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    January 15, 2025 Legal Education

    Mythbusters: What do we really know about online law schools?

    By Julianne Hill
    The journeys of individual students enrolling in online law school are as varied as the programs themselves, the ABA Journal finds.

    The journeys of individual students enrolling in online law school are as varied as the programs themselves, the ABA Journal finds.

    Stock photo.

    Gloria Jacobsen dreamed of attending law school, but she wanted to stay in her small town in rural Alaska.

    Sara Levien decided that shifting from in-person to a brand-new hybrid program in Boston would give her the flexibility to check in on her family in Seattle.

    Michael Kaner wanted to go to law school while maintaining his dental practice in Pennsylvania but didn’t have enough time to commute to nearby programs.

    The journeys of individual students enrolling in online law school are as varied as the programs themselves, the ABA Journal finds.

    Currently, only law schools with brick-and-mortar campuses can gain ABA accreditation for their online JD programs. To date, 19 have received that blessing, and others are carefully considering joining the ranks.

    It’s a hot topic.

    “We’re just like everybody else,” says Stacy Leeds, dean of Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, which is one of three schools that submitted an application in October to the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to start part-time distance programs. “We’re looking at what we’re going to do and not do in the online space.”

    But as interest grows, the council is considering standards necessary to fully accredit online-only law schools without brick-and-mortar campuses, like Purdue Global Law School. Several steps remain before a proposal would be presented to the House of Delegates for approval.

    Meanwhile, the council is in the process of gathering data from the existing ABA-accredited online programs related to graduation and job placement, says Jennifer Rosato Perea, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education. In most states, only graduates from accredited law schools can take the bar.

    But the current dearth of data about outcomes for graduates of online law schools—with or without brick-and-mortar campuses—concerns some. At the August ABA council meeting, Susan Krinsky, interim CEO and president of the Law School Admission Council, expressed concerns about consumer protection, wondering if attending online law schools would pay off for students.

    “It is not wise to move forward in a way that puts the risk on students,” she said. “It’s time. It’s money. It’s their lives.”

    Christopher Chapman, president and CEO of the AccessLex Institute, disagrees and cites conversations he’s had with deans and administrators of ABA-accredited online law schools.

    “I have seen nothing that would give me concern about quality or inferiority versus the residential programming. It is clear to me that law schools work with extra diligence to ensure the quality and experience,” he says.

    His concerns are about online programs that are not ABA-accredited. He says that while AccessLex has not done any research into non-ABA-accredited online programs, “what we do know is that bar passage performance of such programs falls well below ABA-accredited law schools.”

    He also notes that non-ABA-accredited schools generally suffer from “adverse selection” when it comes to their applicant pool.

    “A substantial number of non-ABA accredited schools end up with students who are not able to meet the academic standards of any ABA law school—which leads to worse overall outcomes for such a school,” he adds.

    Ahead of the council’s planned data collection, the ABA Journal talked with students and administrators from six ABA-accredited law schools and one unaccredited fully online program to tease out facts from fiction from those currently in its midst.

    All programs have the same format

    FALSE. “There is not a one-size-fits-all approach to online legal education,” says Andrew Perlman, the Suffolk Law School dean. “There are many different models, and they serve different purposes.”

    Of the accredited schools, six JD programs are conducted completely online and 13 are hybrid programs, with some classes in person and some virtual. Nearly every program has a different twist.

    For instance, a hybrid or blended program means different things at different law schools. Suffolk Law demands its students attend all 1L classes on campus. The Mitchell Hamline School of Law’s blended, part-time program involves spending a week in person at the beginning and end of each semester. The Syracuse University College of Law and the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law requires in-person, short-term courses several times each year.

    Meanwhile, both St. Mary’s University School of Law and the Case Western Reserve University School of Law offer fully online, entirely remote programs, as does unaccredited Purdue Global Law.

    All of them started after COVID-19

    FALSE. Mitchell Hamline, Syracuse Law and Franklin Pierce each launched their online programs before the pandemic, and Purdue Global Law’s forerunner, Concord Law School, opened in 1998. But deans at other schools say that remote teaching forced by the pandemic proved online classes were possible and effective and helped to inspire their online JD programs.

    Students tend to be older

    TRUE. Nearly every law school contacted by the ABA Journal reported that students in its online or hybrid programs skewed older than those in its traditional program.

    J. Rex Tolliver, now vice president for student affairs and academic support at the University of South Carolina, entered Mitchell Hamline at 40 years old while working at the University of Illinois Chicago, joining a cohort that included doctors, a former NBA executive, and some music executives from Nashville, Tennessee. “That changed the richness of the discussions, the way in which we looked at case law and analyzed it based on all the experiences that we had in society,” he says.

    At Purdue Global Law, the average age of a 1L is 42, says Dean Martin Pritikin. At St. Mary’s online program, the median age is 35, compared with 25 for its in-person cohort, says Dean Patricia Roberts.

    And Franklin Pierce Law almost always has a student in the nonresidential program who is in their 70s, Dean Megan Carpenter says.

    Oftentimes, many online students are using law school as a bridge into a second career, sources say. Plus, there is pent-up demand. “There are people who always wanted to be on campus but never thought they could because they couldn’t afford to spend three years on campus,” Roberts says. “Online programs now let them do that.”

    Only students in remote places are interested in attending

    FALSE. While the assumption is students like Jacobsen, who attended Mitchell Hamline from her cabin in remote Glennallen, Alaska, are the target market for online law schools, many are like Levien, who lived in Boston not far from Suffolk Law. She joined that school’s online program for its flexibility.

    Every dean contacted for this story emphasized that there is no typical online law student. Their students come from all walks of life and from all over the world, they say, ranging from members of the military or their spouses stationed overseas to parents of young children who live in nearby cities but whose busy lives don’t allow for the time to commute to law school.

    They are always easy to get into

    NOT NECESSARILY. Admit rates for St. Mary’s have ranged from 7% to 9%, says Dean Patricia Roberts. Suffolk Law reports 15.7%.

    At Case Western, the median LSAT is 161 for the online cohort and 160 for in-person students. At Suffolk Law’s fall 2024 entering class, the hybrid students’ LSAT median score was 153, and it was and 155 for the in-person cohort.

    “We don’t really have a difference in what we’re looking for in traditional academic credentials for our hybrid JD admissions,” Suffolk’s Perlman says.

    However, Purdue Global Law enrolled 394 of 422 applicants for its current 1L class, according to its report to the State Bar of California. The school’s dean clarified that these figures may be misleading, because only people whose admissions exam scores surpassed the minimum requirement are considered to be official applicants.

    “According to our internal records, last year Purdue Global Law School had 1225 JD applications, of whom 406 (33%) were offered admission,” Pritikin told the Journal in an email.

    The courses are not as rigorous

    FALSE, according to the deans, who say instructional designers help build online courses to ensure sure the rigor matches that of an in-person class.

    “What matters a lot more than whether it’s online or in person is the thought and attention that’s put into designing the class and ensuring that students have many opportunities to assess their learning,” Perlman says.

    At Mitchell Hamline, all required classes are taught by full-time faculty members, Dean Camille M. Davidson says. At Syracuse Law, Dean Terence Lau says that no classes are taught by teaching assistants.

    Still, at the August council meeting, LSAC’s Krinsky called into question the standards to be used in online law schools.

    “Will the educational experience be of the quality it needs to be, and how will it be measured?” she asked.

    It’s always less expensive for students

    FALSE. Despite proponents who say online law schools will bring in less economically advantaged students and ease access-to-justice issues, most often the online sticker prices are the same as in-person programs.

    Only the fully online program at Purdue Global Law, which is not accredited and does not have a brick-and-mortar campus, offers a much lower total price. Purdue Global’s total tuition for a law degree is $52,900, according to information filed with the State Bar of California. Average tuition for a law degree is $151,072, according to the Education Data Initiative.

    Hybrid programs can actually cost students more because of the mandatory travel for in-person visits, students and graduates say.

    “There was no discount for hotels or AirBnbs,” Tolliver says.

    Building community must be done in person

    TRUE AND FALSE. This depends on who you ask.

    Deans at the law schools with required in-person stress that face time matters.

    “When we get these students together, we are building community. We’re building their professional networks,” Franklin Pierce Law’s Carpenter says. “We’re engaging in experiential and practical education.”

    For Dr. Kaner, a dentist who lives in Pennsylvania and completed his fully online law degree in 2003 from Purdue Global Law’s forerunner, Concord Law School, he and his classmates coordinated in-person study weekends, with everyone flying into Arizona to meet and work together.

    But some students say it wouldn’t matter if they met people face-to-face. Dan Hoy, a 1L at Case Western School of Law’s 100% online program, is satisfied with connecting to classmates through channels on the chatting app Discord.

    “It has different subcategories based upon if we are talking about class stuff or life,” he says. “People are on there, getting to know one another, asking questions about a course or if someone watched the football game last night.”

    Alaska-based Jacobsen agrees. “I don’t think the in-person piece matters as much as making real-time connections with people. Just students talking to each other in real time online and figuring stuff out, you’d get the same experience out of it.”

    Experiential learning opportunities and help finding jobs are nonexistent

    FALSE. All the accredited schools contacted offer online students access to various activities and organizations traditionally set up for on-campus students.

    Jacobsen participated in law review, the Native American Law Student Association and a drafting clinic. Dr. Amanda Higgenson, a pediatrician in North Carolina studying at Syracuse Law’s online program, participated in a couple of tax clinics. Tolliver was involved in moot court, took advantage of Mitchell Hamline’s international studies classes overseas, and found help to land an externship with Rainbow PUSH in Chicago. Suffolk Law administrators helped Levien land a clerkship at the Massachusetts Appeals Court, she says.

    Many don’t bother with taking the bar

    SOMETIMES. Some remote students just want their JD to help get a promotion in their current career, not to practice law at a firm.

    “I was never planning on going into a traditional law career, so I didn’t see much value in taking the bar,” says Tolliver.

    Some just delay it. “Whereas our residential students graduate and take the bar the next cycle, nonresidential students say, ‘I’m going to study for the bar over the next year and take it a year and a half later,’” Carpenter says.

    In Mitchell Hamline’s classes of 2020-2023, roughly 89.63% of blended students have taken the bar exam at least once, and roughly 94.3% of brick-and-mortar students have taken the bar at least once, according to Ally Roeker, assistant communications director.

    Meanwhile, at Suffolk Law, all of its 15 online graduates to date have taken the bar, according to Perlman.

    Bar pass rates are lower

    HARD TO TELL. Considering most programs are very young and many haven’t graduated classes yet, it’s very early to be looking at bar pass numbers.

    The more established programs offer some insight. Of the 125 graduates of Syracuse Law’s online program who have sat for the bar exam, 110, or 88%, passed on the first attempt. Fourteen of those test-takers sat for the New York bar exam, and 13 of them (93%) passed on the first attempt, according to Robert Conrad, communications and media relations director.

    For Mitchell Hamline’s graduates of the blended-learning program, the first-time bar passage rate was 73.96% for the July 2023 bar and 83.64% for graduates of the in-person program, according to the Minnesota-based law school. Purdue Global Law’s first-time bar takers had a 30% pass rate in the July 2024 administration of the California bar.

    Online graduates have a harder time getting a job

    ALSO HARD TO TELL. Again, information is limited to the older programs.

    At Mitchell Hamline, 93.5% of all known job-seekers from the blended-learning class of 2023 had either secured employment in bar-passage-required, JD-advantage or other professional positions, or they were enrolled in graduate studies programs.

    Purdue Global Law surveyed its 2021 grads about their employment in 2022, 2023 and 2024, and 100% of respondents reported employment in JD-required or JD-advantage jobs, with the JD-required number fluctuating between 45% and 58%.

    Pritikin admits most Purdue Global Law graduates do not go to big firms: He says they end up at small or midsize firms, open their own practices, or go into government work. Many graduates become in-house counsel at the companies where they had been working during online law school, he adds.

    An online degree is less prestigious

    FALSE. The deans and students contacted note that graduating from an online program isn’t stated on their diploma or transcript.

    “Unless a student voluntarily discusses their experience, it’s not something that necessarily comes up,” Lau says. “It is the same degree, the same diploma, the same transcript. It’s just a different path.”

    It’s cheap and easy for accredited law schools to add an online program

    FALSE. “The assumption is that they would be cheaper,” the ABA’s Rosato Perea says. “But you have to have technology in place to make sure it works. You’ve got to have training for teachers.”

    Deans agree. Online law schools require robust support from information technology staff, video production and instructional designers, they say.

    “To do it the right way and to serve our students well requires a fairly significant investment,” Suffolk Law’s Perlman says.

    Developing the videos for the coursework is a hefty lift. “These are professionally produced, TV-quality, multimedia-laden productions,” Syracuse Law’s Lau says. “These are not cheap.”

    As other law schools consider the move to online programs, the deans interviewed advise being realistic about the financial realities.

    “Make sure that you’ve done your financial due diligence very, very carefully,” Lau says. “You’ve got to be prepared to make a substantial investment up front, and you’ve got to be realistic about your enrollment projections.”

    Ultimately, keep in mind the students you serve and the needs they have.

    “Understand why it is that you want to launch such a program,” Suffolk Law’s Perlman says. “Does it fit your mission? Are you going to be able to serve your students effectively? What are you trying to achieve?”

    “It is not just a matter of opening a camera and having students Zoom into class,” Mitchell Hamline’s Davidson says. “It really is about faculty being deliberate about the pedagogy of teaching in a different modality.”