Congressional leaders are calling for an investigation by the Government Accountability Office into why Black enrollment in law school is declining while overall enrollment is up.
Members of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, including committee chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., and ranking Democrat George Miller of California, sent a letter to the GAO asking it to do a “quick, turn-around study on the accreditation process conducted by the American Bar Association and an examination of the enrollment and completion trends of minority students in law school.” U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, has also joined the request.
“In law schools throughout the country, the number of Black applicants, students and graduates are all declining,” she says. “At the same time, overall law school enrollment is on the rise. I am pleased with the bipartisan commitment to examining this important issue.”
Tubbs Jones says she attributes the decline to an over-reliance on standardized testing and the ABA’s accrediting process. She says the ABA has rejected or delayed the accreditation applications of law schools based on their LSAT scores and has threatened sanctions against accredited law schools unless they raise their minimum scores. Many of these schools serve the Black community.
Hulett H. Askew, an ABA consultant on legal education, said the ABA does not set a minimum LSAT score. He added that new standards for schools to achieve diversity were adopted by the ABA House of Delegates in August.
“We’re not telling schools to raise their scores,” he says. “Everybody is keenly aware that applications and admissions have gone down. We are working on programs for a diverse student body, faculty and staff.
