. Ask the staff where to stay and if they would set up an informal meeting with some of the students at the school, as well as send you information on things to do in and around the school. Most admission offices will be happy to oblige and will work with you to make your visit a constructive one.

Visiting every school in which you are interested will normally be impossible due to monetary and time constraints. Thus, you may have to restrict your visits to the law schools that have offered you admission and that you are seriously considering attending. However, since personal environmental factors are absolutely crucial to your enjoyment of law school, it cannot be stressed enough that you should never decide to attend a law school without first visiting it.

Deciding what law school best suits you involves balancing numerous factors and gathering a great deal of information. Just as the law schools begin their selection of students many months before the next school year rolls around, you too should begin your selection process early. If you do so, you will probably end up choosing a law school that will give you an opportunity to have a successful and enjoyable three years. If not, you may unfortunately have a long, hard first year and a strong desire to attempt to transfer to a more agreeable law school environment for your second and third years.