Day: 2012/07/23

2013 Official Guide Released

This actually happened a few days ago, but if you want to know how badly or well your law school did in fall 2011, see for yourself.

A few notes:

  • The ABA’s Web site has not yet uploaded the rest of the Official Guide as it did last year. Hopefully it will soon as I found its tables really useful.
  • The 2013 Official Guide places a second entry for Cooley in Florida owing to its new branch campus there. Unfortunately, it duplicates the Michigan entry, so readers will have no idea how large the Florida campus is by looking the Guide, not that it’s opened yet but the Guide probably shouldn’t’ve put anything there at all.
  • As with last year, Widener Harrisburg’s entry is a duplicate of Widener Delaware’s. Assumedly the tables in the Official Guide distinguish between the two in terms of number of applicants, etc., but as I said, the ABA has not updated that yet.
  • Readers might be surprised to see University of La Verne returning to the fold even though it lost its provisional accreditation in June 2011 because too many of its graduates were failing the bar exam on their first attempts. The Official Guide excluded it in last year’s edition, which wasn’t fair from a statistical standpoint because it was accredited at the time the data were collected. However, the ABA restored La Verne’s provisional accreditation for no reason I ever saw in spring 2012, so I guess that applies retroactively to fall 2011.

The 2013 Official Guide is important because it depicts what happened to law schools in the application cycle just after the New York Times‘ story on scamblogs and stats-juking appeared in January 2011. I don’t have an enormous amount of time to input the numbers yet, but I’ll get to it. I’d even like to update those ancient pages projecting law school tuition increases.

*****

Also, one minor point while I’m here: Occasionally, people see the LSTB and want to contact me. My e-mail is in the “ABOUT” page above. Please use that rather than Facebook, esp. since it automatically sends messages from people I do not know into the “other” folder, which no one ever checks. Including me.