Promoting Graduation Outcomes for Racially Minoritized Law School Students: Examining the Role of Finances, Racial Representation, and Prestige

The Law School Context

The number of entry-level law jobs declined precipitously after the Great Recession, ending a pattern of steady growth that began in the 1970s. Burk (2019) documented how some law job sectors were hit harder than others: Very large firms (500+ employees) now hire a greater proportion of law graduates than in 2008, even as overall job numbers remain below 2008 levels. These same “biglaw” firms generally seek out students attending the higher-rank, higher-prestige, and higher-price schools as new hires (Dinovitzer & Garth, 2020), leading to stratification in the profession. At the same time, law students are burdened by an enormous amount of school debt. Law students are more likely than other graduate students to use loans to pay for school (Pyne & Grodsky, 2020), and law students typically borrow larger amounts than their peers when they receive loans (Belasco et al., 2014; Pyne & Grodsky, 2020). In 2020, the average amount borrowed for students who took out loans was $133,480 for private school graduates and $93,131 for public school graduates (Law School Transparency, 2021b). Black and Latinx law school graduates have higher loan debt on average than White graduates and are more likely to retain or increase that debt load in subsequent years (Hanson, 2021).

Media attention on the worsening legal job market and the high cost of law school (Auter, 2018; Olson, 2015), along with digital transparency initiatives (e.g., AccessLex Institute, lawschooltransparency.com), may have convinced potential law students to pursue other professions. The total number of U.S. law students dramatically decreased in the decade after the 2008 recession, from a high of 147,525 in 2010 to 112,878 in 2019 (Law School Transparency, 2021a). However, the 2021 law school application cycle has seen more than 10,000 more applicants and 100,000 more applications than 2016, leaving law school administrators with many more choices to make in terms of admissions, financial support, and future teaching loads.

These substantial application and enrollment shifts in recent years affect who law schools are able to recruit, admit, and train, which may have notable implications for the pipeline of potential future lawyers. With greater numbers of applicants, higher-ranked law schools have the ability to be more selective in crafting their incoming cohorts of students; these schools could exercise this discretion in ways that either promote or undermine racial representation and equity. Lower-ranked law schools could be more selective in these circumstances, but they may instead (or also) choose to enroll more students overall (Spivey, 2019).

Factors That Shape Disparities Within Law School

Attrition rates for law Students of Color have always been high, especially during the academically and psychologically challenging first year (Clydesdale, 2004; Hamlar, 1983). First-year grades play a large part in determining future academic and professional opportunities, such as joining the law review or landing a good summer job (Feingold & Souza, 2013). The limited spots for these opportunities and the strict grading curves exacerbate an academic environment that is already highly competitive and stressful. This environment appears to cause isolation, lowered self-esteem, and exhaustion, especially for Students of Color (Hess, 2002). In 2016–17, the first-year non-transfer attrition rate of law Students of Color was almost twice as high as for White students (Thomas & Cochran, 2018). Most non-transfer attrition is academic (i.e., dismissal for low grades), but a substantial number of students also voluntarily leave due to other reasons. With scholars aware of these ongoing issues, law schools have been encouraged to tailor academic support programs to address the success of first-year law students from minoritized racial backgrounds (Bodamer, 2020).

Beyond the first year, law school can continue to be a deeply marginalizing experience for Students of Color, thereby potentially influencing the path to graduation. Overall, 31% of law students identify as People of Color (ABA, 2020); racial representation varies greatly between institutions, so many students find themselves even more isolated. In 2017, 18% of the 200 accredited U.S. law schools enrolled half of all Black law students (Taylor, 2019). Only 17% of faculty and administrators at law schools are People of Color (Association of American Law Schools, 2020), and research has suggested that student exposure to same-race instructors may contribute to increased academic performance (e.g., Fairlie et al., 2014). Lancaster and colleagues (2019) also found that taking classes with Faculty of Color helped Black law students feel more comfortable in the classroom, even without any feeling of a special bond or mentorship relationship. Birdsall et al. (2020) specifically studied this effect in legal education and found a small but significant same-race grade boost, perhaps due to factors such as students having representative role models and the increased cultural competencies of Faculty of Color.

The history of legal education has been one of racial exclusion and the promotion of White cultural and racial norms (Bhabha, 2014). Black students were denied from enrolling at most law schools before the 1950s, and schools often informally excluded other People of Color (Anderson, 2009). The few People of Color who did pursue law school were not welcome in the profession: The ABA’s policy until 1943 was that “the settled practice of the Association has been to elect only white men as members” (ABA, 2021b). Even by 1970, there were only 3,400 practicing Black lawyers in the U.S., most of whom graduated from historically Black schools, such as Howard University (Littlejohn & Rubinowitz, 1987).

Feingold and Souza (2013) argue that the burden, or “racial tax,” for law Students of Color is often subtle and difficult to recognize. Besides the numerical lack of representation at law schools, Students of Color are adversely affected by these institutions’ White-dominant culture, which includes pedagogical norms, ways of thinking, and standards for evaluation (Crenshaw, 1988). Traditional legal pedagogy, known as the case method, assumes that “law has evolved, and continues to function, through race-neutral legal principles” (Feingold & Souza, 2013, p. 97). Students of Color, who have a lived understanding of the importance of race, must adapt to “objective” legal argumentation. Furthermore, the competitive, pro-business ethos of law school does not match the culture of many Students of Color, who are more likely than White students to want to pursue a career in the public interest (Clydesdale, 2004).

Recent research has shown that issues of race in law school are often absent from classroom discussions (Deo, 2011, 2019), and law Students of Color report facing higher levels of discrimination and marginalization than their White peers (Feingold & Souza, 2013). Students of Color at UCLA were 3 to 8 times more likely than their White classmates to report experiencing an incident of racially hostile behavior from other students, faculty, or staff (Feingold & Souza, 2013), and Students of Color are less likely to believe their law school is very supportive of racial and ethnic diversity (Law School Survey of Student Engagement, 2020). Jones (2021) points out that Black law students face various cultural, psychological, and social hurdles, but little research has untangled the relative impact of these factors.

While there is limited empirical research on promoting law student success, qualitative research on other graduate and professional disciplines offers additional context related to success for students with marginalized racial backgrounds. Burt et al. (2018) followed the graduate school journeys of 21 Black engineering students at one predominantly White institution. These students felt isolated in their program and experienced difficulty joining study groups and interacting with classmates and faculty advisors. Truong and Museus (2012) identified the various types of racialized experiences and coping mechanisms of doctoral Students of Color in a range of academic programs. Students reported various forms of overt and subtle racism, such as low expectations paired with high standards, isolation, devaluing of research on race, and exploitation. These types of experiences may have negative effects on graduate students’ sense of belonging and their persistence in school (Strayhorn, 2012).

Faculty support can make a difference in student persistence and graduation. Decades of research on Faculty of Color beyond the legal education context point to the importance of diversity in the professoriate to promote postsecondary student success, particularly for Students of Color. Based on a systematic review of studies of faculty across disciplines at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, Turner and colleagues (2008) argue that increases in Students and Faculty of Color on campus can support the recruitment and retention of both groups and reduce feelings of isolation in the campus community. Substantial racial disparities between graduate students are also observed in the quality and quantity of mentoring in ways that disadvantage Students of Color, and the recruitment of faculty who share students’ identities can play a role in remedying this problem (see Brunsma et al., 2017).

Theoretical Framework

The racial diversity of law schools has been an issue of national importance for decades, with high-profile cases before the Supreme Court driving ongoing media attention about law schools’ affirmative action policies and the state legislation banning such practices. Central to many of these affirmative action cases has been the concept of critical mass, which was discussed in both Grutter and Gratz cases before the Supreme Court in 2003, as well as in the Fisher cases in 2013 and 2016. What constitutes a critical mass, particularly of students from minoritized racial groups, is itself an ambiguous and debated construct. Instead of seeking to identify a single proportion of students, Garces and Jayakumar (2014) recommended instead to consider particular educational contexts. Their alternative, dynamic diversity, focuses on context-specific considerations about nurturing a positive campus racial climate, addressing historical legacies of racial exclusion, attending to the impediments for productive learning environments, and fostering cross-racial interactions in learning spaces. These considerations exist atop omnipresent issues of numerical or proportional racial representation among students and faculty.

This study draws from existing literature on racial representation and student success, acknowledging factors that extend beyond notions of attaining critical mass. We use the Multicontextual Model for Diverse Learning Environments (MMDLE; Hurtado et al., 2012) to consider how overlapping contexts within the learning environment interact to promote or hinder degree attainment. Of particular relevance for this study are the model’s three institutional dimensions: compositional, historical, and organizational. The compositional dimension deals directly with the notion of critical mass in terms of numerical or proportional representation, but it cannot be considered a direct proxy for campus climate for diversity. Instead, the compositional dimension must be acknowledged as an element of the environment that influences student satisfaction, prompts perceptions of equity around campus for all people enmeshed in the organizational environment, and can signal the success of initiatives that promote equity. In the law school context, the compositional dimension is reflected in not only the ongoing enrollment, retention, and graduation of students from racially minoritized backgrounds, but also the representation of law school faculty and campus administrators from racially minoritized backgrounds.

The historical dimension of the MMDLE pertains to how legacies of racial exclusion influence students’ experiences (Hurtado et al., 2012). Students, faculty, and administrators within the legal education environment continue to navigate the remnants of a system that included segregated Jim Crow law schools (Longa, 2007), racist gatekeeping practices (Taylor, 2019), and disregard for the unique needs of Students of Color (Robbins, 2020). These histories influence the present law school climate and the broader learning environment, which then affect outcomes for Students of Color.

Finally, the organizational dimension of the MMDLE comprises processes that normalize ongoing inequity, which often manifest in hiring decisions, budget allocations, and day-to-day organizational practices (Hurtado et al., 2012). Law schools operate in an isomorphic organizational field that is highly stratified by rank, where there is significant competition that leads to inequitable distribution of resources within and across schools (Espeland & Sauder, 2016). Analyses of law student success must not overlook the role of finances in this organizational frame, especially as the weight of similar research at the undergraduate level indicates that grants and scholarships promote student retention, persistence, and graduation (Nguyen et al., 2019), and the role of finances tends to be larger for Students of Color (Goldrick-Rab et al., 2009; Mayhew et al., 2016). Ongoing inequitable funding practices can lead to divergent educational outcomes across race, social class, and other student characteristics.

Considering these organizational constructs in tandem with the historical and compositional features is critical for understanding student success in the multidimensional environments of law schools. For example, law school faculty hiring is a thread that cuts across the compositional, historical, and organizational dimensions of the MMDLE. While the data regarding racial representation of a law school’s faculty may appear simply compositional, the longstanding underrepresentation of law school Faculty of Color and the administrative decisions that lead to this long-standing underrepresentation touch upon both the historical and organizational dimensions. As such, the MMDLE provides a lens for understanding the role of faculty representation that considers dynamic diversity (Garces & Jayakumar, 2014) in the faculty-student relationship. In this regard, law students interact with multiple meanings pertaining to faculty racial representation as they navigate the legal education environment; this multimodal understanding informs the design of our analysis.

Present Study

The present study explored the extent to which financial, demographic, and prestige attributes of U.S. law schools predict the number and percentage of law school graduates who hold several racially minoritized identities. This paper expands and improves upon previous research in several ways. First, it directly examined dynamics that may shape law school student success, which have received limited attention in prior work. Second, it included various predictors that are attributes of law schools themselves (rather than pre-enrollment student attributes), thereby leading to concrete implications for improving policy and practice. Third, the analyses were conducted separately for students who hold different racially minoritized identities, which sheds light into the generality of relevant dynamics across several groups that are often lumped together. Finally, some analyses also predicted outcomes for the number of White graduates, which allowed us to discern whether the potential role of certain factors may diverge between students who hold privileged versus minoritized racial identities.

Method

Results

Discussion

The present study explored how organizational factors predict law school graduation outcomes among students who hold several racial identities. These dynamics were further investigated through separate analyses of graduation outcomes among higher-ranked and lower-ranked law schools. Given the large number of results across the various predictors, outcomes, and subgroup analyses, the discussion below focuses on four key findings and patterns that were observed consistently across analyses.

First, the representation of Faculty of Color was frequently associated with a greater number and percentage of racially minoritized graduates, whereas this representation was often inversely associated with the number of White graduates, which suggests the potentially important role of Faculty of Color for fostering law school success specifically among racially minoritized students. Faculty of Color may contribute to these graduation outcomes in multiple ways. The presence of Faculty of Color itself could serve as a signal of embracing diversity as a value at that law school. The recruitment of Faculty of Color may run counter to historical exclusionary practices and demonstrate future commitments, which are both emblematic of efforts to advance dynamic diversity rather than simply to meet a numeric or percentage hiring target. Perhaps more importantly, Faculty of Color may engage with students individually or collectively in a manner that facilitates racial equity, whether through the development of formal or informal mentoring relationships, selection of curriculum and course content, use of specific pedagogical practices, creation of an overall positive (or less negative) psychological racial climate, or other mechanisms.

Table 6. Unstandardized Coefficients for Random Effects Analyses Predicting Student Graduation Percentages for Law Schools Ranked 101–200

Note. Standard errors are in parentheses. URM = underrepresented racial minority. SOC = Students of Color. Year fixed effects were entered in all models.

*p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001

Second, ingroup racial representation within the state was also frequently and positively related to graduation outcomes for all groups of students. This finding is especially impressive given that state-level demographics provide a very rough proxy for the local communities with which students will engage during their time in law school. Of course, this dynamic is outside of the control of law schools, but it provides further evidence of how racial representation—and the climate and culture that is often associated with it—may lead to improved outcomes for students whose identities are often marginalized in their graduate programs and beyond. These findings lend evidence to the broader notion that human geography well outside of the institution affects the academic success of law students. U.S. society is becoming more racially diverse (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021), and this population increase is more rapid than that of the representation of Students of Color enrolled at law schools. Thus, we do not consider the positive significant relationship a success for racial equity in itself, but it may serve as a call to consider how law schools in the U.S. might continue to keep pace with the contemporary demographic landscape of America. Beyond the immediate educational community, many law students have internships or become summer associates in the communities near their law school, thereby providing additional means through which this proximal racial representation may become even more salient and potentially influential.

Third, in the subgroup analyses by law school ranking, financial indicators were much more often related to graduation outcomes at schools outside of the top 100. This greater association at lower-ranked schools may be driven by a combination of compositional student factors and organizational factors. Specifically, students at lower-ranked schools tend to have greater financial need, and these same institutions are also less able to provide the type of financial aid that higher-ranked schools can frequently offer (Taylor, 2018). This combination of factors means that allocating resources toward student financial support may be an especially effective strategy for promoting graduation, whereas charging higher amounts for tuition and fees will be especially likely to hinder graduation. As an additional and perhaps surprising finding, cost of living sometimes had positive associations with graduation outcomes for Students of Color. This cost is partially shaped by whether the school is located within a metropolitan area, which may have a greater representation of People of Color; thus, the positive results may be driven by similar dynamics as those for the association between in-state racial representation and graduation outcomes.

Fourth, the contextual factors of racial representation and law school ranking were more often associated with graduation outcomes at schools ranked within the top 100. Recalling the historical and structural/organizational dimensions of the MMDLE (Hurtado et al., 2012), this finding points to overlapping components of organizational life in an educational environment. The results for U.S. News rankings may be a proxy for the capacity that top-ranked law schools have to mobilize support and resources on behalf of their students, especially since these schools often hold affiliations with the richest, oldest, and/or most heavily supported universities. As the top-ranked law schools are also those that are most rank-aware, they may divert resources away from student support in years following a U.S. News ranking slide, thereby affecting student persistence to graduation. Moreover, the representation of Faculty of Color may be especially important for facilitating the success of Students of Color in higher-ranked law schools, given the weight of historical and ongoing legacies of racial exclusion at these oldest and most prestigious institutions. The presence of Faculty of Color at these law schools demonstrates that students attending the most respected legal institutions can ultimately persist and succeed against the substantial obstacles that they face.

Conclusion and Implications

This study provides important insights into the dynamics that shape law school graduation outcomes among students from various racial identities, which is especially crucial when preparing students for well-paying jobs in an influential profession that is overwhelmingly White (ABA, 2021a). Student success dynamics are understudied in non-STEM graduate and professional school contexts, so these findings highlight various factors related to racial representation, finances, and prestige. Many of the constructs that significantly predicted graduation outcomes are well within the control of law schools, suggesting actionable directions for bolstering the success of racially minoritized students and ultimately of future professionals. Relevant implications include hiring more Faculty of Color, increasing transparency about metrics of student success, and auditing the distribution of financial resources directed to supporting students’ law school attendance and persistence.

The present results indicate that larger tuition grants predicted lower percentages of racially minoritized graduates, while the percentage of Faculty of Color led to both greater numbers and percentages of racially minoritized graduates. The choices around the number and size of tuition grants, or how legal scholars are incented to join a law school faculty, are unquestionably discretionary budget decisions. Aligning with the MMDLE’s perspective on interlocking organizational, historical, and compositional dimensions (Hurtado et al., 2012), it is important for administrators to recognize that the avenue for promoting graduation among law Students of Color should involve understanding their annual budgets as organizational routines that have become historicized and normalized, resulting in graduating classes who are often demographically dissimilar to their geographic communities. In viewing choices around hiring and student support through this lens, and with the data to understand their role in the shaping of law school graduating classes, administrators can adjust their policies and practices to move toward more racially equitable outcomes.

Further research should directly examine the organizational dynamics that lead to racialized experiences and outcomes in legal education. Providing a potential lens for doing so, Ray (2019) describes racialized organizations as “social structures that limit the personal agency and collective efficacy of subordinate racial groups while magnifying the agency of the dominant racial group” (p. 36). Research on other professional education systems has adopted this approach in understanding the role of different racial groups’ agency in reported systemic outcomes. For example, studies of medical education have noted ways that student success metrics and leadership decisions offer evidence for ongoing racialized dynamics within medical education (e.g., Nguemeni Tiako et al., 2021). The extension of these understandings to legal education, bolstered by the quantitative findings of this study about campus organizational features, could aid in shifting the practices of the legal education system toward racial equity.

Moving forward, the legal field would have greater understanding about the mechanisms behind these racialized findings in this study if there were greater transparency around how funding was distributed to Students and Faculty of Color. While the current ABA disclosure requirement mandates that law schools report the size and proportion of scholarships, this study’s unexpected finding about large scholarships leading to a decrease in the number of graduating Students of Color suggests that the mobilization of these scholarships and who receives them may be inequitable. The ABA recently decided that it would require law schools to report financial aid information by students’ racial identity (ABA, 2021d), which will shed light on how law schools are targeting certain students in their recruitment and retention strategies (at least in future years). This change represents a positive step toward transparency so that law schools may be held accountable for their role in perpetuating (or ideally alleviating) racial inequities; additional movement toward disaggregating racial data for students and faculty would provide further insights.

Organizational changes for equity would shift not only the legal education system itself in terms of student success outcomes, but also the legal profession and communities served by newly minted J.D.s. Graduating more People of Color from U.S. law schools would likely contribute to more racial diversity among prosecutors and judges, which Ward and colleagues (2009) found had the potential to advance racial justice in American courtrooms. As law school administrators faced a boom in the number of law school applicants and students in 2021, leaders of educational institutions seeking to advance racial justice must consider orienting their ongoing immediate faculty hiring and student financial aid practices toward achieving long-term aims to graduate more Students of Color.

Author Note

This material is based upon work supported by AccessLex Institute and the Association for Institutional Research.

References