Law schools may soon have more information about the educational and economic challenges applicants face on their path to a law degree. The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) is developing a new “environmental context” metric for colleges and universities. This metric considers factors such as institutional student spending, graduation rates, and the percentage of undergraduates who received federal need-based Pell Grants.
LSAC officials, who administer the Law School Admission Test and maintain the central application system for law schools, unveiled the project on Friday during a meeting of the American Bar Association’s legal education body. They are collaborating with The College Board, which develops the SAT and now offers colleges a similar tool that contextualizes applicants’ neighborhoods and high schools.
Elizabeth Bodamer, council research director, explained that the new college metric, along with the existing neighborhood and high school ratings, aims to help law schools better understand the advantages or hurdles applicants have encountered. This approach seeks to offer a fuller picture of applicants’ potential beyond undergraduate grades and standardized test scores. “There are thousands of law school applicants each year who have journeyed through barriers and, in spite of it all, have made it through,” Bodamer said. “The big question is: How do we capture this context?”
The project follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision curtailing the consideration of race in college admissions. Although LSAC approached The College Board about this collaboration years earlier, the COVID-19 pandemic delayed their efforts. Bodamer clarified that the project focuses on the “environmental factors that may shape students, and not the students themselves.”
This year, law schools began experimenting with new ways to admit students without directly considering their race. Many schools have overhauled their essay prompts to gain a deeper sense of applicants and how their past experiences have influenced them.
To test the impact of the new college metric, LSAC is using 2023 applications that law school admissions offices have already considered. Schools are rereading these applications with the new metric to see if it changes their decisions. Early figures show that law school applicants from “high-challenge colleges” are 2.5 times more likely to be first-generation college students than those from “low-challenge colleges.” Low-challenge colleges have higher graduation rates, per-student spending, and fewer Pell Grant recipients. Nearly all applicants from low-challenge colleges get accepted into law school, while fewer than two-thirds from high-challenge colleges gain admission.
