Law school transfers continue downward trend

The recent spike in law school interest has caused a number of reactions, such as a bump in enrollment, more competition for seats and a scramble for scholarship money. Here’s another apparently: shrinking transfer options.

In 2014, 5.5% of students transferred, most of them after their first year. In 2021, just 3.6% did so. Transferring can be an attractive option for high-achieving first-year students. They get an opportunity to move to a better school. And schools normally like to accept them because such students have shown they can handle the rigors of law school.

It doesn’t normally work the other way around. Stanford Law School students don’t often consider transferring. Zero did last year. However, 11 transfers got in.

So why is the drop happening nationally?

Jerry Organ, a law professor at University of St. Thomas School of Law—Minneapolis and a regular commentator on legal education, said in a recent analysis that schools don’t have to rely on transfers as much, given the heft of entering classes.

“This [drop] may partly be attributable to the larger and stronger first-year applicant pool for fall 2021, which may have enabled some law schools both to grow the size of their first-year class while simultaneously increasing their median LSAT,” he wrote. “With a larger group of first-year students anticipated to be joining the law school this fall, some schools may have dialed back their transfer classes a little bit.”

He said the drop is part of a gradual decline from more than 2,100 in 2014 to less than 1,400. There was a slight bump up in 2017 and last year, but otherwise fewer students are transferring.

“I think some of the growth in transfers in 2012 to 2014 was a response to the downturn in applicants (and an effort to backfill with some added revenue), but now that many schools have ‘right-sized’ and the applicant pool is growing it may mean fewer transfers in the coming years,” he said. “For example, my guess is that many of the law schools that welcomed a class 15 to 20% larger this fall likely are not going to be looking for too many transfers next summer. Time will tell.”

Organ has been doing this analysis annually since 2014. And even though the numbers are going down, some schools still dominate the transfer market, such as Georgetown University Law Center and Harvard Law School. Students still want to move up to more prestigious schools if possible.

However, that might be more difficult moving forward, given the trend. If schools are taking fewer transfers, that means competition for such a move will only increase.

Harvard, for one, is bucking the trend. It’s actually accepting more transfers of late — more than double than that of three years ago. But Organ believes that’s because the school had curtailed enrollment.

“Knowing that it would be welcoming a smaller class in 2020, I suspect Harvard made a conscious decision to welcome more transfers in 2020 and in 2021 to counterbalance the loss of revenue from a smaller first-year class,” he wrote in his analysis.

Harvard officials declined to comment. However, one other explanation could be the recent rise in the quality of transfer students from last decade, during a time when applications to law schools plummeted. Since the number of quality students diminished, so did the quality of transfers.

Georgetown University remains the school that accepts the most transfers. Its numbers have been consistent. It took 105 students in 2018, just one more than 2021. Georgetown is the highest ranked school in the nation’s capital, which is rich with law schools. Transferring is easy for students of nearby schools. They don’t even have to move. The highest number of transferring students—10—came from another D.C. school, American University Washington College of Law, for instance.

This can be dicey stuff. Schools hate to see excelling students leave. In the past, some schools claimed that other law schools actively recruited their better students as a way of strengthening their classes. They call it poaching. Here’s another reason why accepting transfers can be lucrative: Their LSAT and GPA numbers aren’t included in the data used for rankings. The school from which they came is wedded to that data.

In 2015, Antony Varona, then American University law school’s associate dean for faculty and academic affairs, accused the more highly ranked George Washington University Law School of raiding its school’s students in a Facebook post. The accusation made national news. He wrote in part:

“[George Washington] shrank its 1L class some years ago, deciding instead to transfer in large numbers of students after the first year. 97 transfers just last year alone. Well over HALF of those from my law school, which—to say the least—causes us quite a bit of disruption. Speaking only for myself and not in my official law school capacity, I view this practice as downright predatory. No other law school is similarly raided anywhere else in the United States.”

George Washington denied the accusation.

But the trend has definitely slowed the number of transferring students at schools such as American University. In 2015, it saw 77 students leave via transfers. In 2020, it lost 57. Last year? The number fell to 25. American University declined to comment.

Other schools, such as Phoenix-based Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, have been accused of poaching students. The now-closed Arizona Summit Law School said the loss of students to the nearby school was partly responsible for its struggling bar passage rate.

In a 2017 National Jurist story focusing on Arizona Summit’s challenges, school leaders noted how ASU accepted 47 of the school’s students in 2015, about 15% of Arizona Summit’s 1L class. Losing top students hurt the bar performance because such students are most likely to pass the exam, the school said.

Arizona State also denied it was poaching.

“Students go to [Arizona Summit] looking to leave,” said Douglas Sylvester, who was dean at the time. “That’s not a good model.”

Indeed, a number of under-achieving law schools such as Arizona Summit have closed. For a time, the better-performing students at those schools looked to get out and would seek enrollment at more prestigious schools nearby. In 2015, for instance, Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, another law school that is in the process of closing, saw a whopping 73 students transfer out.

Now that pipeline is closed. Organ said that may be a factor in the drop, as well.

“If those schools were still around there probably would be a slightly larger number of transfers,” he said.

His analysis focuses more on which top schools are drawing the most students and from where. It’s valuable, no question, to those students who may have the academic strength to attract a better school’s attention.

From his analysis: “As I have noted for the last few years, these more detailed transfer data should be very helpful to prospective law students and pre-law advisors, and to current law students who are considering transferring. These data give them a better idea of what transfer opportunities might be available depending upon where they go to law school (or are presently enrolled as a first-year student).”