From Prestige to Performance: Evaluating Law School Outcomes Using Value-Added Modeling

From Prestige to Performance: Evaluating Law School Outcomes Using Value-Added Modeling Jason Scott, Andrea Pals, and Dominique Monserrat Abstract Bar passage and employment rates are widely used to evaluate law school performance, yet these raw outcomes often reflect student selection rather than institutional performance. This study applies a value-added modeling (VAM) framework to assess the contributions of law schools to student success, controlling for prior achievement and contextual factors. Using a 10year panel dataset of 189 ABA-accredited law schools, we estimate fixed-effects models to isolate the impact of the law school learning environment on first-time bar passage and lawrelated employment. Our findings reveal that schools traditionally viewed as underperforming often exceed expectations when student background is accounted for, challenging the validity of prevailing rankings. These results have implications for accreditation, accountability, and equity in legal education, particularly for mission-driven institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. By centering institutional contributions rather than student inputs, this study advances the use of VAM in postsecondary evaluation and offers a more equitable framework for assessing educational quality. Keywords Value-added modeling, legal education, law school outcomes, institutional outcomes, bar passage, student outcomes, educational equity, accreditation Introduction In legal education, a law school’s bar passage and employment rates play a sizable role in accreditation decisions and rankings of the “best” law schools, both of which bear high stakes for applicants, students, faculty, staff, and administrators. This is problematic. A focus solely on outcomes ignores how these data were generated, particularly differences in the credentials of the individuals who schools admit. Indeed, legal education research consistently finds positive relationships, of varying magnitudes, between a law school’s bar passage rate and the entering credentials of its students (e.g., Bahadur & Ruth, 2021; Marks & Moss, 2016; Pals et al., 2024; Taylor et al., 2021). Importantly, overreliance on these credentials in the admissions process perpetuates racial inequities (Anglade, 2014; Hartocollis, 2022; Taylor, 2019). When these outcomes are used to evaluate school performance without accounting for factors such as the entering credentials of a school’s students, the definition of quality shifts away from an institution’s ability to mold and develop the students it admits to one that rewards (or penalizes) non-pedagogical factors, such as the entering credentials of its students, its prestige or reputation, or the reputation of its faculty. Consequently, the role of the formative law school experience is