Lauren Robel
Van Nolan Professor of Law Emerita, Provost Emerita
Indiana University
Now in its twentieth year, the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) has become an indispensable resource for everyone who cares about legal education. Modeled on the National Survey of Student Engagement, which has been asking undergraduates about behavior that empirically correlates with good learning outcomes since 2000, LSSSE has for two decades provided individual schools and those interested in legal education with a wealth of empirical information and important insights about how law students navigate their educations. From a starting point of 42 law school participants, the annual survey over its lifetime has included over 425,000 students at more than 200 discrete institutions in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. LSSSE has accumulated a lot of data in two decades about how law students experience legal education and what schools are doing to help them thrive. Working from that unique and powerful dataset, LSSSE has flowered from a yearly snapshot of student behavior to an exceptional resource for understanding how law schools create and respond to change.
The power of this resource is a function of its unmatched longitudinal and comparative data. This annual report relies on that data to ask what twenty years of survey responses can tell us about what has stayed the same and what has changed in the years that the survey has been administered. There is much good news. Law students, like practicing lawyers, have been and remain overwhelmingly satisfied with their chosen vocational path.[1] Students continue to participate in experiential learning at high levels and large numbers of them take advantage of opportunities for public service and pro bono. More of them— almost half—- believe that their law schools are doing a good job in preparing them to work with diverse constituencies than when LSSSE first began collecting data.
And the same is true of identity formation: more than half credit their schools with developing their professional identity. As these data document, law schools are doing many things right.
During its twenty years of collecting these data, LSSSE has remained staunchly committed to its founding mission of helping law schools improve learning by keeping the voices of students front and center. Its focus on how students learn predated the ABA’s adoption of learning outcome accreditation standards by ten years,[2] and it has helped law schools demonstrate that they are meeting the requirements of that standard. While providing deep analysis of single-school data on a specific topic, LSSSE also regularly steps back to analyze how schools can think holistically about their data. For instance, LSSSE has pulled together a set of responses that show how often students report engaging in the specific skills that, together, constitute “thinking like a lawyer.”[3] And it has cultivated partnerships to understand how behaviors in law school might be influenced to improve bar passage rates.[4] Law schools are also able to compare how their students are using their career and advising services, or their libraries, to students’ use at peer institutions, allowing them to benchmark and improve these critical services. All of these services are important to student success and are expensive to provide, putting a premium on ensuring that schools can rely on their responsiveness and efficacy. For individual schools, LSSSE is an invaluable tool for ensuring the quality and efficacy of the school’s work.
While all of this has helped individual schools, LSSSE has done much more. It has responded to important new questions driven by the evolving literature on law schools or experiments that law schools themselves want to explore. For instance, schools took seriously the questions arising from the Carnegie Foundation’s important report on law school professional identity formation,[5] and LSSSE helped them understand how the programming they instituted affected their students’ understanding of their nascent professional selves. Similarly, law schools have expanded their experiential offerings tremendously during the twenty years of LSSSE administration. Schools interested in ensuring the effectiveness of new graduation requirements, such as pro bono or clinical course requirements, can use LSSSE to follow changes over time and adjust where necessary. Institutions interested in how law schools have responded to criticism can look to LSSSE for empirical answers. LSSSE provides a way to stand both inside and outside a single school, allowing deans, faculty, staff, and constituencies interested in the profession to determine whether innovation is having the hoped-for effects on students’ development as professionals.
The annual reports have also thoughtfully explored the effect of major cultural and social events and trends, like the pandemic and the interest in online courses it triggered, on legal education.[6] They have explored difficult and intractable issues, such as student debt levels.[7] And under Professor Meera Deo’s thoughtful leadership, LSSSE has been especially attentive to exploring how diverse students experience law school.[8] One of the great success stories of the past twenty years has been the increased diversity of the student bodies of schools across the country, which LSSSE has documented and which may be imperiled by the Supreme Court’s dismantling of affirmative action. Increasing the presence of diverse students carries with it the imperative of ensuring that their path to success does not face unintended barriers. As Dean Jelani Jefferson Exum explained, “LSSSE data has been extremely useful in illuminating the culture of law schools,” and permitting schools to stay true to their missions for all of their students.[9]
In addition to its own stellar work with the data, LSSSE has also supported an impressive and deepening array of research and scholarship (at last count, close to 150 articles, books, and doctoral dissertations) that looks to this data set to answer questions about legal education, student engagement and success, diverse students’ experiences, and comparisons to other professions.[10] LSSSE has become an important resource for scholars as well as schools.
What makes LSSSE’s work critically important, of course, is the importance of the work for which we are preparing our students. Our country endows lawyers with a great deal of power and responsibility, both for their clients’ lives and for the health of the rule of law. The more we know about how students are forming their skills, judgment, and ethics, the better we can perform the crucial task of preparing them for a virtuous practice that supports the highest values of the profession. For twenty years, LSSSE has made succeeding at this task more possible. Congratulations to LSSSE and the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research for their important and growing contributions to the success of our students.
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[1] See R. Nelson et al., THE MAKING OF LAWYERS’ CAREERS: INEQUALITY AND OPPORTUNITY IN THE AMERICAN LEGAL PROFESSION (2023), reporting on a twenty-year longitudinal study of practicing lawyers that found lawyers overwhelmingly satisfied with their decision to become a lawyer.
[2] Stephen C. Bahls, Adoption of Student Learning Outcomes: Lessons for Systemic Change in Legal Education, 67 Journal of Legal Educ. 376 (2018) (Chair of ABA’s Student Learning Outcomes Committee discussing process that led to adoption of ABA Standard 302 in 2014).
[3] Jak Petzold, Learning to Think Like A Lawyer, (August 7, 2024) at https://lssse.indiana.edu/blog/learning-to-think-like-a-lawyer/
[4] AccessLex Institute/LSSSE Bar Exam Success Initiative at https://lssse.indiana.edu/accesslexlssse-bar-exam-success-initiative/
[5] William Sullivan, Jr., et al., EDUCATING LAWYERS: PREPARATION FOR THE PROFESSION OF LAW (2007) (part of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s “Preparation for the Professions” series0.
[6] 2021 Annual Report, The COVID Crisis in Legal Education; http://lssse.indiana.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/COVID-Crisis-in-Legal-Education-Final-1.24.22.pdf 2022 Annual Report, Success with Online Education, https://lssse.indiana.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Success-with-Online-Education-Final-10.26.22.pdf
[7] 2015 Annual Report, How a Decade of Debt Changed the Law School Experience at http://lssse.indiana.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/LSSSE-Annual-Report-2015-Update-FINAL-revised-web.pdf
[8] See Diversity and Exclusion, LSSSE Annual Report 2020 at http://lssse.indiana.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Diversity-and-Exclusion-Final-9.29.20.pdf The Cost of Women’s Success, LSSSE Annual Report 2019 at http://lssse.indiana.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/LSSSE-AnnualSurvey-Gender-Final.pdf
[9] Jelani Jefferson Exum, The Role of Data in Mission Focused Law School Leadership (Sept. 20, 2024) at https://lssse.indiana.edu/blog/the-role-of-data-in-mission-focused-law-school-leadership/
[10] See Publications citing LSSSE Research at https://lssse.indiana.edu/scholarship/