The California State Bar Committee of Bar Examiners must be listening in on all the noise about ABA accredited schools. It announced last week that it was tightening the minimum pass rate for California accredited law schools. Going forward, in order to maintain state accreditation, a school must maintain a cumulative pass rate of 40%. That is, over a five year period, 40% of all graduates who take the bar one or more times must pass the bar at some point….even if it takes ten attempts.
According to the California Bar Journal:
During the most recent public comment period before the committee approved the change, Southern California Institute of Law Dean Stanislaus Pulle called it “draconian.”
Southern California Institute of Law charges $370 per credit for its 84 credit JD program – $31,800 total (or as SCIL puts it in their FAQ's "a little over $29,000"). At that price, a rational actor might well think the risk worthwhile…until she discovers that in July 2012, 43 SCIL grads sat for the state bar (including first timers and retakers.) Zero passed.
The school's website is filled with pictures of their graduation speakers over the years on the front page and again on one of the drop down tabs. Ken Starr a few years ago!
You have to dig a little further to find their faculty.
I attended a symposium tonight on the ethics of marketing law schools in a down economy and got the sense that state-accredited schools will start flunking out more students to keep their passage rates higher. (The panel had the deans from Lincoln, Santa Clara, and Hastings.)