In Fall 2022, the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding the future of affirmative action in higher education. Initially, affirmative action policies were adopted to give equal opportunity to communities who have been and continue to be harmed by discriminatory systems and practices. As we wait...

With landmark affirmative action decisions pending from the United States Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, this paper examines whether the educational benefits that flow...

It is increasingly common for universities to offer financial education or life skills courses as electives. However, less is known about the potential impacts of these courses on factors beyond financial literacy, such as financial attitudes, financial stress or financial well-being. Out study...

Ten years of administrative data from a diverse, private, top-100 law school are used to examine the ways in which female and nonwhite students benefit from exposure to demographically similar faculty in first-year required law courses. Arguably causal impacts of exposure to same-sex and...

Demographic disparities in bar exam pass rates are problematic but poorly understood. We investigate a possible explanation: participation in extracurricular activities, which could either distract from bar exam preparation or motivate and prepare students to succeed. Generally, participation in...

U.S. News & World Report rankings and tier groupings are often used as proxy measures of law school quality. But many of the factors that contribute to both law school outcomes and U.S. News rankings (e.g., undergraduate GPAs [UGPA], LSAT scores, admission rates) do not reflect the impact law...

The lack of diversity in legal education and the profession is a well-established fact. Data and rich commentary from law school scholars clearly illustrate barriers to entry for historically underrepresented groups. Yet, we continue to see persistent gaps in law school and bar admission among...

The bar exam tries to distinguish minimally competent lawyers from incompetent ones: it exists to protect the public from the harms of incompetent legal representation. That protection is critical to maintaining the integrity of the profession, but the bar exam achieves that goal only if it...

This report, the second of our two-part series on graduate lending, uses federal data to show, as one example, that black borrowers and Historically Black Colleges and Universities would likely be severely harmed by a move to significantly limit or outright eliminate federal lending to graduate...

A five-year cohort of 39,737 examinees who sat for the California Bar Exam (“CBX”) between 2014-18 was analyzed using a simulation model based on actual exam results to evaluate how the minimum passing scores (“cut score”) of 1440, 1390, 1350, 1330, and 1300, if used as qualifying scores...