Summary: The Faculty Lounge has named the bottom 10 schools in the United States.
Potential law students use Best Law School rankings like the yearly one from U.S. News and World Report to determine where to go to school. But very few publications dare to list the worst of the worst, but that’s where The Faculty Lounge comes in.
On Friday, the publication released The 2017 Bottom 10 Law Schools in the Country, a list that undoubtedly is one that law schools wish to avoid like the plague.
To create the ranking, author David Frankt compiled a list of the least selective schools in the U.S., based on first-year class LSAT score data from the ABA. The following are his bottom 10:
Faculty Lounge’s Bottom 10 Law Schools – 2017
1.Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School
2. Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University.
3. (Tie) Appalachian School of Law
3. (Tie) Southern University Law Center
5. (Tie) Charleston School of Law
5. (Tie) Thomas Jefferson School of Law
7. North Carolina Central University School of Law
8. (Tie) Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School
8. (Tie) Florida A&M University
10. Concordia University School of Law
- See Thomas Cooley Law School Exposed (and Why Much of the Legal Profession Is a Scam) for more information.
The ten schools on the Faculty Lounge list have a high number of students with low LSAT scores or undergraduate GPAs; and Frakt said that although it was hoped that the ABA’s crackdown of predatory admission policies would stop the practice, it appears to continue.
“Several schools have clearly not learned from the experience of their peer schools and have admitted classes that are very likely to incur ABA scrutiny. It seems that some schools are so desperate to stay open that they are willfully violating Standard 501 even though they must know that sanctions are likely – call it the Charlotte School of Law strategy,” Frakt wrote.
Number one on the list was Cooley, which The Faculty Lounge said has already been found to violate Standard 501, an ABA admission standard that essentially states schools should not admit students unless they exhibit an ability to successfully complete the program and pass the bar.
“[Cooley] recently lost in their efforts to get a restraining order against the ABA to keep this secret (the Standard 501 violation) from prospective students and did little to improve their chances of having that decision reversed with this year’s embarrassing incoming class,” The Faculty Lounge wrote. “But the school is still making a fortune with an entering class of 458, third largest in the country (after Georgetown and Harvard). Cooley accepted 85.6% of applicants, far and away the highest acceptance rate in the country.”
Second placer, Texas Southern, has also already been sanctioned by the ABA, according to The Faculty Lounge. Despite this, the school enrolled a class of 227 last year.
Tied for third was Appalachian and Southern. Appalachian was notified in May that they were not in compliance with ABA standards, but The Faculty Lounge said that the school hid this from prospective students and doubled its class size. Southern has not been officially sanctioned, but The Faculty Lounge said that they should be.
In fifth place, Charleston, which admits 71% of its applicants, tied with Thomas Jefferson, which was sued by a graduate for alleged misleading job statistics.
N.C. Central, which The Faculty Lounge dubbed the “least selective law school in North Carolina” was listed seventh. It was followed by Atlanta’s John Marshall, which the ABA had notified was not in compliance with Standard 501, and Florida A&M who tied for eighth place.
The last school on this list of shame was Concordia, which raised its bar passage rate last summer but also lowered its admission standards, according to The Faculty Lounge.
Source: The Faculty Lounge