ABA Journal, Mythbusters: What Do We Really Know About Online Law Schools?:
The journeys of individual students enrolling in online law school are as varied as the programs themselves, the ABA Journal finds.
Currently, only law schools with brick-and-mortar campuses can gain ABA accreditation for their online JD programs. To date, 19 have received that blessing, and others are carefully considering joining the ranks. …
“We’re just like everybody else,” says Stacy Leeds, dean of Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, which is one of three schools that submitted an application in October to the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to start part-time distance programs. “We’re looking at what we’re going to do and not do in the online space.”
But as interest grows, the council is considering standards necessary to fully accredit online-only law schools without brick-and-mortar campuses, like Purdue Global Law School. Several steps remain before a proposal would be presented to the House of Delegates for approval.
Meanwhile, the council is in the process of gathering data from the existing ABA-accredited online programs related to graduation and job placement, says Jennifer Rosato Perea, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education. In most states, only graduates from accredited law schools can take the bar.
But the current dearth of data about outcomes for graduates of online law schools—with or without brick-and-mortar campuses—concerns some. At the August ABA council meeting, Susan Krinsky, interim CEO and president of the Law School Admission Council, expressed concerns about consumer protection, wondering if attending online law schools would pay off for students.
“It is not wise to move forward in a way that puts the risk on students,” she said. “It’s time. It’s money. It’s their lives.”
Christopher Chapman, president and CEO of the AccessLex Institute, disagrees and cites conversations he’s had with deans and administrators of ABA-accredited online law schools.
“I have seen nothing that would give me concern about quality or inferiority versus the residential programming. It is clear to me that law schools work with extra diligence to ensure the quality and experience,” he says.
His concerns are about online programs that are not ABA-accredited. He says that while AccessLex has not done any research into non-ABA-accredited online programs, “what we do know is that bar passage performance of such programs falls well below ABA-accredited law schools.”
He also notes that non-ABA-accredited schools generally suffer from “adverse selection” when it comes to their applicant pool.
“A substantial number of non-ABA accredited schools end up with students who are not able to meet the academic standards of any ABA law school—which leads to worse overall outcomes for such a school,” he adds.
Ahead of the council’s planned data collection, the ABA Journal talked with students and administrators from six ABA-accredited law schools [Case Western, Mitchell Hamline, New Hampshire, St. Mary's, Suffolk, Syracuse] and one unaccredited fully online program [Purdue Global] to tease out facts from fiction from those currently in its midst. …
Of the accredited schools, six JD programs are conducted completely online and 13 are hybrid programs, with some classes in person and some virtual. Nearly every program has a different twist.
Editor's Note: If you would like to receive a daily email with links to legal education posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.
