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Once Again - Why Motivations Matter

Stephen Daniels
Research Professor Emeritus
American Bar Foundation

Shih-Chun Chien
Assistant Professor
Cleveland State University College of Law

Students’ motivations for attending law school and choosing law as a career are crucially  important. So we have argued in two previous posts[1] and elsewhere.[2] Those motivations are important for understanding students’ career aspirations and what they hope to do as lawyers.  (we have a special interest in public service).[3] More generally they help in understanding the future of the legal profession and the role it plays or should play in our society.

Our exploration of motivations began with a special set of seven questions (in addition to the full suite of annual questions) posed to a subset of the 2010 LSSSE survey schools. The questions asked students to rate each of seven motivations on seven-point scale from “not at all influential” to “very influential” (see Figure 1 below). Importantly, each motivation was assessed independently, meaning students were not asked to choose among them. These questions were the focus of our first post.

Wanting to extend our work we asked the LSSSE administrators if they could add those seven motivation questions to the 2021 survey. They generously did so adding the questions for a subset of schools. With an interest in any change in responses to the motivation questions, a comparison of the 2010 and 2021 responses to those questions was the focus of our second post.

Working with the null hypothesis of no substantial change in motivations between 2010 and 2021, we found that to be the case with one key exception. It involved the motivation of contributing to the public good, one of importance to us with our interest in public service. It became more important in 2021 compared to 2010. Wondering if this change signaled an ongoing shift or perhaps just a short-term disturbance related to the COVID pandemic, we again asked the LSSSE administrators if they could add those seven motivation questions for a subset of schools in the 2024 survey. And again, they did.[4]

Here we compare the 2024 motivation responses to those from 2010 and 2021, looking for evidence of an ongoing shift for contributing to the public good or a short-term disturbance.

Drawing from each of the surveys, Figure 1 compares 1L responses to the seven motivation questions. The bars represent the percentage who reported that a given motivation was more influential for them (a rating of 5, 6, or 7 on the seven-point scale).  1Ls because they are closest to the decision to attend law school.

Perhaps the most striking general pattern is the relative stability in 1L motivations. With only small decreases over time in the degree of influence, the intrinsic motivations of a challenging career and academic development are the most intense motivations. They are followed by the extrinsic motivation of financial security, which stayed within a narrow range. A bit lower in intensity is the extrinsic motivation of prestige, that also stayed within a narrow range.

The extrinsic motivation of contributing to the public good is different, with a marked increase from 2010 to 2021 in its importance. The question for us is whether this was just a short-term disturbance. While there is a small decrease in 2024 (not unlike those for challenging career and academic development), the percentage does not return to the 2010 level. The importance of this is a focus of our ongoing analyses.

Perhaps we can say these five motivations make-up a relatively stable core (relative only because of the shifts for public good) for most students, one reflecting the mixture of motivations – intrinsic and extrinsic -- drawing students to law school. The remaining two motivations – unsure and others – are less important in comparison, but not unimportant. They are different in not having an identifiable substance as the others do and pose an interesting interpretative challenge.

Importantly, even at the individual-level students report a mixture of motivations – particular motivations are not necessarily mutually exclusive (again, each motivation was assessed independently). A simple correlation matrix using he 2024 data – which shows the relationships each of the motivations has with each of the other motivations – shows few relationships that are not significant.[5]

Not every law school appears in each annual LSSSE survey or in the motivation subsets, but one school did appear in each of the motivation subsets.  Like the general pattern in Figure 1, it had a marked increase in the importance of the public good motivation between 2010 and 2021 (more influential going from 63% to 77%), with a slight decrease in 2024 (more influential 75%). A second school appeared in 2010 and 2024, with more influential at 66% in 2010 and at 73% in 2024. What we don’t know is whether some schools may be more attractive to those motivated by the public good and others less so.

The extent to which motivations and aspirations are connected is the focus of our ongoing work along with the ways law schools can support public service careers. While not all who are motivated by the public good will go into public service, it is still important to know if the interest in the public good follows students into other legal careers as well. Fostering this motivation should be a part of any idea of professional identity.

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[1] Stephen Daniels and Shih-Chun Chien,” Beyond Enrollment: Why Motivations Matter to the Study of Legal Education and the Legal Profession?” LSSSE Guest Blog (Sept. 24, 2020); Stephen Daniels and Shih-Chun Chien, “Why Motivations Matter Revisited: More So Now” (Dec. 21, 2021).

[2] Shih-Chun Chien and Stephen Daniels, Who Wants to be a Prosecutor? And Why Care? Law Students’ Career Aspirations and Reform Prosecutors’ Goals, 65 HOWARD L.J. 173 (2021).

[3] While we are interested in public service generally, we have a special interest in the criminal justice system (e.g., as prosecutors and public defenders).

[4] The respective motivation subsets were not the same for each survey (2010, 2021, and 2024). Perhaps we can look at the subsets as a very rough form of sampling with replacement from a relatively small population.

[5] The relationship between public good and financial security is not significant as is the relationship between public good and unsure and public good and others’ expectations. Of course, not all relationships are strong or even positive.

by LSSSE

An Indispensable Resource: The Law School Survey of Student Engagement at Twenty

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/

by LSSSE

The Parenting Penalty for Law Students

Laila L. Harris
Associate Professor of Law & Co-Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic
Associate Provost of International Affairs
Tulane University Law School

This fall, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents, responding to levels of high stress parents report and the harmful effects on their own mental health, as well as their children’s. This was on the heels of findings from a national study that a majority of parents experience isolation, loneliness and burnout  related to parenting. For those of us at law schools, often recognized as high stress environments already, it raises the question: what is the landscape for parents in law schools?

Professor Lindsay M. Harris (University of San Francisco Law School) and I have begun talking and writing about “the parenting professor penalty,” the panoply of harms and challenges that pregnant and parenting people, as well as those who are presumed to become pregnant or parenting, face in entering and being successful as faculty within the legal academy. We are bringing this topic to the annual AALS meeting, focused on “Courage in Action” held in January as a discussion group session and welcome you to join us.  Yet faculty often comprise those with the most privileged positions in law schools, relative to staff and students. Law students who are parents, or more broadly caretakers, may face steep challenges and inequities related to their status and circumstances.

Mental health has long been a concern in law schools and the legal profession. According to LSSSE, around 60% of law students experience very high law-school related stress or anxiety. Law students who also serve as caretakers are particularly likely to have more stress. This is especially true because students with dependents also spend more time on commuting to class and working, and less time on exercising and socializing, which may help combating anxiety and isolation.

While about one-third of law students reported spending time caring for dependents, the burden of hours spent every week is particularly high for non-traditional law students. First-gen students comprise a  larger portion of law student caretakers: 44% of first-gen students spend time caring for dependents, compared to 33% of non-first-gen students.

Caretakers are also over-represented in part-time law programs, with 56% of part-time students reporting caretaking for dependents. Time spent caretaking per week is highest for older law students, as 40% of those aged 31-40 spent 11 or more hours per week caretaking, and nearly half of those aged over 40 spent 11 or more hours caring for dependents.

Given these genuine concerns for law student caregivers, how can we as law faculty respond individually and collectively, and how can we respond institutionally as law schools?

As individual actors, law professors should think about how to account for the stresses parenting law students may be facing. Professor Harris and Professor Mallika Kaur recently released a co-edited volume titled How to Account for Trauma and Emotions in Law Teaching, which is instructive and helps to mainstream conversations about stress and well-being within law schools. Professors may, for example, want to think about whether they want to model “parenting loudly,” though this is not without varying consequences depending on an individual professor’s positionality, as Professor Meera E. Deo documents in her book Unequal Profession: Race and Gender in Legal Academia.

How can law schools as institutions respond to the special needs of law students who are caretakers and are at risk of heightened stress and burnout? As part of the ABA mandate that law schools  provide substantial opportunities to explore “well-being practices,” law schools should offer meaningful courses and co-curricular activities to address law students’ well-being, including trainings, screenings, and policies to encourage work-life balance. These co-curricular programs should also have resources to address the particular needs of law students who are parents or caretakers. Some institutions do this already. For example, some schools have created a clearinghouse of information directing students to school and city-specific parenting resources, as well as child care subsidies and student groups.

Schools should also conduct internal assessments to learn about the experiences and needs of law students who are caregivers to consider whether policies and practices around leaves and broader resources for this community are responsive to needs. Creative responses including creating parenting support groups are warranted. Schools can also take steps to accommodate the schedules for working parents. For example, one law school designated one of the nine first year small section modules as the parent module (affectionately called the “mommy mod”) and classes were scheduled to align with times when school was open and to accommodate drop off and pick up responsibilities. Similarly, another school designed a part-time law program so law students with school age children take coursework while their children are in school. Finally, as a broader measure and perhaps an impetus for the cultural shift the moment demands, U.S. law schools should consider signing on to the International Guidelines for Wellbeing in Legal Education, which would require a comprehensive overhaul of law school structure, curriculum, and atmosphere with well-being in mind.

by LSSSE

Law Student Online Engagement and Universal Socratic

Law Student Online Engagement and Universal Socratic
Christopher J. Robinette[1]
Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School

In the fall of 2023, Southwestern Law School received ABA approval to operate the country’s first fully online Juris Doctor program.  Moreover, to increase student flexibility, the program is asynchronous, with only a few voluntary synchronous sessions.  In essence, the students and professor will not be online together in a Zoom room, but students will access videos of the professor and exercises on their own schedules.

As a law professor who has taught in-person courses for over twenty years, I deliberated a long time before volunteering to teach online.  I love the energy of the face-to-face classroom and, frankly, I was somewhat skeptical about the efficacy of online law classes, particularly in the first year.  In fact, one of the most compelling reasons that I agreed to teach online was the hope of improving my pedagogy in the “real” classroom.  As I began planning my online course, however, I became excited about the possibilities particular to the online mode.

The 2022 LSSSE Annual Report, Success with Online Education, says half (50%) of all law students were enrolled in at least one course that was taught mostly or entirely online and every law school participating in the LSSSE survey offered at least some online courses. Most law students (70%) took courses that met in-person, though 10% took mostly online courses, and 20% reported that they had enrolled in a mix of courses that met online and in-person. Of those who did meet online, most (78%) were in synchronous classes; but 3% of LSSSE respondents in online courses met asynchronously and an additional 19% were in hybrid courses. Clearly, online education is here to stay and could grow even more prominent in the years ahead.

As an instructor, my biggest concern about teaching online was something about which LSSSE is expert: engagement.  Keeping students engaged can be difficult under any circumstances, but it is especially challenging online. I believe a solution to the online engagement problem is not singular; instead, it lies in numerous program and instructional design decisions.  With that in mind, I considered how law professors engage their students, particularly first years, in the traditional classroom. Of course, a major technique is the Socratic method, in which the professor asks a (usually cold-called) student increasingly challenging questions about a case.  This is an interactive mode of teaching and learning that involves the students and does not conceive of them as passive recipients of knowledge.  Although they exist, I do not need the overwhelming data telling me that active learning is superior.  I can sense it in the fact that the air starts to go out of the room whenever I lecture my students for lengthy periods of time.

Was there a way to adapt the Socratic method to the online asynchronous environment?  In thinking about this, I had to admit that one facet of the Socratic method in the classroom was not replicable.  In the traditional classroom, the professor is able to tailor her follow-up questions precisely to the student’s answers.  This is not possible in an asynchronous online class.  But—and this is where I grasped that the online environment has advantages—you can ask all of the students all of the questions.  In the traditional classroom, one student is on call.  Ideally, we expect the other students to be following along and answering the questions silently for themselves.  In reality, we know that at least some of them do not.  They are spaced out, or shopping online, or simply exhausted.  In an online course, all students can be engaged.  And it can be verified.

This is how I developed the Universal Socratic for my online course. For each module in my course, I selected one case that I found significant and created an interactive exercise around that case.  I wrote five questions about the case.  For the first few modules, I followed the structure of a basic case brief (facts, issue, holding, disposition, rationale), allowing the students to reinforce their briefing skills.  As the modules progressed, I formulated more questions in the upper ranges of Bloom’s Taxonomy (analyzing, evaluating, and creating).  Thanks to exercises like this, LSSSE data indicate that students believe legal education contributes to multiple skills, especially thinking critically and analytically, as much online as in-person.

I then drafted answers to the questions.  Using Canvas’s Quizzes feature, I inserted the questions and required the students to answer them one at a time.  After the student has answered each question, and before they answer the next question, they are shown my answer and are able to compare it to theirs.  Not only asking the questions but providing prompt feedback is helpful to engage students.  Using this process, the student and I are essentially having a dialogue, even though I do not have the benefit of their exact answer in real time in person.  Moreover, every student in the class engages in the exercise of answering the questions.

Given the growth in online education, students will benefit from legal educators modifying effective face-to-face techniques, like the Socratic method, for the asynchronous online mode.  When educators do so, they will find that some features of online education make it better than the original.

[1] I benefited greatly on this project from the ideas of my terrific colleagues Catherine Carpenter, John De Sousa, and Danni Hart.

by LSSSE