As I have noted in a recent column, 10 schools have been found out of compliance with ABA Standard 501 on Admissions, which requires that school admit only students who appear capable of earning a J.D. and passing the bar. Although several of these schools have been found out of compliance just in the last few months, there was ample evidence during this year’s admissions season of what the ABA was willing to tolerate and what the ABA considered out of bounds. So the big question this year was whether the ABA’s increasingly aggressive campaign to stop predatory admission practices would result in more schools raising their admission standards to acceptable levels.

Well, the new ABA Standard 509 Reports are out, and the results are not encouraging. 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.

In addition to the ABA 509 single school reports, the ABA helpfully compiles data on all the schools into sortable Excel spreadsheets, making school by school comparisons relatively simple. Drawing from the “First Year Class” spreadsheet, I have compiled a list of the bottom 10 least selective law schools in the U.S. (excluding Puerto Rico) by LSAT score (in some cases I have also considered UGPAs as a tiebreaker) for the 2017-18 school year.

The Bottom 10

Thomas Cooley Western Michigan U - 146/142/139. Cooley has already been found out of compliance with Standard 501 by the ABA. They recently lost in their efforts to get a restraining order against the ABA to keep this secret from prospective students and did little to improve their chances of having that decision reversed with this year’s embarrassing incoming class, with similar credentials to last year’s (147/141/138). 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. (Vermont, with 159 entering 1Ls, was second, with a 78.8% acceptance rate.)

Texas Southern – 146/143/141. Already sanctioned by the ABA for standards violations and under remedial measures, Texas Southern nevertheless enrolled a large class of 256 students, a significant increase from last year’s 227. Unfortunately, these students are virtually all at high risk of failure. The school grew its class by lowering its already dismal admission standards across the board. Last year they were at 147/145/142. What are they thinking? The school should be placed on probation.

(Tie) Appalachian – 149/143/141 Found out of compliance by the ABA last January and formally notified in May, they hid this fact from prospective students and managed to nearly double their class from 38 to 73 entering students, while very modestly increasing their numbers from 147/143/140. The bottom half of the class are all at extremely high risk of failure. Their bottom 25% UGPA is an especially woeful 2.51, the lowest of any law school in the country. Appalachian also boosted enrollment in its upper divisions by taking 16 transfers from Charlotte School of Law, which is not likely to boost their abysmal bar passage rate. Expect Appalachian to be sanctioned.

(Tie) Southern – 146/144/141. Number one on my list of schools that deserve to be sanctioned but haven’t yet. Southern has enrolled 200 students, virtually all of whom at are very high or extremely high risk of failure. They increased their class size to 200 from 171, so they could have raised standards, but basically held steady at atrocious. (Last year: 146/143/141) Where are you, ABA?

(Tie) Charleston – 148/145/142 Charleston enrolled a large class of 251 students, up from 215, by admitting 71% of applicants. They could have been more selective and raised their standards considerably. Last year: 149/145/141. So, for the last three years, at least 75% of Charleston’s class has been made up of high risk students. The ABA must put a stop to this exploitation.

5. (Tie) Thomas Jefferson – 147/144/142. In January, TJ was found out of compliance by the ABA on Standard 501. TJ dishonestly kept this secret from its prospective students, enabling the school to grow its enrollment. But this school is digging itself is an ever deeper hole by admitting a pathetically weak class in a state where students with LSATs below 146 have extremely poor prospects of passing the bar, and everybody below 150 struggles. Last year TJ had 232 students with a profile of 147/143/141, and the second highest non-transfer attrition rate in the country at 37.2%. Despite knowing they were facing sanctions due in part to its lax admission policies, TJ chose to increase its class size and essentially maintain its abysmal admissions standards. The one point increase at the 50th and 25th percentiles was offset by lower UGPAs across the board. Not surprisingly, TJ was recently placed on probation by the ABA. Expect droves of transfers from TJ this winter and next summer, and continued bar passage woes for the foreseeable future, assuming TJ can stay in business.

N.C. Central – 149/145/142. Now that Charlotte has closed, NC Central takes over the mantle of least selective law school in North Carolina. To their credit, they did raise their LSAT standards a bit by shrinking the class from 183 to 166. Last year they were at 149/144/141. But this one point increase at the 50th and 25th was offset by lower UGPAs across the board. More troublingly, NC Central had the highest level of 1L non-transfer attrition of any law school in the country last year, at 37.7% nearly twice the rate that the ABA has stated will result in presumptive non-compliance with Standard 501. The ABA needs to take a hard look at NC Central.

(tie) Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School – 149/146/144. This school was recently notified that they are out of compliance with Standard 501 by the ABA, and now I am starting to understand why. They’ve slipped from 2016 when they were at 149/148/145, and they had a 21.9% non-transfer attrition rate, 12th worst in the country, and above the ABA’s presumptive exploitation rate of 20%. Last year they had 195 entering students. This year 216. This was not the year for the school to grow the class by lowering their standards.

8. (tie) Florida A&M University – 149/146/144. FAMU is up a smidge from 148/145/144 last year, but not enough to reverse their sliding bar passage rate. With 222 students, up from 151, they could have maintained their class size or even grew modestly and raised standards considerably, instead of growing by 50%, remaining in the bottom 10 nationally. FAMU is practically begging for ABA scrutiny.

Concordia – 151/147/144. Although there are four other schools with a bottom 25% at 144 and 50% at 147, and two of these have lower LSATs at the 75% by one point, the UGPAs at Concordia are by far the lowest of these five schools (3.24/2.90/2.59) so they narrowly edge the competition for the coveted tenth slot in the bottom 10. Although Concordia had great bar results last summer, they have placed their future in jeopardy by lowering their standards for the fourth year in a row. Their entering class of 2014 was at 157/152/149. 2015: 154/150/146. 2016: 151/149/145. This year: 151/147/144. And other than Valparaiso, which recently announced it was suspending admissions, Concordia had the smallest entering class of any law school in the country, at just 48 students. Not good signs.

Dishonorable Mention:

There are 6 schools with 25% LSATs at 144 – which I categorize as Extremely High Risk. Two (FAMU and Concordia) made the bottom 10. These schools have presumably calculated that they are safe from ABA scrutiny based on prior ABA adverse actions. In light of the recent finding of non-compliance against Atlanta’s John Marshall, these schools may find that they have miscalculated. Even if they get a pass from the ABA, these schools should be ashamed that they have stooped so low as to be admitting over a quarter of students from the bottom 23% of LSAT takers.

The other four at 144:

South Dakota – this state flagship university has truly fallen on hard times. They are down to 57 1Ls (5th smallest in the country) with an LSAT profile of 150/147/144 (down from 152/148/144 in 2016) and plummeting bar pass rates. The school needs to move from tiny Vermillion to Sioux Falls to survive, but this proposal has been nixed.

Southern Illinois – Another state school with very weak students, identical to South Dakota at 150/147/144, but with much worse UGPAs. Down from 150/148/145 last year.

Roger Williams - 151/147/144 down from 153/148/145.

Oklahoma City – 152/147/144. Last year 151/147/144.

The Next Tier:

There are 20 law schools with a bottom 25% LSAT at 145 (26th percentile). There is probably safety in numbers here, as the ABA is unlikely to take action against so many schools with similar numbers. This group includes one school that was previously forced to take remedial measures for violating admission standards (Ave Maria), one school that is currently on probation (Arizona Summit), and another school that has recently received notice of non-compliance with Standard 501 (Florida Coastal). Florida Coastal has argued that they should not be considered in non-compliance because they have raised their bottom 25% to 145. But the 509 report reveals that they did so by taking a lot of students with dreadful undergraduate records. The UPGA profile at Florida Coastal for 2017 is 3.10/2.83/2.59 – worse even than Western Michigan Thomas Cooley! (The average undergraduate GPA in the U.S. is about 3.15.) Only three law schools in the country have comparably awful UPGA profiles: Appalachian, Thomas Jefferson and InfiLaw sister school Arizona Summit (3.15/2.81/2.53). For comparison purposes, Ave Maria’s UGPA numbers are 3.52/3.16/2.83, about average in this cohort of 20 schools. Ave Maria seems to have weathered the storm under the leadership of Dean and President Kevin Cieply and is on the rebound, with 97 1Ls, up from 88 last year, and a two-point improvement at their LSAT 25%. Meanwhile, it is not clear if Arizona Summit can survive, with just 49 matriculants, down from 143 last year (and 450 in 2011!). In 6 years, Arizona Summit went from tied with NYU for the 12th largest entering class in the country to the fourth smallest entering class. With the fifth highest non-transfer attrition rate in the country last year at 27.2%, they are likely to continue to get smaller. That is one way to go from for-profit to non-profit.

Some Other Observations

There is a new format for the ABA 509 Reports, and overall there is more useful data, particularly regarding attrition. One area of concern with the new report format is that schools with part-time programs are no longer required to report the admissions credentials of their part time classes separately. As I noted in a recent column, many schools were admitting substantially weaker students into their part-time divisions, leading to concerns about exploitation of this cohort. Now, there is no way to know if law schools are doing so. The ABA should require that this data be reported in future years.

Bar passage data, like employment data, will now be reported separately. Bar passage data should be out in March, employment data in April.