There are now hundreds of news articles and entire blogs devoted
to warning potential students of the perils of attending a low-ranked,
high-cost law school.
We’re positive people here at Lawschooli, so we typically try and
keep our message positive and upbeat. But sometimes we see things
happening in the legal education industry that we simply can’t ignore.
Today we’re going to talk about the dark side of the industry.
Admissions standards have been in a free fall at Tier 4 law schools
over the past few years. One school, in particular, has sunk so low that
we felt compelled to announce our pick for…
The Worst Law School in America
Most of our readers are very conscientious. Most of you take the LSAT
very seriously. Over 300,000 of you have read Josh’s post on how he got a 177 on the LSAT, tens of thousands of you have followed his LSAT prep book recommendations, thousands of you follow our LSAT study schedules every year, and hundreds of you have joined the LSAT Mastermind Group.
In spite of our best efforts to convince people to take their LSAT
prep seriously, our message doesn’t reach everyone. Every year I
encounter scores of the uninitiated. They didn’t take the LSAT
seriously, got a low score, and are ready to run head-long into a costly
and potentially disastrous career choice by attending any law school
that’ll take them. As a new law school admissions cycle approaches, it
is worth a reminder why the advice to avoid certain schools is more apt
than ever.
…and the loser is: Thomas M. Cooley Law School
Why pick on Cooley? There are a lot of terrible law schools out
there, certainly. Cooley Law, however, has secured a deserved reputation
as the worst of the worst, churning out scores of the most
uncompetitive graduates into an extremely competitive profession that
has nowhere near the ability to absorb them all. Cost of education is
extremely high relative to expected salaries. Many graduates struggle to
even pass the bar. Cooley has even been sued for inflating salary data.
By any reputable method of ranking ABA law schools, they would appear
near the very bottom. Famously, however, for many years they tried to
counter this by publishing their own rankings
based on silly metrics such as total volumes in the library, law school
square footage, and incoming class size. In their own estimation, they
ranked 2nd, just behind Harvard!
As the recession hit and the legal market shrank, law schools have
had a choice about how to handle it. Fewer good candidates are applying
to law school now. In response, either you shrink class size and retain
your standards, keeping incoming students GPA and LSAT numbers where
they used to be, or you lower your admissions standards. Cooley has made
some very, very bad choices. Here is a comparison of 2014 admissions
data with 2015.
| GPA | 25th %ile | Median | 75th %ile |
|---|
| 2014 | 2.53 | 2.90 | 3.28 |
| 2015 | 2.51 | 2.85 | 3.19 |
| LSAT | 25th %ile | Median | 75th %ile |
|---|
| 2014 | 141 | 145 | 149 |
| 2015 | 138 | 141 | 147 |
For those who aren’t familiar with law school admissions, I’ll tell
you: this is extremely, extremely bad. Cooley was making a surprising
good faith effort to keep their numbers from falling through the floor,
but now they have, as one legal blogger put it,
“abandoned all pretense of maintaining sound admission policies.” It
might be more accurate to say that they’ve abandoned the pretense of
having any standards whatsoever.
The 25th percentile at Cooley is now a shocking 138. Ninety percent of LSAT takers perform better on the test.
Given that even very low ranked schools generally try to take only
students that perform better than average (about a 152), you can see
how Cooley has committed themselves to scraping the very bottom of the
applicant pool.
It’s this recent move, combined with their commitment to keeping a
huge class in spite of offering very poor job prospects, that earns
Cooley the distinction of being the very worst law school in America.
If you want to find some truly harsh invective about Cooley and
schools like it, it will just take a little googling. People feel
strongly enough about trashing these schools that they have
compiled accurate school profiles and decorated them with pictures of
cow dung.
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