Here’s a tempest in a teapot for you — should law schools stop requiring applicants to take the Law School Admission Test (LSAT)? Some people argue vociferously that schools should drop it because they could then achieve more diversity in student bodies. Others argue that it’s the other way around and that the LSAT is good for diversity. Whether it helps to sort out those who are best suited for the work of lawyering from those who aren’t seems not to matter much.
Reflecting on this controversy, Matthew Anderson argues in today’s Martin Center article that it would be fine to kill off the LSAT, but not for the reasons advanced by most of its enemies.
He writes that, “Efforts to drop the LSAT and welcome law students from a larger pool of applicants is also, however, an admission that the ‘university machine’ needs to be fed. There just aren’t enough traditionally qualified students to go around in order to keep the tuition machine running. (‘You have to work harder to find students,’ says the University of Chicago.) This may be a somewhat negative perspective, but it is a practical acknowledgment that universities are corporations and are more like their commercial counterparts than they used to be.”
I think that hits upon the truth. Legal education is an overgrown industry looking desperately for revenues. Many of the not-so-prestigious schools are having a hard time filling up their classrooms. If doing away with the LSAT helps them do that, fine.
Anderson’s big argument is that the LSAT is irrelevant — as is law school itself: “The LSAT, which is just another standardized test of the sort that students are exposed to in high school, is not only not the test that really matters, but it is not a test that is necessary to take the exam actually used to license new lawyers. Indeed, some advocates for law-school reform (such as consumer advocate and Harvard Law graduate Ralph Nader), have gone so far as to claim that any generally intelligent high-school student can pass the Bar exam with a few months of preparation. Others (including myself) believe that any undergraduate or graduate student from any discipline (including community college paralegals) should be allowed to take the Bar exam. This, of course, makes the LSAT irrelevant — but for the right reasons, based on free markets instead of monopoly markets and politics.”
Correct.