How Would You Change Your Law School's Admission Policies?
This week, we noted a study that found that more than three quarters of the students at the nation’s top 20 law schools come from the top one-fourth of the socioeconomic population, and just 2 percent come from the bottom quarter. University of California-Los Angeles law professor Richard Sander said that most law school admission policies favor “legacy” students, favor students with records of “interesting” volunteer or athletic activities, or fail to take grade inflation into account. Sander noted that his own school’s experiment with race-blind socioeconomic affirmative action in 1997 resulted in a class that was one-third nonwhite and had the highest bar-passage rate of any class before it or after it.
So we’d like to ask you: How would you change your law school’s admission policies? Would you implement race-based or socioeconomic affirmative action policies? Give undergraduate grades, LSATs, extracurricular activities, interviews or personal statements greater or less consideration? How do you think your innovations would produce better lawyers?
Answer in the comments.
Read the answers to last week’s question: Would You Hire Someone Who Is Unemployed? Have You Ever Landed a Job Despite Being Unemployed?
Featured answer:
Posted by KTGator: “Yes, to both questions. I took a 2+ year ‘sabbatical’ to care for a relative. The firm where I worked dissolved during my absence. I had a hard time getting a job—even getting an interview—until a wonderful woman, who had entered the job market at 50, took the time to read my writing samples. I’ve been here 10 years now, and each year send her a gift on my employment anniversary. Having experienced the insecurity and stigma of not being employed, I know how grateful I am, so I would hire unemployed qualified candidates, hoping that they would also have the same sense of gratitude, loyalty, and commitment to keeping this job, that having this job has given to me. However, it is sad that people can’t look beyond the label ‘unemployed,’ and thus, another law and lawsuit pursuit is born.”
Do you have an idea for a future question of the week? If so, contact us.
