For low bar exam passage rates. Here’s a description of what’s going on from the Charlotte Observer:
From the start, the school billed itself as atypical – geared toward giving nontraditional law school applicants a doorway to a career. The cost to students was high – an estimated $60,000 a year for tuition, housing and fees.
The school’s expansion, however, collided head-on with the economic crash of 2008, a downturn from which the legal industry has still not fully recovered. With fewer jobs waiting, applications to law schools fell nationwide, increasing the competition for students willing to take on enormous student debt without guaranteed employment.
Enrollment at Charlotte Law dropped. Enrollment fell from a high of 1,400 to about half that number today. The downturn forced it and similar schools to admit students far less prepared for the academic rigors, says a former longtime faculty member of the school.
“I certainly think the faculty and students could see some marked differences in the preparation and ability of the incoming students,” said the former teacher, who asked not to be named because of a professional relationship with the school.
Over the years, he said, faculty frustration grew at the administration’s “failure to recognize that we were admitting students who did not have a realistic chance of success.” He blames the school’s economic model “for a lot of admission decisions that have been driven by the need to put butts in the seats.”
Student test scores bear him out. The school’s first time bar exam passage rate peaked in July 2010 at 87 percent. It hit 79 percent a year later. But the latter marked the first time that the Charlotte scores fell below the state average, and they’ve been been falling steadily ever since, hitting a low of 35 percent passage last winter. The state average for the same test was 51 percent.
There’s nothing really surprising in this narrative. Charlotte has, for a city its size, traditionally had relatively little in the way of advanced higher education options. UNC Charlotte is a decent enough school (full disclosure: I’ve taught there) but it doesn’t have things like a medical school, a dental school, a law school, or that large a number of graduate school offerings. So other universities have come to Charlotte to fill in some of the gaps. And that includes the creation of the for-profit Charlotte School of Law in 2006. And as the UPoR article rightly highlights, it’s exactly schools like the Charlotte School of Law that are going to be most impacted by the legal downturn of recent years. Not sure it’s far to blame the school’s for-profit model though — a non-profit would also feel the pressure to bring in less-prepared students to make their budget.
