The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) is developing a new environmental context metric pertaining to colleges and universities based on factors such as institutional student spending, graduation rates and the percentage of undergraduates who received federal need-based Pell Grants.
This information may soon provide law schools with information about the educational and economic challenges applicants have faced on their path to a law degree.
Officials at the LSAC, which administers the Law School Admission Test and maintains the central application system used by law schools, unveiled the project during a May meeting of the American Bar Association’s legal education body.
The project is a collaboration with The College Board, which develops the SAT and now offers colleges a similar tool called Landscape.
Elizabeth Bodamer, council research director, said during the May meeting presentation that the aim of the new college metric — along with the existing neighborhood and high school ratings — is to help law schools better understand the advantages or hurdles their applicants have encountered and to offer a fuller picture of their potential beyond undergraduate grades and standardized test scores.
“There are thousands of law school applicants each year who have journeyed through barriers, and in spite of it all, have made it through,” Bodamer told the council. “The big question is: How do we capture this context?”
The project comes in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision curtailing the consideration of race in college admissions, though Bodamer said the council approached The College Board about it years earlier but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bodamer was careful to clarify that the project focuses on the environmental factors that may shape students, and not the students themselves.
Law schools this year began experimenting with new ways to admit students without directly considering their race. For example, many schools overhauled their essay prompts to get a deeper sense of applicants and how their past experiences have influenced them.
To test the impact of the new college metric, the council is using 2023 applications that have already been considered by law school admissions offices. Schools are rereading those applications with the new metric provided to see if it would change their decisions.
Early figures showed that law school applicants from high-challenge colleges are 2.5 times more likely to be first-generation college students than those from low-challenge colleges, Bodamer said. Low-challenge colleges have higher graduation rates and per-student spending and fewer Pell Grant recipients.
Nearly all applicants from low-challenge colleges get accepted into law school, while fewer than two-thirds from high-challenge colleges get in, she said.
