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The research, titled "From Prestige to Performance: Evaluating Law School Outcomes Using Value-Added Modeling," analyzed a 10-year panel dataset of 189 ABA-accredited law schools to assess institutional contributions to student success on bar passage and employment outcomes.
"Bar passage and employment rates are widely used to evaluate law school performance, yet these raw outcomes often reflect student selection rather than institutional performance," the study's authors—Jason Scott, Andrea Pals, and Dominique Monserrat—wrote in the report.
The researchers found that all five schools with the lowest ultimate bar passage rates in 2024 demonstrated at least one positive value-added score for bar passage, despite what their raw passage rates suggest about performance.
The study introduces value-added modeling to legal education, a statistical approach that isolates the impact of the law school learning environment while controlling for factors such as incoming LSAT scores, undergraduate GPAs, economic conditions, and institutional resources.
Traditional rankings heavily weight metrics like bar passage and employment rates, which account for 58% of a school's U.S. News ranking and 40% of the Above the Law Top 50 ranking. However, these systems reward or penalize schools for factors largely outside their control, according to the research.
"When these outcomes are used to evaluate school performance without accounting for factors such as the entering credentials of a school's students, the definition of quality shifts away from an institution's ability to mold and develop the students it admits," the authors stated.
