Golden Gate Law takes big swing to right ship

Golden Gate University School of Law is making a historic pivot. The private law school was founded in 1901 and has thousands of alumni and years of success under its belt.

But it has struggled in recent years with its bar passage rate, and last year the American Bar Association put the school on notice that it was not meeting a relatively new standard regarding bar passage.

A school must have 75% of its graduates from a two-year span pass the bar. Golden Gate’s graduates from the Class of 2018 had a two-year pass rate — known as the ultimate bar passage rate — of 57.5%. In 2019, the number increased to 67% — a year-over-year improvement but still falling below the key mark.  

Facing the challenge of losing accreditation, the school has taken a bold step. It has drastically reduced this year’s entering class and is giving full-tuition scholarships to all full-time students. It’s also doubling down on academic support so that students will get intense supervision, particularly when it comes to bar-related academia and bar prep.

“It’s a very ambitious step, no question,” said Dean Colin Crawford, who knows of no other school embarking on such a path. “We’re the first and hopefully not the last. We saw an opportunity for dramatic and innovative change.”

This year’s full-time class numbers just 21 students compared to last year’s class of 103. Part-time students stand at 24, down from 42. Half of them are getting full scholarships too. That’s a near 70% reduction.

It averaged more than 220 students per class in the prior decade. 

Crawford, who took over as dean in June of last year, said that he and Golden Gate University Provost Brent White decided to take action even before the ABA put the law school on notice. They didn’t want to take a quick-fix path, though. They wanted something more comprehensive so this threat wouldn’t haunt the school yearly. 

“We didn’t want to have classes see-sawing between compliance and non-compliance,” he said.

Nor is the school not about to sacrifice its mission of diversifying the law profession to do so, he added. It’s routinely honored by the National Jurist as being one of the nation’s most diverse law schools.

“That’s part of our DNA,” he said.

This year’s class remains highly diverse, with half of the students being first-generation law school students. The students are also more academically sound. The median LSAT for newly admitted students is 155. It was 149 when Crawford came onboard.

As part of this effort, the school wants to address other legal education woes, such as student debt burdens. According to U.S. News & World Reports, Golden Gate graduates incur about $133,000 in debt. Eighty percent have debt.

“We want to be dramatically different in every sense,” Crawford said.

It’s tuition is $52,500 a year, so the scholarships are a significant financial investment.

To make the new model sustainable, the university is adding a one-year Master of Law Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Law for Golden Gate undergraduates, both of which will be taught by existing law faculty. The hope is that they will also bring in revenue to offset the loss of J.D. tuition. The legal profession is changing and these degrees can help professionals be positioned to take advantage of that, he said. That’s yet another prong of this effort.

Also, the schools hopes to identify those students who excel in those programs and want to earn J.D.s. The school will give them a first crack at the full-ride scholarships.

“We’re a school of opportunity and we want to keep it that way,” Crawford said.